Part One

England at Peace

Chapter 1

First Shots

The works of man’s hands are his embodied thought, they endure after his bodily framework has passed into decay and thus throw a welcome light on the earliest stages of his unwritten history.

Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives, by Prof W J Sollas (second edition, 1915)

I

The Honourable Gerald Legge began 1914, the last full year of his life, in Sudan of all places. Other upper-class young men left midwinter England for Switzerland, the south of France, or Egypt, with friends and family. Legge passed through the Suez Canal at Christmas, on ‘a nice empty ship’, landed at Port Sudan, and took the train to the capital Khartoum. He went further, where few travellers have ever been, into waterless Kordofan, so waterless that he had to send camels 30 miles to wells: “They leave here one morning and get back two days later,” he told his father in a letter in March. You suspect from his letters that only in the harsh but simple wilderness did he feel truly himself.

He had wintered far from England before. Born in 1882, the second son of the sixth earl of Dartmouth, he had served in the Army from 1900 to 1905, and had since gone shooting as far as Newfoundland and Java. The Kordofan country was very like the Kalahari, he told his father, ‘but the climate even better’. “Our hunting is usually done on camels as it is too hot to walk very far in the day time when we have to be chary with water. As soon as we strike fresh spoor we leave with camels and then go on foot and if we kill anything the camel has to carry it. I like these camels, they are wonderfully patient beasts and very forgiving; if only they didn’t stink and groan so much I would like them. I took a toss off one, one day; I was in a hurry to get off and shoot a guinea fowl and somehow managed to get off quicker than I expected but luckily I fell on my head, so wasn’t hurt,” he joked, “but missed the guinea fowl.”

Legge was disappointed not to see oryx, but shot gazelle. The game was very wild and wanted good stalking, ‘and I am just as fit as blazes’, he wrote. On January 31 he arrived at El Obeid, the main place in that region, about 400 miles from Khartoum, paid off boys and camels, and went by train to Kosti on the Nile to find a boat. The country had hold of him already. He wrote of the ‘knowledge that you are bang away from every white man; the Nile will be all ginger beer bottles and orange peels, nearly as bad as East Africa I expect’.

He wrote again in February ‘on a man of war on the Nile’, which had been waiting at Kosti. The inspector there had been at Eton with Legge. “It is the most luxurious form of travelling possible, bathroom, deckchairs, etc etc ... I am not much impressed with the bird life on this river after hearing so many wonderful accounts of it. It isn’t a patch on Ngamiland [in the Kalahari Desert] for that but maybe it will improve as we go south.” He noted storks, herons and cranes: “We have shot a good many duck mostly our own northern species.” Legge had skinned the ducks, ‘and a bad job it is as they are all so fat and greasy that each skin takes a very long time to clean’.

The hunters shot anything, but the bigger and the faster the animal, the better. The day before he wrote, a fellow hunter, named only as Jack, had shot a water buck and a white-eared kob. While Legge was stalking through some very high and thick grass, he nearly trod on a lion. “He jumped up grunting and growling within four yards of me but of course I could see nothing except the grass shaking as he bolted. I ran like mad after him in hopes of seeing him cross an open space somewhere but never got a glimpse.” Legge shot what he was stalking and left some of the meat there in the hope that the lion would find it. Legge and his companion went after the lion early the next morning. A native shouted ‘Asser! Asser!’, meaning lion. Legge recalled: “I saw a great brute prowling around still a long way off and tried to get nearer but it was very flat and open and he saw me and slunk off. We ran after him and he started lolloping away so I had a long shot and got him plumb in that portion of his body least immediately fatal as he was going dead away but the bullet raked forward and he was dead in five yards. As soon as I fired Jack said he was a hyena and he was right! A great big devil too. So I had all the fun of shooting a lion without getting him.”

The game was much tamer than Kordofan. The men set off in the dark at 4am to hunt buffalo, to get away from the river. Legge shot wide, and back at the river-boat, found that Jack had shot two bulls. “It was hard not to appear jealous,” he admitted. Another day, Legge shot a bull from 20 yards away. He wrote how he went for ‘the thin part of his neck just behind the head where his spine, windpipe and big blood vessels are close together’:

At the shot he just rolled over without a kick but another bull I hadn’t seen jumped up and started looking about. I didn’t want to shoot another and expected him to clear off but no! he would wait for his pal and he just stood looking from me to his pal and back again. So I yelled and screamed at him and so did the man with me but he wouldn’t move. I liked him for that! He wouldn’t leave his pal. Then I fired in the air over his head and all the notice he took was to walk towards me looking very truculent. We still shouted at him and I was determined not to shoot at him but he just came on so I shinned up a tree with my rifle and cursed every hair on his enormous body. He came to within 40 yards and then turned and walked back to the dead one and stood there on guard. It was now just about dark so I came down off my perch and left him master of the situation and made a detour and came home. I have a greater respect for a buffalo now than before even. What a splendid beast to bluff me out like that. I am glad I didn’t shoot him. So this morning I went back at dawn. In hopes of finding a lion at the dead bull but nothing was there. But my friend of last night had been butting the corpse really hard to make him get up I suppose ... now I can take it easy as I have got what I came for.

According to its postmarks, the letter, addressed to his mother the Countess of Dartmouth, left Khartoum on February 18 and reached the family estate at Patshull outside Wolverhampton by March 1. She was not there, so the letter followed her to the family’s London residence in Berkeley Square. On March 10 Legge was writing again before he returned to Khartoum. He was not sorry he was finishing his hunt on the Nile, calling it ‘altogether too tame and touristy’ and grumbling: ‘... the whole trip is a hold-up from beginning to end and this Sudan steamers department are robbers of the worst kind’. He returned to his costs at the end of the letter: “I hear rubber is up but have seen no paper. I hope it is true as I am spending money like water here.” Legge had been working on a rubber plantation in Java in November 1907, when his sister Dorothy married Francis Meynell. (‘How are you? Married, settled down and lived happily ever after! Good for you,’ Legge wrote to her then, sounding like a man who was not for settling.) Usually, he kept his letters to his shooting: ‘the rest of my news will keep till I get home,’ he wrote on April 11, from Port Sudan Hotel. A boat was sailing on April 14, and he expected to arrive home on April 26, in time as it happened for his 32nd birthday. “Dear Mother, Just back from the hills as hard as nails and so fit!” he wrote. “Real hard work down there, with here and there a bit of climbing that nearly frightened me to death. Jack got what is nearly a record ibex, a real fizzer. I got two, one small, the other only moderate, but quite nice heads. But I am rather proud as I found them, stalked them and shot them with no-one to help at all and was previously told they could not be stalked!’ Legge hoped to go into the hills again in 1915. “This country has fairly got hold of me,” he had told his father in January. “I love it and the people. The Arab is the greatest gentleman I ever met; I wish some of the things that think they are gentlemen at home could live out here for a bit and pick up some wrinkles from the Arab.”

II

The brothers Clifford and Sydney Gothard, too, began 1914 with a bang. January 1 in their native Burton upon Trent, the Staffordshire brewery town, was fine all day, frosty then thawing, ‘slightly misty and dull in afternoon’. So Clifford wrote in his new Boot’s Scribbling Diary. In the morning he and Syd cycled uphill to Brizlincote, looking over the Trent valley, where his Uncle George Startin farmed. “Had a short chat with the two Miss James, uncle and auntie and went out shooting with Jack. Shot a cat which was ailing of some disease and killed a few small birds. Had lunch and then went out shooting again. Killed a few sparrows for the ferrets and enough blackbirds etc for a pie for them. Had tea, cleaned guns etc and played bridge. Syd and I v Uncle George and Miss James for three rubbers and then Jack took Miss James’ place for four more. Miss Nancy James and Aunty Louie went out to tea and only turned up again just as we started to have supper. Cycled home, roads very slippy and went to bed.” Next morning a thaw set in; Clifford went into town and bought the diary. He cycled to Bretby, and ‘shot two or three birds for the ferrets’.

The shooting by the young Gothards - and many other farmers and their friends - had its uses. Besides ridding farmland of wild animals that might eat seed or grass, Gothard fed his ferrets. In a memoir in old age he explained further: “... the rabbits brought in were cleaned, hung in a game larder to cool and taken out the next morning in the milk float to the milk customers with whom the rabbits found ready purchasers. This brought a little income for the farm which far more than paid for the cartridges and had the advantage of keeping rabbits down to reasonable numbers.”

III

In India, British Army officers shot for pleasure, and kept the dead skins as souvenirs; and, they could claim, saved Indians from dangerous animals. One Royal Horse Artillery officer, Alan Brooke, wrote to his mother how in February 1914 he and a friend and fellow officer Ronald Adam shot duck and snipe. They found a tank snake, ‘a real big fellow, about eight feet long and about as thick as my wrist’, which they did not want to shoot for fear of disturbing ducks. “So I first chased him with a stone, but he defeated me by getting into his hole. However I caught him by the tail as he was going down and pulled him out, then I swung him by his tail while Adam tried to drop a rock on to his head. At last I put my foot on his neck and we finished him off. They are not poisonous but have got a very nasty row of teeth with which they could give one a nasty bite. I skinned him on the spot and have sent his skin off to be cured. It ought to make a very nice belt and perhaps a card case also.” One morning, news came of a panther in a cave. “So I went out in the afternoon. When I got there she had come out of her cave and was sitting out on rocks. I had a herd of goats moved about at the bottom of her hill to try and divert her attention while I climbed the hill and tried to stalk her.” But the panther had gone back to her cave. Brooke waited until dark when he heard the panther kill a goat. He switched on a lamp:

“The panther was sitting like a great cat looking at the dead goat. It was not a very easy shot as I could not see my sights well and I let fly. There was a roar and I saw a streak of yellow and spots come straight at the lamp which was at my feet. In my excitement I took my finger off the switch and the light went out. The panther dashed past within a yard of me making the most unholy row. I heard her making a noise for some time then when everything was quiet I followed her up with the electric lamp and I am glad to say I found her stone dead about 150 yards away. It was only a dead rush that she made at the lamp but rather unpleasant for all that. She turned out to be quite a fair female six foot six long. While I was skinning her I found two large bullets in her neck with the wound quite healed over which accounted for her being such a cunning old brute and for her temper not being of the best.”

As Brooke’s story suggested, the hunter did not always win, and he gave the story of a subaltern named Shaw, who shot a panther which had killed tame animals nearby. “It charged him, pulled him off the rug which he was sitting on by his leg and they had a rough and tumble together till the shitari came up and hit the panther over the head with the second rifle and drove it off. They got Shaw in by the next train and pushed him straight off to the hospital where he is now.” Despite having a hand amputated, Shaw died of blood poisoning.

IV

Here, then, is a reason why most of Europe went to war within a few days in 1914. Just as men thought nothing of killing other creatures with a gun, so nations sent their young men with guns to settle an argument with a neighbour, or to conquer some other continent. Which alliance your country was one of, how democratic you were, made little difference. Men - and women - from Europe turned to violence, if it suited them, or merely to pass the time. Eva Tibbitts gave the evocatively big address of 631 105th Street, Edmonton, in an undated letter from Canada to her mother in Gloucester. The only clue to the date was that she was ‘sorry the war broke out when it did as I had just worked up a connection in the colony’. She furnished studios for a living, and was living in a house with ‘artists and professionals’. Her ‘man’, Billie Stredmond, had taught her how to shoot, “and we make up a party amongst the boys and girls here nearly every week and go duck pheasant partridge and prairie chicken shooting. We have a motor car and drive on a bit and shoot and drive on again and shoot till we get 50 miles out. Last week we had a bag of 60 birds and 20 rabbits.” Her free days sounded as rich and, at root, empty as the rest of her life.

War, like shooting, made a change from the boring working week; or from routine, if you were too rich to have to work. War was like the jar of mustard or the bottle of beer in your pantry. You might not even like mustard or beer, or only seldom had a taste for it, or only kept it to satisfy some visitor. Yet the chance was always there that you might bring them out one meal-time, and pour the bottle, or spoon some mustard on your plate. Even if you wished you hadn’t, you could not very well put the mustard back in the jar, or unpour the beer. That was how the brewers and the makers of mustard made their money.

Chapter 2

Ways to Die

And now the time has come when we must part, and go our respective ways - I to die, you to live; and which of us has the happier fortune in store for him is known to none, except to God.

Socrates; from Marginal Notes by Lord Macaulay, arranged by Sir George Otto Trevelyan (1907)

I

Clifford Gothard had his life ahead of him in 1914. On June 9, he was 21; on Friday June 12, he took the last exam of his last-but-one year at Birmingham University, where he was taking mechanical engineering. He began another carefree summer: shooting hares as they fled the wheat-fields at harvest; planting strawberries in the garden; playing tennis at the family home in Winshill on the outskirts of Burton; some light study. He had some growing-up to do, however, in the early hours of Thursday July 9:

At about 2.15am mother came and called us. ‘Do get up, dad is so ill.’ And I hastened to his bedroom and found him lying on his back and breathing heavily. His face being a trifle bluey. I raised him slightly and felt his pulse. It got very weak and so I wanted to give him some brandy but was afraid to pour it into his mouth as it may choke him. I dipped my finger in the brandy and then moistened his lips and mouth with it. It failed to revive him. I put a hot water bottle to his head with Syd’s assistance. He breathed less and less heavily and finally breathing ceased just before the doctor arrived here. He said death had taken place two or three minutes before he arrived. (He was not above ten minutes in coming from the time we telephoned to him.)

As the eldest son, Clifford took charge. He drove with Dr Holford the three miles to his mother’s unmarried brother and sister at Home Farm, Bretby - where James Startin farmed, and Sarah kept house. Clifford knocked at the door and summoned his uncle: “I told him. Auntie guessed when she knew that it was me.” That day Clifford Gothard began settling his father’s affairs, taking letters to friends and relatives - ‘nearly 50 in all’ - telephoning others, having an interview with a reporter from the Burton Gazette, one of the town’s two daily papers, and before lunch going with ‘Auntie Sallie’ (Sarah Startin) into town ‘to see bank manager where I opened an account’. Suddenly he had to become a man. They buried Frederic Gothard on the Saturday afternoon, July 11. Clifford, and Syd, worked for the rest of the month on their father’s papers. When on the Wednesday, July 15 - according to his diary his first break from the accounting - Clifford took his father’s guns, ‘to kill a rabbit or two at Bretby’, you feel the son was turning to a favourite pastime for comfort, and symbolically taking his father’s place.

Clifford had much to live up to, for Frederic Gothard had risen in the world. The son of a tailor on the high street, Frederic had studied chemistry and became the head of the brewing and malting departments at Worthington’s brewery - the man to make sure the beer was right, thanks to Burton’s underground water - and a company director. He was 57. As the local newspapers remarked, Mr Gothard had not given any sign of illness. Whether he had worked too early in the morning on the private bowls green opposite his home was the most the papers could speculate. If Frederic Gothard had felt unwell in front of his family, Clifford wrote nothing of it in his diary. No matter how high your place in a town, death could strike you any night.

