A food queue at Brock Street outside Speight’s, listed in Bulmer’s Directory of Lancaster and District as a ‘confectioner and fruiterer’. (LCM)
It is often assumed that the people of Britain responded with universal enthusiasm to the country’s entry into the First World War on 4 August 1914. King George and Queen Mary were loudly cheered when they appeared on the balcony at the front of Buckingham Palace, a few hours after a state of war had been declared between Britain and Germany. The Daily News reported how crowds surged through Westminster and Charing Cross singing patriotic songs and waving flags. It would be wrong, though, to assume that the war was welcomed by everyone. The King himself had noted in his diary a few days earlier that many people were against any British involvement in a European conflict. In some northern cities, like Huddersfield and Leeds, there were many voices arguing that the industrial workers who filled the mills and factories had little stake in the conflict. Nor was everyone convinced that the war would be over by Christmas. The publication of countless invasion-scare books and articles over the previous twenty years, describing how modern warfare was likely to be far more brutal than anything previously known, meant that the news of war was often met with apprehension as much as jingoism.
Food shortages followed the declaration of war, more because farmers, suppliers and shop keepers were holding back stock and individuals were panic buying. The production of food was affected by the number of young men joining the military and, from 1917, the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.
A food queue at Brock Street outside Speight’s, listed in Bulmer’s Directory of Lancaster and District as a ‘confectioner and fruiterer’. (LCM)
The outbreak of war in Lancaster was met less with elaborate displays of patriotism and more with a sober determination to face whatever lay ahead. The Lancaster Observer and Morecambe Chronicle (hereafter Lancaster Observer) ran an article warning that ‘immense carnage is coming, and commercial and trade desolations’. The paper’s first edition after the declaration of war noted that ‘popular demonstrations’ in the town had shown ‘a subdued character’. It also noted that the departure of the first wave of local territorial forces ‘was marked by no such excitement as was witnessed fourteen years ago’ (during the Boer War). The cautious mood was heightened by several warnings from local businessmen that Lancaster’s factories might have to close if it proved impossible to import cotton and other vital raw materials. Local shoppers rushed to buy staple foodstuffs, alarmed at rumours of shortages, with a resulting rise in the price of goods including butter and sugar. The cancellation of summer fetes and holiday railway excursions added to the sense of crisis.
In the days that followed the outbreak of war, the people of Lancaster volunteered in large numbers for service in the local hospital, in expectation of the arrival of casualties. The Town Council announced the establishment of a Distress Committee to raise funds for the dependents of those who volunteered to fight, as well as the families of workers expected to lose their jobs. The Mayor, Councillor William Briggs, was typical of many of Lancaster’s dignitaries in calling for practical measures to help the town cope with the disruption of war. His wife Mary established twice-weekly sewing parties for local women to produce gloves and blankets for the troops. Lord Ashton made a large donation to help those facing poverty. The local press continued to warn that ‘the country must be prepared for a long and arduous struggle’. By the third week of August, the Lancaster Observer noted that there was ‘a wonderful calmness’ in the town, as local people began to face the war with determination rather than frenzied nationalism.
The first of a series of weekly sales of local farm produce raised £8 13s 2d for the Mayor of Lancaster’s Relief Fund. The first sale, held outside the Town Hall, in November 1914 included two turkeys, a prize-winning leek and a 40lb cheese. (LCM)
The sober tone was reinforced by local clergy and ministers of religion. The main denominations in Britain all moved quickly to express support for the war, although some opposition was heard among the Primitive Methodists and Baptists, whilst members of the Society of Friends generally remained true to their long tradition of pacifism. The tone of the sermons preached in the early weeks of the war was, though, once again cautious and restrained. Although some Anglican clergy across Britain used their pulpit to encourage men to enlist in the forces, the Vicar of Lancaster was more measured, telling his congregation that although war was evil it was not a crime:
It was no use whinging about war, and trying to run away from it … All sensible people shrink from war, just as they shrink from the surgeon’s knife. But when disease came, and they were faced with an operation, it was their duty to accept it with resignation as if it was coming from God.
Mayor Briggs and his wife Mary Alice, née Stanton, on the steps of Lancaster Town Hall, both wearing chains of office. The photograph was taken on 19 October 1919, at the return of the cadre of the 1st/5th Battalion, King’s Own, which had spent time in Ireland after it had left Belgium in the summer of 1919. (KOM)
Quiet resignation rather than celebration continued to characterise the reaction of many residents of Lancaster during the weeks that followed. The sewing parties organised by the Mayoress were devoid of ‘frivolity or gossip’. And while there was strong support for soldiers heading off for service, the ceremonies were still largely devoid of jingoism, and ‘the cheering was subdued but nonetheless hearty’.
