In Lancaster, the gulf between the battlefront and the home front was never wide. As the Lancaster Guardian pointed out, ‘as a garrison town Lancaster has been in close touch with the war from its commencement.’ Throughout the war, the newspapers were full of news from the battlefront, not just official communiques but details from letters submitted by the families of soldiers. The first inkling that the 1st/5th Battalion of the King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment was at Ypres shortly after it had arrived in France, for example, came from the Lancaster Guardian of 10 April 1915, when it was reported that ‘Several letters received from the men of the 5th King’s Own Royal Lancaster Regiment refer to the fact that they have this week arrived at a famous town, which has loomed largely in the fighting of the western front.’ A bookseller on New Street, Mr G.S. West, had two sons, Jack and Bert serving in the ‘Pals’. On 10 April 1915, the Lancaster Guardian reported Mr West had received a batch of picture postcards of Ypres from Bert, showing the shocking impact of the bombardment on the city. The losses during the Second Battle of Ypres (see chapters 4 and 5), when 121 Lancastrians died in six weeks in April and May 1915, led to a period when every newspaper edition brought home with ‘greater intensity the terrible nature of the hostilities and appalling sacrifice of life involved’. As described in Chapter 2, these letters and reports did not lack graphic descriptions of the experience of warfare.
Newspapers were not the only media to offer coverage of the war to civilians. The North West Film Archive holds footage that would have been eagerly watched in one of the town’s four cinemas: indeed the footage was often deliberately shot to include as many faces as possible to encourage viewers seeking a glimpse of loved ones. In late summer 1914, Thomas Scholey shot footage of men drilling outside of the Winter Gardens in Morecambe: without uniforms, they sported blue and orange flashes on their sleeves to demarcate them from civilians (see Chapter 1). There is footage of the collection of blankets for the troops, of men leaving from Lancaster Castle station, waved off by Mayor William Briggs and local dignitaries, catching in celluloid their flag-waving commitment to the war effort. Indeed there was much discussion in the press about who was allowed on the platform. Later in the war, there was considerable disgruntlement expressed by families not being allowed to wave goodbye to their loved ones: the blame was laid with the military controlling the space with an eye only to military efficiency. Not all war films were local of course. The most famous film of the war is perhaps ‘The Battle of the Somme’ filmed by Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell. The directors had for the first time been given permission to film at the front. This film probably did most to elevate cinema from lower-class entertainment to a fitting pastime for all. This was footage which appeared to offer authentic images of the war and offer a sense of immediacy. In the autumn of 1916 over 20 million Britons – half the population – saw it. In Lancaster, ‘The Battle of the Somme’ screened at the Lancaster Palladium in Market Street, on 5, 6 and 7 October. The Lancaster Guardian reported ‘record houses … Quite a number (of Lancastrians) recognised relations amongst the fighting men.’
There are interesting further indicators of how the home front engaged with the war. James Hayes has convincingly argued that the treatment of ‘aliens’ in Lancaster and Morecambe shows how much the home front was affected by the war and the extent to which individuals sought to be part of the war effort in whatever ways available to them. Foreign aliens had to register and the press was full of court proceedings against individuals of numerous nationalities (not only enemy nations) who had contravened the regulations on registration and movement, including a Mrs Margaret Kniel who was arrested in September 1914 for failing to register that she was of foreign birth. Born in Austria-Hungary, she had been a resident in Heysham since 1898. Some aliens were brought into the town from areas deemed vulnerable such as Morecambe, Manchester or Barrow-in-Furness: in August 1914, for example, thirty-two aliens from Barrow arrived in an attempt to protect the port from subversive activities.
Lancaster was not immune to the anti-German feeling which erupted across the country. The shop windows of Frederick Kramer, a pork butcher, were targeted in May 1915, when the newspapers were full of the local losses at Ypres and the sinking of the Lusitania. Kramer was of German parentage, but a naturalised Briton who had lived in Lancaster for many years. Lance-Corporal Joseph William O’Brien, 2nd Battalion, King’s Own, was charged with wilful damage, but the main criticism expressed at his court case was that the cost of the repairs would have to be borne by the town. The mayor suggested instead boycotting such establishments, hoping that: ‘Lancaster people would have the common-sense not to follow such a foolish example, but behave in a law-abiding manner, and not damage property in this way. If they had any feeling against shops of this kind they need not deal with them, and then they would soon be closed.’
