Shirebrook; the Western Front; Oswestry, 1914–22
Four and a half years later, the young Parkin family is still living in the three rented rooms at 3, Ashbourne Street. Winnie Parkin, hazel-eyed and raven-haired like her mam, has started at Shirebrook school. Annie, twenty-three, has another daughter now, called Millie, after Annie’s own mother. Walter still works at the pit and rules the home with pious discipline. Fearful of the Weavers’ jollity, he hangs the walls with needlepoint mottoes: ‘Bless This House’, ‘Cleanliness is Next To Godliness’, ‘Teach Me What Is Good’ – the latter hung over the sitting-room table and silently indicated to command silence when the family is eating.
Shirebrook still has its bad reputation, but Walter and Annie see it improving. Two years ago British miners won a national strike for a minimum wage and since then there has been more money in the village, the shops, theatre and hotels full of men and women with payday pockets clinking. In June, the streets were cleaned and hung with flags for the visit of King George V and Queen Mary, and Winnie gathered with the town’s children to cheer them as they walked through the market place. Some people said the King looked tired. Soon afterwards the adults will look back and wonder if this had anything to do with the political events in Europe they read about in the newspapers through the summer.
A few days after that royal visit, Bosnian-Serb assassins shoot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg in Sarajevo. On 4 August, Britain declares war on Germany. Thousands of miners make up some of the first new territorial units and in Leeds, the West Yorkshire Coalowners Association raises a miners’ battalion for the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. In Derbyshire, some colliery owners say they will give free rent and coal to the dependants of soldiers at the front; in some pits, colliers vote to have money stopped from their weekly wages so that it can be given to the families of miners who have left the pit to fight. In Shirebrook, miners and managers set up a recruiting station in the colliery offices. Underground, work slows because there is no imported timber for pit props. The local newspapers carry on their front pages Lord Kitchener’s Appeal to England’s Young Manhood – a letter to the youth of Shirebrook, Langwith and Warsop Dale, urging them to join up.
Walter, a strong believer in duty, enlists among crowds of young men on 2 September 1914. It is a hot day with a hot atmosphere in the market place outside the recruiting office at Mansfield Town Hall. There is a summer crowd smell of sweat, warmed stone and mud. Journalists interview officers and new recruits. There are already rumours of entire British battalions having been wiped out in the fighting and of a German spy arrested in the town. The crowds cheer as the men go in to sign up, and the new recruits – miners, clerks, farm labourers, young managers and tradesmen – turn to grin at the spectators.
This mood lasts through to the winter, the public resolve only hardened in mid-September by news of the first Shirebrook man to die in action: twenty-one-year-old Alf Whitehall, who worked at the pit and whose family live on Church Hill. Alf is killed near the Franco-Belgian border on day two of the first battle of the Aisne. No one feels his death should be in vain; a sound victory for the Allies here, it is said, will more or less end the war. From the town and the villages and the outlying cottages, young men keep coming to enlist.
Walter Parkin joins the Leicestershires and is then transferred to the Lincolnshire Regiment. He travels to Grimsby to train with the 3rd Reserve Battalion, and regularly writes home to Annie enclosing money: ‘Don’t worry lass, spirits high, it’ll be done with soon.’ He ends every letter the same: ‘Kiss the children for me, and remember me to all at home, xxxxx.’ As Private Parkin No. 14171, he sails for France in February 1915, part of a group sent to replace the depleted British Expeditionary Force. For the first few weeks he moves between reserve positions and holding trenches at Le Tilleloy, and then in March, his unit moves up to the front for the battle at the village of Neuve Chapelle. In the middle of the battle the Lincolnshires are ordered to charge, and Walter says a prayer, climbs out of his trench and advances with his comrades towards the German lines. Amid the bullets and shells he feels a hard blow to his chest and goes down. He ought to be hurt but – not really: studying his chest he sees a brass button of his uniform with a hole punched raggedly through it and there, lodged between it and the jacket, a bullet. Men pass him. Others are dead and dying around him.
A few days later two letters arrive at 3 Ashbourne Street, one from the War Office explaining Private 14171’s injury, another sent from a hospital in France.