The mood of subdued patriotism, characterised by a focus on the kind of practical measures needed to respond to the challenges of war, was not perhaps surprising in a town with a large military presence and residents used to the challenge of hard work in the local mills and factories. It was not, though, calculated to foster the kind of exuberant sentiment needed to encourage the young men of Lancaster and the surrounding towns and villages to enlist. The British army in 1914 was a volunteer force, far smaller than its continental counterparts, and remained so even following the mobilisation of the territorial reserves during the first weeks of the war. Lord Kitchener, who became Secretary of State for War the day after war was declared, quickly put in motion a recruiting campaign intended to attract a large number of volunteers to bolster Britain’s military forces. Nearly half a million men responded by the end of September, a huge number, but still far less than was needed as it became clear that the small British Expeditionary Force already in France would be utterly inadequate for the battles that lay ahead. The recruiting campaign continued over the following months, complete with posters designed to appeal to the patriotic instincts of potential volunteers and play on their fears of being thought a coward by their friends and family.
Recruiting Handbill of the 1st/5th Battalion, King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, in 1915.
The local papers in Lancaster proudly reported on the gallantry of the men who served in the King’s Own. In April 1918 the Lancaster Observer described how one Pte R. Corbett took command of his platoon when all the officers and NCOs were killed in action, successfully continuing the attack on a German trench mortar.
Both the Lancaster Observer and Lancaster Guardian regularly printed columns during the early months of the year proudly noting that the town was providing more than its fair share of recruits. The presence of the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment undoubtedly helped to fuel local patriotism. The two papers also took a lead in criticising young ‘shirkers’ who refused to join up, and who did ‘not seem to realize that the call is to them’. Both papers reflected the prevailing sense that the justice of Britain’s cause was unquestionable. A similar tone prevailed at the large recruitment meetings held in Lancaster and Morecambe, as part of Lord Kitchener’s drive to attract large numbers of volunteers, where local dignitaries and army officers called for men to come forward and join the forces. Some local women wanted to do even more. ‘Margherita’ wrote to the Lancaster Observer calling on the women of north Lancashire to learn to use weapons effectively, so they could, if necessary, take part in defending their homeland, should the Germans invade Britain.
Recruitment seemed to have been particularly problematic in the rural areas around Lancaster, in part because small family farms would struggle to survive with the loss of even one or two men, unlike the large factories of Lancaster. Accusations that the villages stretched along the Lune Valley were not ‘doing their bit’ predictably infuriated some local people. One resident from the village of Wray acknowledged that there were ‘shirkers’ there, but added that some locals had already joined up, while the ladies were ‘knitting furiously’ and the older men were volunteering as Special Constables.
Herbert Lushington Storey (in the uniform of Deputy Lieutenant of Lancashire (High Sheriff) in 1904). (LCM)
Recruitment drives continued right down to the introduction of conscription early in 1916. The speeches at recruiting meetings, along with articles in local newspapers, provided some of the most robust defences of Britain’s role in the war against the Central Powers. By the spring of 1915, there was growing concern that recruitment was running at such a level that the loss of workers from Lancaster’s biggest factories might force them to shut down altogether. Lord Ashton raised the issue at length with the War Office, leading to suggestions in some quarters that the town’s business leaders were not sufficiently patriotic, a charge that was unfair and rejected locally. Both Herbert Lushington Storey and the Lancaster MP Norval Helme followed Lord Ashton in warning about the danger of recruiting disproportionately from the biggest factories. All three men forcefully argued that there was nothing unpatriotic about wanting to keep Lancaster’s economy prosperous, and its people employed, working in factories that played an important role in the war effort.
The local newspapers printed extensive commentary about the progress of the war, giving particular attention to the activities of the various battalions of the King’s Own. The recruiting drives that took place throughout 1915 continued to build on the town’s pride in its strong military connections. In early June, Major J.H. Bates of the 1st/5th Battalion, who had been invalided home from the Second Battle of Ypres and whose son had been killed there, addressed a large recruiting meeting with the rousing call ‘Are you going brother?’. He spoke vividly of the heavy losses among local Lancaster men at the Front, telling his audience their ‘memory would never die as long as we live’. Bates called on mothers to encourage their sons to join up, describing how hundreds of young Belgian girls had to ‘hang their heads in shame as a result of the vile conduct of the fiends the Allies were fighting’. Later that day, bands marched through Lancaster’s Market Square playing martial music, and local dignitaries gave rousing speeches calling for recruits. A telegram was read out from Lord Derby, who headed the national recruiting campaign, noting that ‘We want all we can get to fill again the ranks of Lord Richard Cavendish’s splendid battalion.’ The local MP called on the young men of Lancaster to join up and ‘bring about a glorious victory’ as soon as possible. The streets of the town resounded in the early summer evening with a blend of music and speeches, which together created a celebration of the rightness of Britain’s cause, and encouraged those present to reflect on what they could do to work for their country’s victory.
