3. Pieter Geyl and Émile Cammaerts: The Dutch and Belgian Chairs at the University of London between Academia and Propaganda, 1914–1935 | Pieter Geyl and Britain: Encounters, Controversies, Impact

3. Pieter Geyl and Émile Cammaerts: the Dutch and Belgian chairs at the University of London between academia and propaganda, 1914–35

The First World War proved to be an important catalyst for the institution-alization of Neerlandistiek (Dutch studies) as an academic subject at universities outside the Low Countries. This goes for Germany, where the first lectureships and chairs for Netherlandic studies were created to accommodate intellectual Flemish activists who had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation of 1914–18 and fled Belgium at the end of the war, but also for the United Kingdom, where in 1919, with moral and financial support from the Dutch government and Dutch and South African companies, Pieter Geyl was appointed as first professor of Dutch studies at the University of London, the first such chair in the anglophone world.

While Geyl was widely recognized as an original and prolific scholar, his political views were actually quite close to those of some of his Flemish counterparts in Germany, and his Grootnederlands, or ‘Greater-Netherlands’, ideology and personal relationships with Flemish activists made him suspicious enough to the Belgian government for them to support the foundation of a ‘counter-chair’ with a view to balancing out Geyl’s influence on British academia, politics and the public. After a decade of toing and froing and intense Dutch–Belgian altercations in the British press (as well as within the university’s bodies), in 1931 Émile Cammaerts, man of letters and long-time Belgian resident of London, whose wartime patriotic poems had been set to music by Elgar, could be appointed as first chair for Belgian studies at the University of London, marking the pinnacle of what this author likes to call a propagandistic and academic ‘proxy war’ between Dutch and Belgian interest groups in the British capital that ended only with Geyl’s move to Utrecht four years later (1935).

This extended essay analyses the driving forces behind the establishment of the two university chairs against the wider political background of Dutch–Belgian rivalry in the interwar period and the expansion of the University of London to include several ‘foreign chairs’ in that time. It discusses Geyl’s and Cammaerts’ contributions to scholarship, their ideological differences, and the legacy of their conflict for Low Countries studies in the UK today, before concluding with some general remarks on the relationship between academia and politics in the interwar period and more generally.

What will be examined in this chapter is thus not just a conflict between two scholars, which in itself would probably be less noteworthy, as scholars tend to have conflicts with each other all the time, but a wider dispute with three dimensions, a political, a scholarly and a public one, that took place in the institutions of the University of London and in the British political and literary press. On a political level, both Geyl and Cammaerts were semi-official spokespersons for, and had the backing of, the governments of their respective countries of origin, at a time when, in the aftermath of the First World War, the map of Europe was being redrawn and new security arrangements decided at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–20). On a scholarly level, the two protagonists represented two opposing conceptualizations of Low Countries history: the ‘Greater Netherlands’ idea in the case of Geyl, highlighting the cultural unity of the Dutch language area across the border (and possibly even seeking to unite this area politically); and the Pirennean or ‘Belgicist’ interpretation, which stressed socio-economic factors in the development of the Belgian nation, irrespective of language, in the case of Cammaerts. On a public level, the issue at stake was British government and public opinion towards the Low Countries (if this early-modern umbrella term can be used in a twentieth-century context), which was of no little consequence to both countries, as the British empire was still a major world power and London the centre of the global political system, not yet rivalled by the cities of the emerging superpower across the Atlantic. For Britain, the question of who controlled the estuaries across the English Channel, in particular the port of Antwerp, was also of vital strategic interest.

While the issues at contention are no longer of direct relevance today and this story with some justification might be considered a piece of microhistory (although in the sense of approaching big questions through close investigation of well-defined smaller units), they were formative for the development of the academic disciplines of Low Countries history and Netherlandic studies in the UK, and by extension in the anglophone world at large. At the same time, this story is also a case study of the problematic relationship between scholarship and political activism, of the interrelationship between vested interests and academia and, in times of government-imposed ‘impact’ agendas, the encouragement of academics by research councils to directly and indirectly inform public policy and opinion, almost a moral tale about how this can all play out. It certainly also is a story that helps to explain persistent British attitudes towards Belgium and the Netherlands, two neighbouring countries that often consider themselves to be direct neighbours of the UK, whereas from a British perspective they are often seen as lying in a strange corner off the route to Britain’s direct neighbour France and do not really figure prominently on the UK public’s collective mental map.

Without intending to present a full double-biography of the two protagonists in the Plutarchian tradition, but in line with the well-established practice of contrasting Geyl’s intellectual development with that of other contemporary scholars,2 this chapter is an attempt at re-examining Geyl’s period in London (1914–35), which in contrast to his later work in Utrecht (1935–66) has attracted much less historiographic attention, at least in its relationship to his host institution and country. At the same time, it aims to re-introduce Geyl’s now largely forgotten opponent Émile Cammaerts, who in the era of the two world wars was a well-known cultural figure and commentator on Belgian affairs in the UK, associated with Britain’s national composer Edward Elgar, into the institutional and disciplinary history of Low Countries studies in Britain, and to reconstruct and analyse their conflict, which became the second academic cause célèbre of the interwar period involving so-called ‘foreign Chairs’ at the University of London, after Arnold Toynbee’s involuntary departure from the Koraes chair for modern Greek at King’s College in 1924 that Richard Clogg has famously dissected in his Politics and the Academy (1986).3 Both had similar implications, as we will see, for questions of academic liberty, the role external funds play in academia and the relationship between scholarship and political activism.

Fig. 3.1: Émile Cammaerts (left) by Lafayette (1928), © National Portrait Gallery, London, and Pieter Geyl (right) in London (1922), Utrecht University Library, Special Collections.

As with regard to sources, there is no shortage of autobiographical writings by Geyl at various stages of his life, among them his pre-1940 memoirs, written in 1942 while in German captivity during the Second World War and posthumously edited and published in 2009.4 His voluminous papers, including his correspondence, are kept in the Special Collections of Utrecht University Library,5 and reports he sent to The Hague in the National Archives of the Netherlands located in that city.6 The fragmented diaries of the less well-known Cammaerts have not been published but a, very personal, biography by his daughter Jeanne Lindley exists.7 His papers belong to the underused Belgian collections of Senate House Library, one of the last remnants of the federal University of London,8 whose constituting colleges already in Geyl’s and Cammaerts’ time were quite autonomous and have undergone centrifugal tendencies since, turning them into de facto separate institutions today.

Dramatis personae

The two dramatis personae are depicted in figure 3.1, a youthful Pieter Geyl (1887–1966) on the right, and the slightly older Émile Cammaerts (1878–1953) on the left. At the outbreak of the war, both of them were already living in London and to varying degrees established in British society.

Born in 1887 in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, Geyl had finished his historical studies in Leiden with a thesis on the relations between the Dutch and Venetian republics,9 after which for a brief period he worked as a secondary school teacher in the town of Schiedam in South Holland. In 1913, never having been to Britain before, he was offered the post of London correspondent for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, one of the leading Dutch newspapers, with ‘all the standing and allure in Holland of the London Times’.10 The ‘entrance into the Anglo-Saxon world’, in the golden age of Fleet Street, was a liberation for Geyl, as he remembered four decades later, as it allowed him to pursue his political aspirations.11 In the British capital Geyl quickly gained access to the highest British circles through his membership of the National Liberal Club. One of his most influential articles during the war was an interview with Winston Churchill in 1915, in which the then First Lord of the Admiralty declared that after the war England would not support Belgian claims on Dutch territory, an issue that, as we will see, would become of vital importance in the propaganda battles reported here.12

Independent-minded, the Anglophile journalist from a neutral country regularly got into conflict with his editorial office in Rotterdam that tended to lean towards the German side in the conflict, but also criticized the excesses of wartime chauvinism that he witnessed in London, especially in Lord Northcliffe’s press, leading to the British Foreign Office summoning him in 1916 and, unsuccessfully, threatening consequences.13

Indicative of Geyl’s penchant for nationalist and irredentist movements was his attention to the Irish question. He reported passionately, if not uncritically, from the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, attended Sir Roger Casement’s trial in London and interviewed Sinn Féin leader Éamon de Valera for his newspaper. The Irish question informed Geyl’s understanding of the Flemish question, and vice versa, as he wrote in his memoirs,14 but it was the Flemish struggle for emancipation in Belgium that was closest to his heart and became the ‘theme of his lifetime’.15 A distant relative of his, the priest Jan Derk Domela Nieuwenhuis Nyegaard (1870–1955), had introduced Geyl to the Flemish movement at a student conference in Ghent in 1911;16 as leader of the radical Young Flemish movement (Jong Vlaanderen) during the First World War, Domela had been behind the declaration of independence in 1917, for which he had in absentia been sentenced to death in Belgium, a ruling Domela managed to evade by fleeing to the Netherlands. In many ways, the 1911 conference was a formative experience for Geyl, from which also his friendships with the Flemish activists Antoon Jacob, Leo Picard, Hendrik Borginon and Herman Vos originated, as well as with his fellow Grootnederlander Frederik Carel Gerretson, who after the First World War would become secretary of the Bataafsche petroleum company in London, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell. While during the war Geyl had abstained from supporting the Flemish activists (in a 1915 article he even apologized for ‘a few Dutchmen’s [Gerretson’s] meddling’ in this business and dismissed the activists as ‘a few hotheads’ in his 1919 inaugural lecture at University College London),17 in the interwar period the Belgian government’s real or perceived intransigence towards legitimate Flemish claims (the vast majority of the Flemish movement had kept their loyalty towards the Belgian state and army) made him side with radical Flemish demands, to the extent that in 1929 and again in 1931 he was declared persona non grata and denied entry to Belgium.18

Cammaerts, nine years Geyl’s senior, had come to live in London a few years earlier, in 1908. According to the vignette in Ray Jenkins’ biography of Émile’s son Francis (who during the Second World War would become a British Special Operations operative, supporting the maquis in France, a fascinating story in its own right),19 Cammaerts was born to affluent middle-class parents in 1878 and grew up in the ‘intellectual melting-pot’ of belle époque Brussels. When his parents separated he remained with his mother, ‘a demanding early feminist’ who had renounced her Catholic faith and replaced it with ‘wide classical reading, a love of nature, curiosity, music and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, values she passed on to her son.20 At the age of sixteen Émile refused to follow his father and brothers into studying law (‘his being now revolted against the whole concept of law as such’)21 and settled on geography as a subject, a fateful decision because it brought the young Cammaerts under the influence of Jacques Elysée Reclus (1830–1905), a prominent revolutionary, anarchist and life-reformer (vegetarian and anti-marriage) who since 1892 had occupied the chair of comparative geography at the University of Brussels.22 The appointment of this veteran fighter of the 1871 Paris Commune and friend of Bakunin’s with connections to Auguste Vaillant, who bombed the French National Assembly in 1892, had led to a split in the university, with the Université Nouvelle, with its radical democratic and anti-clerical leaning, breaking away in 189423 and Cammaerts following his teacher and mentor to the new institution. The young and impressionable Cammaerts, in the assessment of Cammaerts’ friend Charles van den Borren, later president of the Belgian Academy, still underage at this point, seems to have been rather on the fringes of Reclus’s anarchist circle: ‘Émile was not an anarchist with his reason; but with his emotions; he was in love with anarchy.’24 Cammaerts’ son recalls: ‘Reclus led to my father joining the anarchists for a number of very mettlesome years. They were men who spurned the extreme methods of Russian terror and preached the gospel of social revolution. In his relative innocence, my father wanted to write to kings and presidents and say “we don’t need you” – not quite the route to furious change.’25

Like Geyl, Cammaerts started earning a living as a teacher in his country of origin, at the Commercial Institute in the mining town of Mons in Hainaut, but retained his literary aspirations. He translated G. K. Chesterton and John Ruskin into French,26 as well as, together with Charles van den Borren, poems by the Flemish priest-poet Guido Gezelle; he also authored a number of volumes of art criticism and several plays27 and was one of the driving forces behind the foundation of the Belgian branch of the international PEN-Club.28 After his first marriage ended in divorce, he met his future wife, the Shakespearean actress Helen Braun, better known by her stage name Tita Brand, on a visit to Stratford-on-Avon. ‘Violently in love’ with her,29 he moved to England at the age of thirty in 1908 and ‘after wandering through various philosophies from a rank atheism to a vague mysticism, after spending many years tasting various brands of socialism, after trying to reconcile an all-absorbing love of nature and art with a far less absorbing love of men’,30 under the influence of Tita, a Christian Socialist, gradually abandoned his previous convictions for increasingly pious Anglo-Catholicism, becoming ‘one of the most active and imaginative laymen in the Church of England’.31 Working as a writer, dramatist, teacher, translator and journalist, he lived largely in the shadow of the reputation of his wife’s family until the moment of his breakthrough in Britain came with the outbreak of the First World War.32

‘Brave little Belgium’: The impact of the First World War

While the Netherlands, through a combination of careful political manoeuvring and sheer good fortune, was able to avoid being dragged into the war, Belgium (like Luxembourg) became one of its first victims and played a central role in the Great War, not only physically but also in the theatre of cultural propaganda. The violation of Belgium’s neutrality (which the German Imperial chancellor infamously called a ‘scrap of paper’) and, even more so, the atrocities committed in the opening phase of the war, among them the wanton destruction of the university city of Louvain (Leuven) with its famous library, allowed the war to develop into a ‘war of minds’, an alleged combat between German culture and Western civilization. The ‘libricide’ of Leuven, in the words of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, became the ‘Sarajevo of the European intelligentsia’.33 Maurice Maeterlinck, the 1911 Nobel Prize Laureate in literature from Ghent, declared in Milan that by resisting the German aggression Belgium had saved ‘la civilisation latine’,34 and in the English-speaking world ‘brave little Belgium’ became one of the most prominent symbols in the war’s propaganda battles.

Of immense importance, both in military and in propaganda terms, was the figure of King Albert of Belgium, in Cammaerts’ words ‘the great King of a little country’.35 Not only did he refuse to give in to the German ultimatum to grant free passage, but by mounting a principled, if ultimately futile, resistance against overwhelming enemy forces, he delayed the German advances just long enough for the Schlieffen plan to be derailed. In this respect, the Belgian military engagement had been decisive and altered the course of the war. Moreover, unlike the government that sought shelter in France, establishing itself in Le Havre in Normandy, the king did not leave Belgian territory but stayed in the last unconquered corner of the country, in the seaside resort of La Panne (De Panne), right next to where the French border meets the English Channel. German access to the area west of the river IJzer (Yser) had been blocked by the opening of dykes and sluices to flood the area, and this remained the case throughout the war. The fact that the monarch never left the country also had a morale-boosting effect of utmost importance for the population under occupation and would later move Cammaerts to write the king’s biography (1935)36 as well as, one war down the line, a vigorous defence of Albert’s son and successor Leopold (1941), whom a similar behaviour (staying in the country during the Second World War) would serve less well.37

But first, under the impression of the devastating news from his country of origin, he set to write patriotic war poems that were published by the Observer, one of which, Chantons, Belges, chantons (October 1914),38 was set to music by Edward Elgar, the British Empire’s composer laureate. It would become ‘one of the most popular songs of the war’39 and the basis of Cammaerts’ subsequent fame. Not without patriotic pathos that was so characteristic of war poetry across Europe at the time, but also deeply informed by the suffering of his home country, it started by reciting the sites of German atrocities:

Chantons, Belges, chantons / Même si les blessures saignent, même si la voix se brise, / Plus haut que la tourmente, plus fort que les canons, / Chantons l’orgueil de nos défaites, / Par ce beau soleil d’automne, / Et la joie de rester honnête / Quand la lâcheté nous serais si bonne / Au son du tambour, au son du clairon, / Sur les ruines d’Aerschot, de Dinant, de Termonde, / Dansons, Belges, dansons, / En chantant notre gloire, / Même si les yeux brûlent, / Si la tête s’égare, / Formons la ronde! (…)

or in Tita’s translation:

Sing, Belgians, sing / Although our wound may bleed / Although our voices break / Louder than the storm, louder than the guns, / Sing of the pride of our defeats / ’Neath this bright Autumn sun, / And sing of the joy of honour / When cowardice might be so sweet. / To the sound of the bugle, the sound of the drum, / On the ruins of Aerschot, of Dinant, and Termonde, / Dance, Belgians, dance, / And our glory sing, / Although our eyes may burn, / Although our brain may turn, / Join in the ring! (…)

Cammaerts’ collaboration with Elgar had come about through an initiative to celebrate the monarch’s heroism, and that of his fellow countrymen, conceived by the popular Manx novelist Hall Caine (1853–1931), who had previously edited jubilee books to raise money for Queen Alexandra’s charities in 1905 and 1908, and who managed to convince the conservative broadsheet Daily Telegraph to come on board. King Albert’s Book would be published just in time for Christmas 1914 and would be available by subscription, with all proceeds going to the Daily Telegraph’s Belgian Support Fund. It was Britain’s homage to ‘brave little Belgium’, an anthology of tributes by almost 250 high-profile contributors from around the world.40 It enjoyed huge popular success and shaped British public opinion about Belgium to no little extent; in the recent celebrations of the First World War’s centenary it was commemorated both by the Daily Telegraph and in a three-part series broadcast on BBC Radio 4 (2014–15).41 Contributors included representatives of British and international public life, among them the writers Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, G. K. Chesterton and Maurice Maeterlinck; the composers Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns and Edward Elgar; artists and scholars such as Claude Monet, Sarah Bernhardt and Henri Bergson; as well as political and religious figures as diverse as Herbert Asquith, Winston Churchill, Emmeline Pankhurst, the Aga Khan and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The anthology, which also appeared in French and Dutch editions, with Italian and Russian ones planned, would earn Caine the title of Officer in the Order of Leopold, the highest decoration possible in Belgium for a foreigner; later on in the war he would also be knighted for his services to allied propaganda in the (then still neutral) United States.42

Fig. 3.2: Émile Cammaerts’ poem ‘Carillon’ (‘Chantons, Belges, chantons!’) set to music by Edward Elgar, 1914, © The British Library Board, Digital Store h.3930.l.-7; Anglo-Belgian Notes from July 1928 with prose by Émile Cammaerts, © The British Library Board.

When approached by Caine, Elgar remembered having read Cammaerts’ poem in the Observer and through Marie Brema, Tita’s mother, who in 1900 had been a soloist in the first performance of his Dream of Gerontius, managed to secure the rights to use it. Translated into English by Tita, Elgar renamed it ‘Carillon’43 after the mechanical bell chimes so characteristic of Low Countries towns, where they had functioned as ‘the first musical mass medium in history.’44 As such the poem fitted in well with Thomas Hardy’s contribution to the volume, the sonnet ‘On the Belgian expatriation’, in which Hardy used the same allegoric symbol for the country’s suffering and resilience:

I dreamt that people from the Land of Chimes / Arrived one autumn morning with their bells, / To hoist them on the towers and citadels / Of my own country / […] / I awoke; and lo, before me stood / The visioned ones, but pale and full of fear; / From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend, / No carillons in their train. Vicissitude / Had left these tinkling to the invader’s ear / And ravaged street, and smouldering gable-end.45

A highly atypical arrangement in that it was not a sung version of the poem but a spoken recitation with orchestral accompaniment,46 Elgar’s ‘Carillon’ suited the simultaneously solemn and elated spirit of the time. Consequently it ‘caused a real hype’,47 and became the ‘concert-hall hit of the year’,48 featuring prominently in the Proms and elsewhere. ‘Music of this kind is rare’, reports the Manchester Guardian of the premiere: ‘few composers of real ability have been willing to allow the poet an equal share of credit. Strauss has done it and there are three not well-known but extremely fine examples of Schumann. “Carillon” stands somewhat apart from these, in so far as it depends in great part upon the extraordinary wealth of its orchestral colour. It is not intended for a family circle, but for a large assembly and a great occasion. Its effect is bound to be more intense at the present moment, but its merit will keep it alive long after the event which inspired it has ceased to be the focus of all interest.’49 The performance itself also met with great praise: ‘The poem was recited by Mme. Tita Brand Cammaerts with spirit, and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Edward Elgar, acquitted itself most creditably in the novel task of providing the background for a reciter.’50

Cammaerts, ‘the Belgian equivalent of Rupert Brooke’,51 went on to compose many more war poems, two of which, ‘Une voix dans le désert’ (1916) and ‘Le Drapeau Belge’ (1917), Elgar adapted to music in similar ways, the latter on the occasion of King Albert’s birthday in 1917. Cammaerts’ collected war poetry, along with some of his earlier lyrics, were published under the title Chants Patriotiques et autres poèmes in 1915; successive volumes followed in 1916 and 1918.52 They are what he is ‘remembered best [for], though perhaps they are dated now’, as the Manchester Guardian wrote in its obituary of Cammaerts in 1959, ‘instinct with deep religious feeling, which were inspired by Belgium’s sufferings in the First World War’ (fig. 3.2).53

Anglo-Belgian Union

‘Chantons, Belges, chantons’, the original title of which was ‘Après Anvers’, had been written after the fall of Antwerp, the last stronghold of the Belgian army, in October 1914, which led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Belgian refugees to the UK, France and the Netherlands. Many of them were soon living in makeshift refugee camps in public buildings such as Alexandra Palace and the Earl’s Court exhibition centre.54

Along with the refugee stream came some government officials, among them Henri Davignon (1879–1964),55 a novelist and playwright from a prominent family of Belgian politicians and diplomats; his father, Julien, had been the Belgian foreign minister at the outbreak of the war. Davignon and Cammaerts, as Cammaerts’ daughter Jeanne Lindley reports, ‘so different in background and upbringing, were both writers and needed little but their common impotent agony at their country’s suffering to draw them close as friends’.56 It was Davignon’s reponsibility to regularly report on developments in Britain and the British press to the Belgian government-in-exile in Normandy. His Bureau de Propagande et de Documentation, located at 10 Finsbury Square, became the semi-official London branch of the Le Havre-based Office de la Propagande belge,57 although it needs to be kept in mind that at this point the term ‘propaganda’ had not yet acquired the negative connotation it carries today. Aided by Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau in Wellington House, the Belgian bureau produced, translated, published and distributed works that presented to the world Belgium’s sufferings and created publicity for the Belgian cause, for example a document edition entitled ‘La Belgique et l’Allemagne’ (1916).58 From December 1917 onwards, it also regularly reported to the Belgian government in Le Havre on the evolution of British public opinion regarding Belgium in biweekly notes based on the English press. In his autobiography, Souvenirs d’un Écrivain Belge (1954), Davignon remembers:

One day shortly after I had finished this work, Émile Cammaerts walked into my office. He was about my age. We had met for the first time in the corridors of the Theâtre du Parc in Brussels. One of his plays, all fantasy and folk-lore, had been staged there shortly after one of mine. He had been violently in love with a young English actress, Brema’s daughter, whom he had seen in Shakespeare, at the Stratford-on-Avon Theatre. Before she had consented to marry him, Tita Brand had transformed his whole outlook. By following the path of Franciscan idealism, this pupil of the anarchist Élysée Reclus had gradually turned towards Christianity. Baptised and become an ardent Anglican, Cammaerts was settled with his wife in London and had embarked on a career as a writer and teacher. When war broke out, he tried to join the home defence but contracted pleurisy there. When more or less recovered, he came to me to ask if he could be of any help. I offered him the job of being the link between my work and the British public. This was the beginning of a collaboration which, for four years, was as close as our friendship.59

Cammaerts’ daughter reports on the working method of this unofficial press office: ‘All the news which reached the little “bureau” was mulled through by the two friends with the historical expert [Léon] van der Essen. In addition to this, they scanned the columns of the British press. Nothing untrue was allowed to pass in so far as it was related to Belgium and could be checked against their other sources of information.’60 Cammaerts, with his language skills and social standing, became the face and voice of this Belgian publicity work, as Davignon confirms:

With his practical experience of English journalism, Cammaerts was my guide. His reputation as a literary figure, his quality as a poet, helped by his distinctive appearance, were references for him in themselves. A letter to a famous paper signed by him had every chance of being printed. We all used him as our line of communication when we needed to clear up some detail or explain some policy.61

Two of Cammaerts’ major works in support of the Belgian cause at this time involved collaboration with the famous war caricaturist Louis Raemaekers. This Dutch political cartoonist, who used to publish his brilliant and acrimonious caricatures in the Amsterdam Telegraaf, had been made to leave the neutral Netherlands for London, due to Dutch unease about his campaigning for the country’s entry into the war on the Allied side and the resulting German pressure on the Dutch government. The propaganda value and impact of his graphical works – according to The Times, Raemaekers was one of the few people outside the circle of statesmen and military leaders that had a decisive influence on the course of events62 – in combination with Cammaerts’ popularity with the British public at the time can hardly be underestimated. In The Adoration of the Soldiers (1916), Cammaerts and Raemakers paid tribute to the Belgian army in the form of an illustrated mystery play in the manner of the old medieval French and English nativity plays.63 Behind the Iron Bars: Two Years of German Occupation in Belgium (1917) depicted life in the occupied country after the military conquest and focused on the economic exploitation of Belgium by the occupier as well as on German attempts to use the Flemish movement as a means of sowing division (fig. 3.3).