II

Death found the Gothard family; William Thomas Pickbourne sought it. Not that he wished it on his wife and four sons, or anyone. He did go to his brother-in-law’s funeral in 1912 - in Winshill, as it happens. He and his own could hope for long and healthy lives: his father turned 90 in April 1914. The old man still enjoyed his food when he stayed with the Pickbournes in Northampton for a couple of months in the summer of 1911, though he was growing ever more deaf. Pickbourne took him one Saturday on the train to the Crystal Palace in London, ‘though it nearly knocked him up’, as Pickbourne put it in his diary. Pickbourne had a busy but comfortable life; once a commercial traveller, then a colliery agent, and for decades a part-time Methodist preacher. Whether in his own, Regent Square, chapel in the village of Upton, or around the district, or sometimes on invitation much further afield, he took services every Sunday. He never wrote in his diary about his job; only chapel. In March 1914 he told of a Sunday at Brixworth, the other side of Northampton:

Mrs Allcock, whom I visited for many years passed away about a fortnight ago in great peace ... she has been bedridden for years and was a great sufferer but oh so happy, so peaceful and so thoroughly ready. After tea I visited her relatives and three or four other families between tea and Service as I generally do and at night we had a very fair congregation turned out. Brixworth people however do not hurt themselves by too many services on Sunday. Once generally suits them. Some of our officials even stay at home and sleep in the afternoons! Rather cool I think. I verily believe nothing short of an earthquake would startle some of our so called Methodists into earnestness. They do want waking up!

Pickbourne was hardly the only, or the last, man to grumble in his diary about people’s shortcomings that he could not say to their faces. Pickbourne had a point; he was going to some trouble for these people. On the morning of July 12, 1914, he cycled over six miles to Moulton, the other side of Northampton - a fair task for a man who turned 54 the next month. He found a congregation of nine: “... not a very inspiring number but nevertheless they were there and wanted all the help they could get and I must say they did get help. On my own way home got caught in a shower and got wet through, had to change my clothes.” As so often, he took a young men’s class in the afternoon, and was ‘at his own place’ in the evening.

Methodism bonded these men and women, even unto death. In July Pickbourne recorded the death of a fellow preacher, John Perkins: “A week ago he fell in his bedroom and seemed to quite collapse.” Dead also was a Sunday school teacher ‘and a very earnest worker’, a young woman, Miss Burnett: “She was only ill two or three days.” And as for an old man that Pickbourne visited, Mr Rushton: “He too is fast reaching his end, gets weaker every week and he too will soon be joining the majority in the upper country.”

Just as Pickbourne tried with his preaching to help his listeners, to make sense of their world and to prepare for the next world they believed in, so he, too, was helped. Christianity, when it all came together, felt real to the believers. When in 1912 he went to the Methodists’ conference in Liverpool, ‘from the very beginning we were conscious of the presence and power of God’, he wrote. In February 1914 he felt ‘the master’s presence’, and after one Sunday’s nearly full chapel ‘a very gracious influence rested on us all especially at night and I am certain a good spirit was doing His office on many present’. That grace - as wonderfully and tantalisingly available to the common people of Northamptonshire as it was to the apostles - had to be something powerful, to take Pickbourne and his congregations (even the small ones) from one Sunday to the next.

III

Anyone could take time off work for their own funeral; that was about as far as the rights of workers went. Robert Blakeby, who lived in a room at 25 Great Portland Street in central London, received a letter on Wednesday May 12, 1914 from his brother Harry, ‘to say that Dad died suddenly last night’. Blakeby, then 29, worked in the advertising department of Peter Robinson’s, a draper’s on Oxford and Regent Streets. On the Saturday, he bought a black suit for 22 shillings, a pair of braces for a shilling, and a pair of trousers for seven shillings and sixpence - the last sum the same as his rent each week. On the Wednesday, May 19, he got up at his usual 6.40am, and walked into work as usual before 7am. He left work at 1.10pm, walked to his mother’s home near Edgware Road, ‘changed my clothes and had a wash and shave, then to dad’s funeral (at Finchley) with mother, Aunt Ellen, Minnie (my sister), Bill and Harry (my brothers) and back to mother’s to tea. Changed my clothes then back to work at 25 to 7pm. Left work at eight min to 9pm. Walked home to mother’s and had supper there.’ That was a long day; not much longer than his usual working days. Blakeby took meal breaks, ‘breakfast, dinner and tea’, and otherwise worked regularly from 7am until 7.30pm. He might leave work at 8.15pm, have supper at his mother’s, and return to do ‘LU duty’, or locking up. His employer allowed him not quite five-and-a half hours off work to bury his father.

IV

These deaths may have been distressing to watch, drawn-out and agonising to go through; at least they were all natural deaths. Death could come to you before your time, where you worked, on the roads, even at home. Harold Fencott was playing with other four-year-olds under railway arches at Bushbury near Wolverhampton in July 1914; he slipped into the canal going after a frog and drowned. Anything hot, heavy or high could kill you. A man could fall from a cart at hay-making time and break his neck; a boy given a ride on the cart could fall under the wheels and die; horses frightened by a passing motor car could throw the carter to the ground. Wagons crushed shunters; cranes knocked apprentices off girders. If anything could go wrong, it did. As the local Church Lads Brigade marched through the town of Beverley in August 1913, a dum-dum bullet in a firearm, thought to be harmless, went off, hit the road, and then a watching boy. He recovered. In May 1914 grease caught fire on the apron of Edward Fletcher, 52, a stoker who had worked for Walsall Glue Company for 34 years, and burned him to death.

Mines were even worse: gas underground could explode or poison you, roofs could fall on you. For every accident that an inquest coroner and jury heard about, and that made the newspaper, many more near-misses and injuries left people bed-ridden or degraded, unfit for their old work. Some workplaces looked after their injured; if a railway shunter lost an arm or a leg, he could work as a signalman, or a night-watchman. Most cases never made the news, or never went beyond the nearest workmates or family. They had to accept the hardship, because they could no more expect anyone else to help them than they could help others. They had to shrug - unless the pain did not even allow that.

‘My dear nephew,’ wrote Sarah Pick to William Thomas Swift, on Monday July 20, 1914. Swift, a retired and widowed schoolmaster in the village of Churchdown between Gloucester and Cheltenham, read the letter the next day. She thanked him for a letter of his, then told him:

You will be sorry to know that I have had the misfortune to put my shoulder out. It happened up in my room, I hitched my foot in the carpet where it was unsewn, I fell and struck my shoulder against the doorpost. The pain was almost unendurable until Dr Phelps and his partner came and put it back in again. The pain is still very bad now I have no use at all in my arm yet. But I suppose it will come back.

A relative was staying until she felt better, she added: “He cannot bend his leg and is still on the club but he does all he can and Mrs Mower bandages my arm and dresses and undresses me.” ‘On the club’, so obvious to Pick and Swift that she did not need to spell it out to him, must have been a friendly society or some such savings club, that paid out at such times. Swift must have answered her at once because on the Friday he had a postcard reply: “I am a little better. My arm pains me a good deal and it has made me feel very poorly in myself. I shall follow your advice to be as cheerful as I can and not worry. Hilda, Sybil and John are coming on Monday for a fortnight.”

What could cheer Sarah Pick? She could tell herself, though she had no way of knowing, that others were worse off than her. At least she had not tripped on stairs, which could kill; as inquests heard elsewhere. Miner’s wife Polly Henworth, living in what the coroner described as a ‘miserable hovel’ at Bloxwich in Staffordshire, went downstairs one night in March 1914 to fetch the iron plate from the oven, to warm the bed for her ill, visiting, sister. She must have tripped on stairs - called by the coroner ‘the most awkward he had ever seen’ - while carrying a lamp holding about a quart of oil. Frank Henworth awoke to his wife’s screams and found her, in her nightdress on the kitchen floor, in flames from head to foot. She died 13 days later. Even such a sad story did show how families looked after their own. Also sleeping in the Henworths’ one bedroom - divided by a partition - was the dead woman’s mother. You could shudder at such overcrowding; or understand the sharing. Here, then, in the accidents that made life like a guerrilla war, may have been one reason for such public interest in the loss of the Titanic, in 1912. The passengers on that boat, kept apart by the class of their ticket yet with one fate, were a metaphor for Britain. Rich people, who could imagine themselves on such a ship, could see that an accident could catch even them. For the poor, who could only dream of travel, the Titanic’s story spoke of the harsh choices in their own lives. Thanks to the failings of others, beyond the power of the passengers to remedy or even ask about, there were not enough lifeboats, actual or metaphorical, for everyone.

V

Though Lord Charles Beresford was a bigoted hypocrite, at least as a hypocrite he could take something as embarrassing as the Titanic and not only put the best face on it, but make it sound glorious. He was just the man for the unveiling of the statue to the captain of the Titanic, Commander Edward John Smith, at Lichfield on Wednesday July 29, 1914. Beresford, a Conservative MP, wearing Royal Navy uniform, had made several voyages with Smith. According to Beresford, Smith was ‘an example of the very best type of British seaman, and of British gentlemen’. Hear, hear, the crowd said; the listeners wanted to hear something good. Beresford and other speakers that day described Smith as brave, gallant, and heroic (and, none of them added, dead). They left out the ignored warnings about the icebergs, the missed distress signals, the false pride of the Belfast shipmakers that called the Titanic ‘unsinkable’, and the avoidable lack of lifeboats. Instead Beresford recalled Smith’s last command, as the waters rose to the bridge of the Titanic: ‘Be British!’ (Had anyone really heard that?)

So much for the figure of the man now in Lichfield’s park, because other places more to do with Captain Smith, such as his birthplace of Stoke-on-Trent, didn’t want him. Beresford continued the metaphors, by praising the ‘black squad’, ‘those who served below in the engine room and stoke hole, those often forgotten heroes because being out of sight they were out of mind. That so many people were saved was no doubt due to those who remained at their posts working the dynamos, keeping the lights going, although they knew for hours that the ship was doomed.’ Here Beresford praised the world as the Tories saw it; men at the top and, literally, at the bottom, each did their duty at their posts despite certain death. Never mind that efficient seamen would not have had the accident in the first place; rather, Beresford claimed that the British way worked, avoided panic, and saved some of those on board.

Beresford ended in the present, by calling the Royal Navy and the Merchant Marine as ‘brothers of the sea’: “The Navy were the police of the sea, so that if unfortunately they were called upon to fight they could keep the Merchant marine still plying between our shores and distant climes to provide them,” the listeners, that is, “with raw material and food.” He was hinting at the crisis on the Continent of the last few days; the day before, Austria-Hungary had begun war with Serbia.

Chapter 3

What is an Englishman?

Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace

To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not.

Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country’s,

Thy God’s, and truth’s.

Henry VIII by Shakespeare; a quotation pasted into Arthur Ross’ scrapbook of Beverley Church Lads Brigade

I

Even as Beresford was giving words of comfort about his old ship-mate Commander Smith, though so one-sided as to be deceitful, the journalist Philip Gibbs was at work on an article, ‘What I saw of the Servians’, for that Saturday’s edition of the weekly illustrated paper The Graphic. On his way to Bulgaria to report on the first Balkan war a couple of years before, the Serbs had arrested him for sketching reservists at Belgrade railway station. The Serb interrogator could speak only Serbian and it was so obvious that an Englishman would not be able to speak Serbian, that Gibbs left it unsaid in his article. Eventually someone came who could speak to Gibbs in German, and the Serbs told him that ‘as I appeared unmistakably English I might depart in peace’. Yet much more intriguing than the point of the article - how warlike Serb men (and women) were and how they hated Austria - was the question of why the Serbs let him go. What about Gibbs - what possessions, clothes or manners - was so English that foreigners recognised it?

Not that men who had never been to England and spoke not a word of English had any more idea of an Englishman, than the English understood foreigners. A shorthand sufficed. The English were stolid, whether because of the diet, the weather, the give and take of parliamentary government, or the military habit of waiting for the enemy to come to you that worked so well at Agincourt, Waterloo and Omdurman (less well at Hastings and Isandhlwana). The French by contrast - to quote the editorial of the Wolverhampton Express & Star newspaper on July 29 - had a ‘ferment of emotions’ personally, and revolutions politically. The stock Irishman, in newspaper cartoons during the Irish Home Rule affair, was someone short and shabby, like a leprechaun. To say something was ‘a bit Irish’ was to call it disorderly, or stupid. This prejudice served - in England and other countries - to make you feel the best, or at least better than someone. No matter how daft, or dangerous, such caricatures did point to differences between countries.

And what was wrong with that? “My friends say I am full of prejudices. I am,” Guy Paget wrote in a private memoir, Stray Shots by a Guards Gunner, after the war. “I love my school, Eton. I love Mother Lodge; the Scots Guards; and I love my country, England. There may be as good but I know damn well there are none better.” Even such a short, and frank, burst of national pride showed contradictions. His surname suggested his ancestors took English land after the Norman Conquest. He owned land, and Sulby Hall, on the borders of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. He recalled: “The murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Archduchess in June 1914 found me with my wife at Aix les Bains. We were there for her health. She had a very bad breakdown due to overwork at politics in my old division of mid-Northants.” Paget had stood there for the Conservatives at the last election in 1910. Like many of his kind, he took every chance to holiday abroad (to avoid common Englishmen?). Perhaps the best test of what it was to be an Englishman, or anyone, was what it made you do in extremes. Your sense of who you were would decide the tugs between competing loyalties, even if your choice, or denial of a choice, hurt you.

As the title of his memoir suggested, Paget had pride in being a Guards officer, one of the elite of the British Army. On about Wednesday August 6 - after a long story, as it was for all the English fleeing for the Continent on the outbreak of war - Paget sailed from Dieppe. Paget saw a ‘boy’, who was dirty, without a collar, with a three-day beard, and an unclean hanky around his neck; ‘but still obviously a gentleman’. Paget asked him to have a drink. The boy replied that he would rather have a sandwich, as water was free. “He had travelled three days in a cattle truck from Switzerland, penniless. I discovered his name was Whitbread and he was in the Coldstreams. I cursed him for not calling on me for aid as he saw I had a Guards tie and said I hoped I did not look such a bounder as to be thought unentitled to it. He replied he was so dirty and for the honour of the Coldstreams would not like me to go to the club and say how he looked.” That, Paget wrote, was an example of the Guards’ discipline (that lasted through the war, he added carefully). Here was much of what made men tick - perhaps not all Englishmen, but gentlemen, the sort that could afford to go abroad, for months at a time.

Paget had tried to reach his wife at Aix with 200 gold sovereigns as spending money, only to give up at Paris, as France began war with Germany. Whitbread - such men as Paget spoke of their fellows by their surnames, formally - preferred to suffer silently, rather than admit he could not afford to keep the usual standards, even though it was not his fault that he could not shave. A tie (or a handshake for a freemason such as Paget) was an unspoken signal for strangers to recognise they had something in common. This required trust, because anyone could wear a particular tie and pretend to belong to something. Men like Paget gave those guilty of such a fraud the name of ‘bounder’; that was not a crime in law, but against custom. How could Paget tell someone was ‘obviously’ a gentleman? That came with experience, from being in a country longer than a mere visitor or journalist. All the places you fitted in - the schools, churches and friends’ homes you went to; all the things that you, and people like you, took in - the newspapers and books, the conversations, the accents, the clues from posture and gait, let alone the outward clothes and cleanliness - all equipped you to judge the man or woman you met. In no time, you could tell if the other person was like you, and welcome them or keep a distance accordingly. You were like a sensible man who did not go to extremes of trouble to check that a gold coin or (less often seen) five-pound note was fake; instead, you satisfied yourself with a sign that it was genuine. Sometimes, when the coin or banknote was strange, if you were not in your usual places and met someone new to you in the same boat as yourself - literally, in Paget’s case - misunderstandings could arise.

