Part Two

England at War

Chapter 8

The News

We and the French had to defend ourselves; it is as simple as that.

Within the Fringe: An Autobiography, by Viscount Stuart of Findhorn (1967)

The horror of joining in the silly fray was less than the danger of dishonour of keeping out.

The Mist Procession: The Autobiography of Lord Vansittart (1958)

I

Britain going to war against Germany ranks as one of the most memorable pieces of news of the century, like the assassination of President Kennedy, and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales; or indeed the ends of wars in 1918 and 1945, or the start of war again in 1939. As with any object, however, news needs speed - as well as mass - to have force. People remembered the start of the second war by the speech on the radio by Neville Chamberlain - or claimed to, because some wrongly thought Churchill was the prime minister they heard. Nineteen-fourteen had no such broadcast to unite listeners in a common memory.

The navy and - above all - ships at sea, were the exceptions. Civilians had all the time they wanted to let the news sink in, or to ignore it; sailors had to do as they were told. They assumed fleets would clash as soon as they found each other, the same as the armies on land. If anything, sailors wished for that great battle, to get it over with. G C Harper, a cadet in Devonport who joined HMS Endymion on August 1, admitted to a ‘temporary depressing feeling’ on the evening of Monday August 3, ‘that perhaps after all England would remain neutral’. His ‘frightfully old’, 20-year-old, cruiser put to sea at 10am on the Tuesday, weighed anchor at 5pm, ‘and went off at 15 knots around Land’s End and up the Irish Channel’. Harper was in charge of two of the ship’s four searchlights. An officer told him that Britain was going to declare war on Germany at midnight.

So when the end of the watch came and eight bells struck I thought, at last we have begun war with Germany after all these years of talk; now we will see. There was a ripping kind of air of perfect calm and efficiency about it. We knew that the Navy had been preparing for a week and everyone was ready. I thought of all the novels and scare-mongering magazine articles which all without exception prophesised a surprise and a very bad one for us when this war came off. But it struck me it was more of a surprise for the Germans.

Harper arrived at Scapa Flow, the navy’s harbour in northern Scotland, on the Thursday afternoon, August 6. Also on its way to Scapa Flow was HMS Marlborough, whose wireless officer, James Somerville, heard earlier on the Tuesday that war would be declared. “Revolvers and ammunition were served out to the officers today; I think I shall wear mine after all because I am the only officer on the main deck and if things go badly at any time there may be a panic; not my own people, they are too intelligent, but among the hoi polloi such as stokers etc.” As that line suggested, Somerville felt under strain already - ‘I hardly dare sleep for fear of something going wrong with the WT [wireless transmission]’, he admitted in his diary. He expected ‘to be blown up at any moment’ as the ship steamed towards Norway. At 11pm, Somerville received from the Admiralty the king’s message telling of war. “Somehow it seemed rather banal ...” he wrote, evidently by now too tired to feel much; he went to sleep at 1am and had to turn out again at 4am, ‘dead to the world’.

Typically people learned of the war in their own time, by a routine act - by reading a newspaper; or, even less dramatically, by having the news read to them. Those on holiday might well not have heard the news until hours after everyone else, which would make the event feel even flatter.

William Pickbourne, the Northamptonshire preacher, felt the war as much as anyone; his son Frank, as a Territorial, was called up. Pickbourne and two of his other sons had travelled overnight, uncomfortably, from London Paddington to Ilfracombe, arriving on Saturday August 1. “With the war news about however we felt we had better be getting home,” he wrote; yet the Pickbournes carried on their holiday, taking a coastal pleasure ship to Clovelly on the Wednesday, the first full day of war, and only left Devon on the Friday. By the Monday, August 10, he was telling his diary ‘a horrible crisis has arisen’, and how his son Frank, camping in a schoolyard in Northampton, was about to go to Derby for training. Plainly it took a few days for the war to sink into Pickbourne - or he had not liked to leave the boarding house he had already paid for.

Once you heard of the war, what were you supposed to do? If you had been in uniform, you might expect to join in. Frank Balfour, back in his office in Berber after his trek by camel, let out his disappointment in a letter to the society belle Irene Lawley:

I got back here to read a week’s old Reuter’s and find all the world in a blaze. And tonight comes the news that we have gone to war - and here am I consigned to simply carry on in this cesspit without a chance of a show at all. All leave is stopped. The one thing I’ve prayed for was a chance of a little real soldiering, and I’ve got to miss it and merely do what I’m paid for.

On the Tuesday, Guy Paget in Paris gave up trying to reach his wife in Aix - ‘the military had monopolised all the trains’ - and decided to return to England to get a job. To smooth his way home, he had what he recalled was ‘a very important looking passport covered all over with stamps of eagles and things from having had it in Russia’. As Paget had met ‘a Gordon Highlander called Hamilton’ with a wife, maid and dog, Hamilton ‘indented’ his wife and maid over to Paget, whose passport was ‘made out for those commodities’. Paget’s other weapon was upper-class cheek:

Together we approached the Gare du Nord and ignoring the sentry we progressed to the office of the chef de Gare and demanded an interview. My French is limited but emphatic. They said the chef was busy and saw no-one. I replied dites lui Monsieur Paget est ici ... allez vite.’ The clerk was impressed and alleyed all right. We followed on his heels into the office. Who the clerk said we were whom he had let break unannounced into the great man’s presence I know not but should not be surprised if it were the Prince of Wales incog. Flourishing my passport as if they were an order from the President I bowed and explained that under the present difficulties I should not insist on a special train but if the chef would have a first class reserved for me on the next train it would just do, but only just ... The bluff came off! At 2pm I found an armed soldier at each door of my carriage into which a bowing official in gold lace deposited me cum spurious wife and maid and what he supposed to be I think my ADC.

The train took them only as far as Rouen, where they had to change and go third class to Dieppe. Once at London Victoria on the Thursday, August 6, Paget drove straight to his old regiment, the Scots Guards, and to the adjutant Roger Tempest. “He greeted me with, ‘Where on earth have you been? You are the only one we had not heard from,’” Paget recalled. As a free man not on the reserve, Paget asked the Guards to have him back. Tempest, going by the deaths in Britain’s last war, against the Boers, reckoned it would be 18 months to two years before Paget could reach a battalion, because they were already full. “I said that the war might be over in six months at the most, so might I look for a job ... Roger agreed.” Paget soon had all the work he could take, and never did join the Guards again.

II

The Army officer Donald Weir, writing his weekly letter from India to his mother in England on August 4, was following the crisis, Reuter’s telegram by telegram, and guessing that war would come by ‘the next wire’. They had been arranging mobilisation for three days in case of any sudden order, and all leave was stopped: “But this has no meaning for us as we will not leave India,” Weir predicted.

The Army at home must be overjoyed at the chance of going for the Kaiser’s dirty Germans and to fight side by side with the French. It is most disheartening for us out here to think that we are so absolutely out of it out here and that the latest joined warts and squirrels at home will probably be experiencing their first taste of war. Every soldier longs to see some fighting and here is the chance of a lifetime to have a dig at the Germans whom we have so long despised. It is doing something for one’s country and in the event of being killed which is by no means necessary one can not wish for a more glorious death. This war will probably be the last of any size for years to come at any rate during our lifetime as soldiers and yet we in India can take no part in it, as we are compelled to remain out here and look after these dirty lieing blacks whom we hate so much that one would revel in shooting them down by the hundred daily.

“Am just going to pop off to the telegram office,’ Weir went on brightly, “only 50 yards away to see if there are any more wires. No more news,” he continued after that pause. “It appears the cable via Suez is the whole while taking government messages so something serious must be taking place. The cable via Germany, Russia and Teheran has been cut.”

Chapter 9

Spies

Spying is no more ignoble than shooting; the cause is the thing that counts.

Spy, by Bernard Newman (1935)

I

George Rose lived in a flat in north London, worked as a clerk in an office, and at weekends went to his family home at Chipping Ongar in Essex. He played the piano, and was learning to paint and sketch. By late July the sensitive young man was wondering, over a map of England, where to go on holiday: on a caravan tour; or to Maldon, by the Essex coast? He packed on Friday July 24, and painted in the fields around Ongar at the weekend. On the Monday he and his family took the train from London King’s Cross to Friskney, in the Lincolnshire Fens, where his brother Ted was marrying a farmer’s daughter and George Rose was best man.

Rose began sketching the farm soon after arriving, but soon met the bridesmaid, her mother and sisters. Alice, a 17-year-old ‘with clean cut features and sweet grey eyes’ he knew from a photograph in Ted’s room, ‘and I have always been charmed by it,’ he wrote later in his diary. “Now I am not a whit disappointed by meeting her in the flesh (not much flesh either!).” He played tennis with her and other ladies, before the wedding, addressed cards after, and after tea ‘made a bad drawing of her’. He wrote that he was sad to leave on the Wednesday: “I have received enough invitations to allow me no time for anything else for the rest of my life if I followed them to their logical conclusion. But I shall not for the inviters only expect me to commit matrimony.”

What made this talented young man, who plainly found Alice as interesting as she found him, so ungallant? Insecurity did not explain it, though he was unsure of himself. He had an ambition that women would only get in the way of; he longed to be an artist. As he may have seen it, he had little enough time free from work, without having a woman too. As a sign of his priorities, in his diary for Tuesday August 4 - by now, holidaying at Maldon - he noted the war with Germany, then wrote all about his afternoon outing with his friend, Duncan, to Osea Island nearby. First they had ‘a good tea in a village shop’; “also we found corn fields both reaped and growing. Best of all was a family of little sandpipers in a dyke which we watched but better even was the grey harmony of colour when the moon was behind the white sailed yacht which followed us home.” On the edge of Essex, with Germany beyond the sea, visitors with eyes only for scenery stuck out. On the Thursday they painted Maldon church tower all morning:

and in the afternoon we walked to Heybridge Basin where we had tea at the Old Ship Inn and sat in the comfortable window all the evening whilst it rained and we sketched and listened to the long-shoreman talking about the War News. After supper at our own inn I still had enough energy to start a sketch by the church tower, Duncan with me. We were then inconvenienced and much annoyed by being locked in the churchyard and accused of being German spies and we had to give our identity to the police and show all our works at the Swan Hotel to them. After this performance we stood drinks to the officers and went to bed.

Couldn’t anyone with suspicions have talked to the artists, and seen they were genuine and harmless? As the wrongly accused, should the artists, not the police, have been the ones offered a drink? The most obvious hurt Rose felt was on the Monday: “Back to office after a fortnight’s leave,” was all he put in his diary. Rose knew his ache for more freedom, dulled weekdays by the routine of work, too well to put it into words.

At least his accusers knew they were at war. William Page of Burton-on-Trent and two friends, visiting Grimsby docks on Bank Holiday Monday, on the last full day of peace, tried to take photographs of warships in the bay. Soldiers with fixed bayonets took them to the Customs offices, where the trio showed their excursion tickets. “They could not have been satisfied with what we had told them, for before long we found ourselves being followed by an officer with his hand on a revolver which was, no doubt, loaded,” Page reported later. The officer told him to stop smoking his pipe; why, Page did not know: “... and it was only by taking refuge on an excursion steamer and disappearing down into the hold in double quick time that we eluded our pursuer.” If the officer thought Page was a spy, why let him go? Why believe his story; couldn’t a spy buy an excursion ticket the same as anyone else? The soldiers were doing their job of guarding; you suspect, besides, that they enjoyed the chance to bully civilians, if only to make a change from the boredom.

In Walsall Wood, they didn’t chase Germans; they punched them. On Monday evening, August 10, an 18-year-old miner, Bert Faulkner, went to have a look at the ‘German’ in his street. The stranger asked Faulkner (with swear-words) what he was looking at; and had he lost his dinner? Faulkner may not have grasped that someone with such command of sarcasm in English, was hardly likely to be German; or, the insults may have provoked Faulkner to hit the stranger twice, hard enough to fall on a doorstep. The ‘German’ was Edward Evans, a labourer from Barrow in Furness, who told Walsall magistrates he had walked from West Hartlepool seeking work. As a magistrate told Faulkner: “Why don’t you join Lord Kitchener’s Army?”

II

Evans had, so the court heard, been the talk of the street as a strange-talking ‘German’. If Faulkner felt so keen to take the fight to Germans, what stopped him joining the army? As an excuse of sorts, Faulkner had said that he had ‘only had three days to pick up this week’, meaning three days of work. Short-time working was common in coal mines and factories where demand for their goods changed with the seasons. The poverty, and the ignorance that made Faulkner and his likes take a northerner for a foreign enemy, meant that Faulkner would never feel strongly about the rights of Belgium, or anywhere.

Not that only common people mistook their countrymen for foreigners. A Mr Durose, an accountant from Nottingham, reported to his local police on August 6 that while at Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire he found a German prince was staying at the Clay Hotel, ‘who was constantly receiving and sending telegrams etc’. Nottingham police passed the tip on, and the local force evidently checked, because a Superintendent Corden reported back that the man was Prince Frederick Duleepsingh, of Blow Foston Hall, Thetford, Norfolk, ‘who is an exile prince from India who has come to Woodhall Spa for the last eight years and he has offered his services to the War Department’.

For every hothead like Bert Faulkner and nosey-parker like Mr Durose, many more people minded their own business. What did Mr Durose think he was playing at? Did it not occur to him that the hotel staff would have noticed a suspicious guest? Could he not have asked around the hotel, or indeed politely made conversation with ‘Prince Frederick’, before going to the police (and why wait until he was home?). Mr Durose may have wanted badly to do some good, and did not know how to. Seeing hidden enemies cost nothing. Anyone in uniform, a soldier on guard or a police constable, would always take a sighting seriously. The only sure way they could then stay out of trouble was to act on a complaint, no matter how foolish. Newspapers gave the Mr Duroses of every town their excuse. Fears in print sold more papers, and newspapers knew they could never be proven wrong. A Burton Daily Mail editorial late in August, for example, urged readers to join the ‘hunt for spies’, claiming that 50,000 able-bodied Germans and Austrians were at large in Britain - 30,000 of them in London. Germany had bred, the Burton Mail reckoned,’ the most astute and unscrupulous class of spy yet known to Europe’. What, then, of the real Germans and Austrians in Britain?

III

As early as August 1, the order went from Lincolnshire police chief constable Captain Cecil Mitchell-Innes, a former soldier, to have Anthony Strenge, a marine engineer of May Villa, Barton upon Humber, ‘carefully watched during the present crisis’ as he was suspected of being an ‘evil-disposed person’. Even before the war, clearly the authorities had some suspects, whether agents gathering information or waiting for the outbreak of war to blow up things. At 10.10pm on the Wednesday, August 5, Mitchell-Innes sent a telegram went to all his police divisions to “keep special watch to prevent aliens travelling by night by motor car for purposes of committing outrages. Motor cars belonging to Germans may be seized ... warn Motor Garages not to hire out cars to aliens.”