Around Davignon’s wartime office grew the Anglo-Belgian Union of 1918, a bilateral association with offices in Mayfair’s Albemarle Street, a famous address with links to Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde. In the form of the Anglo-Belgian Society, the result of a merger in 1983 with the Cercle Royal Belge de Londres in 1922 with similar aims, it is still in existence.64 The organisation was born out of the ‘brotherhood in arms’ of the First World War, as its (bilingual) constitution of April 1918 points out right at the beginning:65 ‘The object of the Union is to maintain and develop feelings of friendship between the British and Belgian peoples, to promote more intimate relations between the two nations, and to commemorate the brotherhood in arms which arose from their mutual loyalty to the treaty of 1839’ (Art. 1).

Fig. 3.3: Émile Cammaerts’ publications with Louis Raemaekers, © Louis Raemaekers Foundation and the British Library Board. Reproduced with kind permission.

The patrons of the Anglo-Belgian Union were none less than the two monarchs, King George and King Albert, its first president the liberal member of parliament Herbert Samuel (of later fame for his involvement in Middle East affairs), the vice-president the Comte de Lalaing (whenever the president was a Briton, the vice-president had to be from Belgium, and vice versa). They were supported by a provisional committee that on the British side was headed by Herbert Gladstone, the youngest son of the nineteenth-century prime minister, and on the Belgian side by Comte Eugène Goblet d’Alviella, a liberal senator and rector of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). The organization’s honorary vice-presidents included many notable politicians, including Asquith, Balfour, Cecil, Austen Chamberlain, Bonar Law and Lloyd George on the British, and Charles de Brocqueville, Paul Hymans, Carton de Wiart and Émile Vandervelde on the Belgian side, as well as the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck and Émile Cammaerts himself. In practical terms, Henri Davignon and Algernon Maudslay acted as general secretaries.

Maudslay (1873–1948), one of the driving forces behind the initiative to establish a chair for Belgian studies, was a prominent yachtsman and philanthropist of independent means, who in the 1900 Summer Olympics in Meulan, France, had won two gold medals racing keelboats for the UK. Much of his life was devoted to the British and International Red Cross and other relief organizations, and in 1919 he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his work with the Belgian War Refugees Committee, for which from 1914 to 1924 he served as honorary secretary. Later, in 1927, he would also be appointed a Grand Officer of the Order of the Crown of Belgium in recognition of his services.66

From its inception in April 1918 the Anglo-Belgian Union was committed to ‘includ[ing] among its objects the formation of a fund which will be available for providing each year a course of study for an equal number of Belgian and British young men in order that they may enter into residence in Universities in Belgium and Great Britain […] The Council shall also do all in their power to encourage the interchange of professors and lecturers between the two countries’ (Art. 4.3). It also sought to foster Anglo-Belgian relations by ‘promot[ing] each year in an important city in one or both of the two countries a series of Conferences or Lectures, on the history, literature, art, and the political and economic life of the two countries’ (Art. 4.4).67

In addition to its endeavours in the field of education, the Anglo-Belgian Union also engaged in public diplomacy, its most successful enterprise in the interwar period being the organization of a high-profile exhibition in 1927 of Flemish and Belgian art from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century at the Royal Academy of Arts, which I have published about elsewhere. It was the first such large-scale international loan exhibition in London, with the royal couples of both countries as patrons, and established the format for a series of similar exhibitions of ‘national’ art in the Royal Academy, tellingly setting off an ‘arms race’ in arts-supported public diplomacy with the Anglo-Batavian Society, who trumped it by organizing an exhibition of Dutch art on an even grander scale at the same venue two years later.68

Soft diplomacy: the foundation of the department of Dutch studies

The developments were paralleled on the Dutch side. The first Dutch language courses at the University of London were offered by Dame Margaret Tuke (1862–1947), Bedford College’s principal, in the 1914/15 academic session, largely driven by imperial interests in South Africa, but also under the impression of the wave of refugees from Belgium, and the first undergraduate degree programme was instituted by Bernardus Proper (1874–?), founding head of the department of Dutch at Bedford College, in 1916.69 But the main impetus for a wider scheme came from a Dutch expat organization. As Dame Margaret remembers:

[A]t the same time a scheme was set on foot for raising funds for a Reader in Dutch to take charge of the department. Two years later [1918], however, this scheme was superseded by one with a wider scope under the aegis of the University, in which Bedford joined with University College in founding a centre of Dutch Studies in London [comprising both a professor- and a lectureship as well as a Dutch library]. A strong Committee for the promotion of the scheme was formed by the Senate of the University and an appeal sent out which met with a good response.70

These larger plans were greatly facilitated by the fact that within the Dutch business community in London a sense of urgency had arisen about the reputation of the Netherlands, whose neutrality during the war was widely, if not necessarily correctly, seen as having been more favourable to Germany.71 This Dutch business community was centred around the Nederlandsche Vereeniging te Londen (‘Dutch Association in London’), a gentlemen’s club for Dutch expats with offices first on Regent Street, then on Sackville Street, Piccadilly (fig. 3.4a).

Fig. 3.4: Club House of the Nederlandsche Vereeniging te Londen on Sackville Street and its president F. C. Stoop, from Eigen haard: Geïllustreerd Volkstijdschrift, no. 10 (5 March 1898), pp. 157 and 159, © The British Library Board.

The club had been founded in 1873 by E. H. Crone, but the driving force behind it was very much Frederick (‘Freek’) Cornelius Stoop (1854–1933), who only two years after the association’s foundation was elected into its committee and from 1886 continuously served as its chairman until 1932 (fig. 3.4b).72 A banker, stockbroker and financier by profession, descended from an old family of patricians in Dordrecht, he had moved to England in 1873, became naturalized in 1878 and settled in West Hall near Byfleet, Surrey, using his considerable wealth for philanthropic purposes and to build up a growing art collection (Van Gogh and Picasso were among his acquaintances).73 According to a vignette in the biography of Stoop’s son Adrian, a much-revered gentleman rugby union player for the Harlequins, whose training ground in Twickenham still bears the name ‘The Stoop’, and captain of the English national team, Frederick had made his fortune in the early days of oil exploration, as the London-based managing director of the Dortsche Petroleum Maatschappij set up by his elder brother, Adriaan, on Java in 1887. Clever investment in their own refinery had allowed the Stoop brothers to control the full production cycle of their product. By 1910 they were the last remaining independent oil producers in the East Indies, before in 1911, through an exchange of stock, being merged into Royal Dutch Shell, itself the result of the 1907 merger between two rival Dutch (Koninklijke Oliemaatschappij/Royal Dutch) and English (Shell) companies.74

Another influential member of the Nederlandsche Vereeniging provided the link to the academic world: Lord Reay, the Right Honourable Donald James Mackay (1839–1921), the most famous Anglo-Dutch statesman of his day. Like Stoop, this Dutch-born British liberal politician (in the Netherlands known as Donald Jacob, Baron Mackay, heer van Ophemert en Zennewijnen) had been naturalized, in 1877, after inheriting his Scottish title. He had served as Governor of Bombay (1885–90) and Undersecretary of State for India in Lord Rosebery’s liberal administration from 1894, before being elected president of the Royal Asiatic Society (1893–1921) and founding president of the British Academy (1901–7). A member of the council of University College London since 1881, he became UCL’s vice-president in 1892 and its president in 1897. In this position, which he held until his death in 1921, he advocated ‘the necessity of a University organisation in London on a scale in accordance with the greatness of London as the capital of this country and as the capital of the Empire’ and played a leading role in reforming the federal structure of the University of London, which so far had largely been confined to examinations, by filling it with real academic life.75

In his autobiography of 1942, Geyl remembered the atmosphere in which his appointment took place:

After the war the climate was very much in favour of international cultural exchange between the peoples [of Europe], and [the University of] London back then tried to become a large international centre in this respect. University chair after university chair was founded for the language, literature and history of one country after another. We [the Nederlandsche Vereeniging] did not want to miss out and formed a committee to raise funds: at that time money was easily available and we managed to raise substantial funds.76

Indeed a great number of so-called ‘foreign’ chairs were founded at this time, the best-known examples being the London School of Oriental Studies (today’s School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS) in 1916, championed by Lord Reay,77 and the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), founded by Robert William Seton-Watson and inaugurated by Tomáš Masaryk in 1915. There were also numerous European language departments at the constituent colleges of the university, such as the Scandinavian department at UCL (1917), the Cervantes and Camões chairs for Spanish and Portuguese (1916) and the Koraes chair for modern Greek and Byzantine history, language and literature (1918) at King’s College London.78 The endowments for these chairs often came from the governments of the countries in question, from binational friendship associations or expat communities, which would lead to its own set of problems, as exemplarily shown by Richard Clogg in his study of the other contemporary academic cause célèbre at the University of London of this time, the controversy between Arnold Toynbee and the donors of his Koraes chair for modern Greek (Toynbee, with whom Geyl would spar frequently after 1945, was in 1924 effectively dismissed by King’s College because of his reporting on the Greco-Turkish war in Asia Minor, which displeased the chair’s donors, with all the implications this had for academic liberty and related ethical questions).79 Similar issues, if in a different constellation as we will see, would arise in the conflict between the Dutch and Belgian chairs reconstructed here.

On 20 June 1917 the Senate of the University appointed a committee for the promotion of Dutch studies, reporting jointly to the University College committee and the Bedford College council. Presided over by the Netherlands envoy (and former foreign minister) Jhr. René de Marees van Swinderen (1860–1955), and with Stoop serving as chairman and treasurer, in 1918 the committee issued an appeal for funds and managed to raise a total sum of £21,000 (about £1.2 million in today’s terms) for the endowment of the scheme.80 Among the list of principal contributors, headed by Stoop himself, three main groups can be distinguished. First, Stoop’s own Anglo-Dutch petroleum business: not only was he the main contributor himself, but he also managed to enlist his fellow Royal Dutch Shell magnates Sir Marcus Samuel, founder of the Shell company; Sir Henry Deterding, the ‘Napoleon of oil’ and one of the most influential businessmen in the first half of the twentieth century (and board member of the Nederlandsche Vereeniging since 1913);81 and Arnold J. Cohen Stuart, the first managing director (1907–15) of the Anglo-Saxon Petroleum Company, a subsidiary of Shell Transport and Trading, as principal contributors to the Dutch Studies funds. It may also have helped that Geyl’s friend Carel Gerretson had since 1 August 1917 been Deterding’s (and Hendrikus Colijn’s) secretary at the company.82

The second group of principal donors came from shipping and transport: the Union Castle Mail Steamship Company, the Ocean Steamship Company, the Stoomvaart Maatschappij ‘Nederland’, the Rotterdamsche Lloyd and the Koninklijke West Indische Maildienst. As Geyl gratefully notes in his autobiography, he had the privilege to travel for free on the ferries between the two countries. The name of Ernst Heldring (1871–1954) is important in this context. A ship owner and later president of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (the modern successor to the Dutch East India Company), he directed two of these companies and was also involved with the third. In his diary, he writes about the occasion he first made acquaintance with Geyl, ‘the talented correspondent of the “Rotterdammer”’,83 at a dinner at Van Swinderen’s embassy on 8 November 1918, in presence of, among others, the High Commissioner of South Africa, William P. Schreiner. And from that dominion of the British empire came the third set of contributors: the National Bank of South Africa,84 the Standard Bank of South Africa, as well as Sir Otto Beit, a friend of Cecil Rhodes, and the Rhodes Trustees, of which Beit was the administrator. The theme of Anglo-Dutch reconciliation, now that the wounds inflicted by the Boer War were beginning to heal, played a big role here, as Geyl’s friend Jacob Reyneke van Stuwe, who had been Louis Botha’s secretary during the conflict, before starting a career as London correspondent of Het Vaderland, while also being affiliated with the Algemeen Nederlandsch Verbond,85 wrote in the celebratory volume published on the occasion of the Nederlandsche Vereeniging’s fiftieth anniversary in 1923.86

Apart from ‘the effective support of H. E. the Minister of the Netherlands to Great Britain, Jonkheer van Swinderen’ and ‘the enthusiasm and generosity of Mr F. C. Stoop’, the appeal and the scheme owed their success more generally to the expert help and advice of John Abraham Jacob de Villiers (later Sir John de Villiers), cartographer and deputy keeper of maps at the British Museum (1863–1931), and author of The Dutch in South Africa, who also advised the Foreign Office on colonial border conflicts.87 The Dutch government itself, according to a document summarizing the history of the Dutch studies committee from 1955, does not appear to have contributed at this stage; only later, ‘some time before the [Second World] war’, when the fund had run into financial difficulties, did The Hague start to subsidize the enterprise.88 As pointed out by Reyneke van Stuwe, Geyl’s appointment was one of the most important achievements of the organization:

End of July of the same year [1918] was a very important event for our colony, the establishment of the Chair in Dutch Language, Literature and History at London University. Many of the notables in the colony cooperated until it was established and the ‘Dutch Studies Committee’ includes our Envoy as well as the President of the Association F. C. Stoop and Mr A. J. Beaufort. Our talented fellow, Dr P. Geyl, was appointed professor and numerous public lectures are given by him, which are always attended by a multitudinous audience of students and others interested, and contribute greatly to the increasingly good name of our country abroad.89

There does not seem to have been any serious competitor to Geyl for the post. While it was impossible to locate the university files from the recruitment process, a letter exchange between Walter Seton, the honorable secretary of the committee, and Hendrik Clemens Muller, the Amsterdam philhellene freethinker and social democrat, who had expressed his wish to be considered for the position, preserved in the archives of the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, indicates that at least five other candidates must have been in the running.90 Geyl himself writes in his letters to The Hague that the only other realistic candidate for the post had been Adriaan Barnouw, who instead in 1919 would become lecturer in Dutch at Columbia University, New York, where, a few years later, in 1923, he was promoted to Queen Wilhelmina Professor for Dutch Studies.91 Geyl’s historical-political approach towards Dutch studies seems to have tipped the balance in his favour. If we can trust Geyl’s version of the events as reported to The Hague, he even self-assuredly suggested to the committee that Barnouw was a better philologist than he himself, and that if the emphasis of the chair was meant to lie on literature, they should go with his competitor.92

Geyl knew that the appointment was not in the smallest degree a political one, and that his journalistic writings positioned him well to assert the Netherlands’ place in the post-war order. As he writes in his memoirs, his mentor P. J. Blok had confirmed to him that Geyl’s 1919 article ‘Nederland tusschen de mogendheden’ (‘The Netherlands between the Great Powers’), a review of Joost Adriaan van Hamel’s Nederland en de mogendheden published in the leading Dutch cultural-literary-political magazine De Gids, had fallen on fertile soil: ‘Actually they had me in mind for the post from the beginning.’93 Coming from the same city as Stoop, the main sponsor and driver of the initiative (Dordrecht), and being a member of the same club (Nederlandsche Vereeniging) cannot have hurt his chances either; he was part of the inner circle, as Heldring’s diary entry on the dinner at the embassy has already shown. The Leiden literary scholar Gerrit Kalff, who at the time advised against the appointment of Geyl, instead advocating Barnouw, was taken aback by the panel’s unanimous decision in his favour (‘met algemene stemmen’).94 As Geyl’s replacement as London correspondent of the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, Geyl’s friend and fellow Grootnederlander Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck was appointed; later he would also become a member of the Dutch studies committee.95

In his autobiography of 1942 Geyl would not look back on his benefactors very gratefully; his issues with the Dutch studies committee seem to have been mostly concerned with what he saw as undue interference in his own remit:

In my opinion that Dutch Studies Committee was a practical joke. That the donors unduly assumed the right to stay involved with academic affairs, after they had provided their dutiful service [by providing the funds], I simply felt as a slap in my face. The chairman was Stoop, a petroleum millionaire, the model of a dim-witted but self-conscious moneybag, although also not that hopelessly thick that he did not realize it on occasion.96

Dame Margaret Tuke, the founder of his department, of whom Geyl thought highly (‘a resolute elderly lady, Principal of Bedford College, who could not stand the autocratic style of [UCL Provost Gregory] Foster and was man enough not to be cajoled by him’),97 saw it quite differently, remembering Stoop as ‘one of the three Dutch representatives on the University Committee, of which he was for some time Chairman and at all times a most wise and considerate member’.98

The establishment of the department of Dutch studies at the University of London was thus the result of two initiatives complementing each other: an academic one that sought to institutionalize Dutch studies in the aftermath of the First World War, which (along with the imperial interest in South Africa) had raised British interest in Belgian and Dutch affairs in Europe; and a cultural-diplomatic, if not cultural-propagandistic one (to use a more contemporary term), by Dutch interest groups that provided the funds for the enterprise. The character of Geyl’s appointment, like that of Cammaerts, as we will see, was thus a double-faced one, with the purely academic side gaining prominence only over the course of time; initially, the political dimension was doubtlessly dominant.

Geyl’s double life as ‘silent press attaché’

In this sense, Geyl was the ideal candidate for the post, as he combined these two fields seamlessly in him and never clearly distinguished between them. He was also affiliated with a clandestine propaganda institution of his own. Around the same time of his appointment as chair of Dutch studies at University College London, he had been contacted by the Stichting Voorlichting omtrent Nederland (Foundation Enlightenment about the Netherlands), an initiative by the Dutch liberal politician and member of the Upper House of the Dutch parliament Fredericus J. W. Drion (1874–1948) to counter the predominantly negative image of the Netherlands abroad.99 While formally independent and initially mostly privately financed, the foundation’s executive branch, the Nationaal Bureau voor Documentatie over Nederland (‘National Office for Documentation about the Netherlands’), based in The Hague, worked very closely with the Dutch Foreign Office (Buitenlandsche Zaken, BZ) and it soon became a thinly veiled government institution. BZ increased its financial stake over time, providing the majority of the organization’s budget from 1927 onwards.100

The intelligence (voorlichting) on public opinion of the Netherlands abroad operated in two ways: first through the distribution of copies of important articles from the foreign press (the so-called bulletins), and second by employing a network of international correspondents, Geyl being the most prolific among them, to submit regular confidential reports about the developments in their respective host countries. These correspondents, internally called ‘silent press attachés’, operated clandestinely; their contractual working relationship with a semi-official Dutch government organization was unknown to their regular employers, let alone to the public. The office had correspondents in London, Paris, Brussels, Rome, Berlin101 and New York,102 as well as some less formal collaborators, including in Lausanne, Geneva, Stockholm and Vancouver. The reports were usually distributed to high officials in the Foreign Office and the Dutch ambassadors in countries with ‘silent press attachés’, and to other ministers and officials, as and when necessary. Lastly, the office had the task of influencing public opinion in the foreign press, partly overtly, by distributing the Gazette de Hollande, a daily, later weekly, newspaper founded in 1912 by the Foreign Office and the Ministry for Colonies to spread information about the country and her overseas possessions, and partly covertly, by the discreet exertion of influence on journalists and opinion-makers.

Geyl thus led a double life throughout his time at UCL. While holding his academic position he was also on the payroll of The Hague, with an annual salary of £300 (1919) to £650 (1935) according to Geyl’s (imprecise) recollections of 1942, not negligibly salaried,103 and never informed his employer University College about his sideline. In his dispatches to Drion he reported on developments in British academia, press and politics, including details from personal correspondence, and also provided character portraits of individuals, including many of his university colleagues, assessing their usefulness for the organization’s cause, not fundamentally unlike a Stasi (HVA) informant, even though Britain and the Netherlands were, arguably, friendly countries at the time. Retrospectively, after the Second World War, he acknowledged this role in London repeatedly and seemingly remained proud of it:

There was something else in London. In addition to my professorship, I was a representative of the Nationaal Bureau voor Documentatie. It was my job to follow the reports about the Netherlands in the English press and, if necessary, to steer them in the right direction. Soon this private organisation was taken over by the Foreign Office. De facto, if not formally, I was press attaché of the Dutch legation in London. It was often exciting and time-consuming work, especially in the years of the bitter dispute with Belgium over the Scheldt issue. I was at home on Fleet Street, where I knew many editors who I tried to make write in our spirit. I also wrote articles myself, under my own name or under a pseudonym, often also on the Flemish question. Political again!104

His scholarly and propagandistic activities were also closely intertwined and informed each other, and Geyl himself did not draw a clear distinction between the two, which has led to later generations of scholars questioning the motivation behind his historiography. In other words, they were asking whether Geyl’s scholarship was largely a cover for his activism or a continuation of propaganda by other means, an interpretation put forward in particular by Belgian critics in the late 1970s and 1980s, which has led to what can be called a veritable Dutch–Belgian Historikerstreit.105 While the author of these lines would not want to go that far, as Geyl’s reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century partition of the Low Countries has certainly had an enriching effect on subsequent scholarship, in spite of the somewhat problematic motivation behind it, it is difficult not to see this other aspect of his London period as ethically highly questionable, not just in connection with his Greater Netherlands activism but also in relation to his host country and institution.

