Background Reading

‘What 10,000 pities I didn’t keep a diary in 1914 and 1915 - such vital years: the war for one thing.’ So Mrs Henry Dudeney the novelist opened her 1916 diary, (edited by Diana Crook, 1998; the original is in East Sussex record office in Lewes). Mrs Dudeney was right; they were vital years for the country, and for her, as she gave up her lover (eventually) and went back to living with her husband. Might that be why she did not keep a diary?

In a way it’s not a pity, but a relief, as it means one fewer possible source. Like everything, diaries and newspaper reports have their pros and cons. Some diarists and newspapers were more insightful than others; all make an alternative to the usual tired printed sources. Few knew what war had been like and made the effort to be true to it, such as Captain J C Dunn in The War The Infantry Knew 1914-1919: A Chronicle of Service in France and Belgium (1987 edition), who covered August 1914 from pages 1-41. Even he told of August 1914, knowing of the years of stalemate next; only sources from the time can have the freshness, and innocence of ignorance, that marked that month. August 1914 offered a change from everyday life, drudgery if you were poor, boredom if you were rich; gradually the war became another, much deadlier, sort of everyday life.

The number of books about August 1914 are legion; let alone the books with a bearing on that month. Take the people who later became famous, who had something to say about going to war, such as George Orwell, whose first published work was a poem ‘Awake Young men of England’, as juvenile as its title, on page 36 of Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: A Life (1980). Or, the already famous people who were to become yet more famous, such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Never short of a word, he was against the war from the first: see Ray Monk’s biography (1996), pages 367-70. Monk describes Russell as ‘against the multitude’, and indeed as he shows, most literary and public figures came out for the war. Yet beyond their central London and literate world, no end of common people that Russell did not know (and presumably did not want to) were indifferent to the war. Most great events, done by and for the ruling class, were distant from the mass of people; intellectually, and geographically. Someone ought to write a history of indifference.

Truthful reporting was more possible in August 1914 than later in the war, when all sides were at work to force everyone - men of fighting age especially - to conform. The longer the war went on, the less indifferent you could feel to it. There were more signs of it. Books about the war came out at once, meeting the market for them. W Stanley Macbean Knight, ‘assisted by eminent naval and military experts’ (are there any other sort?) finished volume one of his The History of the Great European War in September 1914, and only got as far as August 2. You could even argue that writing books about the war from your side’s point of view was part of the fight, to keep the public satisfied and to win neutrals over, such as the United States. Hence Winston Churchill’s interview with an American reporter, widely carried in the British press at the very end of August. There’s always however at least another point of view.

Some memoirs from the German side touching on August 1914 include The Dark Invader, by Captain Franz von Rintelen (first printed 1933, 12th impression 1942), pages 17-34; and Surgeon with the Kaiser’s Army, by Stephen Westman (1968), pages 30-49, who were at the German Admiralty in Berlin and at the front respectively.

On the British side, equivalents include Old Men Forget: The Autobiography of Duff Cooper, Viscount Norwich (1955 edition), pages 36-7; The Memoirs of Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1958), pages 27-8; The Memoirs of General the Lord Ismay (1960), page 28, who had even less to say of his 1914-18 years, serving in Somaliland; and A Fortunate Life, by Bert Facey (1981), an early Australian volunteer, pages 233-4. William Robertson went with the BEF to France as quartermaster-general, and covered the month in pages 197-212 of his memoir From Private to Field-Marshal (1921; the 2005 facsimile edition by the University Press of the Pacific has ‘Marshall’ on the cover).

Some books, by leading historians then, have become historical documents, such as George Macaulay Trevelyan’s British History in the 19th century and After 1782-1919 (edition with 1941 postscript). Winston Churchill covered Sir John French, Kaiser Wilhelm, King George V and Herbert Asquith among others in his Great Contemporaries (1937). In Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (1966 edition), Asquith’s daughter Violet Bonham Carter quoted her father’s diary on the Ostend expedition, pages 328-9.

To give just two books on the politics of the day: The Prime Minister, by Harold Spender (1920), pages 177-81; and on the crisis leading to Britain declaring war on Germany, volume two of Randolph S Churchill’s biography of his father, Young Statesman 1901-14 (1967), pages 707-22.

