5327

by Mark Rowe

  ... was thinking an army of million men would be very useful in England to keep out the Germans, apparently thinks our fleet insufficient for the purpose, has discharged one of his assistants and cancelled his order for bulbs from Holland and yet had to confess that trade was normal and that they had to work very hard to keep up with the demand. To cheer him up told him a little story - a true one - the story had reference to the trenches being dug at Sutton - a resident there had one dug right across his lawn and flower beds; when he returned in the evening, his wife said to him, ‘oh! Those poor men have been working so hard today, they looked so tired and dirty, so I had them in and made them a good tea!’

  The trenches Thorp spoke of were between Hull and the sea, between the villages of Paull and Sutton. These precautions (also haystacks moved, and farm buildings pulled down, if they were in the way of these hurried defences) only fed the fear of invasion - last felt, as Thorp noted, in 1805, when the feared invader was Napoleon. Thorp’s uncle, and many others, could not handle the unfamiliar sights, losses and unknowns of war: the commandeering of horses as mounts for officers and cavalrymen, and to pull wagons; and the ‘streets full of soldiers’, leaving as mysteriously as they marched in. Without confidence, businesses put up their prices not only because they could, but to hoard what they could, in case of even worse times, like any squirrel at the first sniff of autumn.

  Given the trade troubles - holiday towns with cancelled bookings, hotels having to lay off staff and disappoint suppliers, who then could not pay their bills; and so on - you could understand the likes of Sophia Langmail, of Cardiff, who in a letter to the Bristol Times on September 2 asked: ‘holiday or no holiday?’ She reckoned that duty (that word again) for her and others like her lay ‘in going forth fearlessly to the seaside or country apartments and in circulating our money as freely as possible in every legitimate way’. Even if well meant, she - like others - could be accused of making an excuse for doing what she was going to do anyway. It was suspicious that everyone found a good reason for carrying on whatever suited them. The Newmarket Journal for instance in its August 22 edition welcomed racing as usual at the town, in September:

  ... it must not be forgotten that a great number of people are dependent for their livelihood upon racing and that the abandonment of race meetings would tend to produce unemployment and distress which would add to the economic difficulties which our country has to face.

  By contrast, Lord Derby, for one, asked the unmarried men in his Newmarket stable to volunteer for the army. If they did, they were promised their job after the war. If the army would not take them, they could keep their job. If they would not volunteer, they were out of a job. Not surprisingly, nearly all the men so asked ‘volunteered’ for the army. Other landowners with servants did likewise. Lord St Aldwyn wrote to his son on September 1: “I have told the footman and the young men in the garden here that they must enlist and that I cannot keep them on unless they are rejected and I hear that three gardeners have been sent away from Hatherop,” the next village.

  By the end of August, then, the lords, as the leaders of society in the countryside and market towns at least, were, in St Aldwyn’s words, ‘getting excited’ about recruiting. In fairness, the sons of these lords, like St Aldwyn’s, were in uniform; the first were dead already.

  III

  Gentlemen were coming together for war, men who already knew one another through family ties, service in local government, fox hunts, and as Territorials - soldering and hunting often asked for the same skills. Francis Meynell of Hoar Cross Hall in Staffordshire was a lieutenant in one of the county’s Royal Field Artillery batteries, which after coming together at Burton-on-Trent moved south. A fellow officer was Viscount Sandon. On August 29 - the day Gerald Legge was told to report to the depot of the South Staffordshire Regiment at Lichfield - Meynell wrote to his mother, on his usual headed notepaper, except that he crossed ‘Hoar Cross’ out and wrote ‘Stopsley’, near Luton, instead. By stages, the called-up Territorials were leaving home behind.

