Arthur Augustus William Harry Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede (16 February 1871 – 23 March 1946), was a British politician, writer, and social activist. He was the son of Sir Henry Ponsonby, Private Secretary to Queen Victoria, and Mary Elizabeth Bulteel, daughter of John Crocker Bulteel. He was also the great-grandson of The 3rd Earl of Bessborough, The 3rd Earl of Bathurst and The 2nd Earl Grey. The 1st Baron Sysonby was his elder brother.
Ponsonby is often quoted as the author of the dictum "When war is declared, truth is the first casualty", published in his book Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War (1928). However, he uses this phrase in quotation marks as an epigram at the start of the book and does not present it as his own words. Its likely origin is the almost identical line spoken in 1917 by the United States Senator Hiram Johnson: "The first casualty when war comes is truth".
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Education and early career
Ponsonby was a Page of Honour to Queen Victoria from 1882 to 1887. From an Anglo-Irish family, he was educated at Eton College. While at Eton, Ponsonby was whipped for organising a steeplechase in his dormitory.
Ponsonby studied at Balliol College, Oxford, before joining the Diplomatic Service and taking assignments in Constantinople and Copenhagen.
Politics
At the 1906 general election, Ponsonby stood unsuccessfully as Liberal candidate for Taunton. He was elected as Member of Parliament for Stirling Burghs at a by-election of 1908, succeeding former Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who had died a few weeks earlier.
In Parliament, Ponsonby opposed the British involvement in the First World War and, with George Cadbury, Ramsay MacDonald, E. D. Morel, Arnold Rowntree, and Charles Trevelyan, he was a member of the Union of Democratic Control, which became a prominent antiwar organisation in Britain.
Ponsonby was defeated at the 1918 general election in which he stood as an "Independent Democrat" in the new Dunfermline Burghs constituency. He then joined the Labour Party and returned to the House of Commons at the 1922 general election as member for the Brightside division of Sheffield.
In 1924, Ramsay MacDonald appointed Ponsonby as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and he later served as Under-Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs and then as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport in 1929. Ponsonby was a leader in the antiwar wing of the Labour Party, a champion of "humanitarian pacifism" which held that the First World War was a sort of conspiracy against the ordinary people of the world by capitalist elites who sough to enrich themselves via war. In his 1925 pamphlet Now is the Time, he deplored "the millions who have fallen in the war" and denounced the "great conspiracy" by the governments of Europe to plunge the world into war. Ponsonby declared that the defining issue of the day was to establish "democratic" control over diplomacy to end the "great conspiracy" to promote "war mentality" as the prelude to another world war. Like many other British socialists, Ponsonby had a strong dislike of the Foreign Office, which was dominated by the scions of the British aristocracy, as a secretive and elitist group who he believed served only the interests of "the Establishment" instead of ordinary British people.
In 1928, he published the book Falsehood in Wartime, an elaboration of the thesis that he presented in Now is the Time that the First World War was far from being the crusade against evil that it was presented as in the United Kingdom at the time. Ponosonby argued that the war was instead merely a cynical exercise by the British government to lie to its own people to start and sustain a war intended only to enrich the arms industry. Ponsonby examined the causes of the war and the war aims of the belligerent powers, but his main focus was in rebutting allegations of German atrocities during the war to prove his thesis of the "great conspiracy". He was especially concerned to rebut the "rape of Belgium" story as he claimed that the reports in British newspapers during the war about widespread German atrocities during the invasion of Belgium in 1914 were all lies and the German Army had behaved in a honourable and noble fashion towards the Belgian people. His book had chapters dedicated to rebutting the stories about the "mutilated nurse", the "Belgian baby without hands", the story of the Canadian soldier crucified during the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, and the "corpse factory" story of 1917 that claimed the Germans were turning the bodies of slain Allied soldiers into soap. The book concluded that "the international war is a monster born of hypocrisy fed on falsehood, fattened by humbug, kept alive by superstition, directed to the death and torture of millions".
Resignation
In May 1940, Ponsonby resigned from the Labour Party, opposing its decision to join the new coalition government of Winston Churchill.
He wrote a biography of his father which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1942: Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria's Private Secretary: His Life and Letters.
Death
Ponsonby died on 23 March 1946 and was succeeded by his son Matthew Henry Hubert Ponsonby.
Personal life and family
On 12 April 1898, he married Dorothea Parry, daughter of Hubert Parry and Elizabeth Maude Herbert (1851–1933), a daughter of Sidney Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Lea. They had a daughter, Elizabeth (1900–1940), who during the 1920s became well known as a leading figure of the Bright Young People, and a son, Matthew (1904–1976), who became the 2nd Baron.
Works
Rebels and Reformers: Biographies for Young People, with Dorothea Ponsonby. New York: H. Holt and Company (1919). OCLC 1051763068.
The Priory and Manor of Lynchmere and Shulbrede. Taunton: Barnicott and Pearce, and Wessex Press (1920). OCLC 1050747120.
A Conflict of Opinion, a Discussion on the Failure of the Church. London: Swarthmore Press (1919). OCLC 1042381801.
The Camel and the Needle's Eye (1910).
The Decline of the Aristocracy (1912).
Democracy and Diplomacy (1915)
Wars And Treaties (1918)
A Conflict of Opinion: A Discussion on the Failure of the Church (1922)
English Diaries: A review of English diaries from the sixteenth to the twentieth century with an introduction on diary writing (1923)
Now Is The Time: An Appeal For Peace (1925)
More English diaries; further reviews of diaries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century with an introduction on diary reading, (1927)
Scottish and Irish Diaries: From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (1927)
Falsehood in War-Time (1928).
Samuel Pepys (1928)
British diarists (1930) (80-page booklet in the "Benn's Sixpenny Library" series, no. 70)