The outbreak of war on the Continent did show who holidayed where. The Alps, Rhineland, France and the Low Countries, future enemy, ally and neutral, were all popular: see D H Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy (first published 1916) for his - how can we put it? - individual, Alpine viewpoint. Also evoking the era and mood: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, from the Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon (1937 edition). Shooting, like hunting, equipped men mentally and physically for war. See A G’s Book of the Rifle, by A G Banks, (first edition 1940; fourth edition reprinted 1958), that hailed the British Army regulars of 1914 on pages 18-19. As that book’s printing history suggests, the teaching of ‘musketry’ by rifle club enthusiasts, and the peacetime emphasis in Army training on rifle fire (as detailed in the War Office manual Infantry Training 1914), cast a long shadow, to the Home Guard of the Second World War.

Long-serving men were able to place August 1914 in their working lives, such as the early ‘air correspondent’ Harry Harper, in his Man’s Conquest of the Air (1942), page 126; the university servant Fred Bickerton, in Fred of Oxford (1953); and the spy Bernard Newman as in his memoir Spy (18th edition, 1947), pages 14-16. On the retreat from Mons’ place in the 1914-18 war, see Basil Liddell Hart’s History of the First World War, which suggests that the Marines at Ostend and even the false rumour of Russians in transit through England, rattled the Germans crucially (page 81, 1972 edition). On warfare more generally, read The Profession of Arms, by General Sir John Hackett (1983), around page 153. On the fighting in France, The Marne 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World, by Holger H Herwig (2011), and more briefly Opening Moves: August 1914, by John Keegan (1973 edition). That must have been one of the first books I ever read, as I coloured in some of the drawings with pencils and felt tips.

The chapter ‘ways to die’, by showing just how harsh and short life could be, also suggests that many people were too occupied by surviving to heed the war. The second edition of The Edwardians: The Re-making of British Society, by Paul Thompson (1992) goes into such topics as war as sport, and game-shooting. An oral history more rooted in home and neighbourhood was Elizabeth Roberts’ A Woman’s Place (1984). For London, see Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887-1920, by Jerry White (1980), especially pages 83-5. For Wigton in Cumbria, Speak for England, by Melvyn Bragg (1976), includes a veteran’s point on page 61 that war was only a ‘bit bigger risk’ than going down a pit. Carl Chinn’s Poverty Amidst Prosperity: The Urban Poor in England 1834-1914 (1995) shows just how hard life was.

Quid pro quo, the English equivalent of the Australian ideal of everyone having a ‘fair go’, was becoming institutionalised around this time, as shown by Keith Middlemas in his Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911 (paperback edition, 1980).

Britain was never as united as those in power insisted. What if Britain had not gone to war in 1914? So Niall Ferguson asked in the collection of ‘alternatives and counterfactuals’ he edited as Virtual History (1997). See also ‘The What Ifs of 1914’ by Robert Cowley, editor of What If? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (2001).

The origins of war in 1914 have a huge literature; the most concise guide is by Ruth, now Baroness, Henig. By discussing ‘deterrence’, The Games of July: Explaining the Great War, by Frank C Zagare (2011) also asks questions of the nuclear, twenty-first century. For the pig’s ear that Britain made of foreign relations, see The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy, 1904-1914, by Keith M Wilson (1985).

As the watershed between a largely peaceful previous few decades and a pair of world wars and a potential third, August 1914 provoked many reminisces and soul-searching about what it did to Europe. Two examples from different eras are World War: Its Cause and Cure, by Lionel Curtis (1945), and the inaugural lecture by Prof A G Lehmann at the University of Hull, published as a pamphlet The Unities of Europe (1979). A book I grew up with, about the town I grew up in, County Borough: History of Burton upon Trent, Part One, by Denis Stuart (1974) has its own poignancy, drawing on ageing townspeople’s memories of former things such as trams, temperance and pawnbrokers. Part Two (1977) has a pen-portrait of Clifford Gothard on page 218. For the Meynell family see the evocative Hoar Cross Hall Staffordshire: Portrait of a Victorian Country House, by Gareth Evans (1994); for A T ‘Dan’ Daniel’s years as headmaster, see W G Torrance’s The History of Alleyne’s Grammar School Uttoxeter 1558-1958, (1958), pages 59-66.