Any Germans in Lincolnshire, a county facing Germany, were a risk not only for the mischief they might do, but in case they guided invaders. The military sent Lincolnshire police two significantly related telegrams on the evening of Friday August 7. First, the army wanted notices along the county’s 60 miles of coast, from Grimsby on the Humber to Sutton Bridge on The Wash, warning people not to go on beaches between sunset and sunrise, ‘as they might be shot’. Why else would the army guard the coast - or say it was guarded - unless it feared a German landing? Next, the army asked for the arrest of all Germans able to bear arms. Fears persisted in Lincolnshire, even as the Germans attacked in Belgium. On August 12, Lincoln police headquarters rang the police stations near the coast, at Spilsby, Alford and Louth. Police were shortly to tell the owners of horses and cattle to drive their animals behind the wolds - in other words, well inland - if, after a naval battle in the North Sea, enemy ships beached on the coast: “and of course the obvious thing to do would be for them to land and do useful work for their point of view”. Here was one of two dilemmas for enemy-facing counties in two world wars: in an invasion, should you stay put, and risk enemy capture and having to do his bidding? Or should you flee (but where?), and risk getting in the way of the defenders, and being called a coward? In both world wars, as this first time, the authorities made some daft compromise. Farm animals would flee, but villagers were best to stay at home, and (the police added hopefully) ‘should not get alarmed nor go rushing about’.

Here was the other, connected dilemma: whether the authorities should warn the locals beforehand, so they would know what best to do (at the risk of panic by the weak and stupid ruining it for everyone else); or should the authorities say nothing (at the risk of panic if the Germans did come). In another unrealistic compromise, police at headquarters told local stations to explain to locals what might happen, ‘but it should be done quietly and without fuss, so as not to cause any excitement etc among the community’. Headquarters did not say how constables should explain the possible invasion without giving people ‘excitement etc’. HQs never do. If German sailors had come ashore, after a battle, would they have felt like capturing anything, let alone cows and horses?

Regardless of reality, fear of invasion lingered. Meanwhile police acted on another, intriguing, worry. On August 10 Mitchell-Innes sent a memo about the possibility that “owing to the discharge of industrial employees on a large scale in the big towns, their districts in course of time may well be visited by casual labourers and others severely affected in fairly large numbers and who may be in serious want and therefore likely to be troublesome”. The chief constable suggested that police on their beats approach “representative members of the community with a view to their forming a local organisation impressing other sound and reliable men in subordinate positions such as farm foremen, keepers, stewards, game keepers etc throughout their districts”. In other words, while police were short of men, because reservists had joined the army or navy again, and police were guarding railway bridges in case of sabotage, citizens ought to do their bit to protect their property. Around the country respectable men, in numbers, volunteered as special constables; George Rose did in London, for example. In early September 110 men swore at Newark town hall to ‘keep the peace’ in case of an (unspecified) emergency.

In mainly rural Lincolnshire, Mitchell-Innes was not only thinking of resisting what he called ‘destitute strangers and wanderers’ by force. He suggested that ‘the unfortunates’ out of work and wandering the countryside should have ‘temporary relief’, such as ‘scrap food, old boots, old clothing etc’. How real was this threat of unrest from the very poor tempted, or forced, to steal to survive? Mitchell-Innes’ need to reassure lonely-feeling farmers may have mattered more than the threat. By defending themselves, the panicky property-owners may have felt less afraid of losing their possessions. Homeless but otherwise sturdy folk from the cities did not invade the countryside in August 1914, but they did come; for Britain always had men and women down on their luck and tramping, as vagabonds, or whatever you wanted to call them. They seldom left a trace. One time that a pair of wanderers did show in print, it proved how such aimless people had no grand thoughts of overturning society; and society was far too strong for them in any case.

On Thursday September 3, William Hall, a warehouseman, went to work at 6am at a flour mill outside Southwell in Nottinghamshire. Hall wrapped his brown leather shoes in paper, and put them on a sack of wheat. He meant to take them home, but forgot about them. When he looked on the Saturday morning, the shoes had gone.

William Sharman, the mill watchman, opened the warehouse door on the Friday evening to let the dust out - which was probably why Hall had a pair of work shoes and another pair. Under the flour bags, Sharman found a man and a woman. Sharman asked the pair to leave, then let them stay, whether out of softness or because the couple were too tough to shift - if they would leave things alone.

At 5.50am on the Saturday, a Southwell shopkeeper, Abraham Bee, was sweeping. A man showed him shoes and asked sixpence for them. Bee told the stranger that he did not know that he wanted shoes. ‘Some old toff gave them to me,’ the man said. Eventually - to get rid of him, perhaps - Bee gave the sixpence. Bee must have guessed something was wrong, and said so, because later that morning police constable Copeland was on the vagrants’ trail. First he found the woman - Bridget Hughes, a widow - lying in a lane; then the man, Charles Mackenzie, a seaman thrown out of work at Hull by the outbreak of war. Drifting south, Mackenzie had reached Southwell from Lincoln on the Friday and met Hughes. You wonder what other petty crimes Mackenzie had done in the last few weeks, though as Southwell magistrates sent him to prison for two weeks - Hughes went for four - this was probably the first time Mackenzie was caught.

Here lay another reason why English holiday-makers on the Continent rushed to the Channel ports for home, despite the discomforts and loss of luggage - or rather, they left their bags to be sent on, so they hoped; in truth someone, probably French, Swiss and German hotel and railway workers, pilfered it. Even if the holiday-makers were not running out of money - and many were - they were not only fleeing danger. They sought their place in society again; while abroad, they were little more than higher-class tramps. A T Daniel, for example, ran out of trains at Amiens and had to buy a second-hand bicycle. Armed with a piece of paper stamped by the British vice-consul - ‘without this my journey would have been impossible’ - Daniel made for Abbeville, stopped at every village every few miles by ‘ignorant and indignant patriots’. This must have been while England hesitated about joining the war because, as Daniel admitted, to many Frenchmen England was ‘a false friend and little better than a traitor’. Having cycled the 70 miles to Boulogne, that left the cheeks of his bottom ‘two huge blisters’, he and a ‘rush of Britishers unused to police interference’ made a farce of the official check on the gangway to the ship home. “It was quite enough to proclaim yourself a British subject in no matter what accent.”

Landing at Dover at 2am, the hotels were full, and the ship’s cabins were forbidden. A railwayman offered Daniel a place to lie down in the telegraph office, adding cheerily: “We put the aliens in there!” Daniel rested there, but could not sleep, ‘because of the shunting and clicking of the telegraph’. By now, Britain must have declared war:

Shortly after four o’clock I got up and saw a brilliant sunrise and had conversations with policemen and watchmen. They were good fellows and one could not help thinking good material but they were singularly inferior in intelligence and singularly ignorant of foreign politics of foreign countries and anything but the very outside of things military. To them this was a war between England and Germany. Little Belgium was plucky, this they conceded but wait till the British Army got there, they would make the Germans run! They seemed to take no account of the French Army whatever.

Daniel went into Dover at 5.30am and found a small coffee house, filled with workmen, ‘mainly of a very submerged type’. They showed no interest in news of the war: “To them the war was mainly a question of the price of sugar and bacon.” One man, Daniel added disapprovingly, used all the expletives he knew, “of course he didn’t know many! To denounce the government. I could not exactly make out why.” Daniel was still 200 miles from home, but had reclaimed his place back in society already, as he was able to look down on (and fail to appreciate) his countrymen. Life-changing events, a war in Europe, made no difference to the thankless lives of roaming, labouring men, surviving on hard or odd jobs, charity, the workhouse, or what they could pocket and get away with.

IV

But to be certain of a situation is not to be certain of a human being.

Maurice, by E M Forster

And for all the fears of agents, invaders, and wastrels, what did the threat to England come to? The London representative of the German makers of armaments, Krupp, sent a petition to Winston Churchill at the Admiralty on August 16, pleading to be allowed home to Germany. On August 5, when about to leave with his family in the German ambassador’s train, he was arrested in his Putney house for espionage. The police search of his letters and belongings had not uncovered anything; newspapers however had called him a spy. Major Kell of the security service did not want to let him go, not because of anything he might have done, but because he might be useful as a hostage or as someone to trade for Englishmen held similarly in Germany: ‘Herr von Bulow belongs to an influential family’. While a memo for Churchill agreed that von Bulow was not caught with anything incriminating, ‘the Krupp firm like other armament firms maintained a system of espionage’, and von Bulow ‘very possibly’ was part of it, or at least knew about it. This case hinted that British companies did espionage, the same as anyone else. Firms did it to keep ahead, or at least so they did not fall behind rivals. It was business, not necessarily done for the sake of a war. In any case, whether you believed von Bulow when he wrote his conscience was ‘absolutely clear’, you suspect that von Bulow’s worst crime was to make the British feel tricked. In June, von Bulow had accompanied the company’s chief, Herr Krupp himself, on a tour of British armaments factories and shipyards, as arranged by the Admiralty.

Churchill’s decision was characteristically brief. ‘Hold him WSC 19-8,’ he scribbled.

Chapter 10

Serving Men

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.

‘This? Oh, well, I couldn’t wait about for a commission, it might have been weeks.’

An unnamed sculptor, a private in the XVth Hussars, in The Garden of Ignorance: The Experiences of a Woman in a Garden, by Mrs George Cran

I

Another letter in mid-month to Churchill came from Francis Grenfell, with his cavalry unit at Tidworth. “I am in command of a squadron and can hardly believe my good fortune of being in the prime of life a soldier at this time,” wrote Grenfell, knowing that Churchill as a former troop leader in the Lancers would understand. On Thursday August 13 Grenfell had been in London for three hours, but had to wait at the dentist, and did not have time to see Churchill before he caught his train back to Wiltshire. “Goodbye my dear Winston. We must teach these foreigners again what a great nation we are, what England means.” It was one of those letters that left much unsaid, because written in haste, and because Grenfell did not have to tell Churchill what he already knew: that an older brother of Grenfell, a Lancer, had died in a cavalry charge with Churchill at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898; and that the chances were that Churchill and Grenfell might - thanks to a dentist - never see each other again.

Such happy and patriotic thoughts as Grenfell’s, brushing aside the prospect of death, have been the stuff of August 1914, on all sides. Whereas Germany and France had millions of men ready-trained putting on uniform, Britain’s new war minister, the Boer War commander Lord Kitchener, began by advertising for another 100,000 men. If the war on the Continent would be over in weeks, as many in England (but not Kitchener) thought, even those first recruits would not reach the front line before their months of training. As Britain had never seen so many men recruited at once, for anything, it would take a while to clothe and arm them, let alone make them soldiers. Exceptions were men who already knew how to do special jobs, such as riding motorcycles to carry despatches: such as the later spy Bernard Newman, and the St John’s College, Cambridge man J K Stevens. They, like Grenfell, were bright young men, well-off enough to ride (a motorcycle, not a horse), and smart enough to know how to get a job - because, as so often, it was a case of who you knew, not what.

Clifford Gothard, who rarely included world news in his diary, began noting war as early as July 27. He did not put his feelings in writing, not even on the sudden death of his father - with one exception. Even on the Monday, August 3, for example, when he wrote ‘everybody seems very excited about the war’, or rather the prospect of Britain fighting in it, he did not say if he was excited. “General feeling seems to be, go to war and smash them,” Gothard wrote, ‘them’ being the Germans. However, when the next morning (still before Britain declared war) a letter came asking Gothard if he would take a commission, if asked, he confided to his diary: “To please mother, entirely against my own inclination, I signed off as unsuitable. I think it is the greatest disappointment I have ever had, having to sign off like that.” For the next few days, Gothard carried on his usual round of shooting rabbits, and finishing the arranging of his father’s estate, though the war was going on around him, and was evidently on his mind. “All the trams passing out house to town have a lot of Territorials in them,” he wrote on August 5.

Did Gothard feel the shame of any young man who could not measure himself against his fellows in battle? Was his shame not so much a feeling of cowardice, but that he would look like a mummy’s boy? Mrs Gothard, we can imagine, did not want to see her son hurt; did she insist as well that no son of hers was wasting his education by going in the army? As so often, did the mother with more experience know better than the immature son?

Kitchener’s appeal for 100,000 men aged between 19 and 35 filled the newspapers. Yet such large advertisements, half-page and whole-page, not only told readers this was important; like any jobs that make the newspapers, perhaps these were the vacancies that could not be filled easily? Some men did seek to join the army, so that they had a place in what the Ashbourne Telegraph, like many, called ‘the greatest war in the world’s history’. Yet the average young man in the Derbyshire market town of Ashbourne had not had the least wish to join the army before August 1914; the pay was poor, the discipline alien, the routine boring, and the years away from home intolerable; as the volunteers were about to find out. Even so early in the war, the Ashbourne Telegraph had to talk up the army, to overcome the centuries-old sense that a civilian only joined the army if he was starving, a fool, or fleeing the hangman: “No man is too good to serve his King and Country as a private soldier. JOIN AT ONCE.” Those capital letters, the printed equivalent of shouting in your ear, were in truth like the ever-more strident tactics of suffragettes: a sign of a losing cause.

II

Soldiers, in these first few days of the war, had something going for them; and they made the most of it. They were needed. It meant, first, that Territorials could get away with mischief. Usually drink came into it. Christopher Hollis, a 12-year-old son of a clergyman, recalled in a memoir that on the Tuesday, August 4, “a drunk leaned out of a carriage window at Taunton” as his family were going on their holidays and bawled to Hollis’ father to pray for him. “My father promised that he would.” And Frederick Jewitt, a gas stoker from Gainsborough, arrived at Beverley drunk on a train on Wednesday night, August 5. Jewitt threw himself across the tracks in front of a train from Scarborough; Mr Franks, the assistant stationmaster, rolled him clear. As thanks for saving him, Jewitt threw Mr Franks - by now trying to help the suicidal man onto the platform - over his shoulder onto the rails. Mr Franks hurt his back and stayed off work. As the town’s chief constable, John Moore, put it: “If he wants to commit suicide he had better put himself in front of the Germans.” The court let off Jewitt; not because of the woes he claimed - his wife had left him, he had four children, he had been drinking all day - but because magistrates simply sent him to his regiment, after a few days on remand.

Another court case shows that the authorities did give soldiers some respect, now their country needed them to stay alive, at least until they reached the battlefield. Herbert Strutt, a Derbyshire magistrate and a deputy lord lieutenant, was driving from his home at Makeney north of Derby on Saturday August 15, to (ironically) a meeting in the county town in aid of the war. Halfway there, at Allestree Hill, Strutt overtook, at crawling pace, some marching men of the 4th Lincolnshires. Another car driven by a chauffeur, Arthur Smith, pipped its horn and came round a bend fast - at 20 to 23 miles an hour, so Strutt reckoned. Some of the soldiers had to jump out of the way and Strutt stopped his car in a hedge bottom. Before the war, the men on foot might have had to shrug off the near-miss. Someone in a car, or on a motorcycle, was all too willing to be the fastest thing on the road and expected everyone else to get out of their way. Being the richest, the motorist got away with it. But now, as magistrates told Smith, drivers had to be careful because so many troops were about. The court fined Smith £5 and banned him from driving for three months.

Another car story suggests that soldiers understood - and played on - their new, albeit unlikely to last, prestige. Clifford Gothard asked a local man, a Mr Cherry, “ if I would be of any service and to try to get a job as transport driver for Arthur Wardle”; Gothard’s friend. The next day, August 12, Mr Cherry rang Gothard, to suggest Wardle could indeed get a commission in motor transport. Gothard set off into Burton-on-Trent on his bicycle with the news; on the way, on the bridge over the River Trent, he met Arthur Wardle, and a man called Arthur Linsley, in Linsley’s car. Linsley offered to push Gothard’s cycle home, while the young men drove on. The drama, fit for a silent film, had only started:

When Arthur and I had just passed the end of Wellington Street we were stopped and asked to give a lift to two Territorials, one of whom had sprained his ankle and whose mates had carried him two miles and were about ‘done up’. We willingly consented and after putting rugs and macs for him to rest his leg on we drove him down to Allsopp’s maltings and then we put him in one of the buildings. We were told it was the wrong one and so Arthur and I carried the chap into the proper building and I asked the officer if it would not be better for the men to have some bags to sit on, so some were brought. Arthur shaking hands with the man with the bad ankle and the officer commanding.