My Dearest Annie
I am writing to you from Rouen where I am knocking about in a hospital. I am alright except for a slight wound in the chest. I will be off back in about a fortnight’s time, so don’t worry, lass . . . Another mate of mine was left on the battlefield and we came off best in the end. I have got the bullet and button. I will send them on for you. I don’t think we shall be long before we are back again, if we go on as we are doing now. They will soon have to give in.
Keep your spirits up. They have not broken mine, as heavy a fire as I have been under, and I don’t think they will.
Kiss the children for me, and remember me to all at home.
Walter
Days later the bullet and the button arrive. Annie takes the trophies to Mr Wilkinson’s hairdressing shop so that they can be displayed in the window, and then receives a visit from a journalist.
Mansfield Chronicle, 25 March 1915
Saved by his Button
Shirebrook Soldier’s Experiences: Shot in the Chest
Knocking about in hospital at Rouen after having been shot in the chest, Pte. Walter Parkin of the 2nd Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment writes to his wife a most cheerful letter, and also sends as a memento the button that has saved his life. Accompanying the valuable metal, which has been pierced through, is the deadly bullet, with spiked lead, and the two will doubtless be kept by Mrs Parkin, who resides in Shirebrook Marketplace, and handed down to children’s children as family heirlooms. The souvenirs are to be seen in Mr Mark Wilkinson’s shop window in King Edward-street, Shirebrook.
Yesterday (Wednesday) morning Mrs Parkin received a second letter, in which her husband stated he was going on alright, and would keep writing, as he had little else to do. Referring to the encounter in which he was wounded he remarks: ‘I suppose you will have read about the big charge that has been made. I was amongst the leaders in that, and we had a lively time of it, I can tell you, but it was a surprise packet for them.’ Continuing, he spoke of the button, which he hoped had been received, as his friend, and added that the bullet came to stay with him after it had done the damage. A pal of his had said that if a bullet was for you it would go round corners to get at you, and it was no use trying to get out of the way. He hoped for better luck next time.
After returning to the lines, Walter is for some months settled in his unit’s routine of holding the established trenches in the Neuve Chapelle area, four days at the front, four in reserve, four at rest. In February 1916 he is allowed home on a week’s leave, but by early summer he is moving down with his battalion to the Somme, where there is to be a major new British offensive. Walter is among a group of men leading a charge. His role, for which he has been specially trained, is to throw himself down onto the barbed wire so that the rest of the infantry can run around and over him and breach the German defences. He gets through the first few weeks, but his battalion suffers so many casualties that for a while it has to withdraw to recover in order to assimilate new men and munitions.
Walter is promoted to lance corporal and learns in a letter from Annie that he is father to a baby girl named Olive. ‘Kiss her for me and remember me to all at home,’ he tells his wife. His mam writes to say that his father has died in Australia and that she has now married George Shaw; they will stay in Highfields, near Doncaster, and Walter must come to see them, she says. Indifferent to his father, and reasonably well disposed towards George Shaw, he seems untroubled by the news and his letters home remain cheerful. He is less confident of an early return though. His battalion, with men and officers who have survived with him, and replacements for the dead and injured, has moved north to Ypres in Flanders and are readying themselves for another offensive.
In Mansfield the newspapers carry lists of the dead, their tone sombre in contrast to the optimism of the sunny days of September 1914. An emergency legal dispensation allows women to labour in the pit yard so the government can call on more men from the mines to replace casualties at the front. Annie takes in some older children whose mothers now go out to work, and supplements Walter’s wage by helping her mam with midwifery and laying out the dead. She makes a little from spiritualist sittings, but people tell her to be careful; the war has created an easy market for fraudulent mediums, and up and down the country police forces are raiding meetings. There are stories of mediums being taken away and charged with fraud – witchcraft even – and so gatherings are more often held covertly, in an obliging person’s front room, or in public rooms that have officially been booked for non-spiritualist purposes.
Nevertheless, Annie uses some of her money to buy from another medium a small, green-tinged crystal ball and uses it to try to help the wives and mothers find their sons on the battlefields. Sometimes, when the children are asleep, she takes it from its black satin bag and looks through the crystal and across the sea and the mud for Lance Corporal Walter Parkin.