You could not check a coin or banknote that carefully, nor did you want to, because most of your fellow countrymen would be as unknown - as incomprehensible, even - to you as any foreigner. Travel - by taking you out of your home, and your workplace if you had one - more often threw up encounters with people unlike yourself, even though people unlike you might not notice social differences, nor care (which was itself one difference between ‘gentlemen’ and other men). The weekly Tamworth Herald printed one example, signed only ‘WM’, about a train journey in July 1914 - maybe by one of the newspaper’s reporters on a holiday to Scotland. He began on a London and North Western Railway (LNWR) Sunday midnight express north. In third class, he wrote, you could always expect to come across ‘sons of the Empire on furlough or on their way to their outpost’. At Crewe, two seamen came into the carriage. One burly man dumped his box in the corridor, sat in a corner, ‘and then genially pulled a large bottle of beer from an inner pocket and invited all present to have a drink from it’. WM did not say if he or anyone else in the compartment took a swig; he, and his readers, may have taken it for granted that it was bad manners to sip out of a bottle, let alone after a seaman had put his lips to it. “He afterwards placed the bottle under my seat and left it there untouched for over three hours while he retired to sleep. Happily the window remained open and we had fresh air.” Again, WM implied, without having to spell it out to his readers, that the seaman might not have washed lately, and might smell, and the other passengers would be glad of fresher air. WM had chosen to buy the cheapest class of ticket, and so was in the company of the sorts of people who could not afford anything else. “The other seaman was inclined to take a nap on my shoulder,” WM went on - readers with imagination would feel how unwelcome that invasion of privacy would be - “so I engaged him in conversation and found he was a stoker just arrived at Bristol from Buenos Ayres and on his way home to Glasgow to his wife and children. He considered the trip from England to Buenos Ayres the hardest a stoker could have. It means 40 days’ continuous stoking ... the poor chap was worn and thin. He was travelling in his shabby go ashore clothes and had no bundle or money, not even a match for his pipe, but he had a Board of Trade certificate for his full pay and would draw the money at Glasgow.” The midsummer dawn came in Cumberland, the train arrived at Carlisle at 4am, and WM had two-and-a-half hours before his next train. He watched the overnight work - hard, unsociable and out of sight, done by men like the stoker. Porters tumbled empty milk churns from handcarts and shivered the air under the glass roof of the station with thunderous noises. Post Office officials came out of the mail trains carrying coats and umbrellas. They lit their pipes and went home. Morning papers from Liverpool, Manchester, York and London littered the platform. Even on the historic edge of England - if you saw Scotland as a separate part of Britain; and Guy Paget, who loved England and the Scots Guards, did not - men spread the things that bound a country together as tightly as the string that bundled the mail and the provincial newspapers on their way to breakfast tables.

II

Eric Bennett, too, was on his way home from Buenos Aires in July 1914 - but on a different ship than that unnamed Scottish stoker’s; Bennett’s landed at Tilbury. In a memoir in old age he was mistaken when he suggested war was looming when he sailed. According to him, the German, French, Dutch and Danish passengers were ‘hurrying men’, and ‘the one thing we were bursting for was news’, on a ship carrying mainly refrigerated beef. Without wireless, the only messages came from passing ships by semaphore. His brother Harry met him at the docks and took him into London to their booked room at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square. Harry had tickets for the big boxing match: between the Frenchman, Carpentier, and the American, Gunboat Smith. The fight, for the ‘white heavyweight championship of the world’, was on the Thursday night, July 16, at Olympia. Not one in a million in Europe, except perhaps the Austrian and German emperors and the men around them, was even thinking of a war within a fortnight.

Carpentier arrived in London a couple of days before Bennett, by boat to Folkestone, and train to Charing Cross station. What the newspapers called the ‘French colony’ in the city, and Londoners too, mobbed the boxer, his manager and sparring partners. The crowd unyoked the horses from his carriage and pulled it - flying a tricolour - to the Hotel Metropole, where Carpentier was to stay. On July 16 the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, for one, sniffed that such enthusiasm - anyone close enough patted Carpentier or shook his hand - was ‘not entirely admirable’. That said, as Carpentier had already knocked out two English boxers, this public tribute to a Frenchman was ‘about as effective a token as could possibly be given of the reality of the entente cordiale’. Again, the writer had no way of knowing England and France would be in a war together within three weeks.

The newspapers, the commentators on fashions, did not know what to make of boxing, or to be exact what the Sheffield Telegraph termed the ‘over-idolising of crack boxers in general’ by ‘sensation-seekers’. The Bennett brothers sounded as if they were seeking sensations; Eric and Harry met Alfred at Euston station, went sight-seeing and, Eric recalled 70 years later, ‘had a marvellous meal of steak and chips at the Holborn Hotel’. At Olympia, in one of the contests before the main bout, as the boxers broke from the clinch, one knocked out the referee by mistake. “The main contest proved to be a bit of a farce,” Bennett recalled, a common view at the time, “because in the fifth round Gunboat Smith caught Carpentier with a good punch felling him to his knees; whilst in this position Smith struck him again and was immediately disqualified.” The brothers took the train to their hometown of Stoke-on-Trent the next morning; that afternoon Carpentier collected a cheque for £3000 from the offices of the Sporting Life, and Smith’s manager Mr Buckley (the ‘beaten’ boxer not showing his face) picked up £2000. Carpentier left London - smartly dressed as ever, in suit and tie, carrying gloves and cane - on the Saturday morning train for Paris, having already promised a match against one of the Englishmen he had beaten before, Bombardier Wells.

What made the people paid to have an opinion on such things unsure about boxing? At least some of the watchers were rich enough, as the Bennetts’ spending proved. The newspapers deplored the rougher sorts of men drawn to watch boxers, seeking the thrill of a knock-out blow. It reminded those who harked back to the Roman Empire of how the commoners of Rome enjoyed rather too much for comfort the gladiators’ fights to the death. On the other hand, as the Sheffield Telegraph admitted, men in the sport of boxing were now of an ‘improved type’, making boxing a ‘healthy and manly recreation among all classes’. Boxing taught you to take a knock, and give one back according to the rules - rules that everyone had to follow, even the failed challenger for the title of white heavyweight champion of the world. Boxing could channel the anger and sheer spare energy of young men, that otherwise might spill out into drunken, disobedient ‘mafficking’, named after the mischief that used the patriotic celebrations for the relief of Mafeking, in 1900 during the Boer War, as an excuse. It was no accident that the Army taught boxing, nor that the Church of England was behind something as military-sounding as the Church Lads Brigade. The Army and the Church were not looking to put out the violent fires in young men, but to discipline them. Likewise countries did not necessarily keep armies to start a war, but to punch back if someone picked a fight; or at least to stay on their feet long enough until someone stood by them. For a war between nations, even ones as civilised as France and Britain, might not carry on, or even start, according to any rules.

III

As Captain Neville Hobson, the captain of the Beverley company of the Church Lads Brigade, said at the opening of the east Yorkshire market town’s new drill hall, in May 1913, drill and discipline were ‘a means but not an end’. It cannot have felt like that for at least some of the ‘lads’ aged 14 and over, judging by the journal of one of the sergeants. The 18-year-old Arthur Ellerker Ross plainly cared about the Brigade enough to keep a handwritten diary of it, and in July 1914 to become joint secretary of the new Old Comrades Association - new, because the first Lads like him were becoming old enough to have to leave. Even so, Ross tells a truer story of the Brigade than the forever favourable newspaper reports he pasted onto the pages - some articles surely written by his father Harry Ellerker Ross, a reporter for the weekly Beverley Guardian. The same things that attracted lads to the Brigade - the smart uniforms, the comradeship - they rebelled against, when carried to extremes. At an evening inspection on Thursday January 29, 1914, for instance, Captain Hobson sent a lad, Walter Welburn, home ‘to change his jacket, because it had some grease on’. Incidentally, to belong to such a group, with its white shirt, brown tie, puttees, haversack and boots, and the cost of keeping them clean, took some money. Capt Hobson left the parade, meaning that when the inspecting officer - from the East Yorkshire Cyclists Territorials - arrived, Arthur Ross had to take charge. Afterwards, Ross ‘went to see Welburn and after persuasion he went down with me to say he was sorry to Capt Hobson. His parents did not like it and they sent in Walter and Tom’s resignations’. Other times, lads tried to fool around or stir up trouble. A sergeant’s lot was a weary one, of telling off one lad for ‘slodging feet’, and perhaps being told off himself for not being strict enough.

Why did anyone stick it? Not every lad did; several of the 55 or so in the Company were made to leave. They may have hung on, much like the adults in the Territorial Army, for the entertainments - the fund-raising social evenings, the sport, the exercise, the parades around the town, and the camp every August. For instance on the Whit Monday holiday in 1914, the lads took the train to nearby Cherry Burton and marched to Dalton Park for manoeuvres. Then they took on Dalton villagers at cricket. Dalton were all out for 55, only for the lads to lose five wickets for nine runs; then Tom Welburn, presumably one of the brothers who resigned over a greasy jacket in January, made 28 not out and Beverley won. ‘Tea was provided at the village inn,’ Ross added, ‘after which a short display of drill was given on the cricket ground.’ After a church service, they marched back to Cherry Burton and caught the 9.13pm to Beverley. It might not sound much of a day, except that in 1914 it offered more than anything a lad could hope to do by himself. Like-minded lads made friends. The Brigade - and similar groups such as the Boy Scouts - appealed to young men, and their parents, because they saw it as another way to rise in the world. Arthur Ross worked for John Bickersteth, the clerk to the East Riding County Council in the town. Ross pasted uplifting quotes from Shakespeare in his journal, and lived in a terrace of villas next to a house called, to this day, ‘Enterprise Cottage’. Far from everyone wanted to, or could afford to, submit to uniformed groups; Ross tallied 157 Lads, Boys Brigade and Boy Scouts on a parade in May 1914, out of a Beverley population of 13,600.

Often, however, those on parade were the ones in any town with something about them, such as Arthur Allinson. One Saturday in July 1914 he was walking to the cricket ground, when he saw a runaway horse, yoked to a cab: ‘... dropping his cricket boots he ran to the horse’s head, seized the reins, and brought the animal to a standstill after running with it for about 100 yards,’ the Beverley Guardian reported. Allinson may have learned the skill from his father, Beverley’s police inspector - police textbooks taught that exact method of halting a runaway, quite a common hazard. Allinson may have known horses, in an era when Beverley and most small towns were physically and culturally not far from fields. Or the lad - who worked in a railway drawing office at York and came home at weekends, and who held a silver bugle as best bugler at Church Lads Brigade regional camp - may have had the very thing that all the uniformed groups were trying to drill into boys: in a word, ‘pluck’.

Pluck, another word for courage, tellingly, is a word long gone out of fashion. Was it something any man, or any organisation, could drill into a boy? To have pluck, like Arthur Allinson, you not only had to do the right thing, and not leave it to someone else; you had to know right from wrong. By having to set up groups such as the Church Lads Brigade, were you in fact admitting that modern life no longer gave someone pluck? What was stopping young people doing plucky things, such as risking their necks for the good of others? Was it the machines taking over ever more of life, the easy-come pleasures of the ‘picture houses’, spectator sports and the seaside? The worship of money, and the advertising everywhere? If men of pluck won Britain the Empire, and if it would take pluck to protect it against envious rivals - not only Germany, but Russia, and maybe France; Japan, even - did Britain have enough lads of the right sort, the men of the future?

Chapter 4

The Quid Pro Quo

A compromise .... is not always the negation of two opposite policies and the adoption of a middle course between them.

Twenty-Five Years: 1892-1916, volume one, by Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1925)

I

England could not agree on anything - even whether all the disagreements were healthy or not. Conservatives, also calling themselves Unionists, believed in the old and trusted authorities: the army, the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church. Liberals had their own beliefs: in liberty, in a life without the nearest priest or lord telling them what to do. Liberals could claim they had won centuries-old battles. They had their freedom to think, to worship God the way they wanted (or not at all, even), and to make money (and spend it) without the state taxing much of it. In 1914 the Liberals had been in power eight years and had won the last three elections. They knew that they had work to do still, and said so, partly as a tactic to keep their side keen, partly because it was true, and they had to explain their shortcomings away.

Rather than go through the politics from 1906, as done and spoken about by the main and best-known politicians - Herbert Asquith, prime minister since 1908; David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer; and Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to name three - it’s of more use to follow the lower-rank politicians. Ministers had to compromise to get anything agreed, and had to mind what they said in public, in case the other side used their words against them. The lower ranks could speak their minds, whether they were men who used to be of top rank, such as the former Unionist chancellor of the exchequer Michael Hicks-Beach, made Lord St Aldwyn; or the Liverpool Liberal MP Richard Holt, starting in parliament after working in the family shipping firm. (Were they freer to speak because they were not in office; or because fewer people were listening?)

Lord St Aldwyn toasted the health of the heir of Lord Harrowby, Viscount Sandon, at his coming of age celebrations, on Thursday July 23, 1914. The estate tenants and workers at Sandon, north of Stafford, ate lunch in a marquee. St Aldwyn admitted that they did not always hear good of the aristocracy. “But were there not black sheep in every class?” he asked, as a local newspaper reported later. “There were commercial men who were not always absolutely honest and there were even labouring men who sometimes scamped at their work. To pick out particular incidents of black sheep and apply them to a whole class was an unfair and a wicked thing to do.” The diners clapped; as their present and future masters were paying for their meal, and watching, they could hardly do otherwise. Even at such an event, where everyone knew their place - or did not have a place at all, as the garden party and a ball later were for grander guests than the common people - the lords had to admit things were not going their way. “They lived in a democratic age,” St Aldwyn went on, “but he was not sure that democracy was not tending towards bureaucracy. For the present, the power was with the democracy.”

St Aldwyn made a shrewd point. Meanwhile, Richard Holt, so he wrote in his journal in July 1914, was “active with business men and some survivors of the Cobden-Bright school of thought against the ill-considered and socialistic tendencies of the Government finance ... we have certainly travelled a long way from the old Liberal principle of ‘retrenchment’ and I deeply regret it. The more I see of socialistic developments the less I like them - the stronger I feel in favour of leaving individuals the maximum of personal freedom including the right to make a thorough mess of their own affairs.” This was Liberal philosophy as argued generations back by John Stuart Mill. Lloyd George, making old-age pensions and national insurance, talked of fighting poverty. Liberty, to the reformers, looked like an excuse to leave people in ignorance, in dirty houses, downtrodden by all; as bad as anything by the Unionists. St Aldwyn may have spoken about democracy with a sneer that the reporter could not or dared not carry into print. St Aldwyn however foresaw that ‘socialism’, whatever that meant, might turn the poor - the drunks and the workshy and the decent sort alike - into new serfs, or the mob of ancient Rome, living forever off the state.

Not that politicians or anyone ever had such a debate. They seldom met under the same roof, apart from parliament. The goodwill - and the means of holding such a debate, until the radio - were lacking. Liberal and Unionist politicians, and newspapers, spoke to their own. A speaker would show how bad the other party was, by jumping on a rival’s reported remark; or would simply misquote. The speaker and his side had the right ideas for the country and worked in a statesmanlike way, the other side made plots. A cleverer Unionist speaker would claim that the other side used to have leaders of principle - men now safely dead, such as Gladstone, and Bright - but not any more. In truth a politician the same as any man had to smile, shake hands and do deals with men he might not like, to get through the day. If the party-political speeches were worth listening to, it was because each side said things that the other side did not want to admit even to itself.