Finally, Gothard told his friend to apply for a commission at Lichfield nearby. Arthur Linsley had earlier given a lift to the town’s police superintendent, a sergeant and a constable, ‘to try and capture a spy’ in the suburb of Stapenhill, ‘so he had quite a lot of adventures in one morning’. While Gothard did not say any more about the poorly soldier and his mates, and may not even have noticed their cheekiness, we can speculate what they made of their lift. But for the war, would two well-off young men - officer material - like Gothard and Wardle have done a good turn for common soldiers? Would the soldiers have dared to ask for such favours? That Arthur Wardle shook hands all round suggests that he was looking ahead to being part of the army. Thousands of soldiers had been gathering for the previous few days in the ‘maltings’, Burton’s brewery buildings where labourers shovelled barley, but which were empty in summer. As so often that month, the men had to make the best of the basic conditions they were given. We can sense, therefore, that the soldiers enjoyed thumbing a lift, and being fussed over, and would have seen the humour in the rather prim civilian Clifford Gothard telling an officer to bring bags for them to sit on.

The first thing the army did with troops was to make them march. It filled the day, gave them stamina and hard feet, and weeded out the weak. In his memoir, Guy Paget made the wise and important point that only the young could stand the sheer physical fatigue, and sometimes hunger and thirst, of warfare: “However gallant the spirit may be, nature cannot be overtaxed when one is much over 40. The war proved it time after time.” Similarly, soldiers who could get away with some disability in peacetime could not in wartime. A commander was only acting for the best for all his men if, like Sir Mark Sykes of the 5th Battalion, Alexandra Princess of Wales’ Own Yorkshire Regiment, he set a higher standard than he would for his civilian workers. To take a 1909 example of a hard-working, well-meaning but deaf man called Edwards he proposed to get rid of:

... suppose we have to mobilise with such a man as adjutant, it means getting another just at the moment when they will be impossible to find ... If Edwards were one’s agent or employed it would be otherwise ...

The army picked only the fit, because lives would depend on it.

III

Gothard had meant well. A couple of weeks later - it may have been significant that it was the day his mother went to Nottingham - Arthur Wardle and another man visited Gothard at home, and they ‘talked for a long time about enlisting’. Still, it was only talk; and these were young men, the very sort that Kitchener was asking for.

Chapter 11

Spectators on the Shore

... the mother country is now engaged in perhaps the most difficult struggle in her whole 1500 years of history.

Sydney Morning Herald editorial, August 6, 1914

I

“War, war, war, per mare, per terras, in short ubique in Europe. It is a horrible shame,” wrote Denys Yonge, the vicar of the village of Boreham, near Chelmsford. As his fondness for Latin showed, Yonge was stuck in the past. He turned 78 in 1914 - ‘mother would have been 109 today’, he wrote on July 11 - and judging by his diary felt distant from, and perhaps indifferent to, events. As a vicar he still did some preaching, and held a place in local affairs. On August 4 he went to the meeting of the local board of guardians, which looked after the poor laws covering the sick, the aged and orphans, besides paupers. He had lunch with his fellow administrators: “All the people full of the war, as of course they would be.” Yonge sounded detached, as any old man would be, who only followed events through The Times.

The clergy did what they could for their parishioners, holding ‘intercession services’ most evenings to pray for peace - presumably a peace won by Britain. Otherwise vicars, and their families, did their usual August rounds, of work and pleasure; such as mowing the grass in the churchyard, arranging the flowers in church, visits (Yonge reckoned he did 980 in 1914), music lessons and light sports. For example Dorothy Wright, the 19-year-old daughter of the vicar of Hemingborough in Yorkshire, wrote in her diary for August 4, the day war was declared, only that she, her mother, and her brother Charlie, a history student at Trinity College, Oxford, played in a tennis tournament at the club at Cliffe, the next village. (“Dad umpired.”) She first mentioned the war on August 9, when Charlie cycled to nearby Selby in the afternoon for news. On the Tuesday morning, August 11, all the Wrights cycled to Selby: “Crowds of soldiers, 7000!” she wrote. “Played tennis in aft.” Dorothy Wright did some war-related charity work; she went to ‘Red Cross practice’ later that day (and even later played croquet in the twilight and dark); wound wool for socks for soldiers and sailors; and held sewing meetings. Likewise her mother took the train to Pocklington on September 2, for a meeting of the Soldiers and Sailors’ Families Association (SSFA), “and came back tired out and had to go to bed”.

II

If the people of 1914 did one helpful thing, and otherwise left the war to others, they gave to charity. Reservists who left their jobs to join the army and navy, as they last did for the South African War of 1899 to 1902, might well have to leave their families out of pocket. At worst, as the Burton upon Trent branch of the SSFA found in 1899, a woman in a terraced house in the town would have been starving, but for the association’s aid. In some ways the association was generous, in others not; in all cases, it set the rules; and the ones setting the rules were the traditional leading figures in a town and county. The Staffordshire president of the SSFA was Lady Dartmouth, Gerald Legge’s mother; Lady Burton chaired the Burton meetings, as the wife of the brewer Michael Arthur Bass, first Baron of Burton. She looked into the cases of reservists’ wives near her country home; she sent regular postal orders to her committee of ladies, who then gave out the charity, in cash, or groceries if the women were judged to be ‘careless’. After the Boer War, Burton SSFA kept giving, to ‘deserving cases’. That even included the wife and child of a soldier in prison for desertion; but not men who had left the army, because national policy reckoned that the men, if supported, would then not bother to look for work.

Such charity - whereby the ones giving the charity knew best - had ticked over for years, and began anew in August 1914. Lady Burton took the chair again. She told her committee, as was reported in the local press:

We must deal very gently and tenderly with these poor women whose husbands have been wrenched from them and who are feeling very sore and unhappy and as a result unequal to conform their lives to their altered circumstances. We must try and make them feel the help we are enabled to give them is not charity but freely offered of their more fortunate friends ... a gift and a kindly thought to make up in a small way for their troubles and anxieties.

That sounded generous, except that, as working folk might have said, you couldn’t spend it at the Co-op. People fallen on hard times, let alone those without a wage because the man of the house had left to serve his country, had no right to aid, only what charitable givers offered. Large employers, such as Burton’s breweries, the post office and the railway companies, said they were giving the families of their workers called up as reservists about half the man’s pay. Again, it sounded generous, but not if you only just made ends meet on your usual pay.

Worries about money ran through the letters of the reservist and Derby railwayman Arthur Bryan. As a King’s Royal Rifleman, he found himself at Sheerness, on the mouth of the Thames in Kent, waiting to sail. In one undated letter in mid-August, he apologised for the handwriting, ‘as I have had the butt of a rifle for a desk’:

That ninepence a day I left to you will not start till we go out to Belgium so I am sending you five shillings. It’s all I can spare as we are getting the princely sum of one and three a day and most of your food to buy out of that. There is a man in my tent that comes from Derby works at the carriage works MR [Midland Railway]; his wife tells him the company are allowing her something a week while he is away so if you hear anything about it you must go to Mary’s and tell them about your change of address. Well sweetheart, don’t worry about giving the house up as it doesn’t bother me a bit as you know.

By that last line Bryan meant that his wife Louie and their baby daughter Doris might give up their house and move in with her mother, whether for the company or to save money. In a later letter while still in England, Bryan advised his wife on how to claim separation allowance, which with the ninepence a day from him would give his wife 14 shillings and sixpence a week, “so you will be able to manage and be sure to register your name for the relief fund as there is plenty for everyone I don’t see why you should not have a share as well as anyone else”. Like soldiers before and since, Bryan urged his wife not to worry about him; he assured her of his love and that he was well; and he longed to be home. “I should like to be chasing you up that garden walk again my love but never mind we shall laugh again shortly,” he told her. Meanwhile, they had to make the best of it.

So too did the ‘army wives’ of officers, such as the newly wed Janey Brooke. A knock on the hotel bedroom door on the Monday night, August 3, had cut short her honeymoon, as a telegram from the War Office ordered Alan Brooke to be ready to leave for India from Southampton around August 11. Once at sea, Brooke wrote to his mother: “I was very surprised that they should be sending us back as I thought that they would be sure to give us a job at home.” Like any ambitious army officer, Brooke wanted a job nearer rather than further from the fighting. Any officer, and any officer’s wife, had to accept that duty came first: “We had to get up again and pack up at once so as to leave early the next morning,” Brooke wrote. The Brookes crossed from Ireland on the Saturday night, August 8, and booked into a hotel in London. On the Monday, Brooke’s last full day in England, his wife wrote her own letter to her mother-in-law. “My dearest mother,” she began, in larger handwriting than her husband’s:

Alan says I may call you that now I am writing to you for him as he is so very busy and had to go out at once after breakfast ... Life seems so to have changed for us in the last fortnight. We heard the first distant rumours of the war scare on our wedding day but we did not think that it would affect us so nearly and so very soon ...

Brooke was leaving, probably, for Egypt, via Gibraltar and Malta, while Janey would stay with an aunt in Buckinghamshire, then make the return crossing to Ireland. “He is very well and quite splendid about it all as of course we know he would and he is the most perfect husband I am so very happy and these changes cannot alter that. Our time at Gweedore was just a paradise and it is so lovely to be able to look back on that now.” Brooke, evidently having returned to the hotel after a day’s errands, then finished the letter: “I did not gather much more today.” As he did not know if the army would return him to India, or send him to Egypt, to guard against the (so far neutral) Turks, he did not know where to send himself money, nor whether his unit would bring any of his belongings from India. With ‘great difficulty’ at the military outfitters Cox and Co, where everyone else in the same fix as him was buying the same things, Brooke bought a uniform and such varied necessities as polo boots, haversack, water bottle, scabbard for sword, and waterproof: “But there was not a revolver or a Sam Browne belt to be got in town for love or money!”

Brooke, like many, was finding life awkward enough, trying to equip himself and do as he was told, without wanting to worry about his wife or the unsure future. At least Janey Brooke looked on the bright side; she cherished what she’d had, rather than cursed what she hadn’t. Or as Brooke wrote to his mother, in yet another letter, while still on honeymoon, Janey was ‘such a help, never a word about herself’. She, and he, in Brooke’s words hoped ‘it will all plan itself out in the end’. Janey Brooke understood the outbreak of war was the time to put her husband first, and not to fret about what was out of your hands anyway. Not so Lady Gwendoline Churchill, ‘Goonie’ to her husband John, the younger brother of Winston. She may have had several reasons, or none, for a crass and demanding stream of letters in the first days of the war. Maybe, parted from her husband, she felt ‘dreadful blues’, as she put it on August 5; maybe she suffered from an idle, self-obsessive life; she may even have been playing a deep game of torturing her husband; or maybe she was dim. Her second letter of August 5, from a holiday cottage near Cromer, was typical:

My darling Jack. I could think of nothing but you and what you are doing; I am dreadfully anxious to know your plans; I have the gloomiest thoughts and I cannot get out of my head the possibility of the Germans landing some soldiers while we are engaged fighting their navy on the high seas. In fact darling I am very unhappy being here and crying a lot though I do try and be brave and make myself believe that it is not all so bad and think you will be able to come here very soon. Do you think you will be able to get away after you have organised the squadron; you must let me know if I should go to Blenheim to be near you. I am torn in two about it, wanting to be near you, and not wanting to leave the children alone being here but it is of no use going on like this and I must pull myself together and be brave and sensible and not see things too black and after all if there is a war in this country you may come out of it with medals and clasps of which we will be both so proud of. Wire to me please darling often and tell me what to do.

This was the letter of someone, as she said, ‘torn’ between responsibilities, though none of them added up to much. A nanny looked after her two sons; servants brought up children and did everything for the Churchills and their class. Winston Churchill’s wife Clemmie, with young children, had visited, Goonie reported: “I have had to pack her poor French nurse off as she was in such a state and crying and having hysterics about her people in France.” The hysterics might have been catching. Goonie might have felt she had not too many choices, but too few. She may genuinely have feared a German landing on the Norfolk coast. Writing to Clementine, Winston Churchill did admit to being ‘a little anxious’ that his wife was at Cromer: “It is 100 to one against a raid but still there is the chance and Cromer has a good landing place near.” As a Churchill, though, married into the family of one of the ministers fighting the war, Goonie and Clementine alike had to set a public example. Did that explain why Goonie privately loaded her woes on her husband - as if he had time to spare, while preparing a cavalry unit for war? Evidently Jack Churchill did answer his wife’s letters at once, because by August 7 she was writing back. “I am proud of you; but of course I am thinking of you all the time and longing to see you again.” She sounded loving; in truth she only wanted her husband to satisfy her emotional demands. She went on: “I am in such a mortal terror of those dirty German swines and you are such a coco, such a sweet and I love you such a lot; you are my life and my being; ... it is always a person like you and loved like you that gets shot at.” Did she have to remind her husband of that? Was she having a dig at him, or was she simply emotionally ignorant? She seemed to supply her own answer: “I am dreadfully silly but I am brave really and quite resigned.” Clementine Churchill had arrived the night before: “Clemmie is full of stories and anecdotes and Cabinet secrets.”

In another letter that day - having received another letter from her husband at the Churchill family seat of Blenheim Palace, and a telegram from Oxford - Goonie hoped that Clementine would stay, “but I am afraid she might want to return to Winston which is quite natural”. Britain was in its third full day of war, and already Goonie Churchill was harping on to her absent husband! She did show signs of adapting: she and Clementine and other friends went into Cromer and told “the trades people not to put up their prices otherwise we would report them to the Board of Trade”. Having something to do, ordering the lower classes around, seemed to help; she closed her letter cheerfully: “Bless you my Jacko your Goonie who is brave and happy.” For the time being.

A couple of days later, after going to church, she had Sunday lunch with Clementine Churchill, “and she has just told us of the battle at Muhlhausen with advantage to the French but with appalling casualties, 20,000, 17,000, it is quite horrible; when do you think it will all end? I don’t think the swines are coming out to fight our Navy; they are playing a dirty game; they have all their submarines out and are trying to sink our ships. Pray God they will not get any.” As they had long planned, the French had launched infantry attacks into eastern France, gaining little and losing many men.

Goonie felt more settled - ‘I am no more in a panic’ - thanks to family gossip, the company of her father and others, and the sight of some defenders: “... we saw about 800 soldiers on the road and on the hill were the Light Horse; they had Essex written on their shoulders and they were Regulars; they looked like they could take on the Germans any day. It is a horrid day very windy and blustery and hot so the poor soldiers looked very hot and tired, but nevertheless it was very comforting to see them.” The next day - ‘Just received your wire from Banbury’ - Goonie told her husband more gossip, which made her one of the most informed people in the country. “Winston has just been on the telephone to Clemmie and he has told her about Muhlhausen been exaggerated also about the rumour of these swines threatening to cut the archbishop’s throat at Liege unless the forts were surrendered.” That correction did not, however, change her opinion of the Germans: “What barbarians and whole swines they are. I tremble to think what they would do if they ever got over here, the horrors.”