Fig. 3.5: Pieter Geyl, Holland and Belgium: Their Common History and Their Relations: Three Lectures Given at University College London on February 10, 17 and 24, 1920 (Leiden, 1920) and first page from his inaugural lecture, 16 October 1919 (UCL Special Collections, College Collection DG 39 and STORE 06-1123)

At any rate, Geyl outlined his plans for the department of Dutch studies in his inaugural lecture at University College London on 16 October 1919, in the presence of the Dutch envoy (fig. 3.5b). Pointing out the ‘original and weighty contributions to Dutch philology’ that scholars had made in Germany, where ‘the importance of Dutch studies has been recognised long ago’, for example by August Hoffmann von Fallersleben and Johannes Franck, ‘who published the [then] best etymological dictionary of the Dutch language’, he regretted that up until this moment ‘there [was] no work at all of English scholars in this field to be set against this’, before optimistically setting out his hopes: ‘but what is not, may be in the future’.106 He also declared his intention not to confine his chair to either history or literature, saying that ‘the whole field of Dutch civilisation comes under its purview’,107 and hastened to add that this by no means meant restricting himself geographically to the Netherlands:

But when I say Holland, I am understating the case. The Dutch language is a key which opens more doors than that to the civilisation of my own native country. Dutch is spoken in two other countries. There is Belgium in the first place. It is a fact which the war has made widely known in England that the language of a majority of the Belgian people is not French, but Flemish, but I think that even now the exact relationship between Flemish and Dutch is little understood […] And then there is South Africa.108

In both countries he saw the Dutch language ‘engaged in a life-and-death struggle’ with more powerful languages, English in South Africa and French in Belgium; only in the Netherlands the character of Dutch was protected against the influence of the three most powerful languages in the world at the time (English, French and German), in between which the country was located.109 Geyl further expanded on his programme in three public lectures that he gave at UCL in February 1920, published together as Holland and Belgium: Their Common History and Their Relations in the same year (fig. 3.5a). The central idea that he would later work out in detail in his Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam (1930–59) is already contained in these lectures. Applying John Robert Seeley’s observation that historians are liable to a ‘curious kind of optimistic fatalism’, which in a British context would make them feel bound to interpret the loss of the American colonies not only as inevitable but even as fortunate, to the Low Countries, he stressed that neither the sixteenth-century partition of the old Burgundian lands, nor the secession of Belgium from the Netherlands in 1830 had been inevitable and that existing national grand narratives, principal among them Henri Pirenne’s magnum opus Histoire de Belgique (1900–32), but also what he called the kleinnederlandsche (‘lesser Dutch’) historiography in the Netherlands were, in his view, impermissibly projecting contemporary realities back into the past. With financial support from the Dutch studies committee, the brochure was distributed to all professional historians in the UK,110 enabling Geyl to set out his stall.

Belgian containment strategy: the first attempt at establishing a Belgian chair, 1919/21

Since its inception in April 1918 the Anglo-Belgian Union had been committed to strengthening Anglo-Belgian exchanges in higher education, independently of Geyl’s agitation. The original plans for a Belgian chair had actually been inspired by the foundation of the Cervantes and Camões chairs for Spanish and Portuguese at King’s College in 1916 and developed in parallel with the foundation of the Anglo-Belgian Union. The earliest correspondence in the archives stems from November 1917, when M. Smeesters, the secretary of the Comité Officiel Belge pour l’Angleterre, which was involved in founding the Union, suggested a similar academic representation for Belgium to Baron Moncheur, the Belgian ambassador.111 Preliminary discussions were held with Ronald Burrows, the principal of King’s College, in March, and an Anglo-Belgian committee to take the scheme forward was formed under the auspices of Paul Lambotte, the director of fine arts in the Belgian Ministry of Science and Arts and honorary secretary of the Union’s Belgian section, in June 1918.112

It is doubtful that much would have come out of these discussions in the economically challenged interwar period, had it not been for the Greater Netherlands propaganda emanating from the Dutch chair. As Bryce Lyon writes in his biography of Geyl’s principal historiographical adversary Henri Pirenne:

Some of his [Geyl’s] work was so polemical and so anti-Belgian [in character] that successive Belgian ambassadors to the Court of St James, concerned with its deleterious effects on British public opinion, suggested to their foreign ministers that Pirenne be sent to England to deliver lectures on Belgian history in order to neutralize Geyl’s propaganda.113

Given the reputation he had earned with his journalistic work for the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, it should come as no surprise that the newly appointed Dutch chair’s inaugural lecture was also attended by representatives of the Belgian embassy and the Anglo-Belgian Union, among them Émile Cammaerts, who, alarmed by the programme set out by the journalist turned professor (‘journaliste, bombardé professeur à l’Université de Londres’114), reported back to Brussels:

Setting out his educational programme, M. GEYL recalled that medieval Dutch literature was mainly composed in Belgium and concluded that this was the reason why Belgium needed to be covered in his courses. He described the progress Flemish literature had made in recent years and announced the imminent triumph of Flemish demands [emphasis in the original]. Finally he promised to offer a course on relations between Belgium and Holland. All this affects Belgium in an unpleasant way, especially as Dr GEYL as London correspondent of the ‘Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant’, has written articles unfavourable to the Allies [of the First World War].115

What added insult to injury in the eyes of the observers and turned this into an incident that demanded diplomatic attention was that the Dutch envoy, De Marees van Swinderen, also addressed the audience on this occasion and did not hide his country’s satisfaction at being put in the limelight by the University of London.116 Familiar with the British university system but assuming his diplomatic contacts were not, Cammaerts advised the embassy that in the British system universities were independent institutions upon which government intervention would have little, if not an adverse, effect, hence the need to contain the problem with a counterinitiative:

Because the University College is autonomous and the Chair of ‘Dutch Studies’ (we would prefer to translate it as Netherlandic or Hollando-Belgian Studies) has been created with the help of a private funds mainly from South Africa, the English government bears no responsibility and has no control of the matter.117

In response to Cammaerts’ report, which the chargé d’affaires sent on to Brussels, Paul Hymans, the Belgian foreign minister, replied on 27 December 1919:

Without doubt you will be able to agree with M. Cammaerts to let the Rector [Provost] of University College or other personalities from the academic world know how unpleasant Dr Geyl ’s statements are for our country. This communication should however be of an informal and discreet nature. It would be desirable to take advantage of the appointment to put forward, as a personal suggestion, the idea of creating a Chair for the history of Belgium – a chair that would be entrusted to a Belgian professor. I would be interested to know the response to this by the Rector of University College.118

Pursuing this suggestion, Cammaerts drew up a scoping document for the proposed department of Belgian studies, which was passed on to the university through various channels. Following Hymans’ suggestion to focus on history (necessary, if the Belgian chair was to function as an antidote to Geyl’s influence), it set out the proposed chair’s multidisciplinary remit as follows:

The ground to be covered by the department of Belgian studies would necessarily include the history of the origins and development of Belgian nationality from the early Middle Ages until now with special reference to the great periods of artistic and intellectual efflorescence such as the Age of the Communes, the Burgundian period, the late Renaissance and the Modern Movement. The latter movement would naturally bring in the study of Belgian contemporary literature in Flemish and in French.

Such studies would show that though Belgium has no particular language, she has a distinct civilisation partaking of the qualities of the two groups forming her population. The study of this civilisation is of special interest to British students owing to the frequent political, intellectual and economic intercourse between the two countries throughout history. Special stress would be laid on these relationships. Belgian art and architecture would be considered more from the point of view of national development than from that of the History of Art. The object of the department should be the study of Belgian civilisation rather than the political history of Belgium.119

On the practicalities of the proposed chair, Cammaerts added that it would be easy to find a person sufficiently competent in history, art and literature to deal with the subject adequately but thought it advisable to set aside a small pot of money for a complementary annual lecture series on contemporary Belgian literature, written either in French or Flemish, for which specialists and men of letters could be brought in from the outside. In order to avoid any overlap with Geyl’s existing Dutch department, the Belgian department would not deal with Dutch history, or literature, from the time of the sixteenth-century partition of the Low Countries onwards.

In his role as secretary of the Anglo-Belgian Union, Cammaerts also visited the academic registrar of the University of London, Sir Philip Joseph Hartog. At a higher level, Algernon Maudslay and Sir Cecil Hertslet, the latter a former British Consul General for Belgium from a family of influential Foreign Office librarians,120 had a meeting with the vice-chancellor of the University of London, Sir Edwin Cooper Perry. An undated letter from the two men to the ambassador specifically made the point that the establishment of the Belgian chair should be seen not just as an end in itself but also as a containment strategy against Geyl’s activities. In particular they pointed out that:

As long as such a foundation does not exist, it may seem difficult to limit the scope of Professor Geyl’s lectures, though his project of dealing specifically with Dutch–Belgian relations, if correctly reported, appears at least timely. The mere fact that the holder of the Dutch chair is giving so much importance to purely Belgian questions seems to prove that he would be the first to recognize the necessity of Belgian teaching in the University.121

The proposal was greeted with enthusiasm by Cooper Perry. Busy with the wider reorganization of the university along regional (‘area studies’) lines, as part of which many ‘foreign’ chairs were founded, the vice-chancellor responded in a confidential letter of 15 March 1920:

I quite sympathise with the feeling of a Belgian that Belgian History is being taught to the English by a Dutch professor, and I suppose that later on we shall have the question of nationality in an acute form if we should establish any Chair specially concerned with the Croatians, Serbians, or Yugo-Slavs. I imagine that some weeks will elapse before all these Boards have had time to report, and I will let you know what is happening later.122

An enclosed extract from the minutes of the academic council, the central body of the university, showed that Cammaerts’ memorandum had been considered and referred to the five relevant boards of studies whose remit the proposed interdisciplinary chair would straddle (the faculty assemblies in history, medieval and modern languages, economics, fine art and architecture), with a request for advice on whether the foundation of a chair of Belgian studies at the university would be desirable and, if so, under which conditions and with what general scope.123

Maudslay expressed his gratitude and great satisfaction to Sir Edwin that the project of the creation of a Belgian chair was now under consideration by the university, but had to wait until the summer for Hartog, the academic registrar, to confirm that the Senate, in its meeting of 21 July 1920, had considered Cammaerts’ memorandum favourably and subsequently resolved that it:

would desire in every way possible to further the studies in this country of Belgian history, institutions, art and literature, but they are of the opinion that the field is too wide to be covered by a single Chair. If the necessary funds could be provided they would welcome the establishment in the University of a Chair [with a reduced remit] of Belgian History and Institutions [emphasis in the original].124

The Senate was further of the opinion ‘that the field of literature, including literature both in Flemish and in French, could perhaps be most suitably be dealt with by the establishment of a supplementary fund to provide lectures on those subjects, to be given by lecturers appointed annually’ and suggested fundraising as the appropriate way to take the scheme forward, as the funds for the establishment of chairs of Spanish, modern Greek, Russian and Dutch studies had been collected by special committees set up for this purpose.125

In October 1921 the good news was announced in the Anglo-Belgian Union’s organ, Anglo-Belgian Notes, and a call for donations issued to put the agreement into practice:

The Senate of the University of London has approved the foundation of a Belgian Chair at the University of London and we are awaiting the result of various negotiations to obtain the necessary funds. Nothing would be of greater help than the stepping forward of a generous donor, whose example would most certainly be followed by others. It is sad to think that while most countries, including Holland and Denmark, have chairs at the University of London, for lack of funds Belgium is not represented.126

As so often, the archives shed more light on the decision-making process than the published minutes. In his letter to the subject boards, Hartog had stressed the urgency of the matter because it had

been brought forward by the ‘Anglo-Belgian Union’, not only on grounds of academic interest, but for reasons of a more public character. It has been pointed out that the creation of a Chair of Dutch Studies in the University, dealing with Dutch History and the common history of Holland and Belgium has given rise to some misapprehension in Belgium, and it has been suggested that the best way of removing that misapprehension would be to found and endow a Chair of Belgian Studies in the University.127

Whereas the Romance languages board in its meeting held at King’s College on 11 March 1920, chaired by Margaret Tuke, was of the opinion that ‘on the Francophone side Belgian literature & language were covered by the [existing] syllabus in French, but that they would view with favour the establishment of a Chair of Belgian Culture [emphasis added]’,128 the board of history caused more of a problem. Having discussed the Belgian proposal on 12 and 20 March 1920,129 it summarized its concerns as follows: First and foremost, the historians felt that the restructuring of the university along regional lines should be governed by general principles rather than by ad hoc decisions that would anticipate and bias future developments in a haphazard way. Their dislike of the new interdisciplinary form of organization had already become apparent on the occasion of Geyl’s appointment the previous year and the board now specifically referred to the ongoing foundation, expansion and integration of the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES) into the University.130 Its objection was very much ‘to binding up diverse academic studies in nationalist bundles’, and its position was that ‘the Belgian claim could be better met by the establishment of professorships, readerships, or lectureships in the different branches of knowledge and associating them with their appropriate academic departments’, not without adding:

But this principle should be applied impartially and Dutch Studies should be encouraged to develop on the lines they are naturally following: i.e. the Professor is confining himself to history and a Reader has recently been appointed to deal with language and literature. The title ‘Professor of Dutch Studies’ has already become anomalous in practice as it always was in principle.131

Indeed, as per the university’s original plan, in 1920 the department of Dutch had been strengthened by the addition of a reader, Pieter Harting (1892–1970),132 a philologist originally specializing in Sanskrit, who took over the Dutch linguistic and literary side of the department, while Geyl, deviating from the plan he had set out in his inaugural lecture, concentrated on Low Countries history.133 The board further objected in strong terms against the broad remit of the proposed Belgian chair:

To the proposal, as defined in the application of the Anglo-Belgian Union, the Board conceives that the Senate could hardly return any but a negative answer. The spirit, if not the letter of Statute 88 [that governs academic appointments] would seem to preclude the University from appointing (or even recognizing) a single teacher in such diverse branches of knowledge as history, literature, and art. It could hardly fail to produce a lowering of the standard of university teaching.134

However, because Cammaerts’ proposal was marked as tentative, they were not willing to reject it without giving the Anglo-Belgian Union an opportunity to modify it. If the reorganization of the university along area studies lines was not to be prevented, the board further noted that, in spite of its general scepticism, it had been

somewhat reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the University will not be able permanently to resist the various movements towards an alternative re-integration of University studies on what are called ‘regional’ lines […] But it is unanimously of the opinion that it should not proceed on purely nationalist lines and that the ‘regions’ selected should in no case correspond with any particular national State. It would deprecate the institution of a Department, an Honours School, or a Board of English, French, German, Italian, Russian or Belgian Studies.135

In the meantime, it would recommend that the application put forward by the Anglo-Belgian Union should not, in its present form, be accepted and that the Senate should inform the organization of the grounds for its decision, indicating that it would ‘welcome other proposals for the provision of further teaching on academic lines, in Belgian history, economics, and art.’136

The archives also contain a memorandum in Geyl’s handwriting on University College paper giving evidence of his attempt to hijack the initiative for his purposes, by suggesting to insert an additional point into the board’s statement:137

The Board fails to see why the existence of a Chair of Dutch Studies should create misapprehension in Belgium. In view of the close connection between Dutch & Belgian history, especially as regards those periods which are of more than a local interest; in view also of the fact that the sources of Belgian history in so far they are not written in the world language French are, like those of Dutch history, written in the Dutch language, – the Board is of the opinion, on the contrary, that the study of Belgian history in a more special sense can only usefully be promoted in close collaboration with the existing Dept. of Dutch Studies, which could easily be developed into a Dept. of Netherlandic Studies in a wider sense.138

Geyl’s suggestion, however, was rejected by the board, which pointed out that the question of a national language could hardly be decisive, as Switzerland preceded Germany, Italy and even the Netherlands as a nation state, despite not having a single national language. Neither could American studies be classified as English, in spite of the common language: ‘Discriminations between claims to national Departments cannot be based solely on language, which is only one element in nationality. Belgian history is not less important than Dutch, and the remark is probably also true of Belgian economics and art.’139

Shortly after the receipt of Hartog’s letter, the Anglo-Belgian Union began forming a fundraising committee for the ‘Chair of Belgian History and Institutions’, as the academic registrar had suggested in his letter, to be presided over by the Belgian ambassador. After a year of prolonged enquiries, they had to come to the realization, however, that owing to the unfavourable economic circumstances in both countries at the time, it would be impossible to raise the required endowment and the foundation of the chair would, sadly, have to be postponed. But the organization, as Maudslay wrote to Sydney Russell Wells, Cooper Perry’s successor as vice-chancellor of the university, on 28 November 1921, gladly took up the university’s second suggestion to provide a complementary, smaller fund for the purpose of organizing regular lectures on Belgian literature.

An enquiry by Maudslay as to whether, in the absence of the centrepiece of the proposed department of Belgian studies, the chair of Belgian history and institutions, the Senate would approve extending the scope of such lectures provisionally to include history (which was needed to directly counter Geyl’s influence),140 received a negative response from Sir Edwin Deller, Hartog’s successor as academic registrar, who restated the Senate’s position that the supplementary fund should be limited to ‘the field of literature, including literature both in Flemish and in French’.141 Despite the disappointing reply, the Anglo-Belgian Notes could report in April 1922:

The furtherance of Belgian and British studies in British and Belgian Universities respectively is again being considered, and various plans are being made in that direction, notably for regular Belgian lectures at London University. While waiting to put the matter on a permanent basis, the Union, [in the] meantime, organised three lectures on Belgian Literature, by Mr Jethro Bithell, at London University (Birkbeck College) during January. They attracted a considerable number of serious students, and were well reported in the Press. Other lectures given since Christmas include two on the Belgian Congo by Sir Alfred Sharpe, at Kingston and Manchester; two by Mr Fagg, on Belgian Art, in London and Southend; five by Sir Cecil Hertslet (three in London and two in the provinces), and four by M. Cammaerts (London, Brighton and Yorkshire).142

Thus far, therefore, the attempt to establish a Belgian chair had been unsuccessful, with only a limited provision of lectures on Belgian subjects having been established. While the Anglo-Belgian Union’s strategy to contain Geyl’s influence had met with approval in principle by the university, the necessary means to put it into practice were lacking. Moreover, some confusion had been created with regard to the disciplinary remit of the chair and the unresolved request for a revision of the proposal by the history board of studies, which apparently had either never been properly communicated to the Anglo-Belgian Union or was not considered urgent by them, given that the necessary funds were unforthcoming, would come back to haunt the initiators, as well as the federal university, almost a decade later.

Press war in the 1920s

According to his posthumously published memoirs, written in 1942 when he was being held hostage by the Germans, Geyl, who was known for his outspoken and often bluntly open views, did not take the Belgian initiative seriously. Showing the same contempt with which he held Pirenne’s Histoire de Belgique, its ‘epigones’ and the Belgian state, he characterized Cammaerts as follows:

I had an opponent: Cammaerts, a Belgian propagandist from Brussels, doubtlessly salaried by the Belgian government. He was well connected in London’s literary circles, a famous personality with many abilities, a bit older than me. My Chair had not existed for long when attempts were made to also found a Belgian Chair whose first incumbent Cammaerts should become. I found the idea risible. After all [this is still Geyl] ‘Belgian history’ is a construct by Pirenne; since when does Belgium exist? I was treating a large part of so-called Belgian history as a natural part of Dutch history. And [calling the Chair] ‘Belgian language and literature’ was completely laughable. In the university negotiations about the proposal to found such a Chair, I have defended this position in no uncertain terms. This was very early on, in 1921?143

Self-critically reflecting on his life in a situation in which he could not expect ever to be able to publish his memoirs, he added:

Doubtlessly I did so back then a bit too intensely and lost sight of the fact that English colleagues must have viewed me as ‘partisan’ in the matter. Like in the Lyde matter [a separate occasion on which Geyl’s temper knew no bounds] I certainly gave the impression of being a bit of a wild man and [in doing so] have played into the hands of [Sir Gregory] Foster [the then provost of UCL (1904–29), who tried to end Geyl’s contract in 1924]. I do not remember precisely why on this occasion nothing came out of [the initiative to establish] a Belgian Chair. Surely my criticism will have had an impact. But a year or so later the plan resurfaced and this time my criticism was only taken in so far into account that University College London declined to host the recently accepted Chair, that finally (its establishment no longer being preventable) was established at the [London] School of Economics (or was it King’s College?). It did not really account for much though.144

But even when his opponent had not yet achieved the academic status of professor, Geyl engaged in many press battles with Cammaerts throughout the 1920s.145 In his memoirs he continues:

It should be interesting to see how Cammaerts characterizes me in his memoirs. Not only academically but also in the press did we cross pens innumerable times and often under pseudonyms (but without doubt he recognized me as well as I recognized him). I like to believe that I ‘won’ on quite a few of these occasions. At any rate, I can say with certainty that I always put the facts straight, whereas the Belgian position, for example about the complaints of Antwerp and even more about the Flemish Question, was always highly tendentious and rhetorical, etc. Also I do know for certain that my articles in the whole spectrum of the British press, in The Manchester Guardian, in The Nation, in The Morning Post etc., over the years had considerable impact. As a consequence of my actions, because I was pretty much the only person writing about these matters, a certain understanding of the main facts of the Belgian–Dutch conflict and of the nationalities question in Belgium began to develop both in political and journalistic circles. Nobody in [the Dutch government in] The Hague wanted to regard the latter issue as something in our national interest, a view that I have never accepted but confronted straight on. But the former was justifiably one of my greatest achievements [‘een pluim op mijn hoed’], something I was particularly proud of. It was noticed immediately and explains why I was in the Dutch ministry’s good books and why I had some pull with them in the other matter.146

As Geyl indicates, his interventions had indeed been instrumental in fending off Belgian claims on Dutch territory during the Paris Peace Conference and especially in the subsequent Dutch–Belgian negotiations about international arrangements regarding traffic on the River Scheldt. One of the longest-running conflicts in European history – ever since the sixteenth-century partition of the Low Countries the port of Antwerp could only be accessed via Dutch territory – Belgium had thought the time ripe to redress the issue in Versailles by laying claim to Zeeuws Vlaanderen, the river’s Dutch southern bank, as well as to the Limburg appendix around the city of Maastricht, causing outcries in the Netherlands, which had been neutral during the war.147 In intemperate statements in Robert Seton-Watson’s journal The New Europe, which the editor presented with a commentary on the role of small nations among the big powers at the peace conference,148 as well as in a public podium discussion in the National Liberal Club, Geyl had also directly clashed with Cammaerts on the issue in the summer of 1919, and the altercations continued thoughout the 1920s in discussions about the Dutch–Belgian treaty on the Scheldt.