  “You will have heard that Hoar Cross is waking up and that ten men are joining the Army,” Meynell wrote. “I expect more will come by degrees; one must not expect them to think as quickly as those in the town.” In fairness to men of the countryside, they might not have thought of the army because they were too busy bringing the harvest in, the most important work of the farming year. Some labourers may have been bound by contract, as apprentices were in towns. Farms could be short of harvest labour, at the best of times: J C White, the Somerset cricketer, had to stay on his farm at Stogumber, near Taunton, when Somerset hosted Yorkshire during Weston super Mare’s ‘week’ of county cricket at the end of August. ‘Farmer’ White lived only 20 miles from Weston, almost in sight (except that he was on the other side of the Quantocks); he could not spare even the two days for the game, because some of his men were ‘at the war’. As the cricket season was ending, cricketers could avoid any criticism of them, as could spectators - 2000 watched at Weston. George Thorp of Hull kept going to the nearby Kirkella cricket club each Saturday afternoon, where his brother played: “It seems rather anomalous to watch and play while such stupendous and tragic events are impending and happening in a near and friendly country,” he admitted in his diary after the last but one game on August 22. It did not feel odd enough, however, to stop him going. As cricket ended, the football season started; professional clubs made the excuse that their players were under contract, and meanwhile went on taking money at the gate, from workers who did not go to war.

  Hypocrisy was never far away in England in August 1914. One rule allowed ‘business as usual’, and another insisted that an employee went to war. Families could go on holiday, Lord Derby could race his horses at Newmarket; but young men could not go to the pictures, or play or watch sport, without someone resenting it, and saying so. Britain was dividing in two, between young and old: those fit to go to war, and those that could not.

  Women, the too old, and the too young, could not enlist. If you were an Englishman aged 19 to 35, of five feet three inches or higher, of 34 inch chest or wider, and with good enough eyesight, teeth and everything else, Lord Kitchener wanted you in his army. Your country needed you.

  Chapter 14

  Recruiting

  I can understand a man opposing a war, but I cannot understand his waging a war with half a heart.

  David Lloyd George from The Prime Minister by Harold Spender (1920)

  I

  Colonel Chichester, and all the other speakers at recruitment meetings, made the army sound so attractive. The colonel, 30 years a soldier, speaking in the open air at Godmanchester in Huntingdonshire, said that the pay after stoppages was ‘a clear six shillings and sixpence a week’. What were the disadvantages? He answered his own question. ‘There are none,’ he said, to applause. Perhaps the audience did not notice, or out of politeness pretended not to notice, that the soldier’s pay was about a third of a working man’s. Then Chichester admitted there was one disadvantage: your job might not be open when you came back. Chichester hoped it would be; and anyway, “would find plenty of work in the country to fill up gaps of the many poor fellows who might not return”.

  Was that not a disadvantage that Chichester had forgotten; you might get killed? If soldiering was as good as he reckoned, why was he and hundreds of other speakers trying so hard and often from the end of August to drum up recruits?

  II

  Judging public opinion is hard. A man’s opinion could change. If you disagreed with something that someone powerful said, it was safest to keep quiet. Some men did respond to the recruiting appeals; 20 young men handed in their names that Monday evening, September 7, at Godmanchester. The meeting may have swayed them; they may have had half a mind already, else why did they attend? What of all the men that did not attend? As with the crowds at the outbreak of war in capital cities, supposedly enthusiastic for war, most people showed what
they thought of recruiting by not being there. Some saw this, and deplored it. The local Huntingdonshire landowner, Lord Sandwich, early in September called the indifference in the villages of his county ‘simply appalling’. Sandwich, so high in the social order that few would stand up to him, had a habit of making extreme statements; at a July public meeting about Home Rule for instance, he had spoken of his ‘contempt’ for Liberals. He seemed to expect people who did not have the time or energy to follow world affairs, to feel as strongly as him.