The aliens greeted most sympathetically were the Belgians, although even they could be detained and penalised for poor registration practices. The press covered arrivals of refugees, termed ‘fugitives’, and their subsequent experiences; a refugee house was opened in Morecambe, and families and employers such as Williamson’s took them in.
On outbreak of war, the first two Germans to fall foul of the entry requirements for aliens arrived on a vessel that landed at Glasson Dock. Out at sea, they knew nothing of the outbreak of war, but were arrested immediately for lack of appropriate paperwork and subsequently interned.
Civilian internment of enemy aliens had been adopted at a national level from August 1914, serving the dual purpose of removing potential threats and bolstering morale on the home front. As Panikos Panayi has shown, by September 1914, 10,500 German resident civilians had been interned in Britain. By the May of the following year, all male civilian enemy aliens of military age were to be interned – by 1917, over 79,000 men. The speed with which this policy was put into practice led to makeshift camps, one of which was located in Lancaster in the Wagon Works on Caton Road.
There is a fascinating account of the flight to England by a young Belgian refugee from Antwerp, Irma Daems, which was published in the Chronicle of Lancaster’s Girls Grammar School, at which she had become a pupil.
After the 5th Battalion, King’s Own, left its temporary billets in the Wagon Works in August 1914 (see Chapter 1), it was only a few days before contractors from Nottingham had moved in to make the site secure, adding barbed wire to the walls and generally making the place ready to take ‘prisoners of war’ or interned illegal aliens. On 20 August a company of the 3rd Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, arrived to take charge of the prisoners, the first of which arrived on the following Monday, conveyed by direct train to the works’ sidings. In the first week 380 prisoners arrived, many of them German seamen whose boats had been in British ports when war was declared. By the middle of September the camp population had swelled to 1,700 with prisoners arriving from Manchester, Newcastle and Carlisle. Most prisoners were German or Austrian nationals and predominantly adult males, however some were detained with their families, including children. One of Caton Road’s most prominent internees was the then circus performer Joseph Hubertus Pilates who developed his physical regime of ‘Contrology’ not least in response to the constraints of incarceration. There is an account of conditions in the camp provided in a prison diary by Willy Wolff, a German Jew from Böchingen in the Rhineland, who had been working at a cotton brokerage in Salford since 1912 and subsequently interned in Lancaster. He described his arrival in the camp in 1914:
An exterior view of the camp in the Wagon Works, Caton Road. Some of the confusions in local lore – placing Joseph Pilates in the Castle, for example, can partially be explained by the indiscriminate use of the term ‘prisoner of war’ which blurs the distinction between foreign service personnel captured in the field and interned aliens. (LCM)
October 5. Brought to Lancaster (3 captive Germans; 3 Policemen); Lancaster camp – an old, very dirty wagon factory that already had been shuttered for ten years. The appearance of the thousand internees already there was deplorable. The ovens were terribly primitive – built by the internees themselves. Nearly all of the people slept on straw mattresses on the damp floor.
Wolff’s account of the camp is confirmed in other sources. Famously, in his autobiography Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves described his experience as a Royal Welch Fusilier guarding the camp:
I went off on detachment duty to a newly-formed internment camp for enemy aliens at Lancaster … a dirty, draughty place, littered with old scrap metal and guarded by high barbed wire fences. About three thousand prisoners had already arrived there, and more and more crowded in every day: seamen were arrested on German vessels … waiters from large hotels in the north …, commercial travellers and shopkeepers. The prisoners resented being interned, particularly family men who had lived at peace in England for many years. The one comfort that we could offer them was “you are safer inside than out”. For anti-German feeling had begun to run high …
There was much contradictory discussion as to the living conditions in the camp which was cold, draughty and dirty as well as overcrowded. At the same time the internees could exercise certain freedoms, such as holding sports days, or celebrating the Emperor of Austria-Hungary’s birthday on 18 August 1915 through singing patriotic songs and enjoying a Bavarian military band. Boredom could foster creativity: on 8 January 1915, Wolff mentions prisoners had started ‘the art of bone cutting’ – carving bones to pass the time – two are held by the King’s Own Royal Regiment Museum, and the Lancaster City Museum collection also holds examples of such pastimes. The prisoners’ visibility could sometimes provoke local hostility, for example, when a march of internees accompanied by a band was seen as an offence to those who had lost relatives in the war.