Unionists mocked the Liberals for taking no interest in Home Rule for Ireland, until after 1910, when the Liberals needed the ‘Irish Party’ of Irish Nationalists to give them enough numbers in parliament. The Liberals accused the Conservatives of hypocrisy. Unionists warned of civil war in Ireland, spreading to England, if the Protestants of Ulster could not stay in the Union. Did Conservatives want Ireland to look bad, to make the Liberals look weak? Would some Tories only be truly satisfied if Ireland did fall into civil war? Both sides felt strongly that they were in the right. After a speech in his Walsall constituency in April, someone in the audience asked the Unionist MP Sir Richard Cooper which he hated more, the Home Rule Bill or the Parliament Act (a Liberal law to reduce the power of the mainly Conservative House of Lords). Sir Richard replied: “Let me be quite frank” - always a sign of a politician steeling himself to say something unusually revealing - “we hate them both, and there is an end of it.” Such hatred in politics - the sense that one side was unlike the other - ran deeper than over Ireland or any single issue. Richard Holt and his wife decided to move into Holt’s old family home in Liverpool, after his father died there in 1908, “a home too big for our requirements but from its excellence and size nearly unsaleable - and I should hate to part with the house my father built and loved - perhaps to a Tory”. Hence neither side liked a politician who left one party for the other, such as Churchill (and his changing back again after the war would not help).

II

... I think that most strikes are due to a longing for a break from the deadly monotony of a repetitive job.

The Lonely Sea and The Sky by Sir Francis Chichester

The lack of trust between Liberals and Unionists over Ireland - ‘the great burning question of the day’ as the Unionist MP Sir Richard Cooper put it in a possibly unfortunate phrase - made what the two main parties agreed on, all the more significant. Usually the agreement was of a taken-for-granted kind: the monarchy, for example. When people did come into contact with royalty, they might not be impressed, or at least they said they weren’t. In May 1914 Charles Wright wrote from Oxford to his sister Dorothy about a tennis match:

After tea I had another single with a Trinity man and the Prince of Wales was playing on the next court. He is pretty bad!! His balls with E on and ours with TC on (Trin Coll) kept getting mixed up. He has a beastly squeaky little voice.

Few, however, came so close to royalty to form a human opinion. At most they would see the king at a distance on a short formal visit to their city, or in a passing horse-drawn coach or motor-car. Few people genuinely queried the monarchy, whether because the king was popular or because all authority stemmed from the crown. While Richard Holt grumbled in June 1911 that royalty was “a horrible nuisance on its ceremonial side tho’ probably the best institution for this country”, he was happy to attend the coronation of King George V that month in Westminster Abbey. Similarly, Liberals and Unionists alike would beware of any groups that did not answer to them, such as trade unions and the Labour Party; and the suffragettes, the campaigners for the vote for women.

Trade unions and socialists talked well. Ben Tillett, the dockers’ union leader, told an open air meeting in Walsall in June 1914: “They were taught that the king was really the king and their children were taught to sing God save the King [here the audience laughed, according to the local newspaper report] but in any real sense there was neither control nor real power in either the cabinet or parliament. The real power belonged to those who owned the land, the wealth of the country, and the machinery of production.” Tillett then predicted (wisely) that even a Labour cabinet, under the present system, “would be as supine, as stupid, as was the present government”. Tillett was hinting at revolution as the only answer. Until then, socialists - who wanted political change - were not working for quite the same things as trade unionists, who sought better pay and hours for the men in their union. Seldom did anyone ask whether the workers not in a union, and even the workers who were, might well be happy with the way the country was run, and merely wanted a better deal in it. Tillett hit home when he told working men that everything - schools, the national anthem - was for a reason, to make them, and the generations to come, know their place. Even if Tillett’s audience laughed in agreement, what were they going to do about it? As Tillett foresaw, striking for a penny more, or for an hour less, or voting Labour, would not change who was truly in power. Was Tillett good, however, for anything besides talk?

Apart from the socialists, as sure, as faithful, as talkative and as few as the Christian apostles, most people wanted, or at least said they wanted, fairness and things done ‘sportingly’. This did not mean that men wanted to carry the sports they played into the rest of their lives; many using the name of sport may have been too old to play sport any more, or never did play. Football was a battle without weapons that left you hurt and dirty. Instead, people were appealing to what people thought sport stood for; they were trying to make a political demand sound more reasonable by sounding less political.

In sport as in politics between Liberal and Unionist, one side faced another. Each side felt it ought to win; but had to tussle, and abide by the result. To be ‘sporting’ was to play within the rules and to either accept defeat or not crow too much in victory. You could tell winners and losers in politics or business, by who made a profit and who won an election. Beyond the obvious numbers, you had to contend with morals, the law, and groups with their own followers and interests. A Unionist parliamentary candidate, Philip Ashworth, made no sense when he said in Stafford in April that the Home Rule Bill was ‘framed on un-English, unfair and unsportsmanlike lines’. If Home Rule was, as he was suggesting, like a match between two sides in some sport, surely the stronger side in the end would win, and the other lose? What he might have been trying to defend was a principle, that people should be allowed to keep what they had - whether a geographical region like Ulster, the ownership of things such as property, the respect due to a name or title, or the going rate for a job. To sum up, if unionists in Ireland gave something (loyalty to the United Kingdom), they wanted something in return (their own way over Irish Home Rule, and no parliament in Dublin where they would always be out-voted).

This sense of wanting a fair deal - a quid pro quo - ran deep, though was seldom aired. An anonymous watcher of cricket, signing himself ‘Quid Pro Quo’, put it as well as anyone, in the Walsall Observer of July 25. He complained: “When I go to a county cricket match I get a good, sound comfortable seat commanding a good view of the game, for sixpence. At Gorway [Walsall cricket club’s ground], for a Saturday afternoon league match, I am charged ninepence, and can take my choice of a front seat on a ricketty old bench which is likely to let me down if I attempt to lean back, or a back seat on an uncomfortable plank with a backing of pailings, the whitewash of which adheres with sorry results to the attire of those who are misguided enough to rest their backs upon them. This, surely, is not fair value for ninepence.” He closed by wondering what the three-penny seats were like; next time, he would try them; ‘they cannot be much worse’.

Here, then, was a metaphor for England that men from one political extreme to the other - Lord St Aldwyn to Ben Tillett - could recognise; though they would argue over what (if anything) to do about it. All classes paid to enter; the more you could afford, the more comfort you could expect. If you did not care for the deal, you could try elsewhere. You could emigrate as Eva Tibbitts did, or go on holiday to miss the winter, as the very richest such as Gerald Legge did. What if, like Mr Quid Pro Quo, you wanted to stay where you were, because for all its faults you liked it? St Aldwyn believed, against the democratic tide of the time, that labourers, shopkeepers and landowners ought all to accept their place. Quid Pro Quo felt differently: paying a few coins gave him the right to say how a cricket club (or a parish, or country?) ran its business.

This wish for a fair deal was widespread - wider than any political party, let alone a movement such as socialism. It made England sound like the supposedly more equal and progressive Australia. It suggested some national unity. As St Aldwyn hinted, all classes had duties as well as rewards. Shops and factories could sell at a profit, but had to be fair to staff and customers. Lords had more wealth than labourers, and more responsibilities, as charitable leaders of their district, especially in hard times. Men could disagree over what was fair and what was ‘taking a liberty’, but agreed those were the terms of the argument. As in a good marriage, if you took, you had to give. What indeed about women in all this?

III

History has been kind to all three of the main protest movements around 1914: few would now deny women the vote, or workers the right to combine in trade unions; and if Nationalists and Unionists are each unhappy still with what they have in Ireland, at least they can be happy that the other side is unhappy. Of the three, the suffragettes have the best reputation, whether because half of Britain can always identify with them, or because of the shortcomings of later trade unionists, Nationalists and Unionists. Odd, then, that in 1914 the suffragettes should have been so despised. They had failed, and gone to extremes, itself a sign that their campaign was not working.

To take two of many court cases: on Wednesday morning, July 15, Mr McKinnon Wood, secretary of state for Scotland, was on the doorstep of his Portland Place home, speaking to his butler, Walter Hanscomb, when Janette Wallace and Bertha Watson rushed up. The butler seized Wallace while Wood warded off Watson with an umbrella. A nearby policeman claimed to hear Wallace say: ‘You Scotch pig, if you don’t stop forcibly feeding we shall smash you up and you can’t say you haven’t had a thrashing from a woman.’ Watson meanwhile told the Liberal minister: ‘You are a dog and a lot of hounds and stop forcibly feeding.’ When searched, she was carrying an egg with the words written ‘refreshing fruit’. When fined £1 each - or two weeks in prison - they screamed and had to be carried out of court. A few weeks earlier, Watson and another woman, who would not give her name, tried to chain themselves to railings in Downing Street. Fining each £2, a Bow Street magistrate told them: ‘There was a time no doubt when you had a case which might have been worth fighting for, but you must recognise now that it has been killed by you and your friends long ago.’

Where to start with such sorry - and unladylike - behaviour? The suffragettes had, on purpose or by mistake, allowed their grievances to get in the way of their goal. Hence Watson’s call to the minister to stop forcibly feeding the suffragettes starving themselves in protest in prison. How did the suffragettes expect to be taken seriously, as seriously as men, if they acted childishly in court? How would they ever have the ear of politicians, if they were hitting them about the head with riding whips? As for public goodwill, the suffragettes - again, whether deliberately or stupidly - only hurt or offended men and women, every time they interrupted a church service, set fire to places, poured some sort of tar in postboxes, or broke windows. By going to extremes, the suffragettes were not campaigning harder; they were showing their contempt for everyone but themselves. Suffragettes by 1914 had turned from calling for the vote to fighting against every institution. They were the first modern campaigners. They were not proposing something but flailing against something; things which later would be as varied as the United States in Vietnam, South African apartheid, airports, power stations, and the testing of animals in laboratories.

All such protesters believe in how important their cause (and they) are; historians generally agree. That women did get the vote after the1914-18 might give the impression that the suffragettes succeeded. Only the fact that the suffragettes stopped their campaign in August 1914 - when even they understood that Britain had no time for them any more - made success possible. Even before Continental war, the public had lost patience with suffragettes. On July 23 - the third day that King George hosted the Nationalist and Unionist leaders, Mr Asquith and others at Buckingham Palace, to seek some agreement on ‘Home Rule’ - a woman tried in vain to enter the palace forecourt. When she shouted something about the king receiving rebels, but not women, the crowd gave such answers as ‘duck her in the fountain’, ‘what about your husband’s dinner’, and ‘you ought to be ashamed of yourself’.

That suffragette did have a point; why one rule for Irish men, because they were threatening bloodshed, and another for women? While we have no way of knowing who in the crowd made those taunts, or even whose side the crowd was on, presumably the crowd was fairly representative of the country: the curious and well off, of any political side, who could spare the time to gawp outside the place of most political drama in London that day. Some, evidently, believed a woman’s place was in the home. Someone, at least, felt the suffragette should feel shame, or even felt shame for her; because what the protesting woman shouted cut both ways. Trade unionists and the Irish, Nationalists or Unionists were not - yet - burning buildings and breaking things, or people; only suffragettes were. An interesting speculation is what would have become of trade unionism or Irish nationalism, without war in 1914, if a few extremists in each movement had, like the suffragettes, decided on violence. Irish Nationalists did take up arms, in Easter 1916, and after 1918; and won independence. Trade unionists stayed peaceful, because they and their members were working men, bettering their pay and hours to feed their families, not to become revolutionaries.

The few aggressive suffragettes had almost become outlaws, sheltered and paid for by outer rings of sympathisers and donors. Suffragette leaders such as Mrs Pankhurst were physically ringed by bodyguards, carrying ‘Indian clubs’, as a confidential memo from New Scotland Yard’s criminal investigation department told police forces in the regions in July 1914. The Metropolitan Police sent the memo - with photographs and pen-pictures of 80 of the most militant suffragettes - because, in another tactic which was to be taken up by twenty-first century protesters, the suffragettes were shifting to less relevant, but easier, targets; away from London, where the police knew them too well, to the provinces.

The suffragette movement, by 1914, did not add up, partly because it had rival leaders and was no more united than the trade unions or Irish nationalism. Partly, and again like later protest movements, some suffragettes at least had given up trying to convince others - or had never felt like it in the first place. They had become anarchic, like the woman in the Met memo pictured with her tongue sticking out. (The apologetic police explained that the woman had not co-operated in having her picture taken.) But for the war, these few fanatical suffragettes could only have become yet more extreme, becoming what we would call terrorists.

IV

A sign of how the suffragettes bewildered the Liberal Government, and the country, was the lack of punishment for their crimes - which sooner or later, by their use of explosives for example, would kill people, if only themselves. Suffragettes boasted of how they went to jail and came out again to do the same again. This was not because of weak magistrates or judges: courts readily jailed trade unionists for assaulting strike-breakers, for example, on dubious evidence. Nor was it that the courts - all run by men - shied away from punishing women, for soliciting for example. No: then as now, the British courts had no answer to people who did not want to reform their ways; whether burglars with no other work skills, or fanatics for an idea. The country could tolerate those staunch law-breakers, because they were not making too much trouble, and because making allowances made England what it was; not Prussia or Spain.

England was what it was; neither divided happily by class as St Aldwyn wished; nor split in two between sensible Liberals and wrong Unionists (or the other way round). Some, like a boxer, or the faithful of a political party, would always see themselves in the mirror of their rival: Liberals and Unionists, Christian and godless, town and country, suffragette or socialist and the uninterested rest. England was like a kaleidoscope, with changing patterns at every turn. You had those who worked with their hands, and those that did not; the rough and the drunken, and the respectable and sober; the educated and articulate, and the ignorant and silent; those who sought change for the better, and those who feared change for the worse. And whether in a family, a workplace, a sports team, or the filthiest ‘court’ of houses backing onto one yard with one water pump and toilet for dozens to share, there were those that did the work, and those that let them.

Chapter 5

On the Brink

What is war? I believe that half the people that talk about war have not the slightest idea of what it is.

John Bright speech of October 1853, from Selected English Speeches from Burke to Gladstone (World’s Classics, 1913)

I

Robin Page Arnot in spring 1914 went from Glasgow to London, ‘like so many writer Scots before me’. He went halfway back in the second half of July, as far as Barrow House, on the shores of Derwentwater in the Lake District, for a Fabian Society conference. While seeking a start on a newspaper in Fleet Street, he had become secretary of the Fabian research department. “Instead, like so many people of my age and indeed of almost any age, of having to work at something not of my choice,” he typed in a memoir 60 years later, “I was doing the thing I most wanted to do in all the world.” That was: working for socialist revolution. He and his new friends wanted to end capitalism, and what they called superstitions (such as Christmas, and birthdays); and to reform dress, language, ranks, and titles, even ‘mister’. This summer fortnight in the country was their chance each year to live as they wanted, earnestly and simply. In the morning they heard reports; in the afternoon they went bathing, rowing and climbing; and later, more speeches. “When the din of discussion had died away each evening I could hear before I slept the tinkling sound of the Lodore Falls within the grounds of Barrow House,” Arnot recalled.

