A tragic attempt to keep a son from war
1918
The passing of the first Military Service Act in January 1916, 18 months after the First World War had begun, meant compulsory military service for every unmarried British male aged between 18 and 41. It was a blunt tool, ignoring the individual circumstances and beliefs of the affected men, but it did allow for exemptions to be made on moral, medical, family or economic grounds. Pioneer Alfred Baggs, himself a veteran of the procedure, addressed this letter to the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal with the hope that his brother, 20-year-old David, would benefit from the last of these exemptions.
David was the youngest of the four Baggs brothers and, with the war having taken its toll, the only one left to help his parents with the family farm. His two eldest brothers had been wounded, while Alfred continued to serve in France, leaving 130 pigs, 300 head of poultry, 4½ acres of fruit trees and an acre of arable land in his hands. With this in mind, David lodged an application with the county tribunal at Middlesex on 15 May 1918, seeking an extension to an exemption he had previously been granted.
As the letter from Alfred makes clear, David’s earlier exemption had been approved on the understanding that Alfred would serve in David’s place, against the general presumption that a younger, single brother would be called up before an older, married one. Alfred pulls no punches, reminding the tribunal of this arrangement and his continued belief in it: ‘I should sooner come out here and be killed and have the consolation of knowing I had done the right thing for my brother than see him come out here’. His words, and his sacrifice, were not in vain. David was granted a three-month exemption on the grounds of his occupation and leave to make further applications beyond this.
This, unfortunately, was not the end of the story. The following August, David applied to the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal to have his exemption extended once again. A bureaucratic shift, however, meant that those seeking exemption with regards to an agricultural occupation now had to apply to their local Agricultural Executive Committee, and so David had to redirect his application to a different body. The delay this caused meant that David’s previous exemption lapsed before the new application could be heard, and he was duly called up for training with the Middlesex Motor Volunteer Corps.
If David had to go, his parents, William and Annie, would now be left to care for the farm without their son’s assistance, sending William into despair. In early September, David awoke to find the fire unlit and the back door locked from the outside. His mother came downstairs in a panic and showed David a letter from William setting out his intention to kill himself in light of David’s conscription. He left in search of his father, but at the top of the lane was met by a girl who told him that there was a man in the river. David soon found him in the Duke of Northumberland’s River, face down, drowned in three feet of water. The sense of tragedy was exacerbated by the timing: just two months later the four brothers, William’s four sons, returned to the farm. The war was over.
