![]() ![]() Our front is united."īut, the newspaper added: "A little more knowledge, a little more time on this side, more patience, and a sounder political principle on the other side would have saved us from the greatest calamity that anyone living has known. On 1 August, CP Scott argued that intervention would "violate dozens of promises made to our own people, promises to seek peace, to protect the poor, to husband the resources of the country, to promote peaceful progress".įour days later, after Britain declared war on Germany, the Guardian said: "All controversy therefore is now at an end. "We care as little for Belgrade as Belgrade for Manchester," it told its readers on 30 July. The Guardian opposed British intervention right up to the declaration of war. It also warned of "the more serious danger of a Russian attack" on Austria in defence of its Slavic ally. ![]() Though the newspaper's first analysis – headlined What the Murders May Mean – played down the "immediate or salient" effect on European politics, it did warn of the dangers of increased hostility between Austria and Serbia. The article added: "Comments on the crime, all expressing friendly feelings for the Emperor, are made by all the European papers, most of them, as is natural while the shock is still fresh, attaching an over-importance to the political consequences." The paper noted that the archduke and his wife had recently visited London and, his uncle, emperor Franz Joseph, held the title of a British field marshal. The next day, 30 June 1914, a Guardian headline read "World's Sympathy with Aged Emperor". The assassins were "almost lynched by the infuriated crowds … many people wept", Reuters reported. Reports from correspondents of the news agency Reuters in Sarajevo and Vienna detailed the circumstances surrounding the assassination and described an earlier attempt shortly before Princip fired the shots that killed the archduke and his wife. Photograph: Charlie Riedel/APīut the Guardian did devote the bulk of its main news page, illustrated by a small map and family tree of the Austrian royal house, to the shooting. Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian-Serb nationalist who assassinated archduke. The Sleepwalkers, historian Christopher Clark's seminal work on how Europe went to war in 1914, reflects the mixture of complacency and rhetoric Europe indulged in. The Manchester Guardian, then edited by the legendary CP Scott, was far from alone in playing down the significance of the death of the archduke, shot by the young radical Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo. Franz Ferdinand was described as "a simple and amiable man, but very passionate and, in anger, uncalculable". The archduke, the editorial noted, was "a great gardener", adding that "in England, under other conditions of life, he would have been an ideal country squire". ![]() ![]() "It is a difficult and at present an ungracious task to speculate on what influence the crime of yesterday may have on Austrian politics." "What its motives may have been we do not know, nor do they greatly matter," it advised its readers. The newspaper's editorial of 29 June 1914, the day after the assassination, dwelt on the archduke's personality and on the narrow implications it might have for the internal politics of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But it is hardly surprising that the Guardian did not predict the unimaginable horror to come. ![]()
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