  Some men volunteered because Sandwich and other lords had men in their power, literally or morally, and could tell them what to do. What of the rest? Depending on the standing of the man calling for recruits, his practice as a public speaker, and how subtle and strong was the pressure he could put on listeners, appeals had effects. Some volunteers would have gone willingly; some grudgingly, like a shop boy doing some thankless task after the doors shut for the night, or a wife running an errand for an ungrateful in-law. You ‘volunteered’, or else you got the sack, or a mouthful or worse from your husband later. Once a man gave his name, it did not matter why he did it: whether he cared about Belgium, fancied a change from small-town routine, or felt so niggled by the looks and remarks of workmates and neighbours that it was easier to give in. The recruiters had their man.

  That said, cynicism can be a trap we can fall into, just as we might feel that the volunteers of August 1914 fell for speeches that meant nothing on the battlefield. It was true that the men giving the speeches never seemed to be the ones that did any fighting. However, the ones making the appeals, and the ones answering, might have enjoyed being part of a cause greater than any of them; greater than their understanding, even. Colchester-Wemyss, the chairman of Gloucestershire County Council, devoted one of his regular letters to the King of Siam to ‘the wave of enthusiasm’. Shrewdly, Colchester-Wemyss suggested pride in the war so far was one reason; the more any country fought, the more invested in lives and effort, the more everyone would want to make it worthwhile. The more men enlisted, the more men left behind would feel the tug of brothers, workmates or others they knew. We forget how novel and thrilling Kitchener’s appeal for 100,000 (and then another 300,000) men was. Whereas young men usually had to scrap for anything - a job, a sweetheart, a promotion, a place in the first eleven - the army was asking for them! All they had to do was accept! To refuse such an offer would take some opposing inner spirit - whether of socialist pacifism, working-class solidarity, or wife or parents begging you to stay at home.

  On Tuesday September 1, Colchester-Wemyss wrote that a thousand men had enrolled in Gloucester since Saturday. “Let me give you a small personal experience.”

  I am chairman of the Stroud brewery company and yesterday afternoon I invited all the men, about 90, together to one of the stores and listen to me for half an hour; they came most of them in their shirt sleeves straight from work and I soon found I had struck oil and in ten minutes I had worked them and myself to a great urge of enthusiasm; I never felt nothing quite like it before, a sort of messianic influence seemed to pass through the whole of us and the result was that at the end of the meeting 29 men literally rushed forward and gave their names ...

  What Colchester-Wemyss found more remarkable was that more than half of the 29 volunteers were married, “and their wives seem quite ready that they are going”. Did it not seem to occur to Colchester-Wemyss - a widower, with a son in the army in India - that some men might have volunteered, to get away from their wives? Or that some wives would be glad to see the back of their husband? While the phrase ‘struck oil’ suggested an element of commerce - only the trade was in men, not goods - the ‘enthusiasm’ had much in common with religious preaching. Generally, more people went to churches after war broke out; but not every day, or everywhere. The Rev Denys Yonge wrote of large congregations in his Essex village, of 30 or 40; Robert Ramsey, the London solicitor, went to a special service of intercession at St Paul’s, just after the declaration of war, and found ‘the body of the cathedral was crowded’. They sang Rock of Ages and, after prayers, the national anthem. Ramsey wrote: “Voices seemed to pause slightly before the last line,” namely, ‘God save the king’, “and gather tremendous force on the last line in a magnificently solemn and thrilling effect.” Not for the last time in August 1914, the act of singing, and the beauty of the created sound, were comforts.

  You suspect, however, that people still felt too shy to go inside a church or chapel building; for once you went in, you were at someone else’s mercy. It’s telling that a big religious success was the 10,000 people gathered on Sunday August 23 for afternoon and evening services in a Northampton park, arranged by the town’s chapels before the war. William Thomas Pickbourne the diarist (and regular grumbler about small congregations) went to the open-air event after he took an afternoon service, “and amid an awestruck and most serious crowd listened, some grand singing and a most inspiring address from Mr J H Saxton,” who was a Primitive Methodist. We have to take Pickbourne’s word for it that the day was a ‘great intercessory gathering’, in other words a plea to God through prayer, and not a Methodist recruiting drive, or merely the best entertainment in Northampton on an otherwise sleepy sabbath.