A further instance of Geyl’s anti-Belgian activities, quoted in Bryce Lyon’s biography of Pirenne, is a report by Baron Émile de Cartier de Marchienne, the Belgian ambassador in London, to the Belgian foreign minister, Paul Hymans,149 which summarized a public lecture Geyl had given at Morley College, University of London, entitled ‘State and nationalities in modern views of Netherlandic history’. In this talk, according to the report, Geyl proclaimed ‘Belgium an artificial state, asserted that Holland and Flanders should comprise one state, and that they did not was disastrous. Its conclusion was that Pirenne’s thesis had no solid foundation.’150 Hymans urged Pirenne, the most famous Belgian historian of his time, who in his magnum opus Histoire de Belgique (1900–32) had argued that the civilisation belge had, irrespective of language, taken shape through shared socio-economic factors in the medieval southern Low Countries, enabling the country to act as a mediator between the Romance and Germanic parts of Europe, to give some lectures at London and Cambridge so as to dissipate the influence of Geyl.151

On one of these occasions, the 1930 Creighton lecture,152 ironically held in Bedford College, home of the Dutch department, Pirenne spoke about the Belgian revolution of 1830. The prestigious Creighton memorial lectures, instituted in the year 1907 in memory of the scholar and bishop Mandell Creighton (1841–1901), ‘reflect changing interests and priorities within British historiography’, as Richard Evans writes in his longitudinal analysis of this cornerstone of the historical profession in the UK.153 It is indicative of the great respect that Pirenne enjoyed in Britain that, in the centenary year of the Belgian revolution, he was allowed to give his lecture in French, the only Creighton lecture ever delivered in a language other than English. In his report to The Hague of 22 November 1930, Geyl gives a detailed account of the event.

Yesterday, Pirenne spoke here, in Bedford College, over La Revolution belge de 1830. It was the Creighton Lecture. The Belgian Ambassador (we only have an ‘Envoy’) presided. There was a large turnout, including a number of prominent historians. Pirenne, the ambassador reminded us, held honorary doctorates of Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews and Manchester. We [the Netherlands] have nobody with whom we could make a similar impression. At the same time he is a man of the world: excellent speaker, full of energy and spirit, and skilful. No Dutch historian manages to achieve the same. I have listened to him with true joy and real admiration, and also observed him because his body language was highly entertaining.154

Geyl’s report continued with a ferocious assault on his historiographical adversary, in which he accused Pirenne of exploiting his fame and being careful to hide from his audience that in reality he was partisan and proclaiming only highly controversial and heavily contested theses:

For an unsuspecting audience, and most English listeners are of course completely ingenuous, this all makes an excellent impression. How impartial, isn’t it? Even [George Peabody] Gooch, who chaired my lecture [on the same subject] in May, and has published it since in his journal, was surprised. He did not see how, under those jovial, gallant and witty manners, Pirenne hid his normal Belgicist nationalist propaganda. […] One has to be naïve to believe it and it was quite obvious that the display of a proper scholarly approach and courteousness was calculated, to let the conclusion ‘It was a truly national revolution’ come across even more forcefully. At the very last he added an elaborate expression of thanks to England and reminded [the audience] of 1914: something like this redoubles the applause of course.155

With his combination of respect for what he saw as skilful propagandistic deception and a scathing critique on the subject (after all, Geyl had timed the publication of the first part of his Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam so that it would coincide – or interfere – with Belgium’s centenary celebrations in 1930),156 one cannot escape the impression that Geyl was looking at an image in a darkened mirror, projecting his own practice on to his opponent. This is also evident in his view of Cammaerts as a mere promoter of Pirenne’s scholarship in Britain, for example when reporting to Drion on 2 April 1921:157

Regarding Pirenne’s theses about Belgian nationality, Cammaerts doubtlessly does fantastic work in popularising them here. It is just that the historians do not accept them. I had already noticed this on the occasion of my Holland [and] Belgium, and just recently a colleague [Neale], with whom I am only vaguely acquainted, told me that he had to review Van der Linden’s Belgian history (translated into English) for History and expressed doubts about the tenability of all the Pirennizing [‘al dat gepirenniseer’], which the new popular accounts of Belgian history are engaged in. He added that he also had to review my Holland [and] Belgium and that he found that ‘an excellent antidote’.158

It is also evident in the quote used earlier, when he had the audacity, and hypocrisy, to accuse Cammaerts of being ‘a Belgian propagandist from Brussels, doubtlessly salaried by the Belgian government’,159 while being himself in the service of the Nationaal Bureau voor Documentatie in The Hague.

Pirenne continued to take a great interest in the establishment of the Belgian chair in London. He would become one of the principal academic sponsors of the scheme, as well as a member of the selection committee (not that, apart from his ‘old friend’160 Cammaerts, there had been other candidates) and in 1934 would use his influence to request additional funds from the Fondation Francqui, a private foundation formed by the Belgian philanthropist Émile Francqui and the American president Herbert Hoover with the aim of furthering Belgian research two years before.161

Second (successful) attempt, 1929/31

A gentleman’s agreement

The second, this time successful, attempt at establishing the Belgian chair in London, the circumstances of which Geyl could not remember in 1942, can now be reconstructed from Cammaerts’ papers, Geyl’s reports to The Hague and the university archives. The level of detail the sources from both sides provide offers a rare opportunity for the study of academic politics and academic intrigue in the period. They reveal a mélange of propagandistic deception and behind-the-scenes manipulation of university bodies on all sides and, like in the case of the Toynbee incident, raise important questions about the role donors and external funds play in academia, the relationship between scholarship and activism and also the principle of academic liberty.

Towards the end of 1929 the drive to establish the Belgian chair had gathered new momentum as the necessary funds had finally started coming together. The Anglo-Belgian Union’s Belgian section, which over the years had organized a series of concerts and theatrical performances for this purpose, had provided the bulk of the funding, while the British section was able to help with a substantial donation and in negotiating the details of the foundation with the university.162 In three letters from 5, 6 and 11 December to Count Guillaume de Hemricourt de Grunne in the Département des Affaires Etrangères in Brussels, all marked as personal, Cammaerts discussed his possible appointment to the academic position.163 Apart from the salary Cammaerts would receive as professor, a major point of discussion that reveals a lot about the dual character of the academic post to be created was the relationship between the new chair and the Belgian propaganda bureau, which Cammaerts had never considered leaving. On the question of suitable remuneration, Cammaerts explained why he was suggesting a salary higher than the £800 per annum he had written into the proposals from 1921 onwards, giving two reasons, one of a general and one of a personal nature. On a general level, the cost of living in London had increased considerably in the decade that had passed, and his understanding was that no professor at the university at that point in time (1929) received less than £1,000, so the Anglo-Belgian Union would have to ask the university to make an exception in order to appoint a new chair for less, a proposition that was conceivable to succeed but would hardly be a good start for the enterprise. More importantly, on a personal level, Cammaerts knew:

from a good source that no professor can enjoy a regular side income without special permission from the Senate – that is, from the Assembly of Professors [he confuses the university’s Senate with UCL’s professorial board here], where Mr Geyl and his friends sit. You know enough of the English mind to know that such a request regarding [work for] an official propaganda office would be disastrous. It is therefore necessary, if I accept the Chair, that I should renounce any salary paid for from the Bureau’s budget.164

Elaborating on his proposal, Cammaerts explained that he was currently receiving a salary of £470 from the bureau, which in a personal capacity he managed to almost double with lectures, articles, courses and related freelance activities, and this was likely to increase further in a couple of years’ time.165 As a professor he would probably have to give up the majority of these sidelines, because the professorial board was known to be quite strict and university professors had to observe a rigorous etiquette. Under these circumstances, a salary of £800 would not constitute sufficient remuneration for him.166

When de Grunne suggested to the ambassador that they reduce Cammaerts’ salary at the bureau by £10 a month (so from £470 to £350 per annum) and put the sum towards the income still lacking for the chair, the idea came to Cammaerts, who was present and listening in on the conversation, that by giving up his salary from the bureau entirely and increasing the remuneration of the chair accordingly, the difficulties deriving from both the general and personal reasons would be solved. If as holder of the chair he received the sum of £1,000 instead of the budgeted £800, this would still be less than the £1,150 he would receive if his salary at the bureau was reduced by £10 a month, as suggested by de Grunne (to £350), and the income of the chair remained fixed at £800.

Apart from the fact that Cammaerts forgot to factor in pension costs to his salary here, the fundamental problem remained that the raised funds were not yet sufficient; only £720 of income for ten years had been secured in subscriptions so far, leaving £280 to be found. However, in order to avoid having to wait for further fundraising successes, Cammaerts was prepared to accept a cutback of the annual operating budget of his bureau, and suggested reducing it from £900 to £600 per annum, delivering an annual saving of £300 for the department that could be used to meet the shortfall.167 The budget the Département des Affaires Etrangères had allocated to his bureau, originally set at £1,200 per annum (including his salary) in 1919, had been gradually reduced to £600 per annum during the financial crisis of the 1920s, continued Cammaerts, and only recently, in 1928, been raised again to £900 per annum, so going back to the funding level of the 1920s, while not ideal, would be feasible.168 Importantly, it went without saying that he would

of course, continue to work in the Bureau, but I would not be accountable to the University since I would not receive any salary. I would simply continue to take advantage of my office and my secretary, which are indispensable to me, both from the point of view of my work for the Anglo-Belgian Union and for the work I am doing for the Embassy.169

In other words, little would change on the ground, but Cammaerts’ continued association with official Belgian authorities would effectively be concealed, muting potential opposition within the university as well as in Belgium (Flanders) herself: ‘After discussing this question with the Ambassador at length, we cannot find any satisfactory solution which will completely shelter me from malicious criticism coming either from my colleagues at the University or from hostile Belgians.’170 But while ‘the necessity, in which I found myself unfortunately, of having to safeguard my interests’171 had preference (Cammaerts had a large family, after all), he still lobbied and tried to negotiate with his ministerial contact an eventual increase of the bureau’s allowance, including funds for systematically building up a Belgian library.172

In his letter to the ministry of 6 December 1929, Cammaerts formally declared his candidature, having been encouraged to do so by the ambassador.173 In line with the multidisciplinary scoping document that he had devised almost a decade ago, Cammaerts pointed to his ‘rather important work on the history of Belgium, from the invasion of the Romans to the contemporary period […], which has been strongly appreciated here as well as in Belgium (notably by Messrs. Pirenne and Van der Essen)’ for his historical expertise, enclosing a copy,174 and to his The Treasure House of Belgium, published in 1924, on Belgian literature of French expression and Flemish expression, related to Belgian art, for his literary and artistic knowledge.175 Indeed his Belgian history had been reviewed favourably in the British press, including by Geyl’s friend and colleague John Ernest Neale, Astor Professor of English History, who, while not failing to point out the ‘Pirennist’ orientation of the publication, was full of praise for its readability and called it ‘the best of the recently published histories of Belgium that the war had spawned’.176 On the basis of this publication, Cammaerts had also been elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the main organization of the historical profession in the United Kingdom. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, had received an honorary LL. D. from the University of Glasgow in 1928,177 and given a great number of public talks at the Royal Institution as well as at the universities of London and Cambridge, among others across the country.

In the same letter Cammaerts informed de Grunne about the improbability of the university picking any other candidate for the position than the one proposed by the Belgian trustees of the newly endowed chair. In theory the appointment would of course depend on the university, but in practice it would be very unlikely that the institution would oppose a candidate put forward by the trustees. And in the unlikely case this should happen, the Anglo-Belgian Union could still refuse to transfer the funds, as the principal had accepted that the fund administration remain in the hands of the organization: ‘It seems to me that we are immune to surprise. The worst that could happen is that the Chair remains unoccupied for lack of funds, and we are certain that the capital will not be used to subsidize the teaching of a professor who would not represent [Belgium] worthily.’178

An extraordinary mistake

Having resolved these internal issues amicably, the Anglo-Belgian Union took up the dialogue with the university again. On 9 December 1929 Algernon Maudslay contacted the principal, continuing the open thread from 1921. Eight years had passed since and the post-war spirit of Anglo-Belgian brotherhood-in-arms had dissipated,179 but the university leadership under the new principal Sir Edwin Deller felt intrigued by the unexpected possibility that the Belgian chair might become a reality after all and the Senate of the federal institution duty-bound by their decision (in principle) of 1920 to accept the proposal.180

A deed of foundation, in which the Anglo-Belgian Union made itself responsible for sufficient funds to guarantee an income of £915 for a period of ten years, was submitted for the seal of the university committee in February 1930 and in light of these circumstances, the Senate approved the establishment of the chair for the period covered by the guarantee, namely for ten years from 30 July 1930. The financial arrangements were signed off by the university court, the financial board of the university, in early December 1930, and a decade after the initiative had started the Belgian chair was finally ready to be filled.181 Or so it seemed.

On 12 December 1930 Cammaerts had to enlist the help of Lord Burnham, the former owner of the Daily Telegraph, who had been interested in Anglo-Belgian affairs ever since his newspaper’s King Albert Book initiative of 1914 and had become one of the trustees of the chair.182 In a confidential letter Cammaerts explained what he saw as an administrative mistake at university headquarters in South Kensington. Reminding Burnham of the fact that ‘at their meeting of July [19]21, the Senate had passed a Resolution stating that ‘they would welcome the establishment in the University of a Chair of Belgian History and Institutions’, as well as the establishment of ‘a supplementary fund to provide lectures on Belgian literature’, Cammaerts pointed out that:

It was for such a Chair of Belgian History and Institutions therefore, that the appeal for funds was made, and when Mr Maudslay wrote again to the Principal, on December 9, 1929, he was careful to remind him of Mr Hartog’s letter defining the scope of the Chair. In spite of this, some extraordinary mistake was made at headquarters, and the foundation was dealt with, not as a Chair of History, but as a Chair of Language and Literature. The Board of Studies in Romance Languages was asked to report on the location of the Chair and to recommend external experts [for the selection of the Professor].183

As soon as the Anglo-Belgian Union became aware of this, Maudslay wrote to the principal reminding him that, according to the previous resolution of the Senate and the wishes of the donors, history had to be central to the remit of the post, and that ‘if the essential character of the Chair were to be altered, the Council of the A. B. U. would be placed in a difficult position’. Answering on behalf of Deller, who was on a business trip in the United States, S. J. Worsley, the academic registrar, responded with an evasive letter, mentioning that some misunderstanding must have occurred, but without saying that anything would be done to set the matter right.184

The blunder had of course not been a blunder, but Deller’s attempt to circumvent the problems the initiative had encountered on its first attempt in 1920 and to paper over serious disagreements about the newly endowed chair within the university, which, as a federal institution, consisted of a complex arrangement of semi-independent colleges and fiercely independent-minded subject boards that, at the time, cut across the colleges. With the hostile response of the board of history of March 1920 in mind, the principal this time, apparently deliberately, and quite probably unaware of the donors’ priorities, had sent the proposal to the board of studies of Romance languages only, which once again, as in 1920, duly approved the development.

Stormy meetings

Geyl got wind of the developments in late 1930. The Senate had recommended hosting the new chair at University College, given the fact that similar ‘foreign’ chairs, his own included, were already located there. Along with John Ernest Neale, head of the department of history; Louis Brandin, the chairman of the board of Romance languages; and Raymond Wilson Chambers, the dean of the faculty of arts, Geyl was asked into the office of the provost (the college’s administrative head), Sir Allen Mawer, Foster’s successor, in mid-November to discuss the university’s proposal to establish the new Belgian chair at UCL:

Ten years ago, there had already been talk of the chair; more than once have I heard from Flemish friends in the meantime, who assured me that money was still collected and that Cammaerts seemed to be destined for the post. Now, all of a sudden, the case had been sealed […] The peculiarity of the case was that the University appeared to have accepted the offer at once. Ten years ago, the Board of Studies (the Faculty Assembly) in History was asked for its opinion, which was not very favourable, but it was also not needed at that stage. However, this faculty has not been consulted this time, neither has that of Germanic languages; only that of Romance languages, and they are now in favour.185

Neale, a close friend of Geyl’s, was deeply outraged that the board of studies in history had been passed over and, as a matter of principle, vehemently opposed the proposal of a chair for multidisciplinary ‘studies’ encompassing history, literature and art. He also suspected that the intention behind the initiative was not a purely scholarly but also at least partially a propagandistic one. Geyl noted that among the list of personalities sponsoring the new chair were only francophone Belgians, among whom ‘of course Pirenne’, and not a single Fleming.186 When Brandin, the only scholar positively inclined towards the proposal in the round, responded that francophone Belgian literature would be the main remit of the new post but that nothing would hinder the new colleague from also covering Belgian literature in Flemish, Geyl protested because Flemish literature was part of the existing Dutch department’s remit. The provost, averse to affronting the federal university, argued that since the chair had been accepted by the university, the only question to be debated was whether to attach it to University College or not. Chambers, the dean of faculty, agreed with all the objections that had been put forward, but thought it better to accept the chair at UCL, where collegial influence could be exerted on the new appointee, a reasoning with which Geyl towards the end of the meeting reluctantly went along when he realized that, in light of the fact that the university had committed itself already and the provost seemed disinclined to refuse, the appointment could no longer be prevented.

At any rate, the meeting on this day had no decision-making powers; the professorial board – the full assembly of all professors and the main lecturers of UCL, representing its academic voice – would have the final say. In his confidential reports to The Hague, Geyl also provides a detailed account of the stormy meeting of that college body that took place on 25 November 1930:

There were a good 40 members present (out of maybe 70). After the Provost had initiated the case, Neale took the floor and contested the proposal for scholarly reasons. He added that Belgian history was an extremely controversial subject, that the Pirennist direction, which the new professor would certainly advocate, had a political tendency and was anti-Flemish, that the postholder would undoubtedly be a dilettante, and that as head of the department of history he refused to take responsibility. You understand that I listened with enthusiasm and waited for what was said by an Englishman so sharply. After Neale, Professor [Harold E.] Butler, Latin, spoke, a highly regarded man who branded the whole thing as propaganda and noted that Flemish literature was already taught (by [Jacob] Haantjes); before ending with ‘We are better without it.’187

Next, Geyl took the floor himself. Pointing to the fact that the university had consulted only the board of Romance languages, whereas the board of Germanic languages had been ignored, while at the same time being told that if the appointee so wished, he could also deal with Flemish literature, Geyl elaborated:

Now this involves us in all sorts of difficulties. Flemish literature is a branch of Netherlandic literature, and as Prof. Butler said, provision has been made for the study and teaching of it at this College by the institution of the Readership of Dutch Language and Literature. Dutch here is the translation of Nederlandsch, Netherlandic, which in this context includes both Holland-Dutch and Flemish. The Dutch Reader, Dr Haantjes, actually lectures, and has always lectured, on Flemish Mediaeval and Modern writers as well as on Dutch, and he could not do otherwise. This interpretation is the only possible one, and it is in fact the generally accepted interpretation both in Dutch and in Belgian Universities.188

Geyl also raised the spectre of reputational damage. Warning of the impact on public and academic opinion in Flanders, he told the assembly that he knew Belgium almost as well as his country of origin, that the political situation there was very polarized and that everything tended to be looked upon as either pro- or anti-Flemish. However, it was not political opinion that he was (pretending to be) worried about but Flemish scholarship as for example represented by the Royal Flemish Academy in Ghent, which he expected would resent the appointment.189 According to Geyl’s account, his reasoning was heard in breathless silence, interrupted only by laughter when he assured that at least there would be no repercussions in Holland. When Chambers, the dean, suggested the offer be accepted, if only to keep the Belgian chair under control, as by rejecting it the board would simply send it to another college within the university, Geyl abstained from commenting.

