Following the outbreak of the First World War Haldane was falsely accused of pro-German sympathies, in July 1914, for hosting Albert Ballin, a German shipping magnate and unofficial mediator between Germany and Britain. The accusations were widely believed and were even echoed in a popular music hall song ("All dressed up and nowhere to go") in the revue "Mr Manhattan". He was harried in particular by Beaverbrook's "Daily Express", which gave great publicity to the claim by Professor Onkel of Heidelberg that he had said "Germany was his spiritual home". He had in fact said that about Professor Hermann Lotze's classroom at Göttingen at a dinner party given by Mrs Humphry Ward in April 1913 to enable him to meet some German professors during his mission.