Letter by letter she swang between extremes, just as she had to swing between roles, none of them made by her, but all in terms of other people - as a wife, a mother, and a Churchill who could out-bully over-charging tradesmen. She was on the same page a nervous and self-centred woman only ever allowed to be a spectator of life; and a swift retailer of the country’s most important secret piece of war news, as told by Winston to Clementine Churchill to her: “... our expeditionary force had left yesterday morning and some more today. I hope our soldiers will not get killed.”

Goonie went on with her holiday: “We sit on the beach and watch torpedo boats capture German tramps [other boats] which is most exciting and we play tennis.”

Chapter 12

Politics

There is no standing still in the world’s history. All is growth and development.

Germany and the Next War, by General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1911)

Goonie Churchill’s letters - simple and silly as some of them were - did show Britain’s thinking, a few days into war. A fear lingered, and not only by the seaside, that Germans would attack Britain, because the Germans were so warlike; and had they not made such a fuss about their navy? Britain thought first and most of war by her navy, to protect the oceans that brought food and kept trade going; even the army, if it sailed to France or anywhere, would need the navy for a safe crossing.

Many spoke like Goonie of the Germans with hatred. At best some, as in 1939, sought to excuse the German people as oppressed or fooled, while the ruler Kaiser Wilhelm was a despot, or insane. If anyone regretted war, and felt pity for all, few said so, at least in public. An exception was the Rev T F Jerwood during a short sermon for the Territorials leaving Market Harborough on Thursday August 6. He asked everyone to pray for the wounded of all sides, and to pray for loved ones left behind, throughout Europe, and for ‘our Father, yes the father of all, even the kaiser, poor misguided man’. While it took some nerve to feel charity for the kaiser, the most Jerwood could do was suggest the German emperor was badly advised - always the polite excuse when kings did wrong - or not right in the head. As a band led the town’s reserve soldiers along the high street on the main Leicester road to Oadby - in the opposite direction to Germany, as each county’s units gathered somewhere central - it was not the time to admit that the kaiser, and his countrymen, had as much right to their point of view as Britain. Only the artist George Rose made a leap of imagination, on Sunday September 6, during special prayers at church at home in Ongar: “I wondering at the time whether the German congregations were doing the same thing as we were.” Even Rose was only querying war, not his country’s right to take part in it. Rose conformed outwardly and probably only aired his doubts to his family, or his diary - or hid his feelings even more deeply. Rose’s brother Frank joined the army on August 25; Rose’s diary pages for the next few days were torn out.

In public, where politics happened, people had to decide where they stood. Who were they fighting for, and against? Why? What did they want, and how hard would they fight for it? The answers soon changed. If anyone remembered Servia, they forgot it; Germany, not Austria, was the enemy. Belgium was the cause, or small nations in general. That could include Servia, although as the country was so hard to reach and help, it was best left unsaid.

Why should Britain, with the world’s biggest navy and empire, bother about small countries? Duty, and honour, said every public figure from Asquith down. Such words - so suspiciously widely agreed by the newspapers, and by Unionist and Liberal politicians - were abstract. You did something out of duty not because it suited you, but because if you did not, you would lose face or feel shame. The navy officer James Somerville in his diary for August 3 noted that his ship would have the ‘honour’ of leading the fleet into action:

It is a great compliment to our admiral and the ship but there is no doubt we shall suffer severely because as the fleets converge on one another the leading ships come into action first and have to stand the brunt of the attack; also after a short time the rest of our line will be shrouded in smoke and spray and we shall be the only clear target for the enemy to fire at so though we have the honour we shall also have the casualties.

In other words, honour could be bad for you. Britain seemed anxious to convince itself that it was going to war for moral reasons. That might be because Britain had doubts - could the Liberal Government have done more, sooner, to localise the war to Austria and Servia? - or simply because everyone wanted to feel they were in the right, doing something as wrong as war. As Rose’s uncomfortable insight suggested, didn’t the Germans, as civilised as the British, feel that God was with them? Would only victory prove who, if anyone, was right?

Another clergyman speaking to departing Territorials, Canon Ernest Morris in Ashbourne, told the men in the town hall that they could go with a ‘clear conscience’: ‘... in as much as the quarrel had not been our seeking, but we had been forced into this war by the actions of others’. The churchman - like the appropriate hymn Onward Christian Soldiers that they then sang - was telling the soldiers they had permission to do what was otherwise unlawful and unchristian: to try to kill other men. Morris, the father of an officer, and himself a reservist, used another moral term. Lord Dartmouth, presiding at a meeting in mid-August at Stafford, used the term too, and like Morris said the crisis had been ‘forced upon them’: “If ever any country went into a war with clean hands it was the British country today.” His audience - including his wife, five other lords, and five members of parliament - applauded. The British wanted to believe they were blameless, although it begged the question of how long hands could stay clean, literally and metaphorically; if they ever were. If Britain had not chosen war (though strictly speaking, on that Tuesday, August 4, it had), and had been forced into it, shouldn’t the political leaders of so great a country as Britain have done rather better? Or, though it might hurt the national sense of worth, had the continental countries gone ahead with whatever they felt was in their interests, taking no notice of Britain? Because Britain was not as great in Europe as it thought it was? And was the fact that Britain deluded itself, with talk of duty and honour, part of the problem - that neighbours saw through it, and distrusted it?

II

At a distance, you might be short of news, but distance and that very shortage of news could make politics look clearer. Frank Balfour wrote to Irene Lawley on August 28: “One spends much time explaining the war, its causes and possible results to all and sundry - I’ve borrowed an Arabic map of Europe from the local school.” Nearly all the sheikhs took a newspaper - unlike Balfour, who had cancelled his, as he had expected to be in Europe on leave by then. “One of the things that strikes them most is the sinking of the Ulster business (I suppose it has - but I’m rather in the dark.)”

Certainly the war was British politics’ most pressing business of all. Public opinion would not allow anything else as a distraction. Suffragette organisers made the best of it and promised to stop their campaign, before they lost all sympathy. The Unionist and Nationalist sides in Ireland, and their English followers, each promised to support the war. Saying so in parliament was one thing; what they thought in private was another. Rallying against some outside threat did not solve Ireland’s differences. At best, the Liberal Government would - as Lord St Aldwyn gossiped in a letter to his son Mickey on Friday August 21 - put the ‘Irish and the Welsh Bills’ into statute but not make them happen for ‘possibly two years so that the next Parliament would be able to alter or repeal it’. (The ‘Welsh Bill’ by the way was for the disestablishment of the church in Wales, also controversial, though not enough to make anyone do gun-running.) Two years would take it to 1916, and another general election. Either the Liberals would win then, and could start again, or they would lose and the Unionists could have the problem. St Aldwyn quibbled: “But the Irish Bill cannot be settled by mere delay; they will have I think to give up the six counties [of Ulster] or something like it as a result and then it will be a pretty good row if they do not.”

As a former Unionist minister, St Aldwyn was still thinking as a party-politician. So was Lord Milner, who had tried, without much success, earlier in 1914 to set up committees across England against Home Rule. In a dictated letter Milner told an old friend, Philip Lyttelton Gell, on September 3 that he had no sympathy with the ‘present speaking campaign’, whereby Unionist, Liberal and even Labour politicians argued on the same platforms for the war and more recruits. Milner claimed he would like to forgive and forget at a time of national crisis. However Milner used recent history as a reason for not wanting to work with the Government and thus aid the Liberals:

At the time when speaking about the duty of National Service was still of some use because there was time to carry out a scheme of national defence the people who are now so eloquent were all engaged in crabbing and belittling and ridiculing the men who were prepared to face unpopularity in order to speak the truth. I should be prepared to forget all this if the government would even now have the courage to face the situation and adopt a measure of compulsion which is the only possible basis of an adequate military organisation and a great people in the modern world. As long as they themselves shrink from their plain duty in that respect it is detestable hypocrisy for them to appeal to the sense of national duty in others. I wonder how many more lessons we must have before they take the bull by the horns.

Milner preferred to be silent on the most important subject of the time, and leave the political ground to rivals, rather than stand with Liberals who talked of ‘duty’ but had, he felt, done the opposite of duty on Ireland and national defence. Milner, with reason, could claim he was serving his country; he was writing from 47 Duke Street in St James’s - another politician with a central London address - while he let the local Yeomanry use his Kent property, Sturry House. Milner meanwhile was still the party-politician. He claimed that the Liberals could stay in office forever, for all he cared: “...in fact I should like to see them there if only they would do the right thing. It is easy for them. It would be almost impossible for the opposition if it came into power.” Without saying so, Milner was admitting that the Unionists did not have the numbers in parliament to run the country; only the Liberals did. Hence the Liberals were running the war by themselves, and not inviting Unionists to become ministers; because they could. Likewise Milner thought only of the Unionists taking power, not sharing power if the Liberals fell. (Ironically, Milner did become a senior wartime minister under the next, Liberal prime minister, Lloyd George. Before then, much would happen.)

All Milner’s letter was honest party politics, and Milner gave his very honesty as the reason for keeping such views to himself. He told Gell: “I should not like to say these things in public because at a time like this all public recriminations must be avoided but between you and me there is no room for humbug.” By his public silence, however, Milner appeared to accept national humbug.

Chapter 13

Business as usual?

The wag of the regiment, a cockney, who had just been reading in the newspapers that the motto at home was ‘business as usual’, brought out an old biscuit tin which he had put the notice on and turned it towards the Germans as a hint that the men were ready again.

A story of Wiltshire Regiment men in France, from the Bristol Times and Mirror, September 4, 1914

I

“Our children talk much of the war,” George Thorp, the Hull architect, wrote in his diary on August 17,

and Muriel’s ideas as to its strictly just and ethical settlement were very much to the point. ‘Why,’ she indignantly asked, ‘do they send all these poor men to be killed, that have nothing to do with it? Why don’t King George and the Emperor fight it out between them?’ Then she paused: ‘Well, perhaps that wouldn’t be quite fair, because our King is such a little man!’

‘My dear,’ I said to her, ‘your idea would settle all bloodshed for if those who made this dreadful strife had in this and other disputes to fight it out themselves there would be precious little war.’

We have no way of knowing how many felt the same as the childlike Muriel Thorp; then or since. By contrast, there are no end of examples of civilians and soldiers taking to heart the sound idea that you ought to aim to win by marching into the enemy’s capital. A month or two of war would show how unrealistic such ambitions were. In the meantime, ‘À Berlin’ was scrawled on the railway wagons taking the French conscripts to the front. J L Dent, a lieutenant in the 2nd battalion, South Staffordshire Regiment, felt low when the villagers who shouted in French ‘À Berlin!’ as his company marched into Belgium on Sunday August 23, murmured ‘A Londres’ as the men passed again in retreat, the next evening. Harold Cook in Clapham in south London posted a plain postcard around noon on Monday August 10, to tell a friend in Lincolnshire the good news. “I have been accepted today for the RAMC (Regulars) and received my first day’s pay,” he wrote. “I attend at Whitehall tomorrow for instructions. I will write to you from Berlin!!! Kindest regards.” By 1915, Cook, in the medical corps in France, was complaining by letter to his friend of the monotony. In the meantime, whether in all seriousness or with some bravado, ‘Berlin’ was (with exclamation marks) a shorthand way of saying that you were throwing yourself into the fight. Most people settled into the war between the extremes of the girl-pacifist Muriel Thorp, and the likes of Dent of the British Expeditionary Force, who bumped into an army between them and Berlin.

Everyone had to ask, depending on their occupation, and wealth, how war affected them, if at all. Few stood with the socialists, at the best of times; even fewer stood with them against war. Men as different as the later secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain Harry Pollitt (outside a barracks in Manchester) and Labour minister Herbert Morrison (on a Sunday morning on Hampstead Heath) each had meetings broken up by angry patriots. Judging by later memoirs, it seemed that you were nobody in the labour movement unless you were roughed up in August 1914 for telling the workers, in effect, that they were stupid, unless they agreed international war was not their business.

Ironically, some wealthy people took much the same view as the socialists, though the comparison would have insulted them. A common cry in August 1914 was ‘business as usual’. Politicians, for example, had little to do, apart from the ministers who were crushingly busy with the army and navy, or with related matters, such as the railways and press censorship. Asquith adjourned parliament for two weeks on August 10, and MPs went on holiday; Richard Holt went to his family’s usual retreat in Scotland. On his return on August 25, he admitted to his diary that MPs had ‘nothing much doing’ except emergency bills; and most of those in his opinion were not needed; but ‘there is a passion for doing something’.

Donating money - and being seen to donate - was popular, because you could look generous, and newspapers took care to list who gave what. By the end of August the new Prince of Wales’ Fund had £2m. A rare sceptic at this time, the writer Arnold Bennett, noted in the Sheffield Daily Independent on September 1 that some thought the sum marvellous. Compared with how much money people had to spare, and considering that the volunteers were leaving home to fight for the donors, Bennett called the amount ‘miserable’. He dismissed the fund as ‘machinery for enabling the income tax-paying classes to display their patriotism’. Another critic, Sheffield alderman George Senior, suggested a war tax, because while in his opinion aristocrats had ‘nobly done their duty’ by offering money and help, the upper middle class only did what they were made to do: “They are forced to pay rates and income tax; beyond that they do very little.”

This question of how much people ought to give to society towards things for the good of all - roads, an army and navy - dated as far back as Caesar, to the dawn of civilisation, and such things as taxation. War only made the question more urgent.

At least donors had given something - or had said they would. In his August 21 letter to his son, Lord St Aldwyn wrote a postscript: “ ... you and I have to give something to the county war fund - would you think £50 too much? I promised £100 but I have paid nothing yet ...”. St Aldwyn was thinking of only paying half at first: “I might pay £50 for myself and £25 for you if you like when I find out where to pay it to.”

Lord St Aldwyn would hardly miss £100; such a sum was a year or two’s income for a worker. Charity, then, was hardly a fair way of drawing from people. Both the Liberal movement and Unionist aristocrats, however, believed strongly in the proverb of one volunteer being worth ten (or however many) pressed men. As they saw it, free people gave gladly, and would prevail over those told to do something by a kaiser. This cross-party feeling was under threat in the last few years before 1914, from socialists, and from Liberals such as Lloyd George who used the state to take money from some (in national insurance for example) and gave it to others (such as the old-age pension). The state would demand more in a war, from more people, than in peace; and would ask for more still, as the war went on and seemed ever harder to win. Whole towns would boom or bust, without seeing a German; some ports had more work, some less, because in a war against Germany, the enemy assumed by the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) before 1914, North Sea ports could not run as normal, or at all. However, the state would not help those worse off as a result. A sub-committee of the CID, ‘supplies in time of war’, with Richard Holt among the members, said in 1911 that any ‘inequities’ (such as men out of work and starving families) could be left to ‘economic laws’ to put right, as soon as the emergency passed. During the emergency - presumably the days or weeks of change from peace to war - the state had enough to do, without looking for people to help. From the beginning, then, war made for coarser public affairs. If soldiers and sailors were dying, what did your suffering matter? And if you could not help the troops, why not help yourself?

When trade, jobs and food looked uncertain, and charity between classes was not nimble enough, or at all enough, to meet needs, society’s principle of individual responsibility looked like something less moral: every man for himself. All this clashed with those public ideals of duty, and honour - which on the battlefield led to another abstraction: sacrifice.