*
At dawn one autumn morning in 1917, on the front line at Passchendaele, a lieutenant with the 2nd Lincolnshire Regiment leads a contingent of men in a surprise attack through the wire and across a stewing bog of limbs and bones towards the German lines. Among the first up is Walter. The group reach the twisted loops of barbed wire protecting the opposing trenches before the Germans begin shooting. The men thud and splash over and around Walter as he braces his back and flattens down the coils. Once they are across, he gets to his feet, takes his rifle and moves towards the German lines. As he does so he sees in front of him his commanding officer, Lieutenant Smith, entangled with wire barbs sticking into his flesh and his uniform.
Crouching low to avoid fire, Walter moves to him and kneels, pulling and cutting. He tells the lieutenant to be still, pulls and cuts some more, and feels the splatter and percussion of grenades exploding nearby. Walter moves the last of the wire and Lieutenant Smith rolls free. Ahead, the British are going down under fire and retreating in disarray. Lieutenant Smith barks orders to retreat. Bullets are whizzing and phutting; arms, legs, hands and feet all over the place. Men hurry back but there is a blast, and Walter is caught. He will not remember much of what happens; he will recall only the struggling, his clothing in a mess, the barbs ripping his skin, his back cut and bleeding, and then the loss of consciousness.
Walter’s cuts and wounds become infected and he is sent to England for treatment. ‘Don’t be downhearted, lass,’ he writes to Annie from hospital, ‘look after the children.’ From his own hospital bed, Lieutenant Smith pens a recommendation to the regiment’s commanding officer for Walter to receive recognition for his valour. Once the CO has had Lieutenant Smith’s account verified, Lance Corporal Parkin is awarded the Military Medal, which is announced in the 28 January 1918 edition of the London Gazette. The medal, suspended on a red-white-and-blue ribbon, is a heavy silver disc bearing the King’s head and on the reverse the words ‘For Bravery in the Field’. It is almost as wide as Winnie’s palm.
Returned to France once more, Walter joins a new unit, the 10th (Service) Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment, the Grimsby Chums, who are on a period of rest and refit in Gomiecourt. In March 1918, he moves up with his unit to Arras. They are in forward positions when, one foggy night, the Germans launch the biggest barrage of the entire war. Mortars, smoke canisters, tear gas, mustard gas, chlorine gas; a million shells in five hours in an area of over a hundred and fifty square miles, and more than seven thousand Allied casualties before the German infantry go in. This time the bullets, or at least the shells, are meant for Walter Parkin. In the explosions Walter’s body is torn up by shrapnel, his spine damaged, his skin scorched by mustard gas. He lies in the mud with the other injured, dead and dying men, vomiting blood as the mucous membrane of his lungs and bronchial tubes burns away. His skin goes a greenish-yellow, although he cannot see this because he has been blinded, his eyes glued shut by the gas. Between the retching, he feels his throat closing as if to choke and kill him.
Walter is turned onto a stretcher and sent back to Blighty blind and unable to walk. He is treated at Park Hall, a military hospital in the grounds of a timbered Jacobean mansion near Oswestry. It is here that eight-year-old Winnie Parkin sees her father for the first time since his injuries, when she, Annie, Millie and Olive come to visit. Winnie has pined for him while he has been away and now she gazes at him in his bed, his eyes bandaged, his voice abraded, speech hardly coherent. The nurses are kind but most of the soldiers seem to be dazed or dying. Annie, eyes brimming with tears, says encouraging things to her husband. Winnie rests her hands on the bed covers and gazes at him.
‘Is our Winnie there?’ he asks. ‘And Millie and Olive?’
‘Yes,’ says Winnie. She does not cry, and does not look like crying. ‘I’m here. I’ll look after you.’
Walter is honourably discharged on 2 May 1918. He receives another medal, the Silver War Badge, and a pension, but crippled and partially blind he remains at Park Hall until long after the war has ended and the men have come home. He is moved to a convalescence home a few miles away, taught to walk again with the aid of wooden frames, and brought back to Shirebrook in the autumn of 1919.
Winnie, almost ten, is excited by the thought of her father coming home, but her excitement collapses into pity and horror when she sees him: bent, hoarse, and still half-blind, he is at thirty a frail old man. Stooping and shuffling, he barely speaks as he is helped into the house and up the stairs, and although he seems to be trying to force a pride and imperviousness, once he is laid down, he remains in bed for several weeks.