The Fabians made camp in tents beside the lake, or stayed in hotels. Early one morning Arnot went to the jetty, testing the water with his toes. Swimming between the islands of Derwentwater was ‘a bearded, good-looking lean figure of a man’: George Bernard Shaw. Meeting for the first time, the playwright said to Arnot: “The temperature is very even.” Arnot, and others, duly went in. Such was Fabianism; you left the world (and your clothes) behind, and chose a new element, so cold that only the most determined would go through with it. Once you became used to it - the talk of guild socialism, collectivism, provision for maternity, and the like - you could tell yourself you were enjoying it, and look down on everyone else as too stupid to follow. Except, if socialist reforms were so good for you, why weren’t more people there? As Arnot admitted, he saw Americans, Indians, Scots and continental Europeans at the conference, and fairly few English.

Everyone was looking forward to the arrival of the French socialist leader, Jaures. As the fortnight ended, on August 1, Arnot wrote: “I saw the face of Beatrice Webb turn white as she learned by the morning papers of the assassination in Paris by a warmonger of her old friend Jean Jaures. It was this more than any flood of frequently contradictory telegrams in the daily papers which made us all realise that war was very near indeed; that it would be hard to prevent it; and that the first blood sacrifice had been made ...”

The Fabians left the Lakes by train at Keswick, for London. “We were leaving a world of keen and animated Socialist discussion and planning of how to end Capitalism, of what was to take the place of it, and of how to provide the means to build up a new society. But this which had seemed so near, so actual, so full of zeitgeist was already far in the past.” So Arnot claimed. Whenever the train stopped, they bought newspapers, and their gloom lifted. “On the facts as known to us there seemed no likelihood of Britain going to war. It was fantastic, utterly needless and groundless. Apart from the overwhelming repugnance of the mass of the people to war (not to mention the reiterated pacific intentions of our Government) there was no reason for it.”

II

“The first sign of war that we heard of was on the wedding day,” Alan Brooke wrote on board ship in mid-August. He had sailed to England from India in June, in a full four-berth cabin ‘no larger than a dog kennel’. In the mornings he studied German and an ‘excellent new book on tactics’. His main homework was to marry, in Ireland, Jane Mary Richardson. His bride, like him, was a child of County Fermanagh. “Day all went off splendidly,” Brooke wrote on Wednesday July 29, the day after the wedding. They drove to St Michael’s Church, Trory, by brougham (a closed carriage drawn by a single horse) and left by hired car. Just as the couple’s change of transport showed a world on the brink between real horse-power and machines, so the weather was a sign of a hopeful future. The sky cleared, Brooke wrote, ‘and the sun was shining brightly on us when we came out of the church’. The guests, who had decorated the car with slippers, pelted the Brookes with rice. “It was a great relief to get off, away from the crowd and to find just the two of us breezing through space. It was quite one of the happiest moments of my life,” Brooke wrote.

Army officers had to make the most of all-too-brief months at home - the Brookes had been planning to marry for six years - compared with years in India. After a reception at his wife’s family home at Rossfad, they took the train to Gweedore Hotel, in neighbouring County Donegal. They honeymooned quietly. On the evening of August 1 they went out to fish the river running past their hotel, ‘and I caught a few small trout, but nothing worth keeping,’ Brooke wrote. They planned to stay a week, return to Rossfad, and pack their presents, and Brooke would sail back to Bombay on August 11. A hint of war was on their wedding day, when a guest from the Royal Navy had to leave after the ceremony, ‘but of course that was more or less of a precautionary measure’.

III

If Ireland was near to civil war - so near, said Lord Harrowby to Unionists in Stafford in April, that they might hear any day of a massacre of Ulstermen - how did a Ulster couple manage to marry, in Ulster, without any mention of it? If anywhere in Ireland would see conflict, it would be Fermanagh: then, as now, it was one of the most mixed counties of Protestant and Catholics. So was Ireland on the brink, but Alan Brooke kept quiet about it in letters, so as not to worry his mother in France? Or were the only ones talking of war the English, who had nothing better to do than poke their nose into other people’s business; and a few Irish politicians, such as the Ulster Unionist Sir Edward Carson, who were boosting their careers? Guy Paget admitted after the war: “I was on the fringe of the gun running with Carson and the Ulstermen. How near we were to civil war during those months will never really be known. The powder was ready and lots of people were striking matches all over the place.” At the time, some feared that war, or the danger of it, in Ireland might tempt unnamed foreign powers to attack England. When continent-wide war came, some claimed that Germany took advantage of England giving all its attention to Ireland. This was crediting Germany with more cunning than it had, and assumed, wrongly, that foreigners worried about England before they made their moves. Certainly neither the Unionist nor Home Rule sides in Ireland held back in case of what foreigners might do. As Paget admitted, men like himself made civil war more likely by sending weapons to Ireland; and not all for the Unionist side.

On Sunday July 26, a 29-year-old Army officer, Gordon Shephard, on leave from his regiment, took the tram from Dublin to the fishing port of Howth. There he directed the landing of guns by boat for the Nationalist Volunteers. He wrote in a letter soon after that “the whole was carried out in a most orderly manner though there was some scrimmaging at the start. The Volunteers marched off when all was over.” Private armies were against the law, and had been since the Wars of the Roses, for good reasons. The Nationalists knew they were doing wrong: a ‘Cycle Corps’ of their men watched for the police. Yet the day could not have been that secret, because newspapers ran photographs of the cyclists; and of Volunteers in their Sunday best suits, marching with rifles over their shoulders.

Shephard had an impeccable background. Named after the imperial hero Gordon of Khartoum, he combined his love of sailing with some amateur spying on German harbours. He may have aided the Irish Nationalists because he had become a Roman Catholic; yet the reason he offered in a letter was one more, daft and irresponsible, example of an Englishman’s wish for life to be like sport. He reckoned that because the Unionists had guns, it was ‘fair play for nationalists to have a counter-consignment of weapons’.

Now that both sides had the means to fight, men who denied civil war could happen were as dangerous as the likes of Lord Harrowby, who merely made themselves look silly by exaggerating the risk. In Ireland in July 1914, the same as before or after, it made no difference to most people where they were ruled from. They wanted a quiet life; they no more thought of spoiling the Brookes’ honeymoon than the newly-weds thought of it being spoiled. It would only take a few hot-heads, drunk from the feel of a rifle in their hand, or plain drunk, to upset the other side, and the other side hitting back, harder, and it would be like a schoolyard or a pub fight - no-one asked for it, or remembered how it started, but once a punch stung you, you would not be satisfied until you had unstung yourself by hurting someone else. That was how wars began. In what looked to some like the last effort for peace, King George V hosted talks with English and Irish politicians at Buckingham Palace between July 21 and 25. Even this offended some Liberals, as the King appeared to lack confidence in his Government. In any case, the conference came to nothing; the elite of politics and London in general had their summer holidays to head for, starting with the race meeting at Goodwood. Paget was right not to know where interfering with Ireland would end.

IV

William Swift, the retired Gloucestershire village schoolmaster with the injured aunt, rose a little earlier than usual, before 6am, on Monday July 20, the day that Sarah Pick wrote, no doubt painfully, her letter to him. He was ‘busy at housework most of the morning’ and had jobs to do for St Andrew’s, his parish church, drawing out cheques for coal and ‘vino sacre’, and for Walter Organ, the village’s young coal haulier. Swift sent cheques to a local solicitor and parishioner, John Henry Jones, to sign. In his diary Swift wrote: “He goes to Ireland probably next Friday or Saturday; he told me this yesterday,” presumably at church. “He thought the Irish might very fairly be trusted with Home Rule. ‘Look at Canada with several parliaments, and why not Ireland?’” So Swift quoted Jones as saying. “Germany got on very well in the matter of religious fairness and why not Ireland? &c.”

Swift’s daughter-in-law Annie came in the afternoon for a couple of hours, to pass on gossip. “She said it was reported that Uncle William had applied for relief to the Guardians so as to make his son ‘brass up’.” This offers an interesting insight into family thinking; that old uncle asked for state help, not so much because he was poor, but so as to shame his son into looking after him better.

Swift, who turned 73 in 1914, was slowing. In the last two years he had had ‘faints’ and ‘swoons’; ‘housemaid’s knee’ from kneeling; and lumbago. In February, when he asked Boots in Gloucester for something for his rheumatic pains, the chemist had told him about new tablets: Aspirin. In May, he had to stop when walking because of a tight chest. It is given to no man to know the hour of his death, and Swift was not to know that he, like Gerald Legge, was in the last full year of his life.

He kept his routine. He rose around 6am, cleaned and swept - women’s work, but his wife Rosena had died in 1907. On Saturday July 18, he picked the last of the broad beans for Sunday meals and dug some of his potatoes. He had to ask a neighbour, Mrs Gilkes, to get some earth out of his left eye: “She then sat for half an hour.” Emily Gilkes, the wife of Daniel the village railway stationmaster, gave Swift some gossip too, about the renovation of her house: “Then of scandalous behaviour of our young neighbour. CP aged 14 and three lads at the school. L upon hearing of CP received the complaint with great apathy and indifference. Lastly that the children at the school did not learn their tables. And Dorothy Locke had just lost L chance of good employment in consequence of this and bad spelling; this is a blot on our school.” Wisely - though Mrs Gilkes was moaning about the school Swift had run for three decades - Swift did not, at least not in his diary, become angry about something that was no longer his affair. Who ‘L’ was, is a mystery, but ‘CP’ was probably Cyril Phelps, the eldest son of another neighbour, Hubert Phelps the baker and his wife Priscilla.

Like the householders around him, Swift had a physically demanding life, helping and helped by neighbours and family. Dorothy Hill, the young niece of Mr and Mrs Gilkes, picked the last of the raspberries and currants. Though busy, Swift had time to read good books: the Bible, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Shakespeare, and the French fairy stories the Contes de Fées, which on July 22 he finished for the 45th time, as dated by him on the cover. As a man of habit, thanks to such attention to detail, he had kept a diary for more than 50 years; a Pepysian feat, one of the great unappreciated recordings of English life. If he had great emotions, he seldom gave way to them in writing. What he had to say was the unexciting stuff of a village; of attending near-deserted church services (on that July 22, he and Mr Phelps were the only ones in church that morning, apart from the vicar); and of occasional train journeys into Gloucester to buy the few things the village could not provide. Swift and the people around him had no quarrel with Ireland, or Germany, or anywhere.

V

The Army officer Donald Weir was scratching around for news all July for his weekly letter from India to his mother at home. He had little to do except run the regimental rugby team in the afternoons, and go through the usual rounds of dinners and golf. He was playing a long game; when the colonel asked if he wanted to go ‘to the depot’, in England, he said he was not keen: “For one reason only,” he admitted to his mother, “that I hope to be in for a year’s leave next February or March though I have little hope of getting more than nine months, whereas if I went to the depot I might get three months at Christmas and that is all.”

On Wednesday July 29 he wrote a few lines before lunch, “as I will be playing in a football match this afternoon and after that I have got fids of work to do so much so that I am going to make a night of it, not dine in mess but have cocoa and biscuits in my quarters and work up to one or two o’clock if needs be. Anyway I have to get answers written to a number of Mil History papers and hand them in on Saturday so there is little time to spare.” Beyond that, he knew his next few months: rugby tournaments in Lucknow and Calcutta, then to Delhi, then manoeuvres. As for the news from home, he called it ‘pretty bad’:

what with the trouble in Dublin and the possibility of a general conflagration among the different European powers. I am afraid our King cannot feel very happy at the way matters are going alone just now. The remarks about the King in the Radical press after the conference at Buckingham Palace are disgraceful. Of course we only get just the general outlines of events in the daily telegrams; so much goes on at home which we do not hear about until a fortnight later. We have been having incessant rain for days past now but it makes the air so cool and though rather depressing I like it.

Weir still had home leave on his mind. “All said and done I have only had eight months leave in six and a half years out here so feel entitled to a winter at home especially as I get that bally hay-fever in the summer.”

VI

Frank Balfour had a routine as much as William Swift; plans for a holiday as much as Donald Weir; an Eton education like his near-contemporary Gerald Legge; and marriage on his mind as much as Alan Brooke, though more in hope. Otherwise his life had little in common with any of them. On his hunting expedition early in 1914, Legge may have passed Balfour, who worked as the inspector of Berber district in Sudan, beside the Nile north of Khartoum. Having returned to Sudan in December 1913 after leave in England, Balfour wrote that he was ‘up to the neck’ with:

taxes, trade, prices of grain and animals, cattle-plague, sanitation (if any), schools, crime, markets, the state of the river, date trees, police, and all the thousand and one things one has to deal with here. One falls straight into it at once - even my dog greeted me as if I’d been away four days, not four months, and barring the big difference of having run up against you, I feel as if I’d never been away at all.

The ‘you’ was ‘my dear Irene’, the Honourable Irene Lawley, an aristocratic beauty he had evidently fallen for the previous autumn. For the next months, and indeed years, he had just about enough maturity, and good humour, to express in letters how he felt about being thousands of miles from her, and the rest of civilisation; without going too far by becoming too self-pitying or menacing. At times it was a close call; he admitted he tore up some of his replies, and on June 2 was reduced to ‘collecting all the back Tatlers in the club, and going into the deserted Billiards Room’, to search for her picture, ‘for a clue as to your whereabouts’. On June 23, he received a 12-day-old letter from her, “as I sit sweating under the office punkah [swinging fan], and I can’t do any work till I’ve answered it. I salve my conscience by using the cheaper brand of Government paper.” He had plotted to ‘lure’ her to the Austrian Tyrol. Instead, she was planning to travel to America. He hoped to meet someone called ‘Baffy’ early in August, probably at Salzburg, “and drift home. I want to see Munich among other places. I was choked off it last year by home-sickness and a Wagner festival.” The dream of meeting her again plainly kept him going, though he managed to keep his tone playful: “I hate the idea of having to wait till September to see you, and I’m not sure I shan’t pursue you to America ... I only ask you for a chance - I’m not in a hurry and I won’t hurry you or pester you with what the Victorians called ‘attentions’!”

In fairness, it sounded as if he was indeed pestering her with (already a quaint term) ‘attentions’. Why did she put up with it? She may have liked him. They did have friends in common; on July 26 he reported that ‘Baffy tells me that you are going to have an operation to your nose which horrifies me’. It must have crossed Balfour’s mind that he was probably not the only smitten young man writing to her; nor was he. As the sort of rich young lady who had nothing better to do than be seen in places where Tatler magazine might photograph her, she might have enjoyed reading and answering letters of the sort that ended “I am, if possible, rather more ‘yours’ than usual, Frank.” His letters, besides, told of a genuinely out-of-the-ordinary life, an odd mix of the exotic and the leisurely European - he had ponies to ride, ‘and very good tennis every afternoon’ he reported on July 3; again using works notepaper, this time from the Governor’s Office. A week later he described enduring two hours of the ‘haboob’:

First a little bright yellow cloud on the horizon across the desert to the east - in ten minutes it covers all the sky in that direction ... - in the interval you stow away everything that could possibly break loose, double mooring ropes and drive in the pegs. Then it falls on you in a hill of wind and sand against which you shut doors and windows in vain - there is nothing to be done but sweat in misery till it’s over, and then go and wash the mud out of your eyes and ears.