‘Lancaster Camp, 7.15am ... Appell’ (rollcall, used here humorously). Watercolour by Adolph Ernest Jean von du Stratton, 1915. (LCM)
By 1915 the camp on Caton Road was no longer deemed an appropriate location: internees across the nation were being relocated to Knockaloe Aliens Camp on the Isle of Man, and locally the National Projectile Factory was being built beside the camp on Caton Road. In the same year, civilian prisoners were removed from the gaol at Lancaster Castle, which was to provide accommodation for German prisoners of war, detached from the camp at Leigh, who formed working parties in the area.
Three German prisoners who died in April 1919 of influenza-related complications were buried in Lancaster Cemetery, where they were interred with military honours. As the Lancaster Guardian reported on 12 April 1919, their coffins were covered with German flags, with a wreath placed on each. The coffins were conveyed in three hearses which were accompanied by six comrades as wreath bearers, and by three guards. The townspeople were reported as showing ‘sympathetic interest’ and the cortege was met on the way to the cemetery by a firing party from the barracks.
This carved bone features a rose and leaves and is marked ‘1914 Remembrance 1915’ and ‘Made in POW Camp, Vieteck, 1803, Lancaster’. (KOM)
There is ample evidence that Lancastrians who remained at home found ways of expressing their patriotism and commitment to the war effort in myriad ways. On outbreak of war, young men were paid to guard railway bridges for fear of alien sabotage and the population was alert to the dangers of internal enemies and spy activity as is evidenced by the reporting of suspicious lights on Morecambe sea front and in the fells, or a car ‘suspiciously’ left without number plates in Lancaster. The Mayoress, Mary Alice Briggs, purportedly set up sewing parties twice a week, where she presided over 150 women, not putting any seamstresses out of work, however. She also gifted beef tea to the Infirmary, joined a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) and sent comforts to the troops. Conversely, Caroline Marshall, the suffragist and peace activist, stood up against ‘our sort’ as she put it, for Conscientious Objectors (COs), giving a temporary home to the CO William Hayes.
The large numbers of soldiers in town also brought negative consequences. From very early in the war there was an increase in the number of cases brought to the police courts of men and women charged with drunkenness or disorderly conduct. One of the excuses was that the men were reservists, on the way to the depot of their regiments, and had been ‘treated’ by friends, or were having a jollification before taking up arms. The defendants received no sympathy by the courts, who stated that their actions were quite out of harmony with the spirit of the country which had taken up the struggle. The prevalence of drunkenness led to the suggestion that public houses might very well be closed earlier each night, or open later each morning.
A case before Lancaster’s magistrates saw the conviction of Hannah Mary Morland, age 24, wife of a Territorial soldier, living at 3 James Street. She was found guilty of keeping a brothel. Chief Constable Harriss prosecuted the case. He told the court that Morland’s husband was away with the 5th Battalion of the King’s Own, and since he had been away she had been carrying out this business, and more recently she had been assisted by other women. As many as three houses had been under observation by the police and different men had been seen very late at night. A disturbance in James Street resulted when some soldiers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, posted to guard the Wagon Works, spent the night at the house, and the neighbourhood was up in arms about it. Captain Fairclough, of the Royal Welch, addressed the magistrates and stated that he had great difficulty in keeping the men at the Wagon Works, stating they gave more trouble than the prisoners owing to the number of girls constantly hanging around the place. He described how two girls got inside the works the other day, spent the night in the place and were lifted over the wall by soldiers next morning.