The pressure on the young men of Lancaster to volunteer became still stronger in the final months of 1915, at a time when the prospect of conscription was becoming more real, given the scale of the losses on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. In August the Lancaster Observer listed twelve excuses commonly given by ‘shirkers’ for not joining up (‘the saddest form of unmanliness’ it remarked). The paper noted caustically that some men believed their ‘position was too good to give up’ whilst others believed that army pay was ‘totally insufficient’. Other ‘excuses’ – at least to modern eyes – seem less self-centred (‘I believe in religion’; ‘the dependants’ allowance will not properly maintain my relatives’).
James Edgar Leach VC at Lancaster Town Hall, flanked by the Mayor and Mayoress (seated). (LCM KOM)
In September Lord Derby visited Lancaster, where he called for more men from the countryside to join up, while Herbert Storey told the same meeting that he was now in favour of conscription. Both local papers supported the introduction of the so-called Derby Scheme a few weeks later, which required men who were less than 41 years old, and not in a protected occupation, to declare whether they were prepared to fight. In Lancaster – as elsewhere across Britain – canvassers visited the homes of thousands of local men to encourage them to register (more than 30,000 men in Lancaster, Morecambe and the surrounding area received such calls). The King’s Own was by now only recruiting a fraction of the men it needed, a pattern that was repeated up and down the country, with the result that the Military Service Act introducing conscription was finally passed in January 1916. In Lancaster a large number of men rushed to enlist voluntarily, while they still had the opportunity, perhaps mindful that by volunteering they would avoid the charge of refusing to serve their country until they had no choice.
The introduction of conscription meant an end to the big recruiting rallies and some of the most stirring rhetoric of 1914 and 1915. Chapter 6 shows how attention instead began to focus more on the supposed lack of courage of the men who sought exemption from military service. In any case the carnage on the Western Front and elsewhere meant that from the very start of the war the language of patriotism had to acknowledge the realities of pain and loss. The sheer scale of human misery, which was only too obvious in a place like Lancaster, which suffered so many casualties (see Chapter 5), became part of a rhetoric that accepted sacrifice as an integral part of Britain’s experience of war. The town was certainly happy to welcome heroes like Lieutenant James Leach of the Manchester Regiment, born in Bowerham Barracks, who won the Victoria Cross for his heroism when fighting near in northern France in October 1914 (see Chapter 8). But it was also important for the anxious and bereaved to find solace in the belief that loved ones were fighting and dying heroically for a good cause.
Soldiers’ letters from the Front played an important role in helping the people of Lancaster understand the lives of their friends and relatives on the battlefield. Censorship meant that some details were withheld, either by the men themselves, or by the officers responsible for checking their correspondence. Even so, while relatives were spared some of the more brutal details of life in and behind the trenches, the letters often gave a good insight into the challenges of modern warfare. Both the Lancaster Observer and the Lancaster Guardian published hundreds of extracts from them during the years between 1914 and 1918. The picture painted by the letters reproduced in the two newspapers’ columns was, for the most part, one of quiet determination and confidence about the justice of Britain’s cause. Such sentiment – as in Lancaster itself – was probably more representative than the extravagant rhetoric of the recruiting rallies of 1914 and 1915.
A few extracts from some letters sent home by soldiers to their families reveals how many of the men wanted to describe their experiences while sheltering their relatives from the full horrors of combat. In a letter written some time after Christmas 1914, Private Richard Gaughan from Bare thanked his friends and family for a package of chocolates and mince pies, which made a refreshing change from ‘bully beef and biscuits’. With these pleasantries out of the way, he went on to describe how the landscape where he was fighting had been ‘blown to atoms’, while ‘the whiz of bullets and the crash of shells makes you realise what a terrible thing war is’. Other soldiers were equally frank about the conditions under which they struggled. In May 1915, a soldier from Lancaster wrote home describing the scenes as his unit advanced out of the trenches, ‘the beautiful spring day’ made ‘hideous’ by the shells falling around him. He was surprised that he ‘felt no fear’, even when hit by shrapnel, after which he was taken to a field-station from where he was writing. In the same month, the Lancaster Observer printed a letter from an officer in the 1st/5th Battalion, King’s Own, describing how his men had recently been ‘badly mauled’ at the Second Battle of Ypres. Another letter-writer vividly told what it was like to be gassed.