He knew by then that he would be on leave from July 26, and in the Tyrol ‘in little over a week’; only his holiday seemed cursed. His relief at the governor’s office missed a train, and his relief at Berber came down with diphtheria at home. On July 26 he wrote to her that he had been ‘buried under papers and people’ at Berber. He made a rare comment on current affairs:

The Buckingham Palace show seems to have ended in smoke - and it almost looks as if we might only be saved from civil war by an European one - anyway I don’t believe Asquith and Co will dare force it to a fight in Ulster - I don’t see why the King shouldn’t make them dissolve.

Frank Balfour - a nephew of the former Unionist prime minister Arthur Balfour - had political work of his own, before he could begin his leave. He had to go 150 miles down the river, pick up camels, and trek back, on the way meeting the local sheikhs and kings. In a letter dated July 28 he told of a perilous and primitive crossing of the Nile. A native, Osman, whose father the British had shot for shooting a colonel in 1885, ‘and the local charon’ - meaning a ferryman, Balfour showing off his classical Greek - paddled with two sticks, ‘to the end of which were bound bits of old sugar boxes’. Balfour, in the bows of the boat, having taken his shoes off in case he had to swim, ‘bailed for dear life’.

Back on land, a sandstorm blew. Balfour ate what dinner he could in under a blanket hung on the side of a native bedstead; he tied his head in a towel,

and pretended to go to sleep - after about an hour of that when I was on the verge of being buried alive, Osman came and said there was a house near by - they dug me out and we staggered to it. At least ten men left it as I arrived and they had a fire in the middle of the room for cooking. Further description of the atmosphere is unnecessary - it was better than the sand though, and I slept the sleep of the just till dawn.

August came as Balfour rode on camels back to Berber. Despite the ‘desperate’ summer heat of midday, when men had to halt, recent rain meant mud even in sandy country, ‘and a camel in mud is the most despicable of God’s creatures’, Balfour reported.

VII

The collapse of that Buckingham Palace conference left ‘the country and the Empire with the greatest danger they have known in the history of living man’, the Times wrote rather dramatically on Saturday July 25. Only then did the newspaper turn from Ireland to what it called ‘Europe and the crisis’. In the last 36 hours, it said, ‘a grave crisis’ had arisen, between Austria-Hungary, and Servia, which the Times summed up, as only it could, as ‘a small and excitable Balkan kingdom’. It seemed to the Times even more of a crisis than the ones of 1908-9 (when Austria took over Bosnia, which neighbouring Servia resented) and 1912-13 (when much of the Balkans went to war with Turkey, or each other). The ‘conflagration’, as the Times delicately put it, might catch all the ‘Great Powers’. Most likely to start a war this time was Austria-Hungary, which seemed set on breaking Servia, before Servia broke it. Given this sniff of a war, some reporters would do anything to follow the story - because they had to if they wanted to stay in the job, and because they wanted to.

The war correspondent E Ashmead Bartlett, for instance, left London on the Sunday, July 26, under orders to cover the Austrian Army. He took the train, running as normal, down the Rhineland to Frankfurt. Germans he spoke to laughed at the idea of European war. Inside Austria, however, he found the railways disorganised. At Vienna he found he would be at least five days behind the armies, and the authorities would not give a time for warcos to leave. Bartlett decided on Monday to try to join the Servian army, at Nish, ‘where I knew I would be welcome, having made the campaign against Bulgaria with the Servians in the previous year’. The Austrians, obviously, would not let him pass into Servia. He would have to take the long way round, first on the 4.50pm to Budapest, crowded with ‘Roumanians, Servians, Bulgarians, Russians, and a conglomeration of Levantines, all seeking to regain their own homes before communication entirely broke down’. If it ever struck Bartlett there was no point heading for a battlefield, if he had no way to tell anyone his news, it did not stop him. The urge of the true reporter, as ever, was to witness - such as Austrian officers leaving for their regiments at the front, and the ladies of Vienna weeping for their husbands. What the newspapers did with his writing, or whether his despatches even reached home, he would worry about later.

Troop trains blocked the line. The travellers reached Budapest at 10pm. A train was leaving almost at once for Brasso, then on the frontier of ‘Roumania’, now Brasov in the middle of that country. Bartlett, and his baggage, made it - but only as far as a corridor. He had not seen a train so packed since ‘the flight of the entire population of Thrace after the rout of Lule Burgas’, he reminisced. ‘The guard blew his whistle, and we moved slowly out whilst a despairing scream arose from hundreds left behind.’ Bartlett was taking himself hundreds of miles out of his way into one of the most backward parts of Europe. After a sleepless night the train crossed Hungary, stopping at every station, on the Wednesday, July 29. Men had to set off for their regiment as they had been dressed when given the slip of paper of mobilisation: peasants in their smocks, small farmers in riding breeches and bowler hat; clerks with pens behind their ears. All ‘to fight for a cause which not one in ten understood and in which not one in a hundred was really interested ...’ Bartlett raged. “They had ceased to be human beings in the eyes of the Government; they were now so many living creatures capable of bearing arms, mere numbers to be counted and killed like sheep, so that Austrian statesmen could boast that their country could put 1,600,000 men in the field.” Most of the called-up men looked surprised, not anguished, Bartlett reported. “Such is human nature - nothing appeals to the mass of mankind so much as excitement and a change.” Did Bartlett have enough self-consciousness to think that applied to him, too?

Bartlett changed at Brasso and arrived at Bucharest at midnight. In the Roumanian capital on the Thursday he bought kit - he had left London without any - and asked around. The government was neutral, its army wanted war with Austria. The people, as the ones who would not have to do any fighting, showed how they felt: “Whenever soldiers marched through the streets they were received with tremendous enthusiasm. At night time in the cafés the officers, who always wear full uniform, stuck large bouquets in their buttonholes, and sang patriotic songs.” At 7pm on the Friday, July 31, Bartlett took the train to Sofia. Bulgarians seemed peaceful, Bartlett noted, though (or because?) their small country of a few million had lost the colossal number of 140,000 men in two wars the previous year. At midnight, after well over 1200 miles and five days of more or less non-stop travel, Bartlett pulled into Sofia. “There was no news of any sort.”

VIII

At least Bartlett was looking for news. For every other English man and woman on the Continent - whether there for work, or through marriage; usually for pleasure - a time would come when even the blindest noticed that everyone else was changing. It depended on country, as each - first Austria-Hungary and Servia, then Russia, Germany and France - began mobilising. Few ever holidayed in the Servian capital Belgrade, near to the border with Austria, and shelled on July 28. Few English people went further east than the Tyrol, for the reason raised by Ashmead Bartlett’s thousand-mile journey. If you had only one or two weeks away, you could only take the train as far as, say, Switzerland, Marseilles, Dresden or Vienna, or else you would spend half your holiday en route.

With so much to see and so little time, the Continental holiday did attract the sort of man who would exert himself half to death, take a month to recover, and for the next ten months look forward to the next holiday: men such as A T Daniel, headmaster of Uttoxeter Grammar School in the Staffordshire market town. As soon as school finished for the summer he went cycling in France, leaving his wife behind. On July 31 he wrote to her - clearly having heard that war was looming across the Continent - that war meant at most a heavier income tax and a fall on the stock exchange; a ‘Mafeking night’ (when, naturally, England won) and a few exciting pictures in the illustrated papers; something distant and theatrical. “Here, with the merest threat, the poor folk see their crops trampled down, thousands of soldiers passing and a bereavement in every family ...”

‘Here’ was the far east of France, only 30 miles from the border with Germany, since France had lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany after the war of 1870. Ever since, France had wanted to fight Germany again, if only someone else would join their side. Late on August 1, in the dark, Daniel reached Verdun:

... and I had some difficulty in passing groups of horses that were being brought in by soldiers. The entrance to the town is through many forts and to be quite sure of my way I asked a soldier if that was the proper entrance to Verdun. He rather gruffly told me it was but seemed suspicious. After some trouble I found this hotel and went to bed but did not get five minutes’ sleep. The mobilisation had at last begun and all night long groups of reservists came marching up the stony street singing the Marseillaise with stirring fervour.

Daniel doubted if anyone slept in Verdun that night, because ‘nearly every ten minutes heavy motor trolleys of ammunition and other warlike gear came rumbling past over the uneven pavement’.

Chapter 6

The Island Club

For some time before the war broke out a belief had been gradually extending and strengthening that modern warfare of any magnitude between the Great Powers was now impossible, in view of economic interdependence among the nations.

The History of the Great European War: Its Causes and Effects, by W Stanley Macbean Knight (September 1914)

I

You could soon see why, within a week, most of the countries on the Continent went to war with each other. Russia was sticking up for Servia, and above all for itself, looking for land from the faltering Turkish Empire. Germany felt it had to stand by its ally, Austria-Hungary. As it had invaded so many neighbours lately and taken land off them, Germany could easily feel ringed by enemies.

England was an island; which was not the same as saying England had nothing in common with the Continent. Northern France looked much like southern England; the Low Countries, much like the flat eastern counties of England. England had traded with neighbours, and neighbours of neighbours, since before recorded history. Nineteen-fourteen marked 200 years since the first English king of the house of Hanover, the German-speaking George I. For the romantics who still wished for the House of Stuart, some newspapers noted that the rightful ruler was another German - Queen Marie Thérèse of Bohemia, married to Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, who became king of Bavaria in November 1913, in place of the quaintly titled ‘Mad Otto’. She, reportedly, did not wish to be Queen of England.

Royalty spread family webs across the continent. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II was a grandson of Queen Victoria, the same as the English King George V. The Austrian Franz Ferdinand and his wife had visited England in autumn 1913; they hosted the kaiser a month before their deaths. A German torpedo boat gave a tow as far as the north German island of Borkum to the kaiser’s boat, Meteor; and to Captain Sycamore, a yachtsman from Brightlingsea, Essex, on his way from Denmark to Cowes for the annual ‘week’. A telegram from Berlin on July 27 ordered the Meteor to Cowes, only for headwinds to keep it in port. “I did not believe the German emperor himself expected war with England,” Sycamore told East Anglian newspapers. Even if the captain and the newspapers each puffed up the story, it showed at least the Europe-wide calendar that the cultured and rich lived by - boat-owners, music-lovers, businessmen.

The rulers of Europe could still clash, despite their shared interests, destinations and backgrounds, just as members of a family could. Yet it’s striking how many middling people, not only the idle rich, had dealings with countries that turned out to be enemies or allies. While Fabians were bathing in the Lakes, Labour politicians were talking with Jaures and their continental equivalents at a conference in Brussels. Bishops were in conference at Constance. English football teams were on tour, and old players were coaching continental clubs. Bretons toured England as sellers of onions, Frenchmen worked in London as cooks, Germans around the country as waiters and pork butchers, Italians as ice-cream makers, Hungarians as violinists. Adventurous young people then, as now, used a musical or other paying talent to see the world; or they gave language lessons to the studious, such as Clifford Gothard. He went to Hamburg in 1911, to learn German, as the language of engineering. Germany even touched William Swift in the village of Churchdown. Cropping up in his diary in the summer of 1914 is a Mr Walker, whose daughter Florence Browne was in a lunatic asylum in Surrey and whose son-in-law had placed a ‘little boy’, presumably a grandson, in a ‘creche infant asylum’ in Munich. In mid-July Mr Walker was planning to take free passage to Hamburg with a ‘sea captain of Mr W’s acquaintance’ and then take the train to Munich to carry off the boy. ‘Seems an awkward business’, Swift noted.

The English, then, showed themselves as keen as the French or Germans to use other countries - keener, maybe, to leave their weather behind. In March 1906 the shipping company owner Richard Holt and his wife stayed at a hotel in Taormina, in Sicily, which Holt described in his journal as ‘not good and very German, but with the best views of Etna’. As that typically English remark about ‘views’ suggests, the English might travel far for the sake of foreign landscapes, but found the going harder with foreigners. That same month Holt stayed at the Amstel Hotel ‘as usual’ in Amsterdam: “The object of my visit was to try to come to terms with the German Australian Co [company] but their representative, Mr Harms, was impossible: ignorant and grasping.”

Each side could not help being the sum of their past. Germans had sprawled for centuries from the Alps to the Baltic, and newly united were still finding their political weight. For centuries England had been without land on the Continent, and had made an empire on other continents out of weakness - never something an Englishman would admit, any more than anyone else. To reach England, or leave it, you had to cross the sea for some hours, days or weeks; maybe hazardous, even impossible, in a storm at any time of year. When Louis Bleriot made history by crossing the English Channel in his monoplane in 1909, England could no longer boast of ‘complete isolation’. Maynard Willoughby Colchester-Wemyss made this point in his monthly letter to the King of Siam in June 1914. “The passage from one country by aeroplane to the other through the air is now a matter of daily occurrence, dirigible balloons can easily make the journey and he would be a rash man who would attempt to limit the possibilities that lie before those engaged in the conquest of the air during the next ten years.” The conqueror of the air might be halfway to conquering England.

Colchester-Wemyss makes an interesting and unusual source. An informed enough man, he was chairman of Gloucestershire County Council, a magistrate, and lord of the manor of Westbury on Severn. By setting out one topic a month, for his Asian reader, he went into detail that news reports and diaries of the day took for granted. He picked up that parliament, and French and Belgian senators, were talking about a rail tunnel under the Channel. This forced the English to ask what they wanted to do with their neighbours, because whereas flying machines were at the mercy of the weather as much as ships, trains would not be. Colchester-Wemyss wrote: “Now of course very large steamers pass across several times in the day, some of them specially constructed to reduce to a minimum the miseries of sea sickness and moving so fast across the Channel that much time would not be gained over a train travelling through a tunnel under the sea.” Even the supporters of a tunnel suggested a dip in it, so that it could be easily flooded; or exploded. You could argue, a tunnel could save England; if England lost control of the sea, and France stayed friendly, England could import the food she needed. “But could we assume France friendly always?” Colchester-Wemyss asked. “No, whatever the commercial advantages ... we must always remember that each generation is in turn trustee only of the heritage of England and has no right to take any steps which might deprive England of an incalculable advantage ...”, namely the advantage of being an island, making it much harder for a neighbour to invade. In isolated safety, England could mind its own business or poke its nose into other people’s.

II

Geography worked both ways. Being an island made it harder for Britain to fight anyone on land; as the Continental countries knew well. Britain made much of its navy, to hold its empire together and to defend the seas - its borders. Its volunteer armies policed the empire and were in any case a fraction of the conscript armies of France, Germany, Russia, even Austria-Hungary. If Britain had wanted a war with anyone on the Continent, it would have built a larger army; it would have joined in more often in more of Europe’s nineteenth-century wars. Peace for itself and the rest of Europe suited Britain; but as one power after another mobilised for war, would anyone listen? ‘Europe ablaze’, said the Lincolnshire Echo on Monday July 27. “War is not yet declared and a faint hope still persists that it may be avoided ... bellicose enthusiasm prevails in Vienna, Berlin and Budapest ....”