It is only on Armistice Day morning that, in the room downstairs, Winnie, Annie, Millie and Olive hear above their heads the sound of Walter forcing himself out of bed and dressing so as to be standing at eleven; he then marches up and down the room. It is an act he will repeat every Armistice Day for the last few years of his life. Often unable to move and racked with pain, he will make himself rise and dress, and put on his medals, and sometimes he will make it to the war memorial. ‘I was lucky, Winnie,’ he says. ‘I saw you children, and your mam again. I’m a lucky one.’
Winnie, as the eldest girl, is kept off school by Annie so she can help nurse her father. Slowly she takes his arm and leads him around the village and some days he tells her about when he was a boy working the land, about spirits, and about saving Lieutenant Smith. On other days he is stern, rigid and critical. As he regains some strength he imposes an ever-stricter discipline: no talking at the table, barely any talking at all sometimes, this enforced with a banging of hands on the table and a threat of beating. Winnie simply obeys him and resents her mother and sisters when they disrespect his wishes. She knows it is the shrapnel and the gas, and she knows that her sadness will make him feel worse. So she learns to take it.
*
Walter and Annie have the bullet and button made into a brass handle for an ornamental dagger which they display on their sitting-room wall. The shell metal still embedded in his spine and legs burns him with pain, and he rubs coal dust into his wounds believing it might keep them from further infection. Whether or not the coal is to thank, he does, gradually, begin to recover. In the months following his return to Shirebrook he seems to will his limbs to action, walking a little more, helping men on their allotments for an hour or two, going under the hands of healers at the Spiritualist Church.
About eight months after his discharge from hospital he is back working at the pit, at first on the top, and then underground. This is dangerous work for the war wounded; not only is there the risk of falling rocks, but veterans’ old injuries and mended bones often burst open or break again under the pressure of bending and lifting, and head wounds lead to dizziness and faints in the heat. When injuries have been caused by work the pit managers will usually pay compensation, but when the war wounded get hurt in the pits the managers say the responsibility lies with the Army. The War Office often counters that the injuries are the fault of the mine owner, meaning that the men who fought the war ‘for Britain, the Empire and civilisation’ are left unentitled to support and unable to work.
Compensation for injuries, though, is only one part of a fight between the men and the colliery owners that Walter walks into in the summer of 1920. Coal mining employs one in ten of all the working men in Britain and the war has left the industry in chaos. In 1917 the government had taken over the running of the mines, setting a higher, national level for wages, and guaranteeing profits for the colliery owners. Some safety laws were relaxed, with a consequent rise in deaths and injuries, and the government tried, on behalf of the mine owners, to lower the minimum age of boys employed in the pits and to suspend the eight-hour day. Men returned from the war to find that while food was scarce and rising prices were devaluing their wages, a high demand for coal was bringing money to the government and to mine companies.
In response, in February 1919, British miners voted to strike for a thirty per cent wage increase, a six-hour day, full pay for all miners demobbed but unemployed, and the nationalisation of the mines. The government, under Prime Minister David Lloyd George, headed off the vote by announcing a royal commission to investigate conditions in the industry. Reporting back in March, the commission called for the wage increase, the reduction in hours, a levy of a penny per ton of coal to improve housing and amenities in coal-mining areas and nationalisation. However, despite declaring his commitment to following the recommendations, Lloyd George dodged. Nationalisation was rejected, and all that came of the commission’s enquiries was a reduction in working hours and the penny levy.
Walter and Annie, like most of the other families in Shirebrook, felt betrayed by the government’s duplicity and confirmed in the belief that if you were not fighting to improve your pay and conditions then the coal owners would be degrading them. Years ago, in the village they lived in before Shirebrook, Annie’s father, brother, grandfather and uncles had been among the miners striking against the colliery owner to force him to employ only members of the Derbyshire Miners’ Association. Annie remembered the DMA medals worn on their caps as declarations of solidarity. Since then she, like Walter, has seen the cycle of booms, when the men strike for higher wages, and slumps, when employers lock out the men, and allow them back only when they accept reduced wages. They have heard the men talk about the union trying to stop the owners and managers taking risks underground to get more coal, and while they can be sceptical about the union leaders, both Walter and Annie believe that combining with their neighbours is the great hope for betterment. Nationalisation seems the logical next step of that combination, and if the government kept control of the mines – well, if it isn’t a hope exactly, it is better than nothing.