The Boys’ National School sold images of the regimental badges to raise money. (KOM)
The Mayor, William Briggs, as the chief magistrate, said it was a very demoralising and shocking state of affairs, and any action the military authorities might take would have the support of the Bench, who were determined to try and stop these activities going on in Lancaster. Mrs Morland was sent to the Castle gaol for two months’ hard labour. History does not record the reaction of Private Morland in Didcot who must have been quick to learn about his wife’s activities as a full report appeared in the Lancaster Guardian, copies of which were sure to find their way to Didcot.
The impact of the war on children is elusive in the primary sources, but should not be ignored. At the start of 1915, Panikos Panayi notes that of the 2,000 internees in Caton Road Camp, 200 were boys under seventeen, some of whom had been taken from fishing boats. Wolff also mentions boys being interned in the camp, eighteen of whom being discharged in December 1914, along with five missionaries. As far as local children are concerned, Bulmer’s 1912 directory for Lancaster lists nineteen academies and schools as well as the Storey Institute and Museum, an art, technical and science school. Apart from providing recruits from amongst pupils, former pupils and staff, schools also supported the war effort in a variety of ways. The Boys’ and Girls’ Grammar Schools both had school magazines during the war. While the boys shared news from ‘Old Lancastrians’ on the battlefront and founded an Officer Training Corps, the Girls’ magazine was a rich source on life on the home front, including, for example, the accounts of a Belgian refugee who attended the school, of fundraising activities to support a prisoner of war and the foundation of Westfield War Memorial Village. The girls also mourned with their headmistress, Miss Phillimore, when she lost one of her three serving brothers to wounds received in action.
The origins of the Girls’ Grammar School lie in the Pupil Teacher Centre intended to train Pupil Teachers at the end of the eighteenth century. Its history has been recorded by Pat Harrison, former Head of History at the school. In 1901 the Centre moved to the Storey Institute and a few years later these Centres had been merged into Secondary Schools. The Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School (LGGS) adopted that name in January 1908: its location near the train station allowed girls to attend from surrounding areas, from Lunesdale to Garstang. The Storey Institute became too small to house the growing intake of pupils and a new building was erected on Regent Street, the school moving in on 22 September 1914, after the outbreak of war. With various additions, that building remains the heart of the current LGGS.
The impact of the war on the school was reflected in myriad ways: school hours were altered to reflect lighting restrictions; certificates were awarded instead of prizes to support War Savings; the girls raised money for numerous war-related causes, from the Serbian Relief Fund to the Jack Cornwell VC Memorial Fund; their excursions included a trip on Empire Day to see a cinematographic show entitled ‘Britain Prepared’ and a month’s flax-pulling in Shropshire; and they adopted two prisoners of war. The war work of Old Girls included employment in agriculture and munitions, clerical work on the railway and voluntary work. The girls were informed by the Chairman of the Lancashire Education Committee, Henry Hibbert, that ‘never has the country needed more trained and educated women’. For some, however, the war ended their education: in 1914, for example, three girls were unable to return to school because of changes in their home circumstances ‘due to the war’.
A wartime edition of The Chronicle of the Girls’ Grammar School, first published in 1914. (CPB with kind permission from LGGS)
At the outbreak of war, the two civilian employers who dominated the Lancaster landscape were James Williamson & Son and Storey Brothers. Bulmer’s trade directory of 1912 described the products of the former as including linoleum, floor cloth, table baize, leathercloth and varnish manufacturers, with sites at St George’s Works (now derelict) and Lune Mills (now redeveloped as housing), St George’s Quay, and cotton spinners and manufacturers located at Greenfield Mills (the last mill to be built in Lancaster in 1864) and Bath Mills, Moor Lane (acquired by Williamson’s in 1864). As Lancaster’s Civic Society explains, table baize was a woven covering for tables (and other surfaces); leathercloth was calico-coated with linseed oil and embossed to make a covering similar to leather, and oilcloth was an early waterproofed cotton textile. Storey Brothers similarly produced leathercloth and table baize manufacturing, and was also listed as cotton spinner and manufacturer, with sites at White Cross (where Lancaster’s oldest mill opened in 1802), just one of a line of mills that stretched along the canal from Queen Street Mill (now B&Q) in the south, to Albion Mill, Bulk Road, in the north. These mills were used in the manufacture of, for example, grey cotton that was subsequently used as a backing material for oilcloth. It was at Queen’s Mill, where Anaglypta wall coverings were first manufactured.