II

Businesses could hardly carry on ‘business as usual’, if what had been their markets, or source of materials, were now enemy territory. Even in Sudan, Frank Balfour soon noticed that almost half the country’s peacetime exports were gum, ‘mostly taken by Germany’. As crippling, though more subtle, was the shaken confidence of businessmen; irrational, maybe, yet all the harder to put right. In mid-August the Hull architect George Thorp visited relations: “Auntie not well,” he wrote. “Uncle pessimistic”:

... was thinking an army of million men would be very useful in England to keep out the Germans, apparently thinks our fleet insufficient for the purpose, has discharged one of his assistants and cancelled his order for bulbs from Holland and yet had to confess that trade was normal and that they had to work very hard to keep up with the demand. To cheer him up told him a little story - a true one - the story had reference to the trenches being dug at Sutton - a resident there had one dug right across his lawn and flower beds; when he returned in the evening, his wife said to him, ‘oh! Those poor men have been working so hard today, they looked so tired and dirty, so I had them in and made them a good tea!’

The trenches Thorp spoke of were between Hull and the sea, between the villages of Paull and Sutton. These precautions (also haystacks moved, and farm buildings pulled down, if they were in the way of these hurried defences) only fed the fear of invasion - last felt, as Thorp noted, in 1805, when the feared invader was Napoleon. Thorp’s uncle, and many others, could not handle the unfamiliar sights, losses and unknowns of war: the commandeering of horses as mounts for officers and cavalrymen, and to pull wagons; and the ‘streets full of soldiers’, leaving as mysteriously as they marched in. Without confidence, businesses put up their prices not only because they could, but to hoard what they could, in case of even worse times, like any squirrel at the first sniff of autumn.

Given the trade troubles - holiday towns with cancelled bookings, hotels having to lay off staff and disappoint suppliers, who then could not pay their bills; and so on - you could understand the likes of Sophia Langmail, of Cardiff, who in a letter to the Bristol Times on September 2 asked: ‘holiday or no holiday?’ She reckoned that duty (that word again) for her and others like her lay ‘in going forth fearlessly to the seaside or country apartments and in circulating our money as freely as possible in every legitimate way’. Even if well meant, she - like others - could be accused of making an excuse for doing what she was going to do anyway. It was suspicious that everyone found a good reason for carrying on whatever suited them. The Newmarket Journal for instance in its August 22 edition welcomed racing as usual at the town, in September:

... it must not be forgotten that a great number of people are dependent for their livelihood upon racing and that the abandonment of race meetings would tend to produce unemployment and distress which would add to the economic difficulties which our country has to face.

By contrast, Lord Derby, for one, asked the unmarried men in his Newmarket stable to volunteer for the army. If they did, they were promised their job after the war. If the army would not take them, they could keep their job. If they would not volunteer, they were out of a job. Not surprisingly, nearly all the men so asked ‘volunteered’ for the army. Other landowners with servants did likewise. Lord St Aldwyn wrote to his son on September 1: “I have told the footman and the young men in the garden here that they must enlist and that I cannot keep them on unless they are rejected and I hear that three gardeners have been sent away from Hatherop,” the next village.

By the end of August, then, the lords, as the leaders of society in the countryside and market towns at least, were, in St Aldwyn’s words, ‘getting excited’ about recruiting. In fairness, the sons of these lords, like St Aldwyn’s, were in uniform; the first were dead already.

III

Gentlemen were coming together for war, men who already knew one another through family ties, service in local government, fox hunts, and as Territorials - soldering and hunting often asked for the same skills. Francis Meynell of Hoar Cross Hall in Staffordshire was a lieutenant in one of the county’s Royal Field Artillery batteries, which after coming together at Burton-on-Trent moved south. A fellow officer was Viscount Sandon. On August 29 - the day Gerald Legge was told to report to the depot of the South Staffordshire Regiment at Lichfield - Meynell wrote to his mother, on his usual headed notepaper, except that he crossed ‘Hoar Cross’ out and wrote ‘Stopsley’, near Luton, instead. By stages, the called-up Territorials were leaving home behind.

“You will have heard that Hoar Cross is waking up and that ten men are joining the Army,” Meynell wrote. “I expect more will come by degrees; one must not expect them to think as quickly as those in the town.” In fairness to men of the countryside, they might not have thought of the army because they were too busy bringing the harvest in, the most important work of the farming year. Some labourers may have been bound by contract, as apprentices were in towns. Farms could be short of harvest labour, at the best of times: J C White, the Somerset cricketer, had to stay on his farm at Stogumber, near Taunton, when Somerset hosted Yorkshire during Weston super Mare’s ‘week’ of county cricket at the end of August. ‘Farmer’ White lived only 20 miles from Weston, almost in sight (except that he was on the other side of the Quantocks); he could not spare even the two days for the game, because some of his men were ‘at the war’. As the cricket season was ending, cricketers could avoid any criticism of them, as could spectators - 2000 watched at Weston. George Thorp of Hull kept going to the nearby Kirkella cricket club each Saturday afternoon, where his brother played: “It seems rather anomalous to watch and play while such stupendous and tragic events are impending and happening in a near and friendly country,” he admitted in his diary after the last but one game on August 22. It did not feel odd enough, however, to stop him going. As cricket ended, the football season started; professional clubs made the excuse that their players were under contract, and meanwhile went on taking money at the gate, from workers who did not go to war.

Hypocrisy was never far away in England in August 1914. One rule allowed ‘business as usual’, and another insisted that an employee went to war. Families could go on holiday, Lord Derby could race his horses at Newmarket; but young men could not go to the pictures, or play or watch sport, without someone resenting it, and saying so. Britain was dividing in two, between young and old: those fit to go to war, and those that could not.

Women, the too old, and the too young, could not enlist. If you were an Englishman aged 19 to 35, of five feet three inches or higher, of 34 inch chest or wider, and with good enough eyesight, teeth and everything else, Lord Kitchener wanted you in his army. Your country needed you.

Chapter 14

Recruiting

I can understand a man opposing a war, but I cannot understand his waging a war with half a heart.

David Lloyd George from The Prime Minister by Harold Spender (1920)

I

Colonel Chichester, and all the other speakers at recruitment meetings, made the army sound so attractive. The colonel, 30 years a soldier, speaking in the open air at Godmanchester in Huntingdonshire, said that the pay after stoppages was ‘a clear six shillings and sixpence a week’. What were the disadvantages? He answered his own question. ‘There are none,’ he said, to applause. Perhaps the audience did not notice, or out of politeness pretended not to notice, that the soldier’s pay was about a third of a working man’s. Then Chichester admitted there was one disadvantage: your job might not be open when you came back. Chichester hoped it would be; and anyway, “would find plenty of work in the country to fill up gaps of the many poor fellows who might not return”.

Was that not a disadvantage that Chichester had forgotten; you might get killed? If soldiering was as good as he reckoned, why was he and hundreds of other speakers trying so hard and often from the end of August to drum up recruits?

II

Judging public opinion is hard. A man’s opinion could change. If you disagreed with something that someone powerful said, it was safest to keep quiet. Some men did respond to the recruiting appeals; 20 young men handed in their names that Monday evening, September 7, at Godmanchester. The meeting may have swayed them; they may have had half a mind already, else why did they attend? What of all the men that did not attend? As with the crowds at the outbreak of war in capital cities, supposedly enthusiastic for war, most people showed what they thought of recruiting by not being there. Some saw this, and deplored it. The local Huntingdonshire landowner, Lord Sandwich, early in September called the indifference in the villages of his county ‘simply appalling’. Sandwich, so high in the social order that few would stand up to him, had a habit of making extreme statements; at a July public meeting about Home Rule for instance, he had spoken of his ‘contempt’ for Liberals. He seemed to expect people who did not have the time or energy to follow world affairs, to feel as strongly as him.

Some men volunteered because Sandwich and other lords had men in their power, literally or morally, and could tell them what to do. What of the rest? Depending on the standing of the man calling for recruits, his practice as a public speaker, and how subtle and strong was the pressure he could put on listeners, appeals had effects. Some volunteers would have gone willingly; some grudgingly, like a shop boy doing some thankless task after the doors shut for the night, or a wife running an errand for an ungrateful in-law. You ‘volunteered’, or else you got the sack, or a mouthful or worse from your husband later. Once a man gave his name, it did not matter why he did it: whether he cared about Belgium, fancied a change from small-town routine, or felt so niggled by the looks and remarks of workmates and neighbours that it was easier to give in. The recruiters had their man.

That said, cynicism can be a trap we can fall into, just as we might feel that the volunteers of August 1914 fell for speeches that meant nothing on the battlefield. It was true that the men giving the speeches never seemed to be the ones that did any fighting. However, the ones making the appeals, and the ones answering, might have enjoyed being part of a cause greater than any of them; greater than their understanding, even. Colchester-Wemyss, the chairman of Gloucestershire County Council, devoted one of his regular letters to the King of Siam to ‘the wave of enthusiasm’. Shrewdly, Colchester-Wemyss suggested pride in the war so far was one reason; the more any country fought, the more invested in lives and effort, the more everyone would want to make it worthwhile. The more men enlisted, the more men left behind would feel the tug of brothers, workmates or others they knew. We forget how novel and thrilling Kitchener’s appeal for 100,000 (and then another 300,000) men was. Whereas young men usually had to scrap for anything - a job, a sweetheart, a promotion, a place in the first eleven - the army was asking for them! All they had to do was accept! To refuse such an offer would take some opposing inner spirit - whether of socialist pacifism, working-class solidarity, or wife or parents begging you to stay at home.

On Tuesday September 1, Colchester-Wemyss wrote that a thousand men had enrolled in Gloucester since Saturday. “Let me give you a small personal experience.”

I am chairman of the Stroud brewery company and yesterday afternoon I invited all the men, about 90, together to one of the stores and listen to me for half an hour; they came most of them in their shirt sleeves straight from work and I soon found I had struck oil and in ten minutes I had worked them and myself to a great urge of enthusiasm; I never felt nothing quite like it before, a sort of messianic influence seemed to pass through the whole of us and the result was that at the end of the meeting 29 men literally rushed forward and gave their names ...

What Colchester-Wemyss found more remarkable was that more than half of the 29 volunteers were married, “and their wives seem quite ready that they are going”. Did it not seem to occur to Colchester-Wemyss - a widower, with a son in the army in India - that some men might have volunteered, to get away from their wives? Or that some wives would be glad to see the back of their husband? While the phrase ‘struck oil’ suggested an element of commerce - only the trade was in men, not goods - the ‘enthusiasm’ had much in common with religious preaching. Generally, more people went to churches after war broke out; but not every day, or everywhere. The Rev Denys Yonge wrote of large congregations in his Essex village, of 30 or 40; Robert Ramsey, the London solicitor, went to a special service of intercession at St Paul’s, just after the declaration of war, and found ‘the body of the cathedral was crowded’. They sang Rock of Ages and, after prayers, the national anthem. Ramsey wrote: “Voices seemed to pause slightly before the last line,” namely, ‘God save the king’, “and gather tremendous force on the last line in a magnificently solemn and thrilling effect.” Not for the last time in August 1914, the act of singing, and the beauty of the created sound, were comforts.

You suspect, however, that people still felt too shy to go inside a church or chapel building; for once you went in, you were at someone else’s mercy. It’s telling that a big religious success was the 10,000 people gathered on Sunday August 23 for afternoon and evening services in a Northampton park, arranged by the town’s chapels before the war. William Thomas Pickbourne the diarist (and regular grumbler about small congregations) went to the open-air event after he took an afternoon service, “and amid an awestruck and most serious crowd listened, some grand singing and a most inspiring address from Mr J H Saxton,” who was a Primitive Methodist. We have to take Pickbourne’s word for it that the day was a ‘great intercessory gathering’, in other words a plea to God through prayer, and not a Methodist recruiting drive, or merely the best entertainment in Northampton on an otherwise sleepy sabbath.

Similarly, we can only sense what everyone had in mind when Robert Thornewill ‘summoned’ workmen at his engineering works in Burton-on-Trent on September 1. “We are all considering what we can do in this terrible war,” he told them. “We are all anxious to help our country, and must each do so in our own way.” And in our own time, he might have added, as he had summoned them in their dinner hour. Thornewill’s way of helping his country was to tell the men, ‘the youth and manhood of this great nation’, to attend a recruiting meeting at the town hall. “I leave it in your hands ... consider how you can serve your country best in your hour of trial.” The meeting closed with three cheers for the king - like singing, a significant way of binding everyone to whatever the gathering was about. If Thornewill said how he was helping the country - by making profits from selling metal goods? - the Burton Gazette did not report it. Thornewill could order his men to hear him, and lay hints as heavy as he liked, but he could not make the men do anything. That he had to resort to the meeting showed that his workmen were happy as they were. Was Thornewill’s speech merely his way of doing his bit? Did he truly want many of his men to enlist - because how would he stay in business then? Again, if he promised to keep jobs open for the volunteers, the newspaper did not report it. Nor did the report give any clue to the men’s reaction. Maybe they did not say anything. After a speech like Thornewill’s, silence would be as loud, and as defiant, a reply as any.

III

Silence, or indifference, seldom makes news. As the last resort of the powerless, it seldom leaves a trace. Yet it deserves a history.

For all the thousands of words he wrote in his diaries, William Swift, the Churchdown old schoolmaster, did not give much away about his opinions. When he came home on the train from a morning’s shopping in Gloucester at the end of July, and was in the same compartment as a man he knew ‘full of socialistic views’, he did not say if he approved of socialism or not. A rare clue to Swift’s thinking came on August 11, after evensong - ‘four there’ - when the vicar told him of one of the three Gregorys in the village who went to war. His employer gave him seven shillings and sixpence as his wages owing. “He came home, took a farewell of his wife and youngsters, giving six and six of the seven and six to his wife and merely took one shilling and departed. Something pathetic about that,” Swift wrote.

Three weeks later, the vicar took evensong early so he could attend the village’s recruiting meeting. “I did not attend the meeting, nor Harry, read instead,” Swift added. Harry, Swift’s youngest son, a single carpenter and joiner in his late 30s, who painted in his spare time, still lived at home. Swift did care about the war; he followed it in the newspapers from the end of July; on August 21 he copied into his diary a list of all 48 Churchdown men serving in the forces; and he did not sleep much on the night of August 30, ‘thinking about our country’s threatened disaster’, after the vicar had told him the British army was surrounded ‘and nothing but a miracle can save them’. That left Swift ‘instantly depressed’, though the more cheerful news in the next day’s Daily Mail reassured him. Still, Swift chose not to go to that week’s recruiting meeting. Was it an act of resistance? Did Swift simply feel too old for such business? The best guess might be that Swift felt too much for men he knew and had taught. On Saturday September 5, Ernest, his eldest son Reginald’s eldest, visited to pick apples. “He has joined as a recruit to the forces and leaves on Monday. I could not help being affected at this,” he wrote.