What followed, as in the case of Toynbee’s dismissal from the Koraes chair for modern Greek at King’s College (1924),190 soon became a fundamental debate about the touchy subject of academic freedom. The provost, retreating in light of the forceful opposition from the faculty assembly, suggested that if the board were seriously contemplating rejecting the offer, good reasons would need to be given at least, and that it was impossible for a decision already taken by the university to be branded as propagandistic or not scholarly enough in nature, whereupon Neale took it upon himself to state, according to Geyl’s account, that this would rob the professorial board of all freedom of decision. His intervention apparently struck a chord in the audience, already distrustful of the university leadership. An attempt by a few junior board members to allow the provost a face-saving retreat with the suggestion of rejecting the proposal under the pretext of lack of office space, was turned down by senior members and it was put on the record that important principles such as academic liberty must also be defended against university authorities.191

Finally, George Barker Jeffery, a mathematical physicist, proposed a motion that delegated the drafting of a response note declining the offer to host the Belgian chair at UCL to a new subcommittee of the professorial board, to which, along with Brandin and Chambers, all the main opponents of the proposed chair were appointed, including Neale, Geyl and J. G. Robertson, the chairman of the board of Germanic languages (who had been absent from the meeting), to be discussed and voted upon at the board’s next regular meeting. Concluding his report to Drion, Geyl added his assessment of the situation:

[I]t is of great importance to me for various reasons. This whole Belgian-chair plan has been directed against me like a counterblast [he uses this English term in the Dutch original]. There is no doubt that Cammaerts has the intention of drawing the available £800 for ten years, professing an academic title and promoting propagandist activity. To participate in education, as I do, as does Haantjes, who teaches the language [does not occur to him], according to the Provost he would earn his salary with ‘a few public lectures’.192

Two weeks later, in his next report to The Hague, of 13 December 1930,193 Geyl could report that the subcommittee meeting had gone entirely according to his wishes. He had prepared a response note for the professorial board accepting the chair at University College under the condition that it would be limited to ‘Belgian literature of French expression’, based on the fact that only the board of Romance languages had been consulted and that the list of external experts to help in selecting the candidate had been drawn up by that board, but could steer the discussions in a way that a motion quite similar to what he had envisaged emerged and he did not have to produce the one he had prepared as a back-up. In his report Geyl notes that ‘Brandin was strangely quiet and the Provost extremely obedient’ during this meeting, which indicates that Geyl sensed that something was going on but did not know precisely what. At any rate, left to themselves, in his opinion, the committee would probably not have accepted the limitation of the chair’s remit so easily. In its next meeting the professorial board would now be presented with a motion to accept the proposed chair on the assumption that the field of study would be circumscribed as ‘mainly Belgian literature of French expression’,194 an outcome that Geyl considered very satisfying, although the ‘mainly’ qualifier allowed the proposal to be a bit less strict than the one he had prepared. However, this was outweighed by the fact that he was not seen as the instigator of the limitation. While it was now certain that his Belgian nemesis would equal him in academic status, and according to Geyl’s verdict ‘on a very thin scholarly basis, as a kind of decoration of his propagandistic activity’, this could not have been prevented because of the federal university’s precipitate acceptance of the chair, but ‘at least now it will be very difficult for [Cammaerts] to venture into my field, history, and he will have to leave Flemish literature to my colleague Haantjes; while the College’s general attention has been drawn to the possibility of a propagandistic abuse of his position.’ As Geyl reported to Drion, ‘It is almost impossible that anything will be changed.’195

Anglo-Belgian countermeasures

The Anglo-Belgian Union in the meantime had continued its efforts to rectify the situation in its favour. Realizing the importance of the professorial board’s weight in the university’s decision-making process, and that it was ‘very likely be favourable to the foundation of a Chair of Belgian Studies – that is to say of Belgian Literature of French expression – at University College’, a formulation that was completely unacceptable to the organisation, Cammaerts felt ‘that some steps ought to be taken to avoid such a decision, which might be difficult to rescind.’ He arranged a meeting with Worsley, the academic registrar, at the same time asking Lord Burnham ‘to have a word with [Worsley] on the telephone, in order to prevent the Professorial Board of University College from taking a final decision, or to persuade them to postpone the whole matter pending some alteration of the Terms of Reference.’196

Lord Burnham responded on 16 December 1930, saying that he ‘was much perturbed at any variation of the original terms of acceptance’, but that Mr Maudslay had told him on the telephone that morning that, as far as he could tell, he had put the matter right with the registrar, ‘who in turn will communicate with the Professorial Board of University College in time for them to make their report,’197 possibly the intervention that Geyl had sensed but had not been able to put his finger on during the last board meeting. Cammaerts and Maudslay also called on the Belgian ambassador, who was:

strongly of the opinion that the essential character of the foundation cannot be altered, not only because it would be contrary to the wishes of the donors, but also because the scope of the Chair would be far too limited and would encroach on the department of the Chairs of French and Dutch Literature. We must also foresee that Flemish opinion in Belgium would look askance at the foundation of a Chair of Belgian Literature in a foreign country, in which Flemish literature would not be adequately treated. I presume that, at their next meeting, the Senate may, on the strength of our protest, modify their recommendations, but it would perhaps be easier for them to do so if the Professorial Board of University College had not delivered their opinion.198

Consequently, in his next report, of 17 December, Geyl had to inform Drion that ‘the question of the Belgian Chair’ was far from over after all. At the meeting of the professorial board the day before, the provost had reported that on the morning of that very day, in response to a copy of the draft motion that the board was about to adopt and that he had sent in confidence to university headquarters as a courtesy, he had received a cautionary reply notifying him of the contract concluded between the university and the Anglo-Belgian Union. In it the title of the chair was given as ‘Belgian studies and institutions’, which made the limitations the professorial board was trying to impose extremely difficult to implement, and, to Geyl’s horror, described the remit of the post in even broader terms, now even including the unfortunate expression ‘the language of Belgium’ in the singular. The contract with the Anglo-Belgian Union, with this title for the chair, had indeed been finalized earlier that month and, as a deed of trust, was impossible to be revised without the counterparty’s approval.199

In response to the central university apparently ignoring University College’s objections, whether as a result of another miscommunication or in response to the Anglo-Belgian Union’s or the ambassador’s interventions (the sources do not establish this definitively),200 the provost, recognizing the irreconcilability of the two positions, now decided that in these circumstances he felt unable to move the subcommittee’s draft proposal. Instead he put forward his own motion, which was to regretfully decline the offer altogether, not by using the subcommittee’s arguments but on the grounds of the Senate’s decision of 1920; while having approved the Belgian chair in principle, the Senate had at that time also referred the proposal back to the Anglo-Belgian Union for revision, a process which apparently had not taken place.201

The provost’s suggestion caused much of a sensation in the assembly. Professor Jeffery, the physicist who at the board’s previous meeting had proposed delegating the issue to the subcommittee, now argued that rejection, and on such grounds, would be a very serious matter, since presumably it would prevent any other college from hosting the Belgian chair and thus upset the Anglo-Belgian Union (and presumably Belgian public opinion) in a harsh and unintended way. To prevent this from happening, he proposed an amendment to the provost’s motion, suggesting that further consultations should be held before taking such a radical decision, not with South Kensington, the university’s headquarters, where the confusion had been created, but with the Anglo-Belgian Union directly, in the hope that a change in the terms of the deed might be obtained. For this purpose, he suggested once more delegating the issue to the subcommittee. Jeffery’s amendment passed ‘with a good 20 votes’ (in Geyl’s recollection, many board members had already left because of the advanced time, including fierce opponents of the plan as a whole), whereas Geyl abstained and four or five voted against, among them the philosopher John Macmurray, who in the discussions had argued that ‘apparently nobody really wanted the Chair and that new deliberations could only lead to a revival of something that was apparently essentially unhealthy.’202 In result, the subcommittee would have to reconvene after the Christmas break in the new year.

In the meantime, the principal, Deller, had returned from America and, still trying to attach the chair to UCL, as proposed by the Senate, explained to Maudslay in a meeting with him and Allan Mawer, the UCL provost, on 19 January 1931 that if he had stressed the literary side of the professor’s activities, it was because he wished to avoid any competition to the Anglo-Belgian Union’s choice of candidate. Given Cammaerts’ strong literary profile, other candidates could be expected to come forward ‘if the Chair assumed a historical character and […] Mr C. might not be elected’. In fact, as Cammaerts writes, ‘Mr Maudslay was faced with the alternative of agreeing with the change of scope of the Chair from History to Literature, or of risking the failure of the Union’s candidate’, adding himself that ‘Mr C. would be the last man to call himself a historian.’203 Deller’s explanation was probably a retrospective rationalization of his autocratic manoeuvre to bypass the historians in an attempt to quickly seal the deal, but after long discussions, a compromise formula emerged, calling the post ‘Chair of Belgian Studies, mainly Literature of French expression’, so as to allow the university to save face and to leave the professor some scope in other directions, something that Deller also put into writing to Maudslay:

I am still in pursuit of a formula which may perhaps save delay and inconvenience […] The point is this. I gather that the reference to ‘French expression’ may prove difficult from your point of view, as quite naturally you may have to be thinking of both the French and the Flemish elements. I wonder whether it would be satisfactory from your point of view if we merely referred to the Chair as a Chair ‘mainly of Belgian Literature’. That would not exclude either History or Flemish, although it makes no specific reference to them; and a formula of this kind might, I think, help matters.204

When the result of this conversation was reported to the ambassador he expressed deep regret that such a modification should be found necessary and suggested that difficulties might be minimized if, instead of installing the chair at University College, the foundation were to take place at King’s College (as originally envisaged at the beginning of the initiative during the First World War). Deller, in a telephone conversation with Maudslay on 20 January, had to inform the Belgians that the difficulties would be just as great there as at UCL.205

Last act of the drama

In Geyl’s subsequent report of 25 February 1931, the silent press agent details the last act of the drama around the Belgian chair, as far as UCL was involved. The subcommittee had met again in his and Neale’s absence – Geyl had been in the Netherlands and his ally Neale could not attend because of a bereavement in the family. Finding the committee’s report on his desk to be signed on his return, Geyl was unpleasantly surprised to discover that of the two limitations the subcommittee had tried to impose on the remit of the new chair (‘studies’ limited to literature, and ‘Belgian’ to ‘Belgian of French expression’) the latter, after negotiations with the Anglo-Belgian Union, had been omitted. Feeling betrayed by his colleagues on the subcommittee, including his ‘good friend’ Robertson, Geyl refused to sign and informed the secretaries of the professorial board of his intention to propose an amendment to reinsert the words ‘of French expression’ at the next board meeting.

Apparently the subcommittee, in the absence of the two members who had been the strongest opponents in the case, had been swayed into dropping the limitation on the grounds of loyalty to the federal university, helped by the fact that the Anglo-Belgian Union had consented to the principal’s compromise formula ‘Chair of Belgian Studies, mainly Belgian Literature’, having heard of Deller’s explanation (unbeknown to Geyl) that Cammaerts otherwise might not be elected.206 Exemplary of this position is Harold E. Butler, the professor of Latin, who apparently stated that he felt no more for the chair than for its opponents, but, as Geyl quotes, ‘thought that the promise of 1920, to be explained by the post-war climate, should be honoured and that the College should not let the University down.’

While Geyl furiously tried to reinstate the linguistic limitation, the deliberations of the professorial board took a different turn when Neale deduced from the Anglo-Belgian Union’s letters, in which Cammaerts had accepted the principal’s compromise formula, that in spite of the focus on literature in the title of the role, the donors were still thinking, and probably even predominantly, of history. Indeed, the Anglo-Belgian Union had assented to the compromise formula with the qualification ‘provided that all facilities would be given to the holder of the Chair to deal with historical and other subjects of Belgian interest’ and the expectation that the chair would be attached to more boards of studies than that of Romance languages alone.207

Neale therefore objected on this ground and proposed a change in the draft ‘Statement of Duties and Terms of Appointment’ for the new post. The draft introduced the duties of the ‘Professor of Belgian Studies (mainly of Belgian Literature)’ as ‘to give courses and to hold classes in Belgian Literature’, but the following clause added that he ‘may, however, lecture on Belgian History, Institutions and Art in relation to Belgian Literature.’ It was this clause which Neale suggested to be deleted.208

In the discussion of Neale’s amendment, several board members again pointed out sharply that it was not appropriate to drop conditions which the board thought necessary from an academic point of view on the direction of the donors. ‘Not one academic argument’, according to Geyl, ‘had been made to justify the omission of “of French expression”. Only the provost had (in a speech that was, to be fair, purely explanatory, not a plea) an argument of the donors, which was apparently political: the reluctance to recognize that the Belgian nation was twofold.’ Whereas ‘this recognition inevitably takes place in Belgian academic and scientific life: it is, after all, a fact of nature: Belgian universities do not teach Belgian, but either French or Dutch literature […] And here they do not want to admit the divorce, but they do want to place everything under French patronage by exclusively French-speaking advisers, etc.’209

When Neale’s amendment was passed by twenty-five to five votes (the latter almost all members of the unfortunate subcommittee, who felt bound by their signature on the previous report), the provost considered it preferable, given the certainty that the Belgians would not be satisfied with this stipulation, that the board move to vote on the amended motion and reject the proposal altogether, which the board did almost unanimously, a bombshell decision that did not fail to reverberate throughout the university.

The embarrassment for the university leadership could hardly have been greater. Deller’s high-handed handling of the matter, committing the institution before having secured full academic approval and at the same time alienating the donors by single-handedly changing the remit of the proposed chair in an attempt to circumvent expected opposition, had hit a wall and been exposed as autocratic. ‘So difficult it is here to refuse money,’ as Geyl commented to Drion,210 in a slightly unfair swipe at the principal, as accepting additional resources was not an end in itself but fitted into the university’s wider plans of a reorganization along regional lines. Geyl’s manipulations then came on top of this, and it was not too difficult to exploit the weaknesses and contradictions of the Anglo-Belgian Union’s proposal, which the organization, having been preoccupied by the financial arrangements for a decade, had neglected to revise.

Contingency plans

In an effort at damage limitation, Deller, in an emergency meeting to discuss the fallout of UCL’s decision, was anxious to reassure the Anglo-Belgian Union that the development would ‘in no way interfere with the resolution of the Senate concerning the foundation of the Chair of Belgian Studies.’ Doubtlessly the extraordinary news had gone round in university circles, as the principal ‘appeared somewhat reluctant to open negotiations with King’s College under present circumstances,’ as Cammaerts reported to Lord Burnham.211 The blow had indeed been a major one, as the future association of the Belgian chair with UCL had already been reported in the press.212

As a contingency plan Deller eventually proposed that ‘if the Union agreed, it might be possible to establish the Chair under the direct authority of the University and to give it provisional headquarters in the London School of Economics’ (LSE).213 The offer was sweetened by the promise that this arrangement might only be temporary as ‘the Belgian Chair would be placed on the same footing as other foreign Chairs as soon as the new buildings in course of construction on the Bloomsbury site [Senate House] should be completed’214 and ‘[t]he professor would also be given facilities to lecture in other colleges, and would receive full professorial status.’215 The LSE, not an obvious host institution given its focus on the economic and social sciences, was selected because its director, William Pember Reeves, had shown great interest in the Belgian cause during the First World War, when his institution had accepted a large number of refugee students from Belgian universities, and knew Cammaerts from that time.216 While in the 1930s it may not have had the full status and reputation that it enjoys today (as arguably one of the finest such institutions in the world), the disciplinary misplacement of the Belgian chair was what caused the Anglo-Belgian Union major concern. As Cammaerts wrote confidentially to Deller:

I trust that my last letter did not give you the impression that the status of the London School of Economics, as a centre of social studies, is not fully appreciated by my colleagues and myself. But the Belgian Chair will also deal with literary subjects, for which we thought that one of the other colleges would seem to be more suitable as a permanent home. This appears to be confirmed by the fact that similar foreign Chairs are established at either King’s College or University College, and we are naturally anxious to avoid disparaging comparisons. It is therefore with great pleasure that I learn from your letter of March 25 that the University would be prepared to undertake that the establishment of the Chair at the London School of Economics should only be provisional. This will no doubt obviate all objections on that point.217

Of course, the arrangement would eventually become a permanent one, lasting until Cammaerts’ retirement in 1947 (and not just because Senate House, the new university headquarters in Bloomsbury, was used to house the Ministry of Information during the Second World War), but at least the disciplinary limitations that UCL had tried to impose on the Belgian chair could be largely ignored now. In July 1931, the Senate passed the resolution that Cammaerts be appointed to the university chair of ‘Belgian Studies and Institutions’ (an exact copy of Geyl’s professorial remit) from 1 September 1931, although still attached only to the board of studies in Romance languages and literatures,218 and on 29 October 1931 he could finally present his inaugural lecture at the LSE, in the presence of the Belgian ambassador. His oration, on ‘The development of Belgian culture’,219 started with a reminder to the audience of the seminal importance of the First World War for the perception of Belgium in Britain and went on to discuss a series of manifestations of Belgian culture that challenged common linguistic, geographical or historical conceptions. Geyl does not seem to have attended the occasion but, if we can trust his account, expected to confront Cammaerts on the occasion of a brief lecture series that he was due to present at the LSE around the same time, arranged before Geyl knew that Cammaerts would join ‘the School’,220 as he derisively called the institution. Its subject, ‘the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1814–30’, could hardly have been a more contentious topic for a confrontation between the two professors from the Low Countries, but Cammaerts returned the favour of not turning up to Geyl’s ‘raid into the enemy’s country’.221

Fig. 3.6: Émile Cammaerts, Jean Lerot (lawyer), C. H. Williams (head of history department, King’s College London) in November 1943, SHL, MS 800/I/162

In spite of the setback with regard to the home institution, the Anglo-Belgian Union’s plans to develop a full department of Belgian studies as it was now conceived continued to be high. As The Times reported on 5 December 1930, it was hoped that ‘it might become financially possible in the future to further the project by the establishment of lectureships, scholarships, and prizes.’222 Looking back on the first twenty years of its existence in 1936, the organization would regard the inauguration of the chair of Belgian studies as its greatest success, ‘its most precious dream come true’ (fig. 3.6).223

Between scholarship and activism: conclusion

How can this episode of academic politics and intrigue intersecting with conflicting national propaganda operations that this author likes to call an ‘academic proxy war’, between Dutch and Belgian interest groups in interwar London, be summarized? First of all, it is pretty clear that while both chairs produced respectable academic œuvres, neither of them was able to fully part with the propagandistic roots out of which their academic careers grew, Geyl certainly not during his time in London. He indicates as much in 1942 when thinking back to this time, writing, ‘I have missed few occasions to argue and spent those years immersed in polemics, right up to the 1930s. Then my Nederlandsche Stam volumes were published, which aimed to be constructive, whereas I had been critical until then, but still I did not shy away from polemics if I had to.’224 But even with that opus, the first two volumes of which were written in London (1930 and 1934; English translations were published in 1932 and 1936), he was aware that he ‘was creating a work with a broader scope than historiography alone. I also provided a foundation for the Greater Netherlands idea in a political sense.’225 The gradual, if incomplete, shift from political activist to scholar of the subject of his activism had partly been a consequence of the Foster incident, when in 1924 he came close to losing his academic post and Geyl’s subsequent internalization of the ‘publish or perish’ paradigm, and partly due to the realization that in order to compete with Pirenne’s grand synthesis Histoire de Belgique, polemics alone were not enough; rather, he had to produce a counternarrative of similar format and standing. As he recalled in 1942, ‘This book has added inches to my stature.’226

Its dual character, namely the question of whether the political intention behind it devalues its scholarly innovation, would lead to some very different assessments of Geyl’s magnum opus, right up to the present day, but there can be little doubt that at the time his reinterpretation of the Dutch Revolt, which scrutinized and challenged previous national-teleological interpretations of Low Countries history (Johan Huizinga saw it as a ‘valuable corrective to the existing national views of history’, even if he disapproved of Geyl’s bellicosity),227 had a lasting impact on later research on the Dutch Revolt, especially in the anglophone world, even if significant reservations have emerged since228 and ‘there may only be a few historians left who accept it with all its implications’ nowadays.229

Nor was Geyl’s dismissive attitude towards Cammaerts’ academic achievements justified. In 1935 the Belgian chair’s comprehensive biography of Albert of Belgium, Defender of Right appeared; the king had tragically passed away in a mountaineering accident the year before. It was followed in 1939 by The Keystone of Europe: History of the Belgian Dynasty, 1830–1939, and in 1941 by his biography The Prisoner of Laeken: King Leopold, Legend and Fact, a staunch defence of Albert’s son and successor’s wartime record, which after 1945 would lead to a major political crisis in the country, the Question Royale, throughout which Cammaerts would continue to defend Leopold, although the francophone part of Belgium had largely turned against the king.230 For a long time a contentious issue, this was also the reason why Cammaerts’ papers were unavailable until after Leopold’s death in 1983. While his works are not completely free of hagiographic tendencies, Cammaerts was certainly the most distinguished biographer of the Belgian dynasty up to that date. He also continued to publish literary works as well as Christian writings and, as the annual reports of the Belgian chair to the trustees of the Anglo-Belgian Union show,231 continued to deliver a great number of talks, not just at the LSE and other colleges of the University of London but also, as in his pre-professorial practice, in various cities across the country, on a wide variety of Belgian subjects, and not as oblivious to the Flemish side of Belgian culture as Geyl had made him out to be, as also Cammaerts’ translations of a selection of Guido Gezelle’s poems into English show.232

The ‘academic proxy war’ described here, which can probably also be interpreted as a late effect of the ‘mobilisation of scholarship’ during the First World War,233 was defused after Geyl’s nomination as professor of Dutch history in Utrecht in 1935, an appointment which his old friend Gerretson had made possible and in which Geyl had to obligate himself to the Dutch government to refrain from intervening politically in Belgian affairs,234 a stipulation that Geyl by and large respected, allowing his scholarly reputation to outgrow his activist side. Intensely nationalistic, Geyl had increasingly come to regard London as kind of an exile and after two decades in the British capital was longing to return to the Netherlands as his natural field of activity. There he continued to build his reputation as an eminent historian, the foundations for which he had laid in Britain – even his later works, such as Oranje en Stuart (1939, published in English translation in 1969), rely to a large extent on research in the Public Record Office undertaken during his London years.

At UCL and Bedford College, Geyl was succeeded by his former student and assistant Gustaaf Renier, who, born in Flushing (Vlissingen) to Belgian parents, considered himself a francophone Zeeuw.235 Having started his historical studies in Ghent, he moved to London at the outbreak of the First World War and completed them under Geyl in London with a thesis on Great Britain and the Establishment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1813–1815 (1930).236 Serving the Dutch government-in-exile under prime minister Gerbrandy as literary adviser in the Second World War,237 and as part of this producing a monograph on The Dutch Nation (1945), which he himself translated into Dutch as De Noord-Nederlandse Natie (1948), it was perhaps inevitable that Renier, who revered his first academic teacher, Henri Pirenne, would come to liberate himself from Geyl’s Groot-Nederlandism, but they managed to part academic ways without it affecting their friendship.238

Like the new incumbent of the Dutch chair, Cammaerts during the Second World War was also close to his government-in-exile and played a major role in the Institut belge de Londres on Belgravia Square, led by Jules Dechamps from East London College (today’s Queen Mary, University of London). As his chair had been established only for a limited amount of time and the endowment had been largely exhausted, no successor was appointed on his retirement in 1947,239 but the ‘Belgian chair’ continued its life, on to the present day, as a rotating scholarship for professorial visitors to the University of London from Belgium. Its significant Belgian library became part of the collections of Senate House Library, although sadly something less than the entire collection seems to have been preserved in the decades since. The wider political climate that made continued funding of this beacon of Belgian cultural diplomacy seem redundant was not just the absence of Greater Netherlands propaganda from the Dutch chair that had triggered the foundation of the Belgian counterchair in the first place, but the shared fate and far-reaching communality of interests between the two countries during and after the Second World War, which found its most visible expression in the development of the Benelux Union (also including Luxembourg), concluded by the governments-in-exile while still in London in 1944 and implemented in 1948, in stark contrast to the interwar rivalry between the two neighbours.