James Helme & Co. (the father of Norval Watson Helme, the Liberal MP for Lancaster during the war) ran Halton Mills which manufactured oilcloth, baize and leathercloth. Lord Ashton and Herbert Lushington Storey were other principal landowners in the area. There were also multiple stained glass window manufacturers: Abbott Jas. Hartley at 27 West Road, for example, Jas. Holmes. & Co. on Fenton Street, and perhaps most famously Shrigley & Hunt on 23 Castle Hill, which was to gain further commissions creating stained glass window memorials for the fallen. A great tension in the war was the competing needs of the military and the civilian professions: the case of Williamson’s as outlined by Philip Gooderson provides a clear local example of the challenges employers faced. By January 1915, 900 men from Williamson’s had volunteered – over one fifth of the workforce. Replacing all of these with women could not be assured especially after the opening of the higher paying Caton Road and White Lund munitions works, although oral testimony suggests some parents refused to let their daughters work at these.
Storey Brothers of Lancaster, White Cross. (LCM)
After the call for volunteers that followed the heavy casualties of the First Battle of Ypres the preceding autumn, in the spring of 1915, Lord Ashton wrote to the War Office stating that he would not be able to keep his works open if more men joined up (see Chapter 2). Norval Helme and Storey expressed their solidarity, but the War Office suggested that enlistment ‘is purely a matter for the men to decide for themselves’. When that ceased to be the case following the introduction of conscription in the Military Service Act of January 1916, the local tribunals were not averse to offering temporary exemptions to employees of the oilcloth firms. This perhaps reflected an awareness of the importance of keeping the works open for the sake of the town, rather than their contributions to the war effort: Williamson’s produced blackout curtains. It was the floor coverings, however, which ensured the industry was upgraded from ‘non-essential’ to ‘restricted’, as these were favoured by the medical profession and the Red Cross for hygiene reasons. Nonetheless, by 1917, production was down to around a quarter of 1914 levels: Lord Ashton had lost 41 per cent of his male workforce to the military and 24 per cent to munitions work, and of his pre-war force of women cotton workers, 42 per cent had left, often to munitions which offered better pay and the lure of the Royal Visit in 1917.
The Royal Visit to Lancaster’s munitions factories, May 1917. (KOM)
Other local industries shifted production more substantially. By the summer of 1915, a scheme of co-operative aircraft construction had been rolled out from Scotland to England, using small sub-contractors for the manufacture of aeroplane parts: Waring and Gillow was renowned for its cabinet furniture, but in the First World War, the Lancaster factory switched to making products for the war effort. There are photographic records showing women working on biplane wings in the factory in Lancaster, located on North Road, and the company records also reveal that it manufactured ammunition chests for the Navy and propellers for De Havilland DH9 aircraft.
In Lancashire, women were already an integral part of the labour force as they were heavily employed in the textile industry. There is, however, evidence that there was a new influx of women into the major employers of Lancaster, Storey’s and Williamson’s, as the men departed for war. Lancaster exemplified Gail Braybon’s theory that the greatest impact of the First World War on women’s work was not to introduce it, but to make it visible. For example, the electric buses taking workers to the munitions works on Caton Road left from the centre of town, in front of the Old Town Hall in Market Square. There were no bus conductresses in Lancaster until the end of the war: it was not until mid-1918 that agreement could be reached over appropriate clothing for them.