A few months after Walter goes back to work – around the time that Annie tells him that she is pregnant for the fourth time – Lloyd George says he will pass control of the industry back to the owners next year, in 1921. Knowing the owners will cancel the agreements that gave them shorter hours and better pay, and fearful of having wages cut, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain draws up a list of demands. The miners, supported by the railwaymen and steelworkers, come out on strike in October 1920. For several weeks, Annie, Walter, Winnie, Millie and four-year-old Olive eat in the Shirebrook soup kitchens.
The miners go back to work in November and in March 1921, a few weeks before Annie gives birth to a baby boy – Ralph, but known from his birth as Sonny – the colliery owners take control of the pits and abolish the national wage agreement, effectively cutting wages. The miners threaten to strike and the owners impose a lockout. After three months the government offers a £10 million subsidy to fill the gap between the old wage levels and the owners’ new deals, on condition that the miners accept the owners’ terms and return to work. They accept. The colliery owners promise better wages but the agreements are broken, and within a few months unemployment and poverty are settling back across the mining towns and villages of Britain and the managers are sacking men deemed to have been militant in the strike. That year Walter receives two more military medals, sent as a pair to all eligible veterans: the British War Medal, issued to those who served in the British and Imperial Forces between 1914 and 1918, and in celebration, the Victory Medal.
Watching and taking this in is Winnie Parkin, who will remember the bitter stories her mother and father tell her for the rest of her life. She has acquired a companion. One day in 1920 she is standing out in the street on her own when she notices beside her a gypsy girl of her own age. None of the women walking past on their way to the shops can see her, but Winnie hears her saying she has come to watch over her and take care of her, whatever happens, for the rest of her life. Knowing what it means, Winnie walks into the house and tells her mam that she has met her guardian angel.
Annie, who of course has had one since she was a young girl, is pleased. ‘She’ll watch over you,’ she says. ‘All people have them you know, but they cannot always have the sight for them.’
Winnie likes this idea very much, and goes back out to the gypsy girl, who – along with Walter – immediately becomes her joint favourite person.
*
Even with Walter’s military pension the Parkins are poor, and at times it seems to Winnie that the injustice and injuries might destroy her father. She has come to see him as a gentleman, a man of high taste and intelligence, like the heroes in the lending-library historical romances she reads, though sometimes he confuses her. In his gentle moods, he is benign and kind, but when he rages and shouts, she finds it hard to respond. To make this worse, there is the galling truth that he appears more indulgent to Sonny, Olive and Millie than he has ever been to her. There is a divide between the young women, formed by the harsh discipline of the pre-war days, and those whose memories all came after 1914; and in keeping with this, Olive and Millie have developed a cheekiness that Winnie envies. Unable to copy it, she instead tries to earn Walter’s respect with her reserve and fortitude, sitting with her head bowed, looking down, and circling her thumbs around each other. It is the right thing to do, says the little gypsy girl: your father is poorly, and you must try to understand.
At other times, though, Walter takes her out to the fields, or to see the allotments, and then Winnie is at her happiest. He talks about the pit, the war, and about the strikes, and she is outraged with him.
One day in 1922 he tells her he has had enough of Shirebrook and that they will try their luck elsewhere. He has had a letter from his mother saying, why not come up to Doncaster? There are new powerful engines and winding equipment, new kinds of cement to seal the leaking shaft sides, new chemicals from Europe that freeze the earth so you can dig the shafts more easily, and the coal owners are using them to reach rich seams that were buried too deep before, thick bands of untold black treasure spoken of like a myth. With Walter’s abilities, he will easily get work in the new shafts, and there’ll be more hours and better wages than in Derbyshire.
He will give it a try. What’s happened doesn’t seem right to him, he says. What about the men that died? What about the men in the trenches and the men in the mines? They had laid down their lives and this is how their families are repaid: fear, poverty and homelessness. When it comes to it human beings can endure most things, he tells Winnie. Injustice, though, will destroy them.