The next day, the Echo said: “Nobody wants war which can only prove disastrous to all the nations of Europe but then wars are never precipitated, as far as civilised countries are concerned at any rate, through the sheer wanton lust for battle. More often than not they arise through comparatively trivial causes. It can only be hoped that statesmanship will be equal to averting a catastrophe unprecedented in the annals of history ...” The Echo was at best half right. Somebody, plainly, wanted war; Austria-Hungary started it. The Echo in fact managed as neatly as anyone at the time to sum up the chain: if Russia, ‘as head of the Slav nations’ took matters to extremes, Germany would ‘enter the field’ as Austria’s ally. “And France will carry out her obligation by supporting Russia.” Were the ‘trivial causes’ worth a ‘catastrophe’, as the Echo - accurately as it turned out - put it? Three of the four rulers of those countries lost the war: the German kaiser had to leave his country, the Austrian empire split into seven, the Russian Czar Nicholas II was murdered. So much for their statesmanship. Why would they not listen to Britain? Lloyd George in his war memoirs came down on the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey (by then dead) for his impartial but ‘weak and uncompelling appeals to the raging nations of Europe to keep the peace’. Even Lloyd George sounded as if he believed stronger British appeals would have been compelling. If the British were telling foreigners - from the Irish outward - what was best for the British was best for them, wouldn’t foreigners merely resent it as British hypocrisy, even if the British had a point? In any case, surely the time to appeal for peace was before any ‘raging’? Foreign emperors, the same as Britain’s leaders, did not listen to many people in their own country, let alone anybody else’s.

In a democracy, the reader of newspaper editorials (let alone the writers) can easily make the mistake of believing that the right to vote men into power every few years, and the freedom to say what you think, also means you can expect those in power to heed what you say. As if those in power, who have worked for years to get there, would ever share decisions - with the ignorant, the uninterested and undecided, and their rivals. Political leaders did not ask for their country’s views by postcard in 1914 for the same reason they do not ask by electronic mail in this century. Even inside the Liberal Government and around it - the friendliest newspaper editors, the king and his courtiers, relatives, friends, officials - few people even got a word with Asquith and the ministers that mattered, let alone had an influence. Richard Holt, as an MP, had some claim to a voice about whether to go to war. Reporters of parliament named him as leader of the Liberal ‘millionaires’ in the Commons, suspicious of big-spending Lloyd George. In 1913 the then war minister Jack Seely had ‘most confidentially’ consulted him ‘about the conveyance of the Army to Armageddon’. As his flippant phrasing suggested, Holt was ‘much amused’. A typical Liberal, he was set against war. His journal entry for the week ending Sunday August 2, 1914, showed his strong views, and that he had absolutely no say in what his government was doing:

We are all in the midst of the most miserable alarm ... Even a week ago we thought not much of it ... What England will do seems uncertain though it is almost impossible to believe that a Liberal Government can be guilty of the crime of dragging us into this conflict in which we are in no way interested. The fear of war has produced a paralysis of business, the Bank rate being advanced from 3 to 4 per cent of Thursday to 8 per cent on Friday and 10 per cent on Saturday. The stock exchanges in London and all the big towns being closed and also many of the produce exchanges. Today an Echo [in Liverpool?] has been published (how these horrors benefit the press!) and we are told that Russia and Germany are actually at war.

Holt cursed even the fear of war - the uncertainty, besides the loss of markets and materials - as bad for business, yet was sharp enough to notice that some, such as newspapers, were as quick to profit. In fairness, in the few days of this crisis, a leader only had so many hours awake, only so many people he could take views from. An able leader stayed in power as long as Asquith did precisely because he understood his friends, and enemies, already. Any minister only had so many letters he could sign, only so many meetings he could attend in a day. Lloyd George had enough work keeping the banks in business, Churchill with the navy, Sir Edward Grey urging diplomats to keep what was left of the peace. What was the point in asking for opinions when the crisis changed from day to day, as ever more countries went nearer to war? While the question was always ‘what is best for Britain?’ it changed from ‘how can Britain prevent war?’ to the more realistic ‘should Britain go to war, or not?’

At least the men at the very centre of power could confer easily. Their work, and lives, did not take them far, physically. Partly, the things they relied on to take in news and send out decisions - letters, telegrams, the telephone - tied them to one place. Partly, keeping to a small part of London kept the rest of the world out. For instance J A Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, wrote in a memoir after the war that he had little time out of his office before war broke out. He had two short talks with Grey:

I saw him again late in the evening at his room at the Foreign Office on Monday, August 3 and it was to me that he used the words which he has repeated in his book; ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’. We were standing together at the window looking out into the sunset across St James’ Park and the appearance of the first lights along the Mall suggested the thought.

The ‘lamps going out’ is the most famous and powerful metaphor of August 1914; what is striking but seldom noted is that Grey - who was supposed to represent Britain to the part of the world not British - stuck himself in a small patch of central London. Downing Street for cabinet meetings was around the corner; parliament, a couple of streets away. Ambassadors called from their nearby embassies; they, and Grey, did not have far to go for pleasure, even, if they had the time. Regular morning riders in Hyde Park, for exercise, included King George and his daughter Princess Mary; many army officers based in London; and Churchill. Typically politicians lived near Westminster, whether they owned or rented for ‘the season’ of February to July. The Holts usually took a furnished house around Sloane Square. They could give and take invitations to dinners and parties, from a ball at Buckingham Palace downwards. On July 21, 1914 the Holts’ time at 112 Eaton Square ran out and Richard Holt stayed at the Reform Club, for the first time (‘very comfortable’). To reach your club, usually around Pall Mall, you could stroll across the park or take a cab for a shilling; all these were chances to have those more relaxed conversations with fellows, that somehow proved so much more important than formal meetings. You could eat, and gossip with like-minded men - army officers, Liberals, clergy, or Scots. A club was one more way to get on. Even the Communists had a club, in much less fashionable and cheaper Charlotte Street, off Tottenham Court Road, as visited by the socialist Robin Page Arnot. Members’ clubs belonged to the well-off - a club’s annual fee might be more than £100, and it might cost as much again to become a member.

That instinct to club together was sound, and widespread; even in August, the holiday month; even if it was a forced holiday, because schools and factories shut. Some liked to be alone, fishing on a river bank, but, the Burton Daily Mail claimed on August 1, ‘the great majority of people really like to take their holiday when all holiday places are crowded, simply because they are crowded’. Even at the best of times, mankind had an urge to be ‘in it’, whether a family, an occupational group, or an artistic or sporting interest; or, when abroad, bunching in the same hotel, quarter of a town, or favourite destination (and maybe copying the native French, Swiss or German crowd). Even the single-minded warco Ashmead Bartlett, who left Sofia on Sunday August 2 at 7am, palled up with his own sort, “a German newspaper correspondent whom I had known in the Turkish war. We were the best of friends, sharing our frugal repast together, talking of the past, and of our plans for the future.” Bartlett’s last 100 miles through the hills into Servia took eight and a half hours; at Nish, he heard that Germany had declared war on Russia. When the English abroad in France, let alone Germany, had to face the coming of war, what Bartlett called the ‘longing to reach one’s native land’ would become over-powering; and telling.

Chapter 7

The Long Bank Holiday

Thank God the press keeps us all, even diplomacy itself, well informed if a nation is going to quarrel with us and threaten war. We have at least some time to make preparations ....

An 1869 paper to the Society of Arts, from Fifty Years of Public Work of Sir Henry Cole (1884)

I

When Ashmead Bartlett had left home, one week before, Servia seemed the most important story in Europe. By the time he arrived, it wasn’t. He described Nish as a ‘strange state of affairs’; a country town of 20,000, ‘about the size of Evesham’, only with squalid houses of straw and wood, swelled by another 30,000 - the upper classes, royal court and parliament , newly fled from Belgrade. The locals and émigrés alike paraded through the streets and beside the River Save, like ‘Hampstead Heath on a bank holiday’. Bartlett as an Englishman and a likely ally was welcome. Even so, as a bright and ruthless newspaperman, he faced the facts. He felt ‘tolerably sure’ that Britain and France would fight Austria-Hungary and Germany; the war in Servia would become ‘of mere local importance’; he had to leave at once for France. The only way - in case Italy sided with its allies Austria and Germany - was through the Mediterranean. It meant he had to make for the port of Salonica, in the opposite direction to home. At 1am on the Monday, August 3 he took the train to Uskub (today Skopje, the capital of Macedonia), the same journey he had made in 1913 to the Servian army headquarters for their war against Bulgaria. His train had to stop to let troop trains pass. Four people filled a hot compartment meant for three, ‘the height of misery and discomfort’, Bartlett moaned. The 140-mile journey took 13 hours. As soon as the reporter’s troubles became his main story, he had missed the story.

II

The man paid to follow the news, thanks to his very doggedness, was the wrong side of Europe. Without meaning to, A T Daniel the cycling headmaster found himself in one of the best places in Europe to witness the marching of an army to war.

From Verdun, after a sleepless night thanks to mobilising troops, he had the choice of turning back, or - like a spy - carrying on along the scenic Meuse valley, parallel to the German frontier about 40 miles away. He carried on. He rode into the town of St Mihiel and ordered lunch at a hotel. Almost all the diners were officers, who stared at him, but Daniel was used to being stared at. He had a good meal, ‘the last for several days’, and paid. Outside, his back tyre was flat. At a repair shop, two gendarmes asked for his papers. He did not have a passport; they arrested him. Daniel managed to convince the magistrate he found himself in front of, Monsieur Roult, that he was who he said he was, a tourist. “I noticed that he laid great stress on the fact that my tickets were issued by Cook, a household word apparently in these remote towns.” The two men became so friendly, they had a drink in a café. Daniel shook hands with nearly all the men in town not mobilised. They toasted his English sang froid, ‘le flegme de la nation’. As Daniel admitted later, ‘it was in fact his ignorance’, not his phlegm, that took him to what would soon become the battlefield.

So near the frontier, Daniel saw the garrisons of Rheims and Orleans arrive: “... trains came in at intervals of about 15 minutes and in less than ten minutes the men had formed up and started on their march with a heavy and varied kit that a French infantryman carries; all fine men with springing step often singing the Marseillaise with a fierceness that gave it a new flavour to me.” The cheerful, soon to die marchers were, as Daniel wrote, ‘a sight never to be forgotten’.

III

The French were rushing to their borders for the same reason the Germans were; because the other side were. As France and Germany each planned one big battle, all hinged on taking as many of your soldiers as fast as you could - by train - to where you wanted to attack. As Daniel saw, the French were hoping to take Alsace and Lorraine back. The Germans were going to attack through Luxembourg and Belgium, making them like two dogs trying to bite the other’s rump. Much has been made of how August 1914 was war by ‘chain reaction’, or ‘railway timetable’, inevitable once one country gave the order to mobilise. The Hull MP and Yorkshire battalion commander Sir Mark Sykes wrote, characteristically bluntly, in a letter of August 1:

I at last have five min: to spare - at least I have slept - well things look worse and worse - by last night’s paper Germany seems to have taken the plunge - as far as I can see this at bottom is a Russian attack on Germany - whether warranted or no of course no one can tell. I do not see any way to peace unless Russia cease mobilising ...

A third world war in the 1950s would have been equally by timetable, as sure as a game of snap; if the enemy played one card, you played the other. The planners of atomic war assumed, incidentally, that their war would last a few weeks, much as the leaders of August 1914 assumed. What saved the world from World War Three was the very speed and ease of nuclear warfare, that made it like a shoot-out in an American Wild West saloon. If you truly did not want to die, if you ever spilt a cowboy’s drink by mistake, you made it your business to apologise fast and keep your hands off your holster. In August 1914, by comparison, once a couple of cowboys had fallen out at cards and pulled out their pistols, everyone else urgently - yet taking several days over it - did the equivalent of knocking their chairs over and pulling out their revolvers.

Then what? A timetable of mobilisation itself did not fight. As Sykes pointed out, the trouble was the lack of a way back to peace. Straight enemies - America and Russia over Berlin in 1961, and Cuba in 1962 - could agree to put away the guns. August 1914 had too many guns pointing too many ways.

IV

War began for the same reason as mobilisation; men could not see straight, whether through fear or lack of it. A Tamworth man, H C Mitchell, left London with a friend on Thursday July 30, ignoring the signs of trouble; the closed currency exchange offices at Charing Cross, all the passengers on the boat from Dover to Ostend being German. ‘Full of faith in the power of the English sovereign’, meaning the coin, Mitchell and friend planned ten days in Belgium and the Ardennes. They made it as far as Brussels, where shops and restaurants would not take English money, or Belgian paper money either. As a last resort, the pair went to the travel agent, ‘the mighty Cook’, only to find a crowd of stranded English and American tourists. The Thomas Cook office advised them to go to the national bank. There they found ‘a surging mass of humanity, vainly struggling for gold’, the only thing people trusted any more. Mitchell came by some coins.

Refugees poured into the city from the German frontier by the hundred, and ‘grim looking Belgian soldiers were marching out by the thousand’. Their light guns were pulled by dogs, “thoroughly imbued with a sense of duty and most apparent enjoyment of their task. It is difficult to say which were the most keen, the men or the dogs.” Mitchell told his story afterwards light-heartedly; he was on holiday after all. He did have a serious near-miss, before he returned to Dover on the Sunday evening, August 2. As in Paris, on Saturday nights it was the custom to sit outside restaurants over wine, and be social. As Mitchell’s friend only spoke English, and Mitchell made a few notes, soldiers and civilians threatened them:

One man accused me in German of belonging to the fatherland. I replied in German that I did not. Several officers then poured out the vials of their wrath in most voluble French; in vain I tried to stem the tide of their eloquence. A passer by brandishing a stick called us German spies. Then a gentleman who spoke broken English called out spies. I understood. Immediately handing him my notebook, my railway ticket and card, I raised my glass and called out ‘Messieurs, je suis anglais. Vive la Belgique! A bas l’Allemagne, vive la France!’

The Belgians took their hats off and shouted ‘bravo, vive l’Angleterre!’. It did not make sense that a spy would be so obvious; nor did a few words in the local language prove that Mitchell was not a spy. It only made sense because the angry and frightened Belgians wanted to let out their hatred of the likely German invader on someone.

Daniel meanwhile, minus bicycle, took an evening train to Chalons, then more trains the next day to Rheims and Amiens. He never saw anyone with, nor anyone asked for, a ticket. Occasional trains passed, full of civilians - Germans, according to Daniel’s fellow travellers, ‘received with grim silence’. As in England at its time of crisis in the summer of 1940, any Frenchman would speak to another: navvy with businessman, private to officer. When a couple said that if and when England saw an advantage, then she would join, they apologised when Daniel, smilingly, said he was a native of ‘perfide Albion’. He then found it wisest to tell any new companions that he was English. None of the French expected England to land an army on the Continent. At most, they hoped the English navy would guard northern France.

For the previous few years Britain had had an ‘entente’, an ‘understanding’, with France; except that, the Liberal Government insisted, it was free to choose what to do. That begged the question, why have an ‘understanding’ at all? Did the French and the British ‘understand’ the same things? As Daniel pointed out, if Germany had attacked Britain at sea, the French would certainly not have fought on land.

Belgium made the difference. On the Monday, August 3, the Hull Daily News asked: ‘Why should England fight?’ The old treaty of 1839 that agreed Belgium was neutral gave the right to fight, if someone invaded Belgium; Britain, or anyone else who cared, did not have to. Two days later, that same newspaper said Britain had ‘got to see it through’; ‘it’ being the hours-old war with Germany, now blamed for trying ‘to fill too large a place in the sun’.

By August 4 Germany had threatened, and had begun, to invade Belgium and Luxembourg. According to a treaty of 1867, Luxembourg - like Belgium - was neutral. Few people in Britain even noticed Luxembourg, because it did not matter to them; Belgium did. Britain was ready to go to war against Germany not because of anything Germany did, but in case of what it might do. If Germany captured the Belgian and northern French coast, it would become too strong a threat to Britain. Better to fight now, with France, than have to fight Germany alone after it beat France. Hence the British demand on August 4 - though days too late for it to make a difference - that the Germans stay out of Belgium; and when the deadline passed that night, the declaration of war: by Britain, against Germany.

