Rumours of angels: a response to Clarke - Folklore 113:1 - Topics, Notes And Comments

I was most interested by David Clarke's article on "The Angel of Mons," for, in writing the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, Steve Roud and I had faced precisely this problem of whether to accept Machen's conviction that he alone had unintentionally started the rumours or whether this is an example of the contemporary legend phenomenon.

I agree with Clarke that everything depends on the value one sets on the diary entry dated 5 September 1914 by Brigadier-General John Charteris, later published in his memoirs At G.H.Q. (1931). If it is true that at that date "the story of the Angel of Mons is going strong through the 2nd Corps," then Machen's story in the London Evening News of 24 September cannot be the sole source of the rumour.

Clarke's comment is: "The officer's testimony is significant only if the entries can be demonstrated as being contemporary with the dates provided by the diary. Unfortunately, it appears that some of the entries were completed at a later date" (164). The only argument Clarke offers to justify the charge that Charteris faked the entries is that in a later passage, dated 11 February 1915, Charteris speculates that perhaps some soldier wrote home that the English were saved as if by an angel of the Lord, that the letter was quoted in some parish magazine, and that in turn was repeated with the "as if" comment omitted. Clarke says that these remarks by Charteris "must, by inference, refer to that [magazine] published by All Saints, Clifton, [which] did not appear until May 1915, so could not have been referred to ... in February of that year."

But why must we infer that Charteris was alluding to that particular magazine? Can we be so sure that no other church magazine ever referred to the angels in the months between September 1914 and February 1915? Are we justified in believing Charteris doctored his diary simply because we have found no such magazine during this period? In any case, he is not claiming to have actually seen a letter or a magazine; he is merely making an intelligent guess, and the fact that magazines did indeed prove to be a major medium for spreading the rumour in the summer of 1915 could be a coincidence.

It would be a different matter if Charteris's memoirs have a general reputation of being unreliable and full of post facto comments to which misleadingly early datings have been added. But Clarke does not give any references to show that this is so. I would be interested to know what reliance military historians normally place on Charteris. If they are inclined to mistrust his facts and dates, then indeed we can ignore his alleged diary entries for 5 September 1914 and 11 February 1915. But if he is regarded as a reliable and accurate source on other matters, we cannot easily dismiss his evidence on this particular point.

Biographical Note

Jacqueline Simpson is Vice-President of the Folklore Society, a former editor of Folklore, and author (with Steve Roud) of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore.

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