This combination of honesty and bravery remained the hallmark of many soldiers’ letters home over the months and years that followed. Relatives sent copies of the correspondence to the newspapers, which were happy to print material that acknowledged the difficult conditions of war, while at the same time capturing the determination and bravery of the troops. Many letters were remarkably positive about the German forces they faced, praising their military skill, and avoiding some of the more hostile language that routinely appeared in the press back in Britain. Soldiers seldom dwelt at length on the rights and wrongs of the war, at least beyond a perfunctory expression of belief that they were fighting for a good cause. The Lancaster newspapers sometimes sought to create a more positive tone in their columns by printing news of awards for valour made to men from Lancaster, and soldiers belonging to the King’s Own, describing the acts for which they had been commended. They also carried details of men who had been wounded, or gone missing, and were occasionally able to carry more pleasant stories of how soldiers feared dead had been found alive and taken to hospital. More common, though, were reports of men who had died, many of which are summarised or reproduced on the Reveille website.
Relatives and friends of soldiers killed on the battlefield were often desperate for news of how their loved-ones had died. The commanding officers and chaplains were equally determined not to be too graphic in their accounts. The brutal character of life and death on the battlefield was almost impossible to comprehend for those fortunate enough not to experience it first-hand. The letters sent to bereaved relatives that were published in the Lancaster press – and in other newspapers up and down Britain – almost invariably paid homage to the bravery of the dead man and his popularity among his colleagues. They were usually economical in providing details about how they died.
A few examples reveal the character of many of the letters giving news of the death of a son or brother or husband. In May 1915, the widow of Private Thomas Towers received a letter from his Commanding Officer, telling her that he had been shot in the head and died later at an ambulance station. In the same month, the mother of Private Victor Keyworth from Bolton le Moors received a letter from his corporal, who came from Lancaster, describing how her son had been shot in the mouth, and before dying had asked that his friends write to her to offer his goodbyes. A few months later, the widow of Private Alfred Bewes of the 2nd Battalion, King’s Own, received a letter describing how her husband had been hit by shell fragments and died shortly afterwards: ‘He died a soldier’s death.’ Similar letters flooded back to Lancaster throughout the war years, many printed in the Lancaster Observer and Lancaster Guardian, telling how men had ‘been killed instantly’, or lived just long enough to send fond farewells to their loved ones.
With separation came letter-writing, fostered by boredom, and the yearning for loved ones and news of home or abroad. To give a sense of the scale of the postal operation of the war, we need only to look at some statistics. At its peak, 12.5 million letters and a million parcels left the purpose-built sorting depot at Regent’s Park every week, while letters back were collected from the men from field post offices across the Front. Over the course of the war, the British Army Postal Service delivered around 2 billion letters. Since the Boer War, the British Army had been well aware of the importance of post to maintaining morale, but the logistics of the operation were challenged by the scale of operations, and the importance of maintaining censorship to avoid information falling into the wrong hands.
Correspondence was read in a number of contrasting ways – in snatched moments of privacy and stored safe close to the body, shared more openly with relatives, friends or comrades to permit snippets of news to be collated and discussed, and more openly still in the local press, as shown in this chapter. Such letters encourage us not to over-emphasise the gulf of experience between the home and the battlefront, even if prose could never convey all the dimensions of experience. Letters also played a significant part in fostering rumours between the fronts: a report into the morals of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps on the Western Front concluded, for example, that its poor reputation was the consequence of rumours started in letters home-fuelled by the ‘jealousy and hostility’ of men ‘dislodged from non-combatant tasks in the bases’ by the arrival of the women.
One of the strangest experiences of war must have been receiving letters from the dead: it took at least two days for post between the Western Front and Great Britain. In Gallipoli, more unopened letters whose intended recipients had been killed in action had to be sent back from the front than letters going forward. The General Post Office did seek to ensure that returned letters did not arrive before informing the next of kin of the death. In a letter to her brother, Vera Brittain described witnessing when her deceased fiancé’s returned kit was received by his mother: ‘These were his clothes - the clothes in which he came home from the front last time. Everything was damp and worn and simply caked with mud … We discovered that the bullet was an expanding one. The hole where it went in in front – well below where the belt would have been, just below the right-hand bottom pocket of the tunic - was almost microscopic, but at the back, almost exactly where his back bone would have been, there was quite a large rent.’ On the other hand, parcels received at the front bringing supplies from home could make all the difference to morale, offering an opportunity, for example, to share a taste of home with comrades - if the rats had not got there first.