In 1914 there were sixteen firms nationally with munitions contracts with the War Office; by the end of the war there were over 218 new or adapted factories producing every kind of munitions. Two of those were in Lancaster – Vickers Ltd managed the National Projectile Factory (NPF) on Caton Road and the National Filling Factory (NFF) on the White Lund, Morecambe. Construction had begun on the former in September 1915, and the site opened in November 1916. Manufacturing and related work here included grenade mortars, 9.2in, 6in, 8in and 60-pounder shells, plus repair and trench warfare work. By the end of the war, the NPF employed 8,656 employees, 53 per cent of whom were men. This statistic is an important reminder that the majority of the male population remained on the home front – and that civilians could take pride in their contribution to the battlefront.
Battery-powered electric buses are seen here in Market Square in c. 1917, picking up female workers to take them to the Caton Road Works. (LCM)
Staff at the White Lund Filling Factory. (LCM)
Poems from ‘N.P.F. Lancaster’, sold to raise money for St Dunstan’s Hostel for the Blind, express this pride in humorous tones, for example, in an ode to the 9.2in shell:
The work is done, now we must part
And for our native town shall start
To leave behind, what we know well,
The making of the 9.2 shell.
A ‘Ripping’ time when on ‘Rough Turn’,
And what a wage ‘Nose Bore’ could earn.
Then ‘Inside Bore’ and ‘Finish Turn’,
That good old 9.2 shell.
Construction of the NFF began on 23 November 1915, and the site opened in July 1916, encompassing sixteen bonded stores, a paint shop, a shell store, magazines, a power station, and six ‘danger’ huts. 6in howitzers, 8in High Explosives (HE) and 60-pounder HE were filled here with Amatol, a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate, or gas. Women outnumbered male employees at this establishment: in September 1917, they constituted 64.4 per cent of the 4,621 employees.
The site remained dangerous. On 5 April 1918 a team of 13 men were salvaging shells from the units wrecked in 1917. Two were killed in an explosion. Then on 14 January 1920, there was another explosion as staff defused and emptied shells. Nine were killed.
The workers were accommodated in local lodgings rather than attracting new building projects to house them, as was the case in some other new factories such as the one at Gretna. The work was dangerous, but comparatively well-paid. Deaths were caused by poisoning (by gas or TNT), and industrial accidents: there were three fatalities caused by accidents involving cranes, for example.
The NFF covered a 400-acre site. The number of separate small wooden huts was intended to contain the risk of explosions. (LCM)
Both munitions factories offered new opportunities for female employment. This image shows Miss Susannah Thompson in uniform, NPF.(LCM)
The Lancaster Munitions Tribunal began meeting from October 1916 to rule on issues concerning either of the munitions factories. Of particular concern were infractions of the prohibition to smuggle matches or cigarettes on to the premises, given the risk of explosive accidents; petty crime including theft was also ruled on here. In 1916, the YMCA on China Street began a club for munitions workers; perhaps in response to national fears about the drinking and courting behaviours of the young female workers. This was not entirely without foundation: in Lancaster three female munitions workers were sentenced for running a brothel on the side. But there is also evidence of sexual innocence: the Imperial War Museum holds a manuscript by Olive Taylor who left Yorkshire to fill shells on the White Lund. She lived in lodgings in Morecambe at 25s a week (out of wages of 27s) and ‘slept five in a room and never got enough to eat.’ She was so horrified to find out how babies were made that her workmates began to call her ‘Old Molly never had it’. The workers also developed their own forms of entertainment: the NPF had both a Vaudeville Society and a Projectile Club which offered such entertainments as vaudeville reviews (such as ‘Hullo Projectile’ in May 1917), or a fancy dress dance to mark the second anniversary of the factory opening.
The programme cover for the NPF revue ‘Hullo Projectile’. (CPB)
At 10.15 p.m. on 1 October 1917, a fire was spotted in Unit 6c at the National Filling Factory. The upper floor held large amounts of TNT; the lower floor, 12-inch partially filled shells which exploded about twenty minutes after the fire began. As the majority of the workers were still in the canteen on their break, most managed to escape unharmed or with minor injuries, despite the panicked rush to the gates (which initially could not be opened because of the crush) and the danger of falling into the flooded marshes around the site. The explosions, the largest of which occurred at 3.00 a.m., could be heard and seen across the region: ornaments fell from mantelpieces, windows smashed, and ceilings collapsed. Shrapnel from the explosion was found as far away as Scotforth and Quernmore. Many of the local populace took to the hills and surrounding areas, although many such as Morecambe promenade proved to be unsafe with shells exploding overhead and shrapnel raining down. One man (anonymised as Mr K1L), interviewed by Elizabeth Roberts in the 1970s, recalled how as a child he and his siblings had walked all the way to Caton to get away from the explosions, being passed by an ice cream man:
He had five or six kids and he had them sitting on top of a bassinet and he said, ‘Me no stop me go on.’ And he landed at Hornby.