The altercations between the Dutch and Belgian chairs in the institutions of the University of London were doubtless another unfortunate academic cause célèbre of the interwar period involving ‘foreign’ chairs. As in the case of Arnold Toynbee having to resign from the Koraes chair for modern Greek at King’s College London in 1924,240 having displeased the donors of his chair with his publications about the conduct of the Greek war in Asia Minor, important questions were raised about the influence of external benefactors on internal academic decisions, as well as about academic self-governance and the relationship between faculty and management. While the anatomy of the two conflicts differed, with two ‘foreign’ chairs (and their donors) pitted against each other in the case of Geyl and Cammaerts, with neither losing his post in the end (although Cammaerts’, arguably, suffered reputational damage), rather than the incumbent of a ‘foreign chair’ against its donors as in Toynbee’s case, leading to the termination of his tenure, the stand-off between the federal university and University College that could be seen here demonstrates that the tension between intellectual freedom as the fundamental value of academe and the basic economic principle that they who pay the piper call the tune was, once more, almost irresolvable. While UCL and its professorial board, although not without having been manipulated behind the scenes by Geyl, could claim to wear the principled defence of academic liberty on their sleeve as a ‘badge of honour’ more in opposition to the autocratic decision-making of the university leadership than against the luckless Belgian proposal itself, the ‘Byzantine’ form of organization within the institution, as hellenicist Richard Clogg called it, allowed the central university to place the new post under its direct control, outside of the collegiate structure, in an attempt at damage limitation, and to console the Anglo-Belgian Union by ‘temporarily’ housing the Belgian chair at the LSE, in spite of the glaring disciplinary mismatch with the new host institution.

It was a conflict that did not just reflect the underlying Dutch–Belgian rivalry of the interwar period for British opinion of the Low Countries, which also played out on the public level through rival large-scale loan exhibitions of Belgian and Flemish (1927) and Dutch art (1929) respectively at the Royal Academy of Arts, organized by the Anglo-Belgian Union and the Anglo-Batavian Society,241 but also played into and was exacerbated locally by the contested reorganization of the University of London along regional lines, a process in which the phenomenon of ‘foreign’ or ‘ethnic’ chairs played a central role,242 and against which there was strong concern over the delineation and apportionment of academic subjects in particular on the part of London’s historians. Whereas both antagonists had started out with similarly broad interdisciplinary conceptions of their respective fields of studies, reflecting the nationalist messages behind them, Geyl had essentially been fortunate to have come early (1919) and, as an (initially unintended) consequence of his 1924 falling-out with Harting and Foster and the separating out of the disciplines between the two, managed to become accepted by and integrated into the disciplinary fold of historians, whereas Cammaerts, arriving several years later, had to bear the full brunt of academic resistance. In these circumstances, it was not difficult for Geyl, pugnacious as ever, to use his influence inside the university to undermine the Belgian initiative, which in origin had been no more or less propagandistic than his own. If anything, looking at the sources of the funds, the Anglo-Belgian Union’s initiative had been much more of a ‘grassroots’ campaign, if this is the right term to use in an elitist higher education context, than the Dutch one, which received its funding from well-established Anglo-Dutch business interests.

Both initiatives had a semi-official character and enjoyed at least the moral support of their respective governments, with non-governmental binational friendship organizations (with significant overlaps with the political and diplomatic sectors in the membership) being the primary actors. Government, academic and public opinion in London as the then centre of the political world system carried weight for both countries, as the issues discussed here were, for once, not ‘purely academic’ but had the potential to matter on the ground, in the literal sense of the word at a time when borders in Europe were redrawn during the peace settlement following the First World War. Like Toynbee, or even more Seton-Watson, who had campaigned for the dissolution of the Habsburg empire and in 1922 became the first Masaryk chair of Central European history (funded by the Czechoslovak government, but with a remit covering more than one country, namely the entire Danubian and Balkans area), at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES, then part of King’s College London, today of UCL),243 Geyl was both an activist and a scholar, and like Toynbee and Seton-Watson, if on a smaller scale, he had direct influence on high politics and the redrawing (or in this case preventing the redrawing) of borders in Europe.

But beyond academic politics, this story has also revealed other ethical problems concerning the larger issue of the relationship between academia and political activism in general. At the same time that Geyl left London for Utrecht (1935), Buitenlandse Zaken, the Dutch Foreign Office, stopped employing silent press agents abroad. After 1932 the practice had internally come to be regarded as reputationally dangerous, as its clandestine nature had the potential to compromise the Dutch government, and coinciding with his star agent’s departure, Drion’s Nationaal Bureau voor Documentatie was rolled into the new, overtly operating, government press service Regeringspersdienst.244 When Geyl, in his autobiography, had the chutzpah to call Cammaerts ‘a propagandist from Brussels’, while he himself was working for an equivalent semi-official Dutch government organization, he demonstrated not only an unhealthy dose of self-confidence bordering on arrogance (something Geyl occasionally became aware of himself)245 but also allows insights into the self-conception of this ‘alpha-historian’, if ever there was one. He had no qualms about being paid by a Dutch propaganda organization, as he saw himself not as a recipient of orders but rather as a senior adviser who quite frequently told the Dutch Foreign Office, whom he regularly accused of ‘lameness’ in the Flemish Question, what to do. His successes in the Dutch–Belgian altercation over the River Scheldt had gained him credit in The Hague, which gave him leeway to pursue his own political activism in favour of the Flemish movement in Belgium, for which there was considerably less enthusiasm in the Dutch capital. The necessity of informing his main employer, the University of London, about his secondary employment, something that Cammaerts skilfully circumvented with an accounting trick, as detailed above, Geyl apparently had no scruples about ignoring altogether.

Some of his practices as silent press attaché were also highly questionable from an ethical point of view. Not only did he, as we have seen, pass on to The Hague internal, often confidential, university documents and letters of his correspondents, and report details of personal conversations with friends, colleagues and opponents alike, but to serve his activism neither did he shy away from writing letters to the editors of British national newspapers, either anonymously or under assumed names. On occasion he even resorted to made-up identities such as ‘A Fleming’ or ‘A Flemish reader’, practices that, certainly today, would be seen as incompatible with his position as a university chair.246 And far from being embarrassed by this practice later on or explaining it as a juvenile folly, he seemingly stayed proud of this aspect of his London years throughout his life and repeatedly acknowledged it, though obviously without giving details. Then again, Geyl never made a secret of his opinion of the relationship between scholarship and politics. In fact, he opened his Levensverhaal, another autobiographical work, published posthumously in 1971, with a reflection on the interrelationship of the two:

I would like to tell you something about my life-long contacts with [the field of] politics. I hardly need to point out that my work as a historian has been strongly influenced by it. It is my deepest conviction that history is related to life in our own times, which means practically with the political, with societal life.247

Cammaerts’ practice of concealing his association with the Belgian authorities was of course not different in principle. The two mirrored each other in amalgamating their respective political activisms with scholarship, if on opposite sides of the conflict, and the ends justified the means, apparently. To Cammaerts, although much more mild-mannered than Geyl, might also apply what James A. Brundage wrote in a review of Bryce Lyon’s Pirenne biography:

Further, while Lyon is prepared to accuse Geyl of using history in the service of politics (which no doubt he sometimes did), Lyon seems oblivious to the possibility that Pirenne himself may on occasion have been guilty of much the same sort of thing. Despite his professional scrupulosity, Pirenne’s view of the history of the Low Countries was strongly colored by his fervent nationalism and by his emotional commitment to the essential unity of Walloons and Flemings. One can respect the commitment without at the same time conceding to it the status of a central historical truth.248

While over time and sometimes also depending on context, Geyl oscillated between more moderate and more radical versions of his pro-Flemish and sometimes openly anti-Belgian activism (the former dominating in his publications and the latter in parts of his correspondence), the question of to what extent tactical considerations determined this restraint remains somewhat controversial – a debate Jo Tollebeek aptly summarizes as follows: ‘While Geyl showed himself to be a reformist in concrete politics, in his heart he was a revolutionary.’249 Growing concern about preserving his professional reputation as a historian, the more he became accepted within the profession, will have played a role, as has the turn towards antidemocratic and national-socialist ideas of large parts of the movement he felt part of, something there can be no doubt he thoroughly disapproved of. For all the contradictions in Geyl’s peculiar form of national liberalism, the liberal side won out in the end.250

If one looks at the afterlife of the Dutch–Belgian ‘academic proxy war’ in London, the most striking fact is that the British perception of the Benelux countries and of Low Countries history, which was largely non-existent before the First World War, was shaped in this time, and remained dominant throughout a good part of the twentieth century. As Alastair Duke pointed out in a review of Geyl’s autobiography:

When Pieter Geyl died on New Year’s Eve 1966, he was one of only two Dutch historians – the other was Johan Huizinga – with a truly international reputation. As far as the then monoglot Anglo-Saxon historical world was concerned he was quite simply the historian of the Low Countries. He owed that position partly to the fortuitous circumstance that while his history of the Dutch-speaking Netherlands was available in English, Henri Pirenne’s Histoire de Belgique had not been translated. His down-to-earth critique of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History was applauded by professional historians queasy about the Englishman’s meta-history. Geyl was then a real star in the historical firmament.251

There can be no doubt that Geyl left his stamp on the field of Low Countries history in anglophone academia. While he justifiably earned the respect of his British colleagues with his scholarly achievements, Geyl, who would later (as part of his altercation with Toynbee) publish on Use and Abuse of History (his 1954 Terry Lecture at Yale),252 also did his utmost to spread in Britain his not entirely impartial views of Low Countries history as generally accepted historical truths. In this, he could count on the material support of the University of London’s Dutch studies fund, beginning with his Holland and Belgium: Their Common History and Their Relations (1920), copies of which, with support from the fund, were distributed to every professional historian in the UK. The publication of the first volume of his magnum opus Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam (which Geyl had translated himself) and the translation of the second and third parts into English by his student Stanley Thomas Bindoff, later Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London, were also heavily subsidized by the committee (so indirectly, as Marees van Swinderen, the Dutch envoy, was then presiding, also with official Dutch backing), the third part even after Geyl had left London for Utrecht.253 Not a small number of his students also made careers at the University of London.

Still, Geyl’s influence on Low Countries history has not outlasted his lifetime for too long. Sad as it could be seen, on a personal level, that Geyl, whose life had been dominated by the Flemish question, did not live to see the transformation of Belgium from a unitary into a federal state, which started only a handful of years after his death and fulfilled at least the more moderate versions of his life’s theme, historical scholarship of the Low Countries outgrew his legacy more quickly than could have expected. As Duke continues:

Yet, forty-odd years later, it has to be said that Geyl’s reputation as a historian has proved less durable than might have been supposed, less enduring than Huizinga’s or, for that matter, Pirenne’s. As the passage of time has deflated the importance of Geyl’s sparring partners, his polemics have grown stale, while the vision of some Greater Netherlands state encompassing all the Dutch speakers has lost its potency. Yet while Geyl’s prestige as the historian of the Dutch-speaking peoples has faded, his involvement in politics has secured him a niche in the political history of his own time.254

The scholarly infrastructure that Geyl created and shaped in London from 1919 onwards, on the other hand, the department of Dutch (that in 1983, when Bedford College merged with Royal Holloway, was reunited with UCL); his own Chair of Dutch history that after its separation from that department in the wake of his falling-out with his literary colleague and the provost in 1924, would eventually be merged into Neale’s history department (1936); the Dutch collections of UCL library and those of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), as well as the Low Countries history seminars that Geyl instituted in the same place in 1924–5,255 firmly established London as one of the best-known centres of Low Countries studies in the anglophone world, with illustrious and well-respected scholars such as Gustaaf Renier, Ernst Kossmann, Koenraad Swart, Jonathan Israel and, currently, Benjamin Kaplan succeeding him to the chair for Dutch history (and institutions), discontinuing the Greater Netherlands direction given to it by its inaugural incumbent and avoiding the pitfalls of Geyl’s intertwined scholarship and activism.

Since 1967, so even preceding Belgium’s far-reaching federal transformation from 1970 onwards, at the suggestion of the Dutch ambassador, Belgian diplomatic representatives have been invited to serve on the UCL committee for the promotion of Dutch studies, which used to oversee the academic activities of what now came to be called Low Countries studies, thus formally ending the unfortunate Dutch–Belgian propagandistic and intellectual rivalry of the interwar years at the University of London.256 The fundamental communality of interests between the two countries, which by now was manifested not just in the Benelux Union and NATO (1948) but also in joint membership of the European Economic Community of the Six (1957), the predecessor of the current European Union, is the background to this development. In parallel with the far-reaching internal Belgian federalization process which in a series of constitutional reforms since 1970 has largely defused the linguistic-communitarian conflict and turned the country from a unitary into a fully fledged federal state, in 1980 a Dutch–Belgian Treaty established the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union) as an intergovernmental organization, looking after the Dutch language and Neerlandistiek abroad. The following year the Flemish literary scholar Theo Hermans took over the reins of the UCL department of Dutch. And when, in 2004, Roland Willemyns, then incumbent of the annually rotating Belgian chair, was invited to deliver the first (and so far only) Pieter Geyl memorial lecture at UCL, he pointed out what an ironic turn of history that was, and one that shows how irrelevant the conflicts of the interwar period have become today.257

1 The author would like to express his gratitude to Andrea Meyer-Ludowisy and colleagues from Senate House Library, London, and to Bart Jaski and colleagues from Utrecht University Library for their invaluable help with accessing Cammaerts’ and Geyl’s papers in their respective Special Collections, and to Reinier Salverda for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

2 See eg E. H. Kossmann, ‘Huizinga and Geyl: a portrait of two Dutch historians’, The Low Countries, i (1993–4), 130–36; J. Tollebeek, ‘Een ongemakkelijk heerschap: Geyl contra Ter Braak’, Ons Erfdeel, xxxii (1989), 21–9, reprinted in J. Tollebeek, De ijkmeesters: Opstellen over de geschiedschrijving in Nederland en België (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 203–14; H. W. von der Dunk, Twee historici in hun tijd: Pieter Geyl and Gerhard Ritter (Amsterdam, 1999); J. Tollebeek, ‘The use of history in Belgium and the Netherlands, 1946–1965: Presentism and historicism in the work of Jan Romein, Pieter Geyl and Leopold Flam’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, xxxix (March 2015), 54–73.

3 R. Clogg, Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (London/New York, 1986), first published in Middle Eastern Studies xxi, 4 (Oct. 1985), pp. v–ix, 1–115, hints at the conflict between Geyl and Cammaerts: ‘At the height of the war a Chair of Dutch Studies had been created but this had later occasioned much trouble and when the Belgians had later offered “a rival Belgian Chair” it had been rejected, with very unfortunate results’ (p. 110). Also see R. Clogg, Greek and Me: A Memoir of Academic Life (London/New York, 2018).

4 P. Geyl, ‘Looking back’, in P. Geyl, Encounters in history (Cleveland/New York, 1961), pp. 399–424; P. Geyl, ‘Levensverhaal (tot 1945)’, in P. Geyl, Pennestrijd over staat en historie: Opstellen over de vaderlandse geschiedenis aangevuld met Geyl’s Levensverhaal (Groningen, 1971), pp. 312–75; P. Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef: Autobiografie, 1887–1940, ed. W. Berkelaar, L. Dorsman and P. van Hees (Amsterdam, 2009).

5 Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, Bijzondere Collecties, Collectie Geyl. See also his edited letter collections: Geyl en Vlaanderen: Brieven en notities, P. van Hees and A. W. Willemsen (3 vols, Antwerp/Utrecht, 1973–5) and Briefwisseling Gerretson–Geyl, ed. P. van Hees and G. Puchinger (5 vols, Baarn, 1979–81); and P. van Hees, Bibliografie van P. Geyl (Groningen, 1972).

6 Nationaal Archief Den Haag, Nationaal Bureau voor Documentatie, inv. no. 2.19.026, nos. 17–26: ‘Ingekomen brieven van en minuten van uitgaande brieven aan de vertegenwoordiger in Engeland, prof. dr. P. Geyl, hoogleraar Nederlandse studies aan het University College’.

7 J. Lindley, Seeking and Finding: the Life of Émile Cammaerts (London, 1962).

8 Papers Professor É. Cammaerts, Senate House Library Archives, GB96 MS 800.

9 P. Geyl, Christofforo Suriano: Resident van de Serenissime Republiek van Venetië in Den Haag, 1616–1623 (The Hague, 1913).

10 O. Renier, Before the Bonfire (Shipston-on-Stour, 1984), p. 89.

11 Geyl, ‘Looking back’, p. 402. .

12 NRC, 17 July 1915; R. S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: 1914–1916. Campanion, ii, p. 1046f.; Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 61; P. van Hees, ‘Journalist – historicus – hoogleraar: G. W. Kernkamp, P. C. A. Geyl en C. D. J. Brand: Een traditie in de Utrechtse school?’, Geschiedenis in Utrecht: Bestaat er een Utrechtse school in de geschiedbeoefening? (Utrechtse Historische Cahiers), xv (1994), 49–60, at p. 52; P. B. M. Blaas, ‘Nederlandse historici en de eerste wereldoorlog’, in M. Kraaijestein/P. Schulten (eds.), Wankel evenwicht: Neutraal Nederland en de Eerste Wereldoorlog (Soesterberg, 2007), pp. 14–31, at 22f.

13 ‘Undesirable messages from Dr Geyl to Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. Remonstrance with Dr Geyl. His memo denying allegations’, National Archives, Kew, FO 395/24/260557; Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 317; Geyl, ‘Levensverhaal (tot 1945)’, p. 314; Blaas, ‘Nederlandse historici en de eerste wereldoorlog’, pp. 21f.

14 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, pp. 65–7; Blaas, ‘Nederlandse historici en de eerste wereldoorlog’, p. 23f.; Van Hees, ‘Journalist – historicus – hoogleraar’, p. 53.

15 J. Floorquin, Ten huize van … [Prof. Dr. P. Geyl, 13 Sept. 1961], ii (Eindhoven, 1961), pp. 201–27, at p. 207: ‘heeft mijn leven beheerst’.

16 The student conference was the VIIIe wetenschappelijk Vlaamsch Studentencongres, ter Vervlaamsching der Gentsche Hoogeschool. On Domela see L. Buning/P. van Hees, ‘Domela Nieuwenhuis, Jan Derk (1870–1955)’, Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland <http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/bwn1880-2000/lemmata/bwn1/domela> [accessed: 2 Nov. 2019].

17 P. Geyl, `The Flemish Movement’, The Daily News, 11 Nov. 1915, cited in Geyl en Vlaanderen, p. 13; Inaugural Lecture delivered at University College London, on the 16th of October, 1919, by P. Geyl, Lit. D., Professor of Dutch Studies in the University of London (London, 1919), p. 8; P. van Hees, ‘Journalist – historicus – hoogleraar’, p. 53.

18 Florquin, Ten huize van Prof. Dr. P. Geyl, p. 210. To Shepard B. Clough from Columbia University, author of A History of the Flemish Movement in Belgium (New York, 1930), who had a similar experience (p. vi); Geyl commiserated on 10 Sept. 1926, writing that ‘The study of nationalism has its exciting moments’; Dartmouth College Archives, Hanover, New Hampshire, Shepard B. Clough papers, ML-6.

19 R. Jenkins, A Pacifist at War: the Life of Francis Cammaerts (London, 2009).

20 Jenkins, A Pacifist at War, p. 7.

21 Lindley, Seeking and Finding, p. 29.

22 C. Brun and F. Ferretti, Elisée Reclus, une chronologie familiale: sa vie, ses voyages, ses écrits, ses ascendants, ses collatéraux, les descendants, leurs écrits, sa postérité, 1796–2015, (2nd ed., April 2015), <http://raforum.info/reclus/spip.php?article474> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019] includes a 1905 obituary of Reclus by Cammaerts’ hand on pp. 323–27.

23 F. Noël, 1894: L’Université libre de Bruxelles en crise, Bruxelles: Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1988 <http://digistore.bib.ulb.ac.be/2010/DL2377563_000_f.pdf> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019]; C. Brun, Elisée Reclus <https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01146464> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019].

24 Quoted after Lindley, Seeking and Finding, p. 32, and Jenkins, A Pacifist at War, p. 8.

25 Quoted after Jenkins, A Pacifist at War, p. 7.

26 G. K. Chesterton, La Clairvoyance du père Brown, trans. Émile Cammaerts (Paris, 1919); J. Ruskin, Conférences sur l’architecture et la peinture (Paris, 1910); J. Ruskin, Val d’Arno (Paris, 1911); J. Ruskin, Les peintres modernes: le paysage (Paris, 1914).

27 For details see [É. Cammaerts], Bibliography, ed. M. Macdonald; Lindley, Seeking and Finding, pp. 205–7.

28 C. Verbruggen, ‘Hoe literair internationalisme organiseren? De “verflochten” geschiedenis van de Belgische PEN-club (1922–1931)’, Nederlandse Letterkunde, vxi (2011), 15–81, at p. 156f.

29 H. Davignon, Souvenirs d’un écrivain belge: 1879–1945 (Paris, 1954), p. 245, quoted after Lindley, Seeking and Finding, p. 101f.

30 É. Cammaerts, The Laughing Prophet: the Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (London, 1937), quoted after C. Thicknesse, ‘Émile Cammaerts’, in Lindley, Seeking and Finding, pp. xi–xiv, at p. xi.

31 Canon Hood in The Times (London), 6 Nov. 1953; Lindley, Seeking and Finding, p. xii.

32 Verbruggen, ‘Hoe literair internationalisme organiseren?’, p. 156.

33 W. Schivelbusch, Die Bibliothek von Löwen: eine Episode aus der Zeit der Weltkriege (Munich, 1988); J. van Impe, The University Library of Leuven: Historical Walking Guide (Leuven, 2012), p. 23 and passim.

34 Romain Rolland – Stefan Zweig, Briefwechsel, i: 1910–1923 (Berlin, 1987), pp. 158f.

35 É. Cammaerts, ‘To the great king of a little country’, Observer, 15 Nov. 1914, p. 7.

36 É. Cammaerts, Albert of Belgium, Defender of Right (London/New York, 1935).

37 É. Cammaerts, The Prisoner at Laeken: King Léopold, Legend and Fact. With a preface by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes (London, 1941).

38 É. Cammaerts, ‘Chantons, Belges, Chantons’, Observer, 11 Oct. 1914, p. 7 ; G. Watkins, Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley/London, 2003), p. 39.

39 ‘Prof. E. Cammaerts’, Manchester Guardian, 3 Nov. 1959.

40 King Albert’s Book, a Tribute to the Belgian King and People from representative men and women throughout the World, ed. H. Caine (London, Christmas 1914): ‘Sold in aid of the Daily Telegraph Belgian Fund.’

41 S. Rainey, ‘Britain’s homage to “plucky Belgium”’, Daily Telegraph, 16 Dec. 2014 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/11295047/Britains-homage-to-plucky-Belgium.html> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019]; I. Hewett, ‘Long live Belgium! When the Telegraph enlisted Monet, Hardy and Pankhurst’, Daily Telegraph, 16 Dec. 2014 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/11283133/Long-live-Belgium-When-The-Telegraph-enlisted-Monet-Hardy-and-Pankhurst.html> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019]; P. Dodgson, King Albert’s Book, 3 episodes, BBC Radio 4, 19 Dec. 2014–2 Jan. 2015 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04vwkvs> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019].