The ‘strange experience’ of hearing Pte Frederick Lupton (Killed in Action) from beyond the grave, as reported in the Lancaster Observer, 14 May 1915. (MJH)
It was usually impossible to know the precise circumstances of an individual soldier’s death. Some were lucky enough to die quickly from a bullet wound to the head or a direct hit from a shell, but many more died slow and agonising deaths. The Wesleyan Methodist chaplain Robert Wearmouth, who worked for long periods of time in field-hospitals in northern France, later recalled how when he wrote to the bereaved he carefully spared them the details about how their loved ones died. Nor was he alone. Lots of those who tended the wounded recalled the horrors of infected wounds, gangrene, maggots, gas burns and amputations. The heroism of the men condemned to such awful fates was not in any way reduced by the agonies they suffered. But the conventions of the letters home to the bereaved, whether from commanding officers and chaplains, or simply from friends, required a language of dignity and selflessness that was in many cases illusory. The rhetoric of approval – the use of a language that emphasised the justice of Britain’s cause and the heroism of its soldiers – placed an emphasis on bravery and sacrifice rather than the harsh realities of mechanised slaughter. The bereaved of Lancaster, like every town and village up and down Britain, preferred to imagine their loved ones lying whole in a quiet grave, rather than as a mangled and incomplete body buried hastily with others in the shallow earth. Yet that was the fate of many who died in the First World War.
This letter from Jane Monks, mother of Corporal F.V. Monks, of the King’s Own, describes receiving multiple letters reporting contradictory news of her son. Between the lines, we can read both desperation and hope.
The obituaries of dead soldiers in the Lancaster papers were typically written in a way that emphasised both their service to their country and their close ties to their home town. When the death of Captain Charles Hinton from Scotforth was reported in May 1918, the Lancaster Observer gave a long account of the career of ‘a gallant soldier and a brave Englishman’. Nor was it only officers who received such attention (although their obituaries were generally longer). The same edition of the Lancaster Observer reported the death of Private George Townley from Skerton, describing his time in Lancaster at Waring and Gillow, as well as giving details of the service record of his brother. The paper also reported the deaths of several other Lancaster men during the previous week, and gave details of the wounded, as well as providing information about those taken prisoner. The language used in these reports was typically factual rather than hyperbolic. The men who had lost their lives for their country were praised for fulfilling their duty as patriotic Englishmen. The tone echoed the language in which the First World War was generally discussed in Lancaster and its environs: as a conflict forced upon Britain, to which its people had to respond, rather than as an occasion for great outpourings of jingoism and nationalism. In the final years of the war, in particular, quiet patriotism and determination to work for victory were the order of the day for many in Lancaster.
Families of men at the Front often found it hard to get definite news of their loved ones. The wife of Harry Winder, who lived at 12 St Leonard’s Gate, only knew for certain that her husband was dead when another Lancaster soldier wrote to say that Winder had been killed with ten other men by a German shell: ‘This big battle is terrible and takes the nerves out of a chap.’
The civic leaders of Lancaster – its councillors, businessmen, newspaper editors and ministers of religion – were unanimous in 1914 that Britain was fighting for a good cause and they believed that their town should play its full part in the struggle. They also encouraged its young (and not so young) men to fight. They played their part in helping Lancaster become a major centre for the manufacture of munitions. The leading civic figures in the town sometimes disagreed on matters of detail, such as balancing the needs of the local economy and the needs of recruitment, but they were wholeheartedly committed to the war effort. Yet the language they used in support of the war in Lancaster was marked as much by quiet talk of duty as it was by nationalist excess. The rhetoric of the recruiting campaigns was inspired by an instrumental need to encourage men to enlist – just as the accusation of cowardice was meant to shame them into the army – but it would be wrong to imagine that talk of ‘shirkers’ and ‘huns’ and ‘heroes’ was the only language in which war was discussed.
It is always easier to peer into the minds of businessmen and newspaper editors than it is into the minds of ordinary people. Yet all the evidence suggests that the people of Lancaster were overwhelmingly in support of the war, ‘doing their bit’, while accepting its agonies either with stoicism or private anguish. They took pride in the sons and brothers and husbands who went to fight. They believed that their loved ones fought for a good cause. And although they were on occasion ready to use or respond to the language of ‘John Bull’, more often they believed that war was a ghastly business, and something that had to be endured rather than enjoyed.