As the appeals for recruits became ever more urgent - because it dawned on the authorities that not enough men were coming forward - dissent seldom went public (assuming it was allowed a hearing). Rather, men dug in. After all, before August they never dreamt of giving up their jobs and families to shoot foreigners and get shot at, and they did not want to start now. The ones making all the noise were not the Swifts of this world, who stayed at home, but the busy-bodies, who leapt at the chance to tell other people what to do. When Colonel Chichester told the Godmanchester meeting there were no disadvantages to volunteering, he more truly might have said there were no disadvantages to telling men to volunteer. Take the bad and thankfully forgotten poetry of the day, such as a widely reprinted poem of early September by Harold Begbie. It had lines such as:

Is it football still and the picture show and the betting odds, when your brothers stand to the tyrant’s blow and England’s call is God’s,

which at least tells us something about what was popular with young men. Every possible guilt was piled on men: they were lazy while their fellow men were fighting for good (and God), and ‘if you sonny don’t fall in, girls would cut you dead’. If you had a wife, your children would ask what you did ‘in the war that kept men free’, and burden you with more shame.

Would that really happen? Wouldn’t women in fact be more glad to be with you, because fewer men were around? Would your children care in the least about a past war? Surely they would mind more if you were dead in Belgium. And as for keeping men free, if you were scratching a living down a mine or in a factory, breaking your back, black with dirt, did you feel that free? Where there was strength in numbers, as on coalfields, resisters to the calls for volunteers felt confident enough to air their disagreement in public. In a significant exchange of letters in early September in the Cannock Advertiser, a weekly covering a coal-mining part of Staffordshire, first an anonymous old soldier wished for a local branch of the ‘white feather brigade’. He mocked young men, three or four in some families, he said, who were ‘staying at home to keep mother’. The next week a Heath Hayes man called George Higgins mocked the old soldier back, saying he ‘wears petticoats’ - that is, wanted women to do his work. Evidently already women were handing ‘white feathers’ to men who they thought ought to be in uniform, seeking to shame them, by implying they were cowards. In Cannock at least, only the opponent of the ‘white feather brigade’ had the self-confidence to give his name.

That was how the ‘white feather brigade’ worked - they took it upon themselves to judge others, while they didn’t have the courage to say who they were or to ask a man to explain himself - as he may have had reasons for not wearing a uniform. Miles Thomas, who went on to a distinguished business career, and indeed served his country well in both world wars, recalled in his autobiography how his Birmingham employer was happy that he stayed at work, making munitions; he had volunteered for a defence unit; and at 17 was too young for the army anyway. One evening on the corner of New Street and Hill Street in the city centre, ‘a giggling chit of a girl’ handed him a white feather:

The back of my neck and the whole of my face blushed scarlet as I hurriedly stuffed the beastly thing in my pocket. I was shocked beyond measure. I suddenly didn’t want anyone to see me ...

Thomas walked to his digs ‘burning with an anger that was fringed with shame’ and soon left the city to become an armoured car driver. The white feather worked. What was the motive of that woman handing it out? A wish to help her country? Indignation that her love had gone, and not others? A bit of mischief? Or malice? Did women join the ‘white feather brigade’ for the same reason men volunteered for the war, and people crowded on seaside beaches each August - they wanted above all to do something right, because what everyone else was saying, or doing, had to be right? How can we explain Thomas’ reaction - why did the silent accusation by a stranger cut him so? He felt he could not face society; even though he was the victim of a random, unjust, prank (did the girl hand out many others, or did the fun soon wear off?); and even though joining the army would make his mother cry. For the symbol of the feather to work, it did require Thomas to have a sense of shame, stirred by a woman.

Not everyone approved of such a trick. Early in September the Harrow Observer columnist ‘Socrates’ deplored anonymous postcards with words pasted out of newspapers, urging the ‘loafers of England’ to ‘for God’s sake play the man’, and volunteer. Evidently two men (who had volunteered) sent their hate-mail to Socrates. Presumably the postcard-paster knew the men to send cards to, but felt unable to talk to them; or maybe he did, but felt he had to blackmail them as well. Interestingly Socrates throughout August wrote conventionally, describing the war as a test for the nation, urging young men not to be ‘idling about’, and so on. According to Socrates, men ought to know the proper thing to do, without nasty cards through the post.

The fact was, many men, maybe most, could not work out for themselves what was proper. Nothing in their lives told them how to react to a continental war. The men of affairs - the politicians of all main parties, the lords and generals - knew Britain faced a crisis. The rest had to be won over, whether by conviction, argument, the pressure of the herd, or most likely some of each. If you were inside Sheffield Artillery Drill Hall, for example, on Tuesday night, September 8, packed to hear Lord Charles Beresford, you were halfway to the army already. You were singing, over and over, songs popular with the troops such as It’s A Long Way to Tipperary. The band of the local regiment, the Hallamshires, played patriotic tunes (shouldn’t they have been at the war?). Listening to Beresford - in his khaki uniform - in such an intoxicating setting, the crowd around you clapping everything, it would take some gumption to spot Beresford’s outright lies (he reckoned the authorities were running the war with ‘faultless organisation’). As he came from near the centre of power in London - nearer than you ever were, at any rate - you had to take what he said on trust: those commanding the fleet were known to him. They could not be bettered; “Germany would be beaten and justly beaten but we must have men,” and he appealed to the nuts, dandies and athletes.

If you believed Beresford, the men at the top were setting an example; the young, fashionable and sporty types ought to follow, and think of someone other than themselves for a change. In fairness to Beresford, if you listened closely, he did spell out what war would mean. They had to fight to the end, he said, whatever the sacrifice. And how much sacrifice? Beresford said the Empire was inexhaustible in men and almost inexhaustible in riches. “If we had time to do it the British Empire could put almost 20 million men into the field.” Would victory over Germany, a country with more men than England, take 20 million? As Beresford was insisting on a fight to the end, would one side win only when the other - Germany, or England - exhausted its riches, in wealth, and men?

Cleverly the organisers did not give you chance to dwell on any questions; they made it easy for you to volunteer while you were still under the influence of the meeting. Buses waited outside to take you to the recruiting halls. Beresford turned up there, recruiting still, in what the Sheffield Daily Independent the next day called ‘his usual breezy style’. Beresford told the men: “I like the look of you, and am glad indeed to see so many of you, but when the enemy see you they won’t like the look of you. Every man jack in the country will be proud of you.”

Chapter 15

United?

England, said Henry VIII in words echoed by Shakespeare in King John, can never be conquered so long as it remained united.

Wolsey, by A F Pollard, 1953 edition

I

Beresford did good work that night in Sheffield: 125 men took the oath, and who could say how many more thought harder about volunteering afterwards? The thousands in the meeting who were too old, or too female to join the army, would add to the climate of opinion that men who could go, should go. As Beresford, the ‘white feather brigade’ and their followers took care to impress on everyone, right was on their side, even if it meant sacrifice.

Of all Beresford’s remarks, the most relaxed ones - and therefore most significant - came after the proper meeting, in the more intimate setting of the recruitment hall. As the men there had heeded him, he no longer had to win them over; he only had to wish them good luck. Every man in the country will be proud of you, Beresford told them. How did he know? Beresford and his kind, based in London and dashing from meeting to meeting, had no way to gauge public opinion. It merely suited them to claim that the country was united. If it was, why did only 125 men come forward that night? Surely that meant most of the men had gone home ignoring him, at least for the time being, or had not turned up at all? And if the country was so keen to fight, why were Beresford and others like him having to convince people to volunteer?

II

The recruitment rallies began one month after Britain began the war, not because recruitment was flagging, but because that was as fast as politics could go. News reached people weekly, at most daily in papers; at best a town or city paper would bring out several editions over several hours as the very latest news came in. Meetings would come together, speakers and venues arranged, by letters through the post, at the very fastest fixed over the telephone or by telegram. News of such meetings, again, would reach people through the papers, or on posters. Labour and trade union speakers, if ignored by unfriendly newspapers, might have to advertise their gatherings by chalk, on pavements. Word of mouth would take over. Likewise, newspaper buyers passed their paper to a neighbour or workmate. Newspapers reached many more readers than copies sold; but far from everyone, all the time.

Robert Blakeby for instance, the London draper’s employee, according to his diary like many people heard about the ‘threatened European war’ by buying a newspaper. On July 29 he wrote: “Mr Burgess (advert department) said he would give me his Daily News and Leader every night instead of throwing it away.” For the first time on August 13, walking after work to his mother’s to eat dinner, Blakeby ‘read Selfridges war news on the way’, evidently displayed in the Oxford Street department store’s windows to draw customers. While on a week-and-a-half’s holiday at the end of August Blakeby bought his own newspaper, and on August 31 - the day he went by train to Skegness and back - he bought two. Besides learning the news, the act of reading a newspaper gave readers a shared experience. Meetings, as in peacetime, were the way men of power explained the news without the newspaper’s slant, and gave their own message, whether party-political or religious. Beresford and the rest were making the first effort of wartime to tell people what they should do.

Some, speakers and listeners alike, welcomed the unity that war brought, as a contrast from the conflicts of peacetime. At a meeting in Stafford on Monday August 31, Lord Dartmouth said what others did on other stages. “They did not,” he said, according to the Stafford Newsletter, “forget that six weeks ago we were at each other’s throats over questions of politics; there was no party now. There were no classes now. Today we were all Britons united in a common cause to face a common danger.” As at many meetings, songs were a way of binding people. At Stafford, the meeting began with the national anthem, and then the anthem of their French allies, the Marseillaise, ‘which was not a success’ as the Newsletter put it politely.

Assuming Dartmouth was correct, the change over six weeks from national conflict to unity came in stages. Before any thought of war, the trade union leader Ben Tillett could dismiss talk of war as imperialism, the work of the army and navy and their cheer-leaders, with nothing in it for the workers. Tillett told a meeting in Walsall in June: “If the working man had any sense at all, he would be only too glad to see the Germans invade their country.” Once war came, the likes of Tillett had to change their tune, shut up, or face being called a friend of the enemy. Because as the Hull MP Sir Mark Sykes put it in a letter dated (probably) Thursday July 30 - the night he set off from London to command his Yorkshire battalion on exercise in north Wales - “this has put an entirely new complexion on affairs”:

the Nationalists are behaving vilely and also the Radicals and Labour Party - the Nationalists boast that they will not have a united front without Home Rule on the statute book - in this they are very foolish - I believe the Ulster volunteers will volunteer to serve us - this should smash the Irish because they are avowedly against us now - if it comes to war, the Government have got to face coalition with us, as the extremists intend to vote against them, all this if it comes out will tend to help us toward National solidarity.

Sir Mark was thinking of uniting with the Liberals, but judging by his tone, only Liberals who thought like him; he did not feel as welcoming towards socialists, Irish nationalists or peace-preferring Liberals (‘Radicals’). Once Germany invaded Belgium, and Britain went to war, men who had sincerely stood against war had second thoughts. The trade unionist and Labour MP for Derby, J H (Jimmy) Thomas, by September was sitting on the same platform as his political and social opposite, the Duke of Devonshire, lord lieutenant of Derbyshire. As Thomas said at the time, and in his end of career memoir (a point worth making, because public figures are not always as consistent), the war was not a question of political parties, nor between capitalists (who made workers do all the killing); the war was between nations, and between, so Thomas insisted, ‘might and right’. Thomas still took care to defend his own kind; he asked that employers look after workers, so that volunteers for the army could look after their families.

The socialist Robin Page Arnot, in London again in August, had few visitors at the Fabian Research Department off The Strand, after he, other Fabians and socialists debated the end of capitalism in the Lake District. According to him, first the war bewildered people, then caught them in what he called a ‘patriotic wave’: “and most of them were to be swept into the torrent”. Labour politicians J H Thomas and Arthur Henderson, who spoke up for the war, were scorned by purists like Arnot, as somehow weak enough to be caught by the ‘tide’ of feeling for war. It’s at least as fair to say that Thomas and Henderson were sticking up (as best they could) for their country, and against the older enemy - capitalists at home or abroad who wanted to screw more out of workers for less. The likes of J H Thomas were already having to defend the principle of voluntary service against the imperialists, who even before the war had wanted conscription (like Germany, which nearly everyone agreed was so wicked). Forcing men to join the army, and knuckle under generally, would mean even less power for working men. In short, wartime Britain had the same divides, whichever way you described it, between rich and poor; capitalist and wage-earner; educated white-collar and ignorant and dirty (or no) collar. Some did believe in unity, and found it remarkable; such as M W Colchester-Wemyss, chairman of Gloucestershire county council, who (in a fine example of local government) set up a general committee. He wrote to the King of Siam about its first meeting on August 19:

All sorts and conditions of men and women were there, all distinctions of class or politics or religion were forgotten. One moment I would be talking to a duke, the next perhaps to a trade union leader then perhaps to the wife of an earl and directly afterwards to the daughter of a butcher then to the bishop of the diocese, a minute afterwards to a nonconformist minister but with one and all the case was the same; all differences of class religion and politics were forgotten ... and they did me the compliment of accepting almost without alteration the scheme I had prepared.

Colchester-Wemyss had the usual charitable and sometimes vague ideas, such as women to make garments for the troops; and do-gooders in each district to care for the wounded and to help soldiers’ families in distress. Without doubting that Colchester-Wemyss meant well, as did the 180 people he invited (and nearly all turned up): after they left the room, was anything different? The war had given the country a common enemy. That did not mean that anyone felt more like trusting men of other parties and opposing interests who (as Dartmouth and others admitted) had been ‘at each other’s throats’. Men did not suddenly change character; or if they did, goodwill could wane. It’s telling that even at the very start of the war, when you might have expected fellow-feeling to be strongest, few spoke like the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star did on August 7: “This is a People’s War,” its editorial ended. Few people said it, because few believed it. Britain was no more ‘one people at war, all pulling together’, than it had ever been in peacetime.

III

Besides, the war divided Britain in new ways, showing people as the good and bad characters they were. We have already met the Conservative MP Lord Charles Beresford who loved the sound of his own voice. He went too far in the hall of the Carlton Club on the Thursday evening, August 27, in the hearing of several members; we know because one of them, the Conservative MP Arthur Lee, told on him.

Winston Churchill sent a letter to Beresford on August 30 that he had heard Beresford was in the habit of talking ‘in a rash and loose way about the First Sea Lord’, Prince Louis Battenberg. Churchill, as the politician in charge at the Admiralty, made this his business. The prince was a lifelong Royal Navy man; he married a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. King George V likewise was a grandson of Victoria, who had married Prince Albert, a German; Battenberg, too, had come from Germany. In short, when Beresford said (as Lee insisted he did) that all Germans should leave the country, including highly placed ones, and Prince Louis ought to resign, Beresford had to watch out: it might have sounded like a threat to the king.

Beresford understood the danger he was in, and like the bully he was, or because he sensed attack was the best form of defence, he went after the tell-tale, not the more powerful minister. Lee wrote to Churchill on the Saturday, August 29, from his weekend home in the Chilterns, Chequers Court: “I have just been called up on the telephone by Beresford who has assailed me with a torrent of violent abuse in consequence of a letter which he says he has received from you.” Lee was not the first or the last to learn how thankless it is to be a snitch. Beresford, according to Lee, called the report ‘a malicious libel and a foul untruth’; in other words, Beresford was threatening Lee.

The ins and outs we have to guess, because in his letter of August 30 Churchill said he considered the incident closed. Churchill had warned Beresford to watch his mouth; the only man left unhappy was Lee. In another letter to Churchill, from his Mayfair address on Monday August 31, Lee noted that Beresford was also complaining,

however absurdly, that I had violated club law or the decencies of social intercourse by repeating a private conversation. It takes some time for even the most sensible people to realise what being at war means and they are apt to cling to social shibboleths even when the enemy is at the gates!