42 M. Derez, ‘“The land of Chimes”: De overzeese promotie van de Belgische beiaard’, in De beiaard: Een politieke geschiedenis, ed. M. Beyen, L. Rombouts and S. Vos (Leuven, 2009), 187–208, at p. 189; V. Allen, Hall Caine: Portrait of a Victorian Romancer (Sheffield, 1997), pp. 356–8.

43 Carillon (pour grand orchestre) pour accompagner ‘Chantons, Belges, chantons!’. Poème d’Émile Cammaerts. Musique par Edward Elgar, O. M, Associé de l’Académie Royale de Belgique; King Albert’s Book, pp. 84–92.

44 L. Rombouts: Singing Bronze: a History of Carillon Music (Leuven, 2014), p. 11.

45 T. Hardy, ‘On the Belgian expatriation’, in King Albert’s Book, p. 20; M. Derez, ‘The land of chimes’, p. 197f.; Rombouts, Singing Bronze, p. 196.

46 S. Hynes, A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), p. 37 f.

47 M. Derez, ‘The land of chimes’, 188.

48 P. Arblaster, A History of the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 212.

49 F. B., ‘Elgar’s “Carillon”’, Manchester Guardian, 8 Dec. 1914, p. 6.

50 F. B., ‘Elgar’s “Carillon”’, p. 6.

51 M. Morpurgo et al., ‘Untold stories of the war’, Guardian, 26 July 2014. The children’s book author who is perhaps best known for writing War Horse is Cammaerts’ grandson.

52 É. Cammaerts, Belgian Poems: Chants patriotiques et autres poèmes … trans. T. Brand-Cammaerts (London, 1915); É. Cammaerts, New Belgian Poems: Les Trois rois et autres poèmes … trans. by T. Brand-Cammaerts (London/New York, 1916); É. Cammaerts, Messines, and other poems … trans. by T. Brand-Cammaerts (London/New York, 1918).

53 ‘Prof. E. Cammaerts’, Manchester Guardian, 3 Nov. 1953, p. 3.

54 In the absence of reliable statistics, particularly for the first months of the war, it is difficult to provide an accurate estimate of the total number of Belgian refugees. According to P. A. Tallier, it is generally estimated that there were about 150,000 to 200,000 in Great Britain at the beginning of Nov. 1914 (172,298 in Aug. 1917, and 125,000 in Nov. 1918)’; P. A. Tallier, Inventaire des archives du Comité officiel belge pour l’Angleterre (réfugiés belges en Angleterre), 1914–1919 (Brussels, n. d.), p. 5.

55 ‘Henri Davignon’, Nouvelle Biographie nationale, viii (Brussels, n. d.), pp. 81–3. Henri Davignon <http://www.arllfb.be/composition/membres/davignon.html> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019]; ‘Henri Davignon, écrivain belge’, Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, xxxvi, ed. Sr M. F. Inial (Washington, D. C., 1948); R. Poulet, Billets de sortie (Paris, 1975), pp. 79–81; H. Davignon, Souvenirs d’un écrivain belge, 1879–1945 (Paris, 1954).

56 J. Lindley, Seeking and Finding, p. 101.

57 M. Amara, La Propagande belge durant la Premiere Guerre Mondiale, 1914–1918 (ULB, mémoire de licence inédit), p. 23; M. Amara, ‘La propagande belge et l’image de la Belgique aux États-Unis pendant la Premiere Guerre Mondiale’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis/Revue Belge d’Histoire Contemporaine, xxx (2000), 173–226.

58 H. Davignon, La Belgique et l’Allemagne: textes et documents précédés d’un avertissement au lecteur (London, 1915); V. D’Hooghe, Inventaire des archives du Belgian Relief Committee de la délégation de Londres de la Commission d’Enquête sur la violation de règles du droit de gens, de lois et des coutumes de la guerre et du Bureau de propagande et de documentation, 1914–1919 (Inventaires 555) (Brussels, 2013), p. 9.

59 Davignon, Souvenirs d’un écrivain belge, p. 245, quoted from Lindley, Seeking and Finding, p. 101f. Also see H. Davignon, Souvenir sur É. Cammaerts, SHL MS 800/II/3ii.

60 Lindley, Seeking and Finding, p. 102; the original Notes hebdomadaires d’Henri Davignon concernant l’opinion publique britannique, 1917–1919, Archives de l’État en Belgique, Bruxelles, BE-A0510.1398 (1413–1419).

61 H. Davignon, Souvenirs d’un écrivain belge; quoted from Lindley, Seeking and Finding, p. 102.

62 ‘Mr Louis Raemaekers’ [obituary], The Times, 27 July 1956, p. 13. After the war, Geyl would write to Raemaekers trying to get him to disassociate himself from Cammaerts because of the latter’s support for Belgian claims on Dutch territories; Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif., Louis Raemaekers papers, box 4, folder 5. For the most recent and complete interpretations of Raemaekers’ work see the richly illustrated publication by A. de Ranitz, Louis Raemaekers: ‘Armed with Pen and Pencil’: How a Dutch Cartoonist Became World Famous during the First World War (Roermond, 2014) and my late friend Richard Deswarte’s ‘Europe under threat: Visual projections of Europe in Raemaekers’ First World War cartoons’, in Visions and Ideas of Europe during the First World War, ed. M. d’Auria and J. Vermeiren (Ideas beyond Borders: Studies in Transnational Intellectual History) (London/New York, 2020), pp. 198–218.

63 É. Cammaerts, The Adoration of the Soldiers (L’Adoration des Soldats). With illustrations by Louis Raemaekers (London, 1916).

64 Anglo-Belgian Union, Proceedings at first meeting of the foundation members, July 20th, 1918, held at the Savoy Hotel, London (London, 1918), SHL MS 800/II/1286.

65 Anglo-Belgian Union/Union Anglo-Belge, Constitution/Statuts (London/Brussels, 1918).

66 See the entry on Maudslay in Olympedia <https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/62939> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019], P. Grant, Philanthropy and Voluntary Action in the First World War: Mobilizing Charity (London, 2014), p. 95, and Maudslay’s correspondence with Lord Gladstone, 1914–34, British Library, Add MS 46013. There used to be a close link between the Anglo-Belgian Society and the Royal Yacht Club, who until a few years ago shared the same premises in Knightsbridge.

67 Anglo-Belgian Union/Union Anglo-Belge, Constitution/Statuts.

68 Exhibition of Flemish and Belgian Art 1300–1900, Organized by the Anglo-Belgian Union (London, 1927); U. Tiedau, ‘Dutch and Belgian artistic and intellectual rivalry in interwar London’, Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies / Revue Canadienne d’Études Néerlandaises (CJNS/RCÉN), xli (2021), 1–26.

69 William Woods, former editor of the Bedford College Association Journal, by letter to the author. See also M. J. Tuke, A History of Bedford College for Women, 1849–1937 (London/New York/Tokyo, 1939), p. 231f; T. Weevers, ‘The beginnings of Dutch studies in the University of London’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, xxv (April 1985), 85–9, at p. 86. Dutch was also championed and strongly supported by the professor of German language and literature at the University of London, J. G. (John George) Robertson, who ‘between 1903 and 1933 played the chief part in making London into the leading centre for German studies in Britain’ and in 1924 would also become the second director of the department of Scandinavian studies, as successor to William Paton Ker, who founded the department in 1917; F. M. L. Thompson, The University of London and the World of Learning, 1836–1986 (London, 1986), p. 70; ‘Memorial to the late Professor W. P. Ker’, Review of English Studies, i (1 April 1950), pp. 221–2; G. Foster, ‘W. P. Ker’, English Studies, v (1923), pp. 153–5.

70 Tuke, A History of Bedford College, p. 231f.

71 E. H. Kossmann, Familiearchief: Notities over voorouders, tijdgenoten en mijzelf (Amsterdam, 1998), p. 142.

72 Tuke, A History of Bedford College, p. 314; J. Reyneke van Stuwe, ‘Hollandsche feesten te Londen’, Neerlandia, xvii (1913), 30–31; J. Reyneke van Stuwe, ‘Nederlandsche Vereeniging te Londen’, Neerlandia, xvii (1913), 57; J. Reyneke van Stuwe, De Nederlandsche Vereeniging te Londen, 1873–1923: Aangeboden door den president van de Nederlandsche Vereeniging te Londen bij gelegenheid van haar vijftigjaar bestaan (Amsterdam, 1923), p. 13.

73 W. Frijhoff, Stoop <https://www.regionaalarchiefdordrecht.nl/biografisch-woordenboek/familie-stoop/> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019]; Byfleet Heritage Society, Stoop Memorial Blue Plaque <http://www.byfleetheritage.org.uk/Stooplch.htm> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019]; I. Wakeford, The Death of Frederick Cornelius Stoop in 1933 (or 1934) <http://wokinghistory.org/onewebmedia/161014.pdf> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019]; F. C. Gerretson, History of the Royal Dutch, ii (Leiden, 1958), pp. 202–27.

74 I. Cooper, Immortal Harlequin: The Story of Adrian Stoop (Stroud, Glos., 2004; Rugby Stadiums: The Twickenham Stoop <http://www.rugbystadiums.co.uk/stadium/thestoop.php> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019].

75 P. Geyl, ‘Levensbericht van Lord Reay’, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde, 1921–1922 (Leiden, 1922), pp. 90–100, at pp. 98–99, and Reyneke van Stuwe, De Nederlandsche Vereeniging te Londen, p. 39. An oil portrait of Lord Reay (1919) by the hand of Dutch painter resident in London Antoon Abraham van Anrooy (1870–1949), presented to UCL during a commemoration of Lord Reay on 6 Dec. 1921, a copy of a painting made two years earlier for the Nederlandsche Vereeniging, is still part of the collections of the UCL Art Museum, Accession No. 5620 <http://artcat.museums.ucl.ac.uk> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019].

76 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 85.

77 Geyl, ‘Levensbericht van Lord Reay’, 98–9.

78 F. J. C. Hearnshaw, A Centenary History of King’s College London, 1828–1928 (London, 1929), pp. 466f.; I. W. Roberts, History of the School for Slavonic and East European Studies, 1915–1990 (London, 1991); N. Harte and J. North, The World of UCL, 1828–2004 (London, 2004), p. 183; N. Harte, The University of London 1836–1986 (London/Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1986). From 1947 to 1967 the Camões chair would be held by the historian Charles Boxer (1904–2000), famous for his The Dutch Seaborne Empire (London, 1965) and many other works.

79 Clogg, Politics and the Academy.

80 University of London, Senate Minutes (S. M.), 20 March 1918. Also see the summary of the history of the Dutch Studies committee provided by the secretary [s. n.] to the principal, Senate House on 20 June 1955, UCL Spec. Coll. D/14/1/34. Historical currency calculation, like all calculations in this chapter, after: https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/relativevalue.php [accessed 2 Nov. 2019].

81 In 1920 Deterding received a knighthood of the British Empire for his service to Anglo-Dutch relations, although his supplying the Allies with petroleum during the war will have been the decisive factor. Reyneke van Stuwe, De Nederlandsche Vereeniging te Londen, p. 99. See P. Hendrix, Henri Deterding: De Koninklijke, de Shell en de Rothschilds (The Hague, 1996).

82 F. C. Gerretson, History of the Royal Dutch, English trans. (4 vols, Leiden, 1953).

83 E. Heldring, Herinneringen en dagboek, ed. Johan de Vries, i (Utrecht, 1970), p. 260: ‘den bekwamen correspondent van de “Rotterdammer”’.

84 See also ‘University and educational intelligence’, Nature, cii, 78–9 (26 Sept. 1918): ‘University of London. – The sum of 1000 l. has been given to the University by the National Bank of South Africa for the promotion of Dutch studies.’

85 Reyneke van Stuwe, De Nederlandsche Vereeniging te Londen, p. 27. On Jacob Reyneke van Stuwe and his South African connections see V. Kuitenbrouwer, ‘A newspaper war’? Dutch information networks during the South African War (1899–1902)’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden – Low Countries Historical Review, cxxviii (2013), 127–50. Jacob (1876–1962) was the brother of the Dutch novelist Jeanne Reyneke van Stuwe (1874–1951).

86 The only principal contributor on the list not falling into these three categories is the Harrisons & Crosfield Tea trading company. As the income from these funds was still insufficient for the purposes in mind, Stoop did not hesitate to contribute a further £1,000 (£63,000 in today’s money) from his own fortune to make good the deficiency in income; Secretary [s. n.] to the principal, Senate House, 20 June 1955, UCL Spec. Coll. D/14/1/34.

87 J. A. J. de Villiers, The Dutch in South Africa (London, 1923). A prize (of originally £10) donated in memory of his mother, Hanna de Villiers, for the best student of Dutch of the year, is still in existence today, although the name has been lost; Tuke, A History of Bedford College, p. 232.

88 Secretary of Dutch studies committee [s. n.] to the principal, Senate House, 20 June 1955, UCL Spec. Coll. D/14/1/34.

89 Reyneke van Stuwe, De Nederlandsche Vereeniging te Londen, p. 47.

90 In his letter of 22 Nov. 1918 Stoop replied that the choice would be made from the six applications the committee had received so far and that Muller’s would be taken into account as a matter of course; Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis Amsterdam (IISG), Archief Hendrik C. Muller (ARCH 00911.5.19), Stoop to Muller, 22 Nov. 1918; P. J. Meertens and J. M. Welcher, ‘Muller, Hendrik Clemens’, Biografisch Woordenboek van het Socialisme en de Arbeidersbeweging, i (1986), pp. 85–7.

91 On Barnouw’s parallel career to Geyl’s in New York see H. Edelman, The Netherland-America Foundation, 1921–2011: a History (New York, 2012), passim; H. Krabbendam, C. A. van Minnen, G. Scott-Smith, Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609–2009 (New York, 2009), p. 437; A. Lammers, ‘Barnouw, Adriaan Jacob (1877–1968)’, Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland <http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/bwn1880-2000/lemmata/bwn2/barnouw> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019]; G. Homan, ‘Adriaan J. Barnouw’s cultural work in the US, 1919–1960’, AADAS 2005 Biennial Conference Dutch Immigrants on the Plains, summarized by Richard Harmes in AADAS News [Association for the Advancement of Dutch-American Studies], vi (spring 2006), p. 4; Columbia University Libraries. Archival Collections, Adriaan Jacob Barnouw Papers, 1895–1967 <http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4078950> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019].

92 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 17.

93 P. Geyl, ‘[Review of] J. A. van Hamel, Nederland tusschen de mogendheden, Amsterdam: Holkema en Warendorf, 1918’, De Gids, lxxxiii (1919), 127–44, reprinted in P. Geyl, Studies en stridgeschriften: Bundel aangeboden aan de schryver bij zijn aftreden als hoogeleraar aan de Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht (Groningen, 1958), pp. 453–68; Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 85; Blaas, ‘Nederlandse historici en de eerste wereldoorlog’, 25f.

94 L. H. Maas, Pro Patria: Werken, leven en streven van de literatuurhistoricus Gerrit Kalff (1856–1923) (Hilversum, 1998), p. 233f.

95 It is striking that interwar London was a real centre of the Groot-Nederland idea. In addition to Geyl at University College, his friend Frederik Carel Gerretson (also known under his literary pseudonym Geerten Gossaert) worked for a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, and Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck became Geyl’s successor as London correspondent of the Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant. In the early 1930s the three Groot-Nederlanders collaborated in publishing Leiding, a cultural-literary counter-journal to the opinion-leading De Gids; see P. van Hees, ‘Het tijdschrift Leiding, 1930–1931’, in Geschiedenis en Cultuur: Achtien opstellen, ed. E. Jonker and M. van Rossem (The Hague, 1990), pp. 199–211.

96 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 89.

97 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 120.

98 Tuke, A History of Bedford College, p. 314. Geyl certainly knew how to benefit from Stoop personally, for he wrote to him asking for help with mortgage problems.

99 NA, inv. nos 2.19.026.17–26: Ingekomen brieven van en minuten van uitgaande brieven aan de vertegenwoordiger in Engeland, prof. dr. P. Geyl, hoogleraar Nederlandse studies aan het University College, 1919–1935; Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, pp. 90–92.

100 For this and the following A. R. M. Mommers, Inventaris van het archief van het Nationaal Bureau voor Documentatie over Nederland, 1919–1936 (The Hague, 1951).

101 P. Stoop, De geheime rapporten van H. J. Noorderwier, Berlin 1933–1935 (Amsterdam, 1988).

102 Like Geyl, Adriaan Barnouw, the first chair for Dutch at Columbia University, New York, was a correspondent of the office (NA, inv. no. 2.19.026.46 Ingekomen brieven en minuten van uitgaande brieven aan de vertegenwoordiger te New York, prof. A. J. Barnouw, 1927–1935).

103 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 91. Compare this with Geyl’s annual salary as a UCL professor (£800–£1,000). According to P. Stoop, Historiker und Diplomat: Pieter Geyl als Niederländischer Presseattaché in London 1919–1935, in Interbellum und Exil, ed. S. Onderdelinden (Amsterdam/Atlanta, 1991), pp. 42–54, at p. 53 (fn. 10), Geyl’s salary from The Hague was lower, hfl. 300 per month (1933), still a substantial sum, roughly €34k per annum in today’s terms. Currency calculations in guilders after Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (IISG), De waarde van de gulden/euro <http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/calculate-nl.php> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019].

104 In an interview with J. Floorquin: Ten huize van Prof. Dr. P. Geyl, 1961.

105 For syntheses of this debate see J. Tollebeek, De toga van Fruin: Denken over geschiedenis in Nederland sinds 1860 (Amsterdam, 1990), pp. 328–32 (which includes a full list of about twenty contributions to this debate in fn. 19 on p. 373); N. van Sas, ‘The Great Netherlands controversy: a clash of great historians’, in Disputed Territories and Shared Pasts: Overlapping National Histories in Modern Europe, ed. T. Frank and F. Hadler (London, 2011), pp. 152–74; and Fons Meijer’s chapter in this volume. Some of the most important articles critical of Geyl have been bundled and republished as L. Wils, Vlaanderen, België, Groot-Nederland: Mythe en Geschiedenis: Historische opstellen, gebundeld en aangeboden aan de schrijver bij het bereiken van zijn emeritaat als hoogleraar aan de K. U. Leuven (Leuven, 1994).

106 Inaugural lecture delivered at University College London, on the 16th of October, 1919 by P. Geyl, Lit. D., Professor of Dutch Studies in the University of London (London, 1919), p. 11.

107 Geyl, Inaugural Lecture, p. 1.

108 Geyl, Inaugural Lecture, pp. 6–8.

109 Geyl, Inaugural Lecture, p. 8; N. Garson, ‘Pieter Geyl, the Diets Idea and Afrikaner Nationalism’, South African Historical Journal, xlvi (2002), 106–40, at p. 114.

110 P. Geyl, Holland and Belgium: Their Common History and Their Relations. Three Lectures Given at University College, London, on February 10, 17 and 24, 1920 (Leiden, 1920), p. 2.

111 Smeesters to Baron Moncheur, 23 Nov. 1917; Baron Moncheur to Smeesters, 24 Nov. 1917; Archives Générales du Royaume (AGR), Brussels, inv. no. BE-A0510/T476, Anglo-Belgian Union, 65.

112 Burrows to Maudslay, 11 March 1918; Maudslay to Smeesters, 17 June 1918; Smeesters to Carton de Wiart, n. d.; Lambotte to Hall Caine e. a, 13 Dec. 1917; AGR, Brussels, inv. no. BE-A0510/T476, Belgian Relief Committee, 296.

113 B. Lyon, Pirenne: a Biographical and Intellectual Study (Ghent, 1974), p. 423.

114 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 157.

115 Foreign minister Paul Hymans to the chargé d’affaires in the London embassy, Maskens, 27 Dec. 1919; SHL, MS 800/IV/6/1i.

116 Note sur les allusions faites aux intérêts belges a la leçon d’ouverture du Dr. GEYL comme Professor of Dutch Studies, University College, London, à la rentrée d’Automne 1919, accompanying a letter by Hymans to Maskens, 27 Dec. 1919; SHL, MS 800/IV/6/1i.

117 Note sur les allusions faites aux intérêts belges.

118 [Paul] Hymans, Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, à Monsieur [Charles] Maskens, chargé d’Affaires, ambassade de Belgique, Londres. Bruxelles, le 27 décembre 1919. No d’ordre 1816; SHL, MS 800/IV/6/1.

119 Minutes of Academic Council, no. 636 (1 March 1920), ‘Proposed establishment of a chair of Belgian studies’. SHL, MS 800/IV/7/11.

120 On Cecil Hertslet KBE of Ramsgate, England (1850–1934), see ‘Sir Cecil Hertslet’, Anglo-Belgian Notes, 1934, p. 2 and The Rotarian, April 1934, p. 39.

121 [Maudslay] to [Baron de Moncheur, Ambassador of Belgium], n. d.; SHL, MS 800/IV/6/2.

122 E. C. Perry to Maudsley, 15 March 1920; SHL, Cammaerts papers, SHL, MS 800/IV/7/1 [also: MS 800/IV/37/2].

123 University of London, Academic Committee [AC], 1 March 1920, minute 636 f.; SHL, MS 800/IV/37/I.

124 [Maudsley] to Sir Edwin Cooper, 16 March 1920; SHL, MS 800/IV/7/2.

125 Hartog to Cammaerts, 22 July 1920, SHL, MS 800/IV/8.

126 ‘Foundation of a Belgian Chair at London University’, Anglo-Belgian Notes, i (Oct. 1921), p. 14.

127 Hartog, academic registrar, to subject boards, n. d., SHL, Univ. of London archive, AC 8/27/10/6 (chair of Belgian studies), 1920.

128 Meetings of the Romance languages committee II, SHL, Univ. of London archive, AC 8/38/1/2, p. 6.

129 SHL, Univ. of London archive, AC, 8/27/10/6 (chair of Belgian studies), 1920, board of studies in history, proposed chair of Belgian studies, draft report of the board of studies in History.

130 SHL, Univ. of London archive, AC 8/27/10/6. For the history of SSEES, founded around the same time by Robert Seton-Watson, Bernard Pares and Tomáš Masaryk and experiencing similar inner-institutional problems, see I. W. Roberts, History of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1915–1990 (London, 1991); M. Pearton, ‘The History of SSEES: The Political Dimension’, The Slavonic and East European Review, lxxi, 2 (April 1993), 287–294.

131 SHL AC, 8/27/10/6 (chair of Belgian studies), 1920.

132 P. N. U. Harting (1892–1970) also taught Dutch at Oxford (1923–25), before in 1924 becoming professor of English and Sanskrit in Groningen. An Anglo-Dutch student exchange programme at UCL, set up shortly after the Second World War, still bears his name (‘Harting student exchange’); R. D., ‘Professor P. N. U. Harting’, English Studies, lii (1971), p. 95.