Colin, later Lord, Davidson, was a 21-year-old private secretary to ‘Lulu’ Haldane, the minister for the colonies. When the 11pm deadline passed Davidson left the Foreign Office with a clerk, a major as a bodyguard, and a sheaf of telegrams in code to send to Britain’s colonies to tell them they were at war.

We went out into Downing Street which had been kept fairly free from the crowds as Whitehall was simply packed with a seething mass of people. We fought our way up Whitehall and unable to get through Trafalgar Square took a route through some side streets by way of the Strand. We got to the post office in the Strand which was still open and went in with the telegrams. We walked up to the counter and handed the telegrams over. The woman behind the counter did no more than just look at them. We didn’t even get a receipt for them ... we then started back to Downing Street to find thousands of people milling around shouting and singing and bursting with cheers. It was all very unpleasant. They did not know what they were in for and they had this awful war fever.

Here is another of the most-repeated stories (with photographs) of the outbreak of war; the cheering crowds in the capital cities; not only London, but Paris and Berlin. For some it’s proof that publics welcomed war. To anyone with business to do, the crowds were in the way. Davidson went back to the Colonial Office and waited for replies; Fiji, where it was the next day, acknowledged first.

What, if anything, were the gawpers there for? Did they catch, as Davidson suggested, ‘war fever’? The men in authority plainly disliked having so many common people around. Asquith for example in his memoirs found it ‘curious’ that going to and from Downing Street to parliament he was ‘always escorted and surrounded by cheering crowds of loafers and holiday-makers’. This was a burdened man, to say the least, angered by the ignorant and idle in his way. Were those people unwelcome to him because they, even without realising it, were holding him accountable? Or were they not anticipating war, but merely there out of curiosity? Even more vaguely, did the on-lookers wish to be around the making of history, something seldom on offer to them? If so, they were hanging around (it cost nothing) in the right place: the centre of government; politics; and, in nearby Fleet Street, newspapers. Some may have joined the crowds in London merely for the same reason everyone sat on the same seaside beaches, at Blackpool, Scarborough, and Skegness, every August; if so many were doing it, something about it had to be right.

In her memoirs Emily MacManus, then sister-in-charge of a ward at Guy’s Hospital, told of how she and other Guy’s men and women on August 4 ‘made our way through the evening crowds of restless, anxious people, to the great space in front of Buckingham Palace. War! Yes, it had come ... I was exhilarated ...’ After that 11pm deadline to Germany passed, King George, Queen Mary and Edward, Prince of Wales went onto the balcony, to cheers and the singing of God Save the King. Even after their majesties went in again, thousands stayed. This went on before and after the outbreak of war. One anonymous reporter described the crowd as ‘Cockneys from the East End, sight-seers, fashionable ladies and top-hatted swells, all showing their love for the Old Country and its Sovereign’, waiting to see their majesties, and cheering at the slightest new thing, such as a raised flag and the guards. The noisier sorts sang patriotic songs and parodies of Germany, ‘probably made up on the spot’. These ‘loafers’, as Asquith spotted, were tourists wanting to see something, or Londoners with time on their hands. The centre of London has always been the place to go after work, if you do not have meals to cook or children to put to bed. After all, during a bank holiday, bank workers among others were on holiday, and in case of a panic run on the banks Lloyd George ordered an unheard-of extra three days of bank holidays, for the Tuesday to Thursday. On that Thursday evening, August 6, Robert Ramsey stood outside Buckingham Palace for the second time that week. As he lived in Ladbroke Square to the west and worked as a solicitor in the City, Buckingham Palace was on his way home. After work (and dinner) he found ‘a large crowd assembled ... which gradually increased until there must have been four or five thousand people’:

.... cheering from time to time and singing snatches of God Save the King and Rule Britannia. At last towards ten o’clock the blind was drawn up, the French window thrown open, and the Queen appeared in white standing between the King and the Prince of Wales and remained for some minutes. The crowd cheered frantically as one man, waved hats and flags and sang God Save the King. One man had two large flags, a tricolour and a Union Jack which he held high to catch the king’s attention. This continued until the royal party withdrew, the king pausing for a moment or two at the closed window. Then the crowd woke up and started away down the Mall in perfect order and good humour.

Some argued afterwards that people headed for the palace seeking a consoling figure at a confusing time. Or it may have been that the people were not paying homage to the monarchy, but showing their power, of a sort; they coaxed the king and queen to appear. As Ramsey went to the theatre and concerts - judging by the programmes between the pages of his diary - he, and we, can see something theatrical in it all: the crowd making music (as if wooing the king outside?), and the royal family - once they had dined - acting their part. Once the royals had made their bows, their public went home satisfied. Something may have drawn people to the palace; or nothing. As Ramsey suggested, nothing came of the evening; it was an entertaining break from daily reality, like a dream (‘the crowd woke up’) or an evening at the theatre (only free). What was political, let alone warlike, about it?

In a world before radio, where someone from Britain’s government had to walk to a post office to tell its empire it was at war, we should not forget that some people made for where news would break first: central London. The weekly Willesden Chronicle, the Friday after the declaration of war, recalled that instead of the usual bank holiday Monday ‘gaiety of crowds’, anxious people were ‘eagerly waiting for the various editions of the newspapers as they came to hand’, sold on the streets by ‘Fleet Street runners’ shouting the headlines. As ever, not everyone felt the same. Robert Ramsey in his diary wrote of that week: “Nights are now made hideous by people calling ‘newspapers’.”

The craving for news can explain at least some in the crowds in any of the capitals going to war, even Wellington in New Zealand. The thousands gathered in the grounds of parliament, to hear the governor repeat the first message of the war from the king - on Wednesday afternoon, August 5, their time - is the most poignant of all the scenes of August 1914. What drew the listeners was more powerful even than war. Some New Zealanders, like Australians and Canadians, felt deep home-sickness for the country they had left behind, that they called the ‘old’, or, tellingly, the ‘mother country’. The guilt they felt for leaving family behind felt even worse now their homeland was in danger. The colonies offered England help so quickly because they hoped it might give them a chance to visit (on the cheap).

V

True, some greeted the outbreak of war with cheers, not boos. Cheers for what, exactly? For whatever it was their leaders decided? For dead men across Europe, at a cost of (so the Hull Daily News speculated) £1,000,000,000, that would have to come from somewhere? “All wars are popular on the day of their declaration,” wrote Lloyd George in his memoirs, with the wisdom of a man after the event. People, even the people who went on to die in the war, cheered because it was something exciting; something for a change; something that had not done anything bad to them yet.

Arthur Ross and the Church Lads Brigade lads from Beverley were, as locals, among the first of 1500 lads, from Carlisle and Alnwick to Sheffield, to pitch tents at Seamer, three-and-a-half miles south of Scarborough. They arrived at the village station at 10am on Wednesday July 29, asked the way, and marched into summer camp with their kitbags, singing On The Mississippi. The lads had so little to do for the first couple of days, they were allowed to enjoy Scarborough all afternoon; walking the pier, eating ices and chocolate, sending postcards. Stepping off the 10pm train at Seamer they walked to camp ‘singing wild to mouth organs, ‘Hello, hello, who’s your lady friend’’, Ross wrote. Their pleasures were as simple as the food in camp - bread and butter, or jam, or brawn; pork pie, and coffee - and the drum-head service after tea on Sunday: “The Bishop of Hull delivered a fine address and spoke of one of Rudyard Kipling’s yarns.” As in the Territorials’ summer camps around the coast, the lads did some drill, and had plenty of time to read and chat, because their officers no more wanted a hard time than anyone else. It all became serious on Monday August 3, as captured by Ross’ clipped prose:

Reveille 5.30. No hot coffee. Adjutant’s parade 630 (company drill). Tent inspection. Parade 10. The brigadier made us a fine speech. ‘England is preparing for a great war,’ he said. ‘If anything happens to annoy you, take it like sportsmen.’ God Save the King was sung and then three cheers given. Half an hour afterwards a telegram came for the Brigadier and he left camp. He had been called up.

Everyone was excited and talked of the possibility of war. A visitor’s Daily Mirror was ‘nearly torn to bits, so anxious were we to see news’, Ross recalled. The Beverley lads were that evening’s camp guard. As Ross posted the first sentries, an officer told him of orders to strike the camp that night. Likewise, around the country, Territorials were going home early, to be readier to mobilise if the order came. The guards opened the gate to the first lot of lads marching out, singing Rule Britannia ‘good enough to wake the dead’. This change from normal - and the strength in anonymity in the dark felt by a thousand lads - prompted a carnival. Or as Ross put it, the camp ‘went mad’:

We could see the mess tent lighted up and you could have heard the row a mile off. The voices absolutely drowned the piano. The guard was rushed twice by parties of lads not leaving till after midnight who wanted to go into the town first for a spree. We held them back the second but not the first time. I had a flash lamp and as the various companies left camp I was able to pick out my friends and say goodbye.

By 2.30am, only the local Beverley ‘fatigue boys’ who would have to unpack the camp were left. Ross, doing his duty, walked round the sentries, and with his commander Captain Hobson: “We saw the Bishop coming back to Camp. Although an old man he had marched to the station and seen the lads off and then walked back.” The Bishop of Hull, Francis Gurdon, was in fact in his late fifties, and presumably looked old to the teenage Ross. The lads ate breakfast on the grass outside the guard tent - ‘eggs, coffee, bread, butter tea and cakes’ - and Ross bought a newspaper from a visitor for the war news. They slept, and after tea went into Scarborough for a shave and to visit the aquarium again. On the Wednesday, August 5, a captain read from the newspaper of the declaration of war on Germany. “Bishop of Hull made a speech to whole fatigue after breakfast and sung national anthem. Bishop leaves camp in midst of cheers.” Whether because camp was cut short, or because he wanted to grab every chance of leisure, Ross did not go home at once; he got off the train at Filey for three hours, walked the cliffs, and with three lads had tea in a cafe for three shillings and elevenpence-ha’penny: “I kept odd half pence as a souvenir.” His father, no doubt anxious, met Ross at Beverley railway station at 8pm. The lads marched to the town drill hall, “some of us keen on joining forces, told Captain Hobson. He asked us to wait.” The next morning, when Ross went into town after breakfast and a shave, he found the ‘town in an excited state’.

VI

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

Matthew 7:18

Ross, in camp, acted like half a soldier already. He, Arthur Allinson, and other Beverley Church Lads volunteered to their Captain Hobson to become Territorials. Civilians meanwhile had no experience of how, if at all, to react to a European war. William Swift, the retired Gloucestershire villager, on his shopping visits by train to nearby Gloucester, similarly found that the supposedly more worldly townspeople were losing their heads. On Tuesday August 4, he rose at 6.15am and caught the 10.17am from Churchdown, to bank the cash from the church collection, only to find the extra bank holiday. A shop ‘obligingly gave me silver for my coppers’. He bought bacon and kidney at Pardoe’s the butcher: “Mrs P not in the most amicable state of mind and a man told her she seemed to have the war fever.”

Swift bought some extra strong peppermints he was fond of ‘and took a slight refreshment’ - he did not say what - ‘near the Northgate railway bridge’. As he returned in the company of ‘Canon and Mrs Bedwell’, he cannot have been too refreshed. Only he and the vicar were at evensong at 8pm; evidently the crisis was not sending the people to church. Swift closed the day by reading St Matthew’s gospel and Boswell’s Tour to the Hebrides.

While his home, garden and village life went on, four of his old scholars, as Territorial soldiers, had left by train. “A young man (Mayo’s) who brings us the par-oil [paraffin] says some of the people seemed demented in trying to obtain as much as they could get; one man who usually has two barrels actually ordered 12.” Everywhere, shoppers were buying flour, ‘and anything that would keep’, such as Quaker oats, canned fruit and Golden Syrup, as the weekly Harrow Observer reported on the Friday. Did a housewife have to stock up on syrup?

Some newspapers, such as the Uttoxeter Advertiser in Staffordshire, admitted it was a week of panic, that would only cause the shortages that the panic-buyers were trying to beat, and encouraged shops to charge more. Flour became ‘practically unobtainable’, the Advertiser reported; the price of sugar more than doubled. Whose panic was making it dearer for everyone else? “Private motor cars went away laden from some shops on Tuesday morning,” the Advertiser said - that is, as soon as doors opened after the bank holiday - “and prices commenced to rise a little later.” A solicitor in Walsall, Lenton Lester, made it even plainer at a meeting of town traders who was guilty - ‘the wealthy’, the few people who could afford a car, the very ones who could, as Mr Lester said, afford a penny or two extra.

The panic-buyers, naturally, did not offer their names to the public, or even admit to themselves that they were panicking. They, like the Gothard family, were only looking after themselves, and - as good customers - traders wanted to look after them. Clifford Gothard wrote for Saturday August 1 that he went to bed ‘after letting in a man with a lot of groceries from Oakden’s’: “Everyone is afraid of a rise in prices all around; there was a panic rush for groceries this morning. We managed to get ours all right. We cleared Wright’s and Oakden’s out of biscuits by buying a very few lbs.” That was as much as anyone would admit, even in their diary.

Traders, too, made excuses. Retailers could blame wholesalers, who could blame shippers. Some perishables, in fairness, became short right away. If fishing fleets could not sail in case of enemy warships, or because the fishermen who were also naval reservists had joined the fleet, fish would be scarce and cost more. Other costs would rise with time; ships could sink and cost more to insure. The question then became: if Europe’s markets drew on the world, and all Europe - all the world, perhaps - was at war, what would be the new cost of doing business? Some shopkeepers had the courage to limit customers’ grocery orders, or the decency to limit their profits. Others wanted to use the crisis to bump up their profits as much as they could get away with. It was the commercial equivalent of the main powers of Europe mobilising armies; if anyone above you in the chain of selling raised prices but you did not, you would suffer; if anyone below in the chain raised prices but not you, you were a fool. Often the profiteering businessmen were the worst-run or the downright crooked in peacetime, such as the Rhodesia Trading Company in southern Africa. Its joint MD Arthur Suter wrote to England from the capital Salisbury in August 1914:

The chambers of commerce have taken up a very philanthropic attitude as to raising the price of actual foodstuffs on present stocks and in Bulawayo practically threatened to boycott any Trader who did so. This has somewhat upset my proposed general increase of about 15 per cent but there are a few good lines on which we have managed to secure a very considerably increased profit and we must bide our time for the remainder.

As with any panic buying, people did not suddenly eat more, or burn more paraffin. The extra fuss during the panic evened itself out with quiet afterwards. The Hull architect, cricket-watcher and diarist George Thorp went into his regular grocers, Brown Cox and Holmes, on Saturday August 8, ‘to learn the why and the wherefore’. Why had the flour they delivered cost two shillings and sixpence a stone - as it turned out, more than double the price before, and after? Why did the tinned beef not come at all? “Found them in a state of collapse, had been working for 33 hours on end. On the previous Tuesday had called with the usual order and found no flour or bacon was to be had. On Wednesday and Thursday they were closed.” Thorp and his grocer saw the panic was over: “I believe I was the second person in the shop that morning. Parted good friends.” At least Thorp had a grocer to go to; Kress, his pork butcher, was among the Germans arrested.