Beresford had made another stab at Lee, accusing him of ‘ungentlemanlike conduct’. Certainly Lee felt threatened, because he begged Churchill for the Admiralty’s protection, by adding his name ‘even in the most honorary capacity of any one of the numerous committees that you must have at work’. While Churchill had a war to run, and Beresford was the one going after Lee for crossing him, you have to fault Churchill - like so many in authority - for not looking after a well-meaning man who blew the whistle on a wrong-doer. What had Beresford said, exactly? According to Lee, Beresford said: “Feeling is very strong in the service about his being First Sea Lord, it is strongly resented.” When Lee had expressed surprise, Beresford had added: “I am entitled to speak for the service, I know the opinion of my brother officers on the subject. It is very strong. If things went badly at sea, as they may, there would be a howl in the country and the mob would attack Prince Louis’ house and break his windows.”

Was Beresford only repeating what others thought - which was not the same, or as bad, as giving it as his own opinion? As with any loudmouth, or a criminal, if they are caught once, you always have the suspicion they are doing the same thing, or worse, many other times without being caught. This story shows the unwritten rule that men of affairs could say one thing in their members’ clubs, and suppress it or deny it, and say another thing in public. (Surely Beresford’s threat of libel was a bluff; would he want any of it aired in court?)

Quite likely Beresford felt jealous that he did not have an Admiralty job. If he was losing his temper so early in the war, what would he and his kind be like, once things went badly?

IV

Working people were used to things - life in general - going against them. They had their own agreed ways to make themselves feel better. They sang; and nothing serious or uplifting such as the national anthem. When 74 reservists left Gresley in south Derbyshire on Thursday August 6, to march their first ten miles to Derby, they sang such popular (and risqué?) songs as ‘Hello, hello, who’s your lady friend’ and ‘Everybody’s doing it’. When someone shouted, ‘shall we be beaten?’ they roared, ‘no!’.

The more common cry and answering shout, as made by the men in the motor buses taking them from Beresford’s meeting at Sheffield to the recruiting halls, was ‘are we down-hearted?’ and ‘no!’. Men, even from different factories or neighbourhoods, plainly knew it and responded to it. As the first half of the phrase admitted, you might feel down-hearted, on the football field, at work or on strike, or leaving home for war. The group denial, the united voice, gave the individual new strength to carry on; or at least made it harder for him then to give up. Here, among the soldiers and sailors, was a sort of unity, a rapidly deepening comradeship against a common danger. While (if only the soldiers knew it) Beresford ranted against the First Sea Lord (behind his back) and gave a deceitful speech a few days later, the soldiers and sailors were risking their lives. Not that Beresford cared about the men; he only spoke of ‘things’ going badly at sea. When Beresford repeated in speeches that the country was united, behind the soldiers, he was profoundly wrong. Simply by joining the fight, by going abroad, the volunteers separated themselves from the rest of the country and went through experiences that the civilians left behind could not go through, and maybe would even not want to know about. This lack of sympathy for the fighting men began early, at or even before recruitment. Across the country - in Manchester, Sheffield, Derby, though some places reported it more than others - men had to queue for hours to enlist. They had to give up, exhausted, or miss meals, or go back to work because they had taken time off. (And remember, the ‘white feather brigade’ was on the streets!)

It did not make sense; why did it take so long - too few doctors to test recruits, was one excuse - to join the army, while the newspapers were demanding volunteers? The army and government had not expected to have to recruit such a big army; the authorities had enough of a job looking after the British Expeditionary Force. More sinisterly, the army evidently took the attitude that anything was good enough for recruits. They wanted to join? They could wait; they had to learn to do as they were told in the army, anyway. If the army had so little regard for men even as they queued to volunteer, what would it be like on the battlefield?

Chapter 16

Food and other secrets

Who doubts that if we all did our duty as faithfully as the soldier does his, the world would be a better place?

Charles Dickens as The Uncommercial Traveller, in All The Year Round, April 21, 1860

I

The war knocked on Thomas Pickbourne’s door on August 28.

A billeting officer came around on Friday and asked us how many we could do with. My good wife remembering she has a son who is a Territorial said we could do four. Accordingly four was chalked up on our door. They came yesterday (Sunday!) and with them many more, 36 in all. Just at tea time, about 430, we were roused from our teas by the tramp, tramp of a number of soldiers going down the street. They passed our door and we thought they had gone elsewhere but at the bottom they turned sharply and came back halting just outside our door! An officer stepped forward and presented a note to me signed by Captain Hazeldine asking that we should prepare a meal consisting of meat potatoes etc and tea for the whole of them (36) at 7 o’clock! We were astounded and Mrs P almost collapsed. But one soldier brought us a huge joint of meat, another brought potatoes in, another two tea and sugar and dumped them down on our little scullery! The officer in charge apologised for the trouble he was causing us and they decamped promising to return for 7 to 7.30!

So many exclamation marks show how Pickbourne was torn many ways: between Christian charity, respect for authority, and outrage at having his day of rest (and not someone else’s) upset. His wife Kate had the grace to see that these young men were someone’s sons, and their son Frank (in camp at Derby race course, then Houghton Regis near Dunstable) might be glad of a good deed by someone like them. The fact was, however, that the Pickbournes had three hours to prepare a meal for 36.

Well there was nothing for it but to make the best of it. And so with the help of Mrs Swann next door and a young fellow who said he was to help us cook we set to work. I took off my coat and commenced cutting slices from the huge piece of beef and mamma cut up some onions. Wilfred and the ‘cook’ cut up potatoes. Mrs Swann took some meat to cook in her kitchen and so we were all at it. Am glad to say we got the whole thing cooked lovely for 715 and about 730 the soldier lads trooped down the street, stood outside our door in single file, came in one by one to receive their ration of meat, potatoes and tea till all were served. And this was on Sunday! Such an experience we have never had and do not want repeating. Still we felt a certain pleasure in doing it. For were we not helping our soldier lads who are going if need be to lay down their lives to defend us. Most of them are from Carlisle and Cumberland.

The Cumbrians were fed in that Northamptonshire village of Upton that Sunday evening not because the whole country was united behind the troops. As it happened, Pickbourne knew Cumberland; he had visited the small town of Brampton only in July, to preach as a guest of his former Methodist minister, Henry Scott. The meal was possible because all classes were used to preparing and eating the same few basic ingredients, cooked or cold. Food had to be cheap, easy to prepare and carry, and had to fit you for heavy work or exercise. An unnamed horseman in the Leicestershire Yeomanry, living in a field at Diss in Norfolk by early September, wrote that he ate ‘bread and bacon for breakfast, stew for dinner, and bread and jam for tea, and my word, we can eat it!’. Then as now, such simple food suited masses of people. It was good enough then for the well-off, too: vicar’s daughter and diarist Dorothy Wright and her mother ate bread and cheese on a moors walk from Whitby during their Easter 1914 holiday.

Of all the diary-keepers of 1914, William Swift in Churchdown went into most detail about his meals, perhaps because food was relatively more important in the old man’s life, or because as a widower he did his own cooking, unless his neighbour Mrs Phelps ‘sent in’ a meal. Swift recorded an apple tart from her for Sunday lunch on August 9. Swift had to leave the morning church service early, ‘during the singing of the Benedictus as in Harry’s absence there was no dinner unless I cooked it and which I had to do’. On August 12, Mrs Phelps sent ‘R Mutt, cabb, potatoes, apple tart’. The next meal Swift described from Mrs Phelps a week later was the same, mutton with vegetables, apart from ‘K beans’ for cabbage. On one of Mrs Phelps’ ‘off days’, Swift cooked nearly the same for himself: potatoes, tomatoes and bacon; the apple tart he had for afters may have been a piece of Mrs Phelps’. The diet may have been healthy, but heavy and unvaried. On a visit to Cheltenham on August 20 - for tea to mark his relative Walter Hambling’s silver wedding anniversary - Rose Hambling was having indigestion; Swift recommended ‘Savoury and Moore’s absorbent lozenges’. He used to buy them on occasional shopping trips to Gloucester, one and fivepence a box from Boots. Swift did not say whether he sucked the lozenges as a luxury, or to treat another effect of a stodgy diet: wind. On August 26, he admitted that he took an afternoon walk, ‘very slowly for I had flatulence badly, but afterwards felt all the better for the exertion,’ as he put it.

A typical meal of his was roast meat or chops, potatoes and green vegetables, and sago pudding. According to his diary he was growing several rows of potatoes; Brussels sprouts, broad beans, cauliflowers, Savoy cabbages, beets and onions; and had raspberry and currant bushes. Unless it was raining, the upkeep of his garden took some hours each day, with help sometimes from visiting sons and grandsons. Despite the drudgery of cutting a hedge, tidying the road in front of your house, and the like, gardening was valuable and gave you a place in the give and take of village society. Swift’s family regularly left with windfall apples, and fruit, to eat themselves or to sell: Annie Swift on August 21 for example ‘took 20lb of Victoria plums kept for her to make into jam’. Sharing produce was an excuse to visit other gardeners. On August 11 Swift ‘went to Henry Morris for carrots’ and inside saw ‘Mrs Morris who was sitting in the settle and with her Mrs Seborne her near neighbour who is very kind to her and goes in several times in the course of each day and with whom I had a pleasant chat’. On the way home, presumably, Swift ‘fell in with Mr Merrell who hawks fruit &c, bought a couple of cucumbers from him’.

The labour that went into growing, and preparing food for the plate, meant that better-off people might well leave such work to servants (besides washing, dusting and so on). Swift did his own housework, but was occasionally a spectator in the homes of people who did have servants, as on August 16 when invited to Sunday tea by a Miss Court. She was renting Green Hayes, from John Jones, one of the leading figures in the village. Swift reported that Emily Prince was Miss Court’s domestic, possibly a girl he knew from teaching her. In a matter of fact way that may have hid his amusement at people not like himself, Swift wrote: “Miss Court complained of the obtuseness of Mr J H Jones’ domestic in not turning on the water for her drinking purposes from Barrow Hill, Mr J H Jones’ residence ... Emily P was dispatched to see to it. Then the next upset was Emily had not got the kettle boiled for our tea; she Miss C had to put fir cones on to hasten the matter.” Swift and Miss Court talked about Abergavenny, the corner of Wales that Swift had taught in as a young man before bringing his family back to Gloucestershire.

Miss Court may have wanted to excuse the late tea; she may have enjoyed an audience to hear her grumble about servants; or the old schoolmaster Swift may have looked like a wise and trustworthy listener that people could speak freely to, and even share secrets with. The humbler sort of villager came to Swift, as someone who had taught their children (and maybe themselves). He could help with the occasional legal business or serious letter that was beyond some. In mid-August, after his Aunt Sarah Pick was given notice to quit, she was posting on her landlord’s letters to Swift for him to write her appeal to stay. In July Swift read a woman’s will, made a clean copy of it, and with his son Harry witnessed it.

Swift’s family told him some secrets, maybe not for advice, but on the principle of a problem shared is a problem halved. Walter Hambling called on Monday August 17:

... he told me how he was entangled with Charles Hambling’s two daughters, one of whom had married a sergeant in the Army and had started a market gardening business in Hayden, bordering on Staverton and in order to do so had borrowed nearly £100 from him and an additional sum from Mr and Mrs Carter, Annie Hambling, and seemed in no hurry to refund. And he was afraid it was a bad go.

If Swift gave Hambling advice, he did not say so; it sounded like the age-old story of a family stuck with an in-law who abused their trust. Hambling may simply have wanted to unburden himself to someone who understood. Mr Walker, who visited Swift on July 13 and September 7 and twice in August, may have felt the same. His married daughter was in a lunatic asylum at Binstead in Surrey and the son-in-law had sent his son to an asylum in Germany, seemingly to get rid of him. Mr Walker was unsurprisingly depressed after visiting his daughter, who was sane enough to be ‘discontented with her surroundings ie the other patients who made unearthly noises crowing like a cock, grabbing at her victuals on her plate &c’. What must have made it worse for Walker was his ‘wife’s nervous state and her reproaches’, because Mr Walker could not free their daughter. Whether because Walker asked too much, or Swift had had his fill of it all, even Swift ran out of goodwill: “He several times spoke quite in heat and I felt bound to check him and to tell the truth I was glad at his departure.”

II

Besides public business, the stuff of newspapers, meetings, and commerce, beyond even the unremarkable dealings of family and friends, that seldom left a trace, there were the private matters of every man and woman, intimate or even shameful things seldom admitted, even in diaries. Even the notes made by a diarist may be beyond understanding now, such as the circle and cross each month in Dorothy Wright’s diary, a week or two apart (the start and end of her periods?). Things that people took for granted, such as food, or baths, were not thought worth noting. That makes it hard to say anything in general about people’s habits. At the back of Robert Blakeby’s 1914 diary were dates ‘when I had a bath during the year’, and ‘how was the water’. He had his first on January 9 (‘cold’) and nine by April 9, but only one more, with a question mark against it, on August 7 (‘water nice and hot’) before the eleventh and last in November. Did Blakeby go months without a bath? If so, did he wash himself in other ways? In midsummer, did he smell? How typical was he?

If people were shy of writing intimately about themselves in the most intimate place possible, a diary, how much more shy they were about airing such things in public; and not only the physical details of their toilet, but the inner workings of their mind. People in 1914 were as curious as in any other era about others, and above all about extremes - murders, and divorces. Many other things affected lives, without quite ever becoming the business of some institution and making the public record: a child deemed insane, or neglected, an animal treated cruelly, an in-law who took a loan and never paid it back. Some people had strange, unseen streams running through their life, that usually they chose to hide, for the sake of a quiet life. M W Colchester-Wemyss revealed one case in his July 1914 letter to the King of Siam. Perhaps because he was short of a topic of proper news, he gave his letter over to a near-miss he had, with a neighbour in Westbury-on-Severn. He described Miss Day, the tenant of Westbury Court, as a ‘distinguished lady of about 40 ... violet coloured eyes and perfectly white hair’. Whether Colchester-Wemyss liked the woman, or her wealth, or both, they agreed to marry. Miss Day said she had a fortune, but kept making excuses about where it was and why she didn’t have it to hand. Maybe Miss Day was trying to keep what was hers from her husband-to-be; she may have been pretending that she was more of a catch than she was, to trick someone well-off into marriage; or, her fortune was in her head and she wasn’t sane - or at least not sane enough to marry. Colchester-Wemyss decided that Miss Day’s fortune was imaginary, and he broke off their engagement. It was a rare and intriguing glimpse of how, in a generally plain and earthy society, with pungent smells to match, not everything was as met the eye.

Chapter 17

Rumours

Untruth did not begin with us; nor will it end with us.

The last line of August 1914, a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I

The last phenomena of August 1914 - little remembered, as they showed British civilians as gullible or stupid - were the absurd rumours of a Russian army in transit through Britain. This was however only the final fairy-story or unnecessary panic of the month, that began on the outbreak of war, when selfish but jittery householders hoarded food, or anything they could afford. As Goonie Churchill did in Cromer, in places the traders or local civic leaders (who quite often were tradesmen) informally enforced rational shopping, telling traders not to sell to strangers, or give any customer too much. Similarly at a bank - where people afraid for their deposits might take out all their money and cause the crash they feared - other customers and bank staff could police behaviour, and shame the worriers out of withdrawing unnatural amounts of money. Newspapers, also, could ask their readers to behave. For example the Willesden Chronicle of Friday August 14 noted the market in food was ‘almost normal again’:

Panic mongers would now appear to have diverted their attention from the food market into an equally foolish channel, for throughout the week remarkable rumours have been afloat as to houses having been raided in Willesden and found to be in occupation of hostile foreigners who have stored there innumerable bombs, rifles and ammunition ... there is not the slightest foundation for such wild stories ...