133 The two never got along well and after a major conflict that almost cost Geyl his position (apparently Harting had conspired with Gregory Foster, UCL’s provost, to replace Geyl on the occasion of the Dutch scheme’s initial five-year review in 1924), the decision was taken to split the department into two, with a view to resolving the interpersonal tensions. The remit of Geyl’s department was formally reduced to ‘Dutch history and institutions’, whereas Harting took charge of the department of ‘Dutch language and literature’, both safely separated by the distance between Gower St and Regent’s Park, where UCL and Bedford College were then located. Stripped of a departmental structure of his own, the developing Institute of Historical Research (IHR) became Geyl’s new field of activity and one behind which he threw himself with fervour, before Geyl’s friend Neale arranged for the one-man ‘department of Dutch history and institutions’ to be folded into the UCL history department after Geyl’s departure for Utrecht (1936). See Stijn van Rossem’s chapter in this volume.

134 SHL, AC 8/27/10/6 (Chair of Belgian studies), 1920.

135 SHL, AC 8/27/10/6.

136 SHL, AC 8/27/10/6.

137 SHL, Univ. of London archive, board of studies in history: correspondence, vi: chair of Belgian studies, 1920 (AC 8/27/10/6): Memorandum (in Geyl’s handwriting on University College paper).

138 SHL, University of London Archive, AC, 8/27/10/6 (Chair of Belgian studies), 1920.

139 SHL, AC 8/27/10/6.

140 Maudsley to Russell Wells, 28 Nov. 1921; SHL, MS 800/IV/9.

141 Maudsley to Russell Wells, n. d. [1922]; SHL, MS 800/IV/18.

142 [n. n.], ‘Activities of the A. B. U. British section’, Anglo-Belgian Notes, i (April 1922), 73.

143 P. Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 156.

144 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef. Later addition: ‘My acting on this second occasion is truthfully and objectively described in my letters to Drion. I had already matured a good bit more by then and the impression that my approach made was one of complete self-control and tact. It is clear from the whole affair that I had doubtlessly earned respect in professorial circles.’

145 Also see Geyl’s characterization of Cammaerts in a report on England and the Flemish Movement that he sent to the British Foreign Office in Feb. 1922 in an attempt to garner British support for the Flemish nationalists: ‘There is, for instance, the Anglo-Belgian Union. The Belgians with whom Englishmen fraternise in that society are anti-Flamingant almost to a man. Its able secretary, Mr Cammaerts, a Brusseler, who years ago translated some Flemish poetry intro French, but who answered a Dutch letter of mine in English, confessing that his Flemish was not good enough, has more than once written articles in English newspapers and periodicals in which he represented the Flemish movement in very false colours, particularly attempting to deny that it had any special significance for Belgium’s foreign relations’; P. Geyl, The Flemish Movement and England, typescript with hand-drawn map of the Low Countries from June 1921 and an amendment from June 1924, bound by the Foreign Office and since 2007 on permanent loan to King’s College London’s Maughan Library, Foyle Special Collections, f. 2596.

146 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 157.

147 On the Scheldt question, see Geyl’s student Stanley Thomas Bindoff’s The Scheldt Question to 1839 (London, 1945); [G. W. Prothero], Question of the Scheldt (Handbooks prepared under the direction of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office, no. 28) (London, 1918); S. Marks, Innocent Abroad: Belgium at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Chapel Hill, 1981); H. P. Tuyll van Serooskerken, Small Powers in a Big Power World: The Belgian–Dutch Conflict at Versailles, 1919 (History of Warfare) (Leiden/Boston, 2017).

148 É. Cammaerts, ‘The revision of the 1839 treaties’, The New Europe, cxli (31 July 1919), 53–7; P. Geyl, ‘Holland and Belgium’, The New Europe, cxlvii (14 Aug. 1919), 112–16.

149 Cartier de Marchienne (1871–1946) had succeeded Ludovic Moncheur (1857–1940) to the post of Belgian ambassador at the Court of St James in 1927. Hymans, during his time as ambassador in London, also had a turn as president of the Anglo-Belgian Union.

150 Lyon, Henri Pirenne, p. 423, fn. 10.

151 Lyon, Henri Pirenne, p. 423.

152 Institute for Historical Research, Making History: The Changing Face of the Profession in Britain: Creighton Lectures, 2007–2016 <http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/creighton_lectures.html> [accessed 2 Nov. 2019].

153 R. J. W. Evans, ‘The Creighton century: British historians and Europe, 1907–2007’, Historical Research, lxxxii (May 2009), 320–39, at p. 325.

154 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen 22 November 1930. Strikt vertrouwelijk (strictly confidential).

155 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4. In his lecture on the same topic, published a few months before (P. Geyl, ‘The foundation of the Kingdom of Belgium’, Contemporary Review, cxxxviii (July 1930), pp. 588–97), Geyl went even further, citing ‘the official Belgian view of the matter, which has been most ably presented by Professor Pirenne, one of the great modern masters of historical construction’ (p. 595). Pirenne’s Creighton lecture has sadly not been published. On Geyl’s battle with Pirenne in a wider context see L. Wils, ‘“Ik gruwde van het wetenschppelijk misdrijf dat hier gepleegd was”: Pieter Geyl tegenover Henri Pirenne’ in F. W. Lantink, Nationalisme en historiografie rondom Pieter Geyl: Afscheidsbundel vor Piet van Hees, Utrechts Historische Cahiers, xxiv (2003), pp. 19–31 and E. Kossmann, ‘Eender en anders: De evenwijdigheid van de Belgische en Nederlandse geschiedenis na 1830’, in E. Kossmann, Politieke theorie en geschiedenis (Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 373–87.

156 Also see É. Cammaerts, ‘Geyl (P.), The Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609’, Revue belge de Philologie et d’histoire, xiv (1935), 496–8.

157 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Verkort overzicht der rapporten van onze vertegenwoordigers tot 14 mei 1921. Zeer vertrouwelijk, p. 1f.

158 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Overzicht der rapporten van onze vertegenwoordigers tot 2 April 1921, p. 3.

159 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 156.

160 Lindley, Seeking and Finding, p. 148; George Peabody Gooch, Under Six Reigns (London/New York, 1958), p. 214.

161 Note by Émile Cammaerts, 22 Feb. 1936, SHL, MS 800/IV/47. During the First World War Francqui and Hoover had organized the food supply to Belgium, heading the Comité National de Secours et d’Alimentation and the Commission for Relief in Belgium respectively.

162 ‘Chair of Belgian Studies’, Anglo-Belgian Union: Report for the Year 1931 (London, 1932), p. 2.

163 Émile Cammaerts to Comte Guillaume de Grunne, Département des Affaires Etrangères, Brussels, 5 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/14; 6 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/15; and 11 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/16/21.

164 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 5 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/14.

165 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 6 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/15.

166 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 5 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/14.

167 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 5 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/14.

168 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 6 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/15.

169 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 5 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/14.

170 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 11 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/16/2i.

171 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 11 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/16/2i.

172 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 6 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/15. After the Second World War and Cammaerts’ retirement in 1947, the Belgian library would become part of the collections of University of London Library (today’s Senate House Library).

173 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 6 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/15.

174 Émile Cammaerts, A History of Belgium: From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day (The Story of the Nations). (London, 1921).

175 É. Cammaerts, The Treasure House of Belgium: Her Land and People, Her Art and Literature (London, 1924).

176 In an omnibus review of new literature on Belgium in History, the journal of the Historical Association, widely read by history teachers in the UK: J. E. Neale, ‘[Review of] Belgium: from the Roman Invasion to the Present Day by Émile Cammaerts; H. van der Linden and S. Jane, Belgium: the Making of a Nation; L. van der Essen, A Short History of Belgium; P. Geyl, Holland and Belgium: Their Common History and Their Relations; Atlas de Geographie Historique de la Belgique. Fascicule 6, Fascicule 7 by L. van der Essen, F. L. Ganshof, J. Maury and P. Nothomb’, History, N. S., vi (Jan. 1922), 273–5.

177 University of Glasgow. Honorary Doctors of Law [1928], SHL, MS 800/I/1101. Indeed, the honorary degree from one of the leading Scottish universities, albeit in laws and not in literature, was bestowed on him in recognition of ‘his contributions to letters, and for his interpretation of the Belgian spirit’.

178 Cammaerts to de Grunne, 6 Dec. 1929, SHL, MS 800/IV/15.

179 Belgian claims on Dutch territory at the end of the war, the Franco-Belgian military accord of 1920 and Belgian participation in the occupation of the Ruhr (1923–5), all of which the British government disapproved of, played a role here, as did improved Anglo-German relations since the 1925 Locarno Treaty and Germany’s admission to the League of Nations in the year after.

180 University of London, Senate Minutes (S. M.) 4190–93 of July 1920.

181 Cammaerts to Lord Burnham, 12 Dec. 1930, SHL, MS 800/IV/17ii.

182 Like Cammaerts a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Burnham had taken an interest in the foundation of the chair of Belgian studies since the beginning and in 1927 received an honorary doctorate from Ghent University for his commitment. He also served as vice-president of the Anglo-Belgian Union and financed its publication organ, the quarterly Anglo-Belgian Notes; ‘Editorial’, Anglo-Belgian Notes, i (July 1921), p. 1.

183 Cammaerts to Lord Burnham, 12 Dec. 1930, SHL, MS 800/IV/17.

184 Cammaerts to Lord Burnham, 12 Dec. 1930, SHL, MS 800/IV/17.

185 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 26 Nov. 1930.

186 The full list of sponsors of the Belgian chair were Professor Jules Dechamps, East London College (today’s Queen Mary, University of London); Professor C. H. Collins Baker, National Gallery, London; Professor Wilmotte, Brussels; Professor Pirenne; Professor Paul Lambotte; Professor Charlier.

187 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 26 Nov. 1930.

188 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 26 Nov. 1930. On Jacob Haantjes, in 1924 Harting’s successor as reader for Dutch language and literature, see the biography in Frisian language: Jelle Hindriks Brouwer, Oantinkens oan Jacob Haantjes, 1899–1956, meast út syn briefwiksel (Ljouwert, 1960).

189 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 26 Nov. 1930.

190 Clogg, Politics and the Academy; W. H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: a Life (New York, 1989), pp. 92–120.

191 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 26 Nov. 1930.

192 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 26 Nov. 1930.

193 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 13 Dec. 1930.

194 Motion in the annex to NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 17 Dec. 1930.

195 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 13 Dec. 1930.

196 Cammaerts to Burnham, confidential, 12 Dec. 1930, SHL, MS 800/IV/17iv.

197 Lord Burnham to Cammaerts, 16 Dec. 1930, SHL, MS 800/IV/18.

198 Reported in Cammaerts to Lord Burnham, 12 Dec. 1930, SHL, MS 800/IV/17iv.

199 Deed between the university and the managing trustees (Lord Granville, the British ambassador to Belgium; Baron Cartier de Marchienne, the Belgian ambassador to the Court of St James; Lord Burnham, Lord Ebbisham, Edmond Baron Carton de Wiart and Professor van Langenhove) ‘with the object of founding in the University of London a Chair of Belgian Studies and Institutions for the furtherance and maintenance of the existing good relations between Great Britain and Belgium’; ‘Chair of Belgian studies and institutions’, SHL, MS 800/IV/43 and 44.

200 According to Geyl’s report, Brandin, the only member of the subcommittee positively inclined towards Cammaerts, was ‘strangely quiet’ in the subcommittee meeting, when the limitation to literature of French expression was imposed, whereas in the board meeting of 16 Dec. he was furious about the developments, which would be consistent with Brandin having had knowledge of the title of the role used in the deed document, but this is of course only speculation.

201 Record of Previous Proceedings of the Professorial Board in Relation to the Proposed Chair of Belgian Studies, SHL, MS 800/IV/42iii–vi; NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 17 Dec. 1930.

202 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 17 Dec. 1930.

203 É. Cammaerts, Memorandum on Chair of Belgian Studies at University of London, 20 Jan. 1931, SHL, MS 800/IV/39ii.

204 Deller to Maudslay, n. d., SHL, MS 800/IV/19.

205 É. Cammaerts, Memorandum on Chair of Belgian Studies at University of London, 20 Jan. 1931, SHL, MS 800/IV/39ii.

206 Cammaerts to Deller, 27 and 30 Jan. 1931, reproduced in the appendix of NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 25 Feb. 1931, pp. 11f.

207 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 25 Feb. 1931, pp. 1f.

208 University of London, University College. University chair of Belgian studies (mainly Belgian literature). Statement of duties and terms of appointment, reproduced in the appendix of NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 25 Feb. 1931, pp. 4f.

209 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 25 Feb. 1931, pp. 4f.

210 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 17 Dec. 1930.

211 Cammaerts to Lord Burnham, 23 March 1931, SHL, MS 800/IV/20.

212 For example ‘A chair of Belgian studies (by our own correspondent)’, Observer, 7 Dec. 1930. MS 800/IV/48/9.

213 Cammaerts to Lord Burnham, 23 March 1931, SHL, MS 800/IV/20.

214 The new headquarters of the University of London (Charles Holden’s Senate House) were still under construction and, tragically, Deller was to lose his life in an accident during a visit to the building site a few years later (1936); ‘Death of Sir Edwin Deller’, Anglo-Belgian Union, Report for the Year 1936 (London, 1937), pp. 10f.

215 Cammaerts to Lord Burnham, 23 March 1931, SHL, MS 800/IV/20.

216 Pember Reeves to the Belgian ambassador, Count de Lalaing, 30 October 1914; AGR, Brussels, inv. no. BE-A0510/T476, Belgian Relief Committee, 296, Comité Officiel Belge pour l’Angleterre, 75.

217 Cammaerts to Deller, confidential, n. d. [March 1931], SHL, MS 800/IV/21.

218 Deller to Cammaerts, 16 July 1931, SHL, MS 800/IV/40. In a personal letter, the Belgian ambassador also congratulated Cammaerts on the final success and called him ‘the right man in the right place’, Cartier de Marchienne to Cammaerts, 17 July 1931, SHL, MS 800/IV/23.

219 É. Cammaerts, ‘The development of Belgian Culture’, manuscript, SHL, MS 800/II/1346/1–18 and MS 800/II/1348/1–25; also published in an abridged version in Contemporary Review, cxli (Jan. 1932), 172–80.

220 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 23 Jan. 1932.

221 NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 4: Rapport van onzen vertegenwoordiger te Londen, 23 Jan. 1932.

222 ‘University News’, extract from The Times (London), 5 Dec. 1930. SHL, MS 800/IV/48/11.

223 ‘Vingt ans après’, Anglo-Belgian Union, Report for the Year 1936 (London, 1937), 16–21, at p. 20.

224 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 158.

225 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 202.

226 Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 202.

227 J. Tollebeek, ‘At the crossroads of nationalism: Huizinga, Pirenne and the Low Countries in Europe’, European Review of History / Revue européenne d’histoire, xvii (2010), 187–215, at p. 199.

228 N. Garson, ‘P. Geyl, the Diets idea and Afrikaner nationalism’, p. 140; N. van Sas, ‘The Great Netherlands controversy’, p. 162f.

229 E. Kossmann, The Low Countries, 1780–1940 (Oxford, 1978), p. 644.

230 E. Cammaerts, Albert of Belgium: Defender of Right (London/New York, 1935); E. Cammaerts, The Keystone of Europe: History of the Belgian Dynasty, 1830–1939 (London, 1939); E. Cammaerts, The Prisoner at Laeken: King Léopold, Legend and Fact (London, 1941).

231 Note on the Activities of Professor Cammaerts since 1931, SHL, MS 800/IV/51/1: ‘Soon after the foundation of the Chair of Belgian Studies, it was realised that the work of the holder of the Chair should be inter-collegiate, and should deal with all subjects concerning Belgian culture which were most likely to be useful in British students. From 1931 to 1939 Professor Cammaerts was able to organize, with the help of his colleagues, an average of 28 lectures each year, including from five to eight public lectures’; individual reports, with details about the courses and lectures held per year, are held in SHL, MS 800/I/1075–1076, and reproduced in the annual reports of the Anglo-Belgian Union.

232 ‘Bibliography of English translations of Gezelle’, in Poems of Guido Gezelle: a Bilingual Anthology, ed. P. Vincent (London, 2016), p. 229.

233 M.-E. Chagnon and T. Irish, The Academic World in the Era of the Great War (London, 2018).

234 Although apparently mostly as a gesture to allow Queen Wilhelmina, who had opposed his appointment for months, a face-saving retreat. Wilhelmina’s opposition had not been on the grounds of Geyl’s Greater Netherlands activism but because of his anti-Orangist works critical of her ancestors, especially his Willem IV en Engeland (1924); Von der Dunk, ‘Pieter Geyl: History as a form of self-expression’, p. 212 (fn. 26).

235 E. H. Kossmann, Familiearchief, p. 157.

236 G. Renier, Great Britain and the Establishment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1813–1815: a Study in British foreign policy (London, 1930).

237 ‘Prof. G. J. Renier: the Dutch and the English’, The Times (London), 6 Sept. 1962, p. 12.

238 See also P. van Hees, ‘Utrecht–Londen: De briefwisseling tussen Pieter Geyl en Gustaaf Renier’, Maatstaf, xxxv (1987), 162–8.

239 See the letter exchanges between Cammaerts and the university in SHL, MS 800/IV/31–33.

240 Clogg, Politics and the Academy, p. 110.

241 Tiedau, ‘Dutch and Belgian artistic and intellectual rivalry in interwar London’.

242 In his scholarly autobiography, which is highly illuminating to anybody interested in the academic study of academic politics, Richard Clogg writes: ‘The Koraes chair is the mother and father of the nowadays not uncommon phenomenon in the English-speaking world of the “ethnic” chair, that is to say a chair intended, overtly or covertly, to legitimise and promote the national aspirations of the donors, whether governmental or individual, who have put up the money for it. Not without reason, its history has been described as bloodstained’; R. Clogg, Greek and Me: a Memoir of Academic Life (London/New York, 2018), p. 3. After Toynbee’s ‘involuntary resignation’, agreement was reached at King’s College London to continue the Koraes chair with conditions approximating ‘those governing the Chair of Dutch Studies’; Clogg, Politics and the Academy, p. 111.

243 I. W. Roberts, History of the School for Slavonic and East European Studies, 1915–1990 (London, 1991). H. and C. Seton-Watson, R. W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years of Austria-Hungary (London, 1981). Seton-Watson, incidentally, was also Toynbee’s opponent in the Koraes affair.

244 A. R. M. Mommers, Inventaris van het Nationaal Bureau voor Documentatie over Nederland, 1919–36 (The Hague, 1951), p. 7; Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef, p. 245.

245 P. van Hees, A. W. Willemsen, Geyl en Vlaanderen: Uit het archief van prof. dr. P. Geyl. Brieven en notities, i (Antwerp, 1973), p. 10.

246 Two letters to the editor of The Nation in Feb. 1921, in response to one by ‘a Belgian Reader (without doubt Cammaerts)’ may serve as an example. Apart from writing one in his own name, Geyl sent a second letter, using the name of a Flemish physician in the East End, with whom Geyl, in his own words, knew he could talk openly, when learning that his activist father had just been sentenced to death in absentia in Belgium. Also, in a counter-piece to an anti-Dutch report in John Bull in May 1921 that he submitted ‘not in his own name’; NA, inv. no. 2.19.026, no. 18, Overzicht der rapporten van onze vertegenwoordigers tot 5 maart 1921. Zeer vertrouwelijk, p. 1; Overzicht der rapporten van onze vertegenwoordigers tot 14 mei 1921. Zeer vertrouwelijk, p. 1f.

247 Geyl, ‘Levensverhaal (tot 1945)’, pp. 312.

248 J. A. Brundage, ‘[Review of] Henri Pirenne: a Biographical and Intellectual Study by Bryce Lyon’, Speculum, liv (Jan. 1979), 174–6, at p. 175f.

249 J. Tollebeek, De toga van Fruin, p. 330: ‘Kortom: Geyl toonde zich in de concrete politiek wel een reformist; in zijn striven was hij echter een revolutionair.’

250 With Willem Schermerhorn, later to be the first Dutch prime minister after the Second World War, and others, Geyl in 1935 founded the Nederlandsche Beweging voor Eenheid door Democratie (Dutch Movement for Unity through Democracy), which sought to defend liberal democracy against both fascism and communism. Also see I. J. H. Worst, ‘De laatste Loevesteiner: Liberalisme en nationalisme bij Pieter Geyl (1887–1966), BMGN, ic (1984), 201–218, at p. 211.

251 A. Duke, ‘[Review of] P. Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef: Autobiografie, 1887–1940, ed. W. Berkelaar, L. Dorsman and P. van Hees (Amsterdam, 2009)’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, xxxvi (March 2012), 88–90, at p. 88.

252 P. Geyl, Use and Abuse of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1955).

253 UCL Special Collections, Committee for the Promotion of Dutch Studies, 22 Jan. 1932 (£45 [£~2.2k in today’s money] for Revolt of the Netherlands, 1555–1609); 18 Feb. 1935 (£30 [£1.5k] for The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century, i); 28 Feb. 1938 (£60 [£2.8k] for The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century, ii).

254 A. Duke, ‘[Review of] P. Geyl, Ik die zo weinig in mijn verleden leef: Autobiografie 1887–1940’. But note the lasting importance of Geyl’s greatest work, Napoleon: For and Against (1947; in English 1949) and its central Geylian idea of historiography as a never-ending debate.

255 See Stijn van Rossem’s chapter in this volume and U. Tiedau, ‘History of the IHR Low Countries history seminar’, in Talking History: Seminars and Seminarians at the Institute of Historical Research, 1921–2021, ed. D. Manning (London, 2023).

256 Herman van Roijen, Royal Netherlands Ambassador, to A. Tattersall, Esq., UCL secretary, 1 Feb. 1967, Royal Holloway University of London Archives, 402/14/7; J. Deleu, ‘Neerlandistiek in Engeland’, Ons Erfdeel, ii (1967–8); ‘België voortaan vertegenwoordigd in het “Committee for the promotion of Dutch studies”’, Neerlandica extra Muros, April 1967, p. 22.

257 R. Willemyns, ‘Dutch: One language divided by two countries’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, xxix (2005), 153–74, at p. 153.

4. Pieter Geyl and the Institute of Historical Research

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3. Pieter Geyl and Émile Cammaerts: the Dutch and Belgian chairs at the University of London between academia and propaganda, 1914–35

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