  Similarly, we can only sense what everyone had in mind when Robert Thornewill ‘summoned’ workmen at his engineering works in Burton-on-Trent on September 1. “We are all considering what we can do in this terrible war,” he told them. “We are all anxious to help our country, and must each do so in our own way.” And in our own time, he might have added, as he had summoned them in their dinner hour. Thornewill’s way of helping his country was to tell the men, ‘the youth and manhood of this great nation’, to attend a recruiting meeting at the town hall. “I leave it in your hands ... consider how you can serve your country best in your hour of trial.” The meeting closed with three cheers for the king - like singing, a significant way of binding everyone to whatever the gathering was about. If Thornewill said how he was helping the country - by making profits from selling metal goods? - the Burton Gazette did not report it. Thornewill could order his men to hear him, and lay hints as heavy as he liked, but he could not make the men do anything. That he had to resort to the meeting showed that his workmen were happy as they were. Was Thornewill’s speech merely his way of doing his bit? Did he truly want many of his men to enlist - because how would he stay in business then? Again, if he promised to keep jobs open for the volunteers, the newspaper did not report it. Nor did the report give any clue to the men’s reaction. Maybe they did not say anything. After a speech like Thornewill’s, silence would be as loud, and as defiant, a reply as any.

  III

  Silence, or indifference, seldom makes news. As the last resort of the powerless, it seldom leaves a trace. Yet it deserves a history.

  For all the thousands of words he wrote in his diaries, William Swift, the Churchdown old schoolmaster, did not give much away about his opinions. When he came home on the train from a morning’s shopping in Gloucester at the end of July, and was in the same compartment as a man he knew ‘full of socialistic views’, he did not say if he approved of socialism or not. A rare clue to Swift’s thinking came on August 11, after evensong - ‘four there’ - when the vicar told him of one of the three Gregorys in the village who went to war. His employer gave him seven shillings and sixpence as his wages owing. “He came home, took a farewell of his wife and youngsters, giving six and six of the seven and six to his wife and merely took one shilling and departed. Something pathetic about that,” Swift wrote.

  Three weeks later, the vicar took evensong early so he could attend the village’s recruiting meeting. “I did not attend the meeting, nor Harry, read instead,” Swift added. Harry, Swift’s youngest son, a single carpenter and joiner in his late 30s, who painted in his spare time, still lived at home. Swift did care about the war; he followed it in the newspapers from the end of July; on August 21 he copied into his diary a list of all
48 Churchdown men serving in the forces; and he did not sleep much on the night of August 30, ‘thinking about our country’s threatened disaster’, after the vicar had told him the British army was surrounded ‘and nothing but a miracle can save them’. That left Swift ‘instantly depressed’, though the more cheerful news in the next day’s Daily Mail reassured him. Still, Swift chose not to go to that week’s recruiting meeting. Was it an act of resistance? Did Swift simply feel too old for such business? The best guess might be that Swift felt too much for men he knew and had taught. On Saturday September 5, Ernest, his eldest son Reginald’s eldest, visited to pick apples. “He has joined as a recruit to the forces and leaves on Monday. I could not help being affected at this,” he wrote.

  As the appeals for recruits became ever more urgent - because it dawned on the authorities that not enough men were coming forward - dissent seldom went public (assuming it was allowed a hearing). Rather, men dug in. After all, before August they never dreamt of giving up their jobs and families to shoot foreigners and get shot at, and they did not want to start now. The ones making all the noise were not the Swifts of this world, who stayed at home, but the busy-bodies, who leapt at the chance to tell other people what to do. When Colonel Chichester told the Godmanchester meeting there were no disadvantages to volunteering, he more truly might have said there were no disadvantages to telling men to volunteer. Take the bad and thankfully forgotten poetry of the day, such as a widely reprinted poem of early September by Harold Begbie. It had lines such as:

  Is it football still and the picture show and the betting odds, when your brothers stand to the tyrant’s blow and England’s call is God’s,