A house had artillery, ready for invaders to fire, according to one story; in another house, foreigners had made poisons. As the north London weekly spotted, the original ‘panic mongers’ hoarding food were turning to rumours, one after another, to voice their witless fears. Poisons were a favourite, because they were hard to disprove, and yet could be anywhere. George Thorp, the Hull architect, likewise understood that rumours were symptoms, passed on by the fearful and received by the willing. In his diary, when noting the first battles of August 24 and 25 by British troops, he wrote of ‘foolish rumours’ of spies poisoning springs and water:

I can see that it wants very little to put this population into a panic, they or a section of them believe anything. Our ex-Mayor’s youngest son aged 22 was shot by a sentry at Saltburn last Friday at midnight, he was with his brother in a motorcycle, and did not hear or heed the repeated challenge - verdict ‘accidently shot’. This makes the fifth innocent person killed by sentries since the war began.

In the summer of 1940, too, guards on roads in case of enemy invasion shot dead civilians, without punishment.

As in 1940, unknown people (never ones to give interviews to newspapers, write memoirs or leave their diaries to public archives) were spreading tales, that respectable-seeming figures were, in fact, German. Their motives may have been commercial jealousy, or spite. In mid-August, for instance, a motor engineer with the English-enough sounding name of George Lakeman put a notice in the Newmarket Journal, to deny ‘malicious rumours’ that he was a German. Clearly stung, he said his father was from Cornwall, and his mother from Berkshire; he was born in Derbyshire, and had always lived in England. Whoever started that story might have resented Lakeman as an incomer; or may genuinely (though ignorantly) have doubted that such a man, maybe with an out-of-town accent, was truly one of them.

Rumours flourished where they sounded believable. Thus the seaside town of Clacton, according to the Essex County Standard in mid-August, deplored ‘wild stories’ of the beach and visitor attractions closed, the pier destroyed by bombs, and the place near-deserted. That was bad for business, but unless you saw the town for yourself, you had no way of knowing the truth.

August 1914 lacked one panic that the summer of 1940 had: only in 1940 did villages, even small towns, mobilise after false alarms of a German landing. All 1914 had were the likes of the homeless ‘aged labourer’ Henry Oakden, stopped on an Ashbourne road by a police constable Pell on Wednesday August 19. Oakden was waving a stick and shouting ‘the Germans are coming’. When PC Pell spoke to him, Oakden said ‘be careful, or they will have both of us’. The town’s magistrates a week later laughed; and fined Oakden for being drunk.

II

That little story shows that the gap between rich and poor, the respectable and rough, was often also one of intellect - maybe the widest gap of all and thus the most cherished by some; the educated were able to look down on the stupid and credulous. However, the rumour of a Russian army in Britain found many learned people wanting.

One of its earliest sightings came in George Thorp’s diary on August 28:

A very curious and persistent rumour has been circulated in Hull, coming from numerous very reliable people, none of whom however have it at first hand, that bodies of Russian troops had landed in Scotland for the purpose of proceeding to the Belgian frontier by way of Boulogne. Most circumstantial accounts have been given as to ordinary trains have been side tracked, while unheard of quantities of Russian troops in from anything from 36 to 16 trains have passed by.

Thorp named four people ‘who knew it for certain’, but noted that the official press bureau called it a ‘pure fabrication’. As shrewd - though admittedly it was in his memoir well after the event - was Sir Almeric Fitzroy, the permanent head of Liberal minister Lord Morley’s department (at least until Morley resigned because of the war). Sir Almeric noted the Russians had ‘appeared’ as far apart as Bath, Reading and Southampton; or rather, no-one saw the Russians inside the trains, because their carriages had drawn blinds. To the believers, this was proof; the movement of troops was a secret. Sir Almeric wrote: “I very nearly forfeited Lord Haversham’s good opinion by venturing to doubt the grounds of his confidence ... the paucity of authentic news is perhaps responsible for the avidity with which fiction is devoured,” he added wisely.

Another lord fell for it. Writing from Wiltshire on August 29, St Aldwyn told his son: “... what a splendid stroke it is to have got Russians around this way, it seems to be true and it will be a nice surprise to those barbarians of Germans to meet them unexpectedly.” So it went on. In Essex at the end of August, the Burnham-on-Crouch shopkeeper Robert Bull wrote in his diary that 70 train-loads of Russians went through the county town of Chelmsford in the previous week, from Aberdeen on their way to the Continent. The story persisted, or cropped up in different regions later, because in his letter to the King of Siam on September 11, the Gloucestershire civic leader M W Colchester-Wemyss said the rumour had been ‘on everyone’s lips for some days’. He had asked scores of people about it, but had not found anybody who had seen Russians. A lord said he had asked a cabinet minister, who said it was untrue. The lord then asked another lord, who said it was true. Colchester-Wemyss came down on the side of believing it: “If it is not true it is a remarkable incident of how an invented story can obtain widespread belief.” That, at least, was correct.

The question plainly gripped Britain in late August 1914. We can no more get to the bottom of it than the diarists at the time could. Where and when did the story start? How did it spread - did many people have the same idea at once, or only one? The French, even more than the English, willed the Russians to come; as an English holiday-maker, a Miss Laura Partridge, a girls’ school teacher from Brondesbury, told her local north London paper on her return from Interlaken. Changing trains at Montgaris before Paris, and seeking news, an excited Frenchman in a blue smock told her: “Tout va bien, et ils viennens les Russes.”

All was going well, the Russians were coming. It might be more than coincidence that the British rumour seems to have begun in the days of the first news of the BEF on the Continent; which only left people anxious for more news. Indeed, after Lord St Aldwyn wrote of the Russians, he next fretted about the British losses. Imagining Russians - 80,000 according to Colchester-Wemyss - was the most a gossiper could do, to help the BEF. It was, besides, wishful thinking; that the Russians would share the fighting (and the deaths) in western Europe. This reflected a deeper, geopolitical hope among the rulers of Britain and France, that Russia would do some, maybe much, of the hard work of beating the Germans, just as Russia from 1812 had broken Napoleon.

As for the truth of the rumour, it was a beauty. The rumour-makers and spreaders could impress people with what they knew. However you tried to disprove it, the gossipers could give an answer. If Britain’s ally was sending thousands of troops, why didn’t the government give out this good news, or ask people to welcome the visitors? Because (as St Aldwyn spotted) it was to be a surprise for the Germans. Yet could thousands of foreigners cross hundreds of miles from Aberdeen (and Hull and other ports, according to Colchester-Wemyss) and not stop once, not speak to someone? Stop for a smoke and something to eat? Wouldn’t someone - a locomotive driver, a liaison officer - have a story to tell? As with the persistent stories that Germans did land on the English coast in 1940, but were thrown back - burned by a secret weapon, some said - and all traces removed, you had to ask in the end: where were the photographs? Some evidence?

The fact that Russians did not show in France was proof; eventually. Meanwhile, you had to manage with argument: why would Russia send soldiers abroad - when presumably it wanted every man it had on its own frontiers? Wasn’t the story as unlikely as Britain and France sending an army to Russia? If anyone knew of a Russian shipment, it was Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, whose navy would have to escort the ships to British ports. In a letter to the Minister of War, Lord Kitchener, on August 28, Churchill did have that very idea: a Russian corps going from Archangel to Ostend, “though I dare say it would not greatly commend itself to the Russians”, he added. As so often in life, if you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself.

Chapter 18

First returns

The population of this country had been schooled in the glories of the British Empire and the deeds of her victorious armies, and, of course, the British Navy, the greatest navy of all time .... Oh! What a shock we got! Oh God! What a shock we got!

Years of Change: Autobiography of a Hackney Shoemaker, by Arthur Newton (1974)

I

As the Bristol Times daily put it mildly enough on September 3, the country would welcome news from the front; ‘practically none has come’. As the newspaper was sharp enough to suggest, it might not be that the authorities were keeping news from the people; maybe the War Office had no news, either?

The previous day, the first returners - wounded from the port of Southampton - arrived at Bristol Temple Meads station. Hundreds of wounded went north, to London, Birmingham and Sheffield, generally cheered on arrival, fed and waved at, and taken to hospitals. On the railway platforms, and later on wards, newspaper reporters (with official permission) sought the soldiers’ stories.

This was a first in British history; witnesses of a battle asked for and giving their accounts, fresh from the battlefield. Some had made what must have been a bewildering round trip: one unnamed artilleryman from the Totterdown district of Bristol left home, was wounded in France, and returned to the city within ten days. In previous centuries, a free press (or any printing press), and a literate mass market for news, had not existed. After the last war, in 1902, men took weeks or months to come home from South Africa; by that time memories (and newspaper readers’ interest) had faded.

We remember the soldiers of the 1914-18 war (if at all) as men who suffered doubly: first, because of what they went through; then, once home, civilians did not want to hear about what the soldiers suffered. August 1914 was the exception, if only because it was early days, before anyone could become disillusioned; and before the authorities enforced censorship, in case anything bad disheartened the public. Newspapers printed what the wounded told them, and carried the plentiful letters (few enough compared with the 100,000 men in the BEF, but plentiful compared with later years of the war) sent by men on the road to the front line, and after the first shock of battle. In later years, soldiers might no more want to put upsetting things on paper than people at home wanted to read about it. In 1914 as in any war, a soldier might want to shield his wife or mother from the worst. “There were some awful sights to be seen, things you will never hear of in the papers, I cannot describe them in a letter ...” wrote William Thomas Simpson, to his family in Ashbourne from Netley Hospital near Southampton. An artilleryman, he was wounded on Monday August 24, the second day of fighting. Simpson indeed did not go into details; some similarly wounded men did, and their families passed the letters to their local newspapers, which printed them.

Just as some men plainly felt a need to get their experiences out of their system and onto paper, so families, and newspapers on behalf of society generally, had curiosity about war. After all, as the papers kept repeating, the 200-mile, two-million-man battlefront of northern France was the greatest in history, by far - greater than any in the wars against Napoleon, the American Civil War, the 1870-1 war between France and Prussia, even the 1904-5 war between Russia and Japan. (That Russia and Austria and Germany might put even more men into the battlefields on their side of Europe went unsaid.)

To sum up, the newspaper reports of soldier testimony of August 1914 - from interviews, and letters home passed to the papers - are a rare and full source, for the 1914-18 or indeed any war. Decades later, a new generation of oral historians asked the veterans, in old age, for their stories; they asked too late for many of the men of August 1914, dead long before then.

II

Not that the men off the train at Temple Meads were much help. To be fair to them, they had not come home to bear witness, but to have their bodies repaired. “All the men told practically the same story, which differs little if at all from the accounts of the battle that have already appeared in the newspapers,” the Bristol Times reported. Possibly the wounded, having a few days on their journey to compare experiences, unconsciously trimmed their stories so that nothing sounded too out of the ordinary, or unpatriotic; maybe they, too, had read the first accounts in newspapers, and did not want to sound peculiar.

Some news from the front arrived even more direct - on dirty scraps of paper, to a Colonel Lang in Wiltshire from his son, dated August 30, and read by Lang to a recruiting meeting at Pewsey on September 2. The younger Lang, presumably, handed it to a wounded man on his way to England - and so avoided any army censorship or other delays. Even this most authentic account, written or spoken, gave an ant’s view; whether of the most junior, or a slightly more senior, ant. The weapons of war had come on but the British soldier at Mons was the same as his forefather at Waterloo, or indeed at Hastings; he only knew about the 200 yards (or 20) of battle-line that he could see and influence, besides any chance news (maybe out of date, misheard in the stress of battle, or jumbled by tired minds) learned from comrades bumped into. Few had the data to give them the larger landscape; perhaps even the commander could not grasp the whole battle.

The returning wounded at least had time to order their thoughts, about the most extreme experience of their lives (worse than anything in South Africa, the veterans of the Boer War agreed). While they did not want to talk themselves into trouble, they felt above all a duty to their comrades, still in battle. It’s striking how many of the wounded men spoke of wanting to go back, as soon as they could. Their listeners may have wanted to hear something as patriotic as that. Yet men in other wars said the same; that they felt they had to help their mates; they felt guilty for being out of danger. The least they could do was to be true to themselves, and their fellows, by saying what the battle was like.

The army did not let this honesty last long. The fighting men soon felt the censor, and not only at the front. Officially, according to the Field Service Pocket Book, printed by the War Office in 1914, censorship was a ‘necessity’, criticism ‘forbidden’. The book detailed what military things you could not write about. G C Harper, a cadet who left Devonport on the brink of war for HMS Endymion, summed up censorship, when told about it, on August 7:

We were not to mention in our letters the name of any ship not even the one we were in. We were not to mention war or anything about it, nor anything about the navy. We were not to mention our ranks or anybody else’s or any place we had been in or were going to ... so the letters were restricted to about two lines, a date and a signature.

That made sense, as any facts if captured might help the enemy. It made less sense far away in Sudan. There, as early as August 11, Frank Balfour wrote to the woman in England he was trying to woo, Irene Lawley: “It would be a charity if you wrote some of the home gossip - bearing in mind that it will probably be read by the censor in Cairo - as also this - I raise my hat to him.” Balfour’s warning, and his droll acknowledgement of the unknown censor, were elegant. In plainer English, but just as effective, was the undated letter from Dick Wallis in camp in Essex to ‘Mother and Dad’ in Leek: “They will not allow any of us to go home unless there is some one ill, so when I want to come I will let you know and you can send a wire to say someone very ill, come at once. But do not send until I tell you.” This letter’s envelope, unlike other letters he sent home, did not have a red ‘passed by censor’ envelope. Wallis had evidently put the letter about his dodge in a civilian postbox (not available to sailors at sea).

The Field Service Pocket Book said nothing about it, but evidently the army read all the letters it could, to watch out for any wrong-doing or rebellion. After the rush simply to put an army into the field in August 1914, and clothe and arm the recruits, the army enforced its discipline; and civilians learned to obey. For the time being, plenty of newspapers - presumably in ignorance rather than seeking to defy the army - printed the forbidden ranks, names of places passed through, and the shocking, bloody stories, of what happened after men marched out of town and sight.

III

Whether in England or even further from the battlefield, the first casualty totals from the continent, even if sketchy or sensationalised, told everyone what war meant. In his letter to his son on August 29, Lord St Aldwyn quoted an estimate of 12,000 British casualties, “and even half that number is frightful and so dreadful for people waiting to hear of their relations; I think it is a good move to arrange for some public meetings to explain the reason for the war etc.” In other words, once people heard that war killed people, they would need more convincing that war was worth the cost. Writing from Sudan on August 28, Frank Balfour felt once more far from the centre of affairs: “It’s pretty rotten reading of British losses of 2000, knowing that one will see no names for three weeks at least.” Sure enough, not until September 21 did the casualty list dated September 3 arrive with the mail, ‘and it makes unhappy reading’. What was the nature of this war, taking so many lives so soon? And what was it like for the soldiers in the middle of it?