You can walk down long Ella Street in Hull as the architect and diarist George Thorp did, and I have been inside Clifford Gothard’s old house at the top of Bearwood Hill Road in Burton, now a retirement home. Anyone can pay to go in Francis Meynell’s Hoar Cross Hall, now a spa. You can walk as Arthur Ross must have done from his home, then on the outskirts of Beverley at 101 Grove Hill Road, into town, over the railway crossing, and to his workplace, county hall. Any sense of 1914 anywhere is, however, elusive. Likewise in my cricket book The Victory Tests, about matches between England and an Australian Services XI in 1945, it struck me how hard it was to find anywhere that had stayed the same. It must have been easier for someone in England in 1914 to find places that had not changed since 1814, since the age of Jane Austen and the stagecoach. Villages such as William Swift’s Churchdown, then physically and economically free of nearby Gloucester and Cheltenham, have merged into towns.

We best seek 1914 not in the cities or in the deserted parts of the country, but in between, places such as the Essex coast as painted by George Rose on holiday; or towns that were small then as now, such as Ledbury, visited by William Swift and his son Leonard for the day on August 6. “It is a fair walk up into the town from the station like it is in Berkeley,” Swift wrote. “We lunched on some sandwiches brought by Leonard and some very fair ale.” Even then the houses to Swift’s eyes were of a ‘former age’.

Or, we can enjoy the seaside towns, built to cater for that era: such as Scarborough, Skegness, Southsea and Ilfracombe. Or the grand railway stations where passengers, then as now, changed trains; Carlisle, Bristol, York - to name only places I have lived in. I recall particularly how, when I began work at the evening paper in Carlisle in August, 1995, my walk from home to work could take me through Carlisle railway station, over the platforms, where post trains still stood at night, though the provincial press - whose bundles ‘WM’ saw at dawn - was, even then, not what it was. Some buildings dating from 1914 - Newark Drill Hall, the Burton-on-Trent museum - still stand, though their use has changed, or ended.

I imagined myself closest to 1914 in Beverley, not in the now pedestrianised shopping streets but the dignified streets off the minster and the market place. I must have been walking where Arthur Ross and the Church Lads Brigade once marched. I was sad to read the short, almost brutally so, list in his journal of his dates home on leave from the war, such a contrast to the comradely feelings that must have prompted him to keep his peacetime journal about his service with the Church Lads. The war killed something inside Arthur Ross, even before his physical death in France.

At the risk of leaving the humbug and deceit intact, sometimes the only dignified response is silence. Hence I did not go into the myth of the ‘angel of Mons’ and alleged German atrocities, covered ably by John Terraine in the first two chapters of his The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War 1861-1945 (1981 edition). For evidence of how some Boer War and earlier soldiers liked to place letters home in newspapers, see the article ‘Military correspondents in the late nineteenth century press’, by Prof Edward M Spiers, in Archives, volume 32 (April 2007). Capt J C Dunn, in The War The Infantry Knew, wrote for September 20, 1914 (page 65) how soldiers were writing ‘lurid’ and ‘highly coloured’ letters home, tongue in cheek, to earn money from newspapers printing their ‘adventures’. That said, I would argue that men sending letters home earlier, before they heard of such newspaper offers, and wounded men sent home and interviewed in England, would feel like telling the truth, as best they could, rather than inventing something (and what?).

Later, as the war dragged on, not only the bad things about war, but the fraud - the difference between what was said about it at home and what war was really like - soured men and coarsened life, for long afterwards. August 1914 has a long reach, into this century, even. Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who counted King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II as family, attended the coronation of her great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. She described her August 1914 on pages 140-1 of My Memories of Six Reigns (1956; paperback 1961).

Now I can fold away my Bartholomew’s 1:1,000,000 scale cloth map of France and the Low Countries (1950). The ten-volume 1895 Chambers’s Encyclopaedia that my father bought as a not-quite complete set has been a help for its articles and maps. As a good omen, I have not wished for the missing volume four (D to H). As my father has had to learn as an amputee, and as many learned after 1914, a man can go on even when something is missing. My thanks to Dr Amanda Field of Chaplin Books for bringing my work to print.

Mark Rowe

Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, August 2013