Did a lot of people go away?
Yes, you’d go as far away from it as you could, because you didn’t know what was happening. We thought it was a Zeppelin dropping bombs. They could hear it at Bentham. An aunt of mine heard it at Bentham. We slept on the bare floor with just a blanket round us in Caton Institute.
Contemporary public reports were kept deliberately curt. Records suggest that ten men were killed that night, mainly fighting the fires. Four Edward Medals were won – introduced to award bravery in ‘Mines’ and ‘Industry’ – with each type having a Silver and Bronze version. Of the 188 Industry medals awarded, only twenty-five Silver awards were made between 1907 and 1949 – four of which were for the explosion at the White Lund. Two recipients were Thomas Kew and Abraham Graham who shunted twenty-nine, forty-nine or fifty-five ammunition trucks (sources vary) holding 250,000 live shells out of the danger zone. The other two were Thomas Tattershall, the works’ fireman, and Police Sergeant Thomas Coppard who shepherded 300 workers to safety. The telephonist Mary Agnes Wilkinson was awarded the Medal of the Order of the British Empire (MOBE) for her devotion to duty. She cycled through the chaos to the exchange in Cable Street. She was blown off her bicycle twice on the way, and stayed at her post for twenty-four hours. Lily Cope, a nurse on duty in the ambulance room at the filling factory, was also awarded a MOBE in November 1918. She stayed with an injured man for six-and-a-half hours in the chaos of the factory grounds, and then succeeded in having him removed to the Royal Lancaster Infirmary. A third medal was won by the factory nurse Maisie Shepherd who perfomed ‘her duties quietly and without regard to personal safety’. The local families supplementing their income lost their lodgers overnight: the factory was not to reopen fully during the war.
Three Edward Medal holders leaving Buckingham Palace after receiving their medals on 7 May 1918. (L-R: Graham, Coppard, Kew). (LCM)
Rumours abounded about the cause of the explosion: initially locals assumed a Zeppelin attack, not such a fanciful idea given that on 25 September 1916, Rawtenstall, Holcombe and Bolton had all been bombed from the air. Anne Spencer (née Harrington), who witnessed the explosions at the age of 10, described how her Aunt and Uncle in Manchester ‘were frantic because they could see the fire and hear the explosions (almost 80 miles away) and were told that the whole of Morecambe and Lancaster were in ruins and they were walking on the dead’. Another theory suggested the fire had been the result of the actions of a German agent working in the TNT store, although the police scoffed at the idea he could have smuggled in matches. Graham Pedder maintained for decades afterwards that the agent had smuggled them in under his eyepatch. At the inquest of Willing Topping, the jury returned the following verdict: ‘That deceased’s death was due to injuries accidentally received while carrying out his duties during a fire in a national filling factory, there being no evidence to how the fire originated.’ It seems unlikely we will ever have any certainty as to the cause.
Life on the home front was a curious mixture of the familiar and the novel; the continuities of labour and pleasure activities and their disruption by the demands of war. Responses to the war were also contradictory: on the one hand, there was a hunger for news from the front, on the other hand, escapist film and literature untouched by martial themes remained highly popular – Mary Pickford was not just ‘America’s Sweetheart’, as local reviews of her films testify. The impact of the war ranged from the irritating and inconvenient – such as lighting restrictions – and at the other extreme, the devastation of bereavement. This was true across Britain. In Lancaster, the profile of employment and the presence of the King’s Own created some distinct consequences. As the following chapters show, the war was substantially to change the profile of the city.