by Abrams, Fran
Meanwhile, in Salford, Elsie Oman’s father had arrived home on leave from the merchant navy, full of excited anticipation: ‘He had brought plenty of money home . . . he spoke about Germany, France and Belgium. The men seemed to be enjoying the thought of war . . . they thought it would be a picnic away from this dull life. They would be sure of good food and a uniform and sixpence a day and their wives and children would get an allowance, so everything in the garden would be lovely. So the men were all clamouring to join up, and it was said that as long as you were “warm” you were passed A1. They even took little men in and called them “bantams”. The men soon found their mistake. We were no more prepared for war than Soft Nick.’26
The fathers go to war
‘One wonderful evening we brought home a Shetland pony in the back of the car; it was four months older than me. The next morning we were brought down early from the nursery: Our Father was standing in the hall dressed in a tunic with gold buttons, riding breeches and tall, shiny brown boots. He hugged and kissed us, and our mother – and then he drove away. It was August, 1914.’27
For Hermione Llewellyn, born into a wealthy mine-owning and brewing family and watched over by nannies, this absence might have made little difference in practical, everyday terms. Yet all over the country, in all kinds of homes, similar scenes were being played out. Fathers were departing to join up, dashing in their new uniforms and apparently destined for great adventures. The departure of so many men from so many homes left a deep impression, and letters home were anxiously awaited.
Hermione’s father was stationed in Norfolk with the South Wales Mounted Brigade, and the family was even able to rent a house nearby for a time. Yet the mood darkened when the men sailed for Egypt in the autumn of 1915: ‘It was dreadful – we’d never before seen our mother cry.’28
In the early days of the war, most children were sheltered from the dread their parents must have been feeling, and letters home were usually upbeat. The letters of Private A. F. Uncle, written from Morn Hill Camp in Winchester to his daughters, Daisy, Ivy and Rosie, in London were typically cheerful: ‘Don’t worry about me, I am with a lot of jolly fellows and get plenty to eat. You would like to be a soldier – they give you DRIPPING on your bread for breakfast and tea nearly every day.’29 And then, slightly more pensively as he departed to take part in the action: ‘You will no doubt have received the parcel of togs and so know that I am now well away. I know you will be wondering what has become of me. Whatever happens its no use grumbling – here I am and here I must stay, so I shall endeavour to make myself as comfortable as possible.’
Elsie Oman in Salford, now a parentless teenager, for her mother was dead and her father away in the navy, followed developments along with her best friend, Vera, avidly but without any deep sense of fear: ‘It made life much better for me. Vera and I had a good natter in the playground. Her mother used to buy papers and let Vera read them and her Mam and Dad would let her join in the conversation, so she had lots to tell me about the situation and it was becoming a new interest in life.’30 And with the men gone, the world began to become a more feminine place: ‘People seemed to come alive and as the men disappeared the women took over. They became tram drivers, conductors, postwomen, land army women on the farms, helped in the army, air force and navy – wherever there was a man shortage, the women were there, even on munitions,’ Elsie recalled. Aged thirteen, she was now able to leave school and get a job in a sugar mill earning twelve shillings and sixpence a week. The now largely female workforce took her to its heart: ‘It was wonderful to mix with young people who were laughing, singing and cracking jokes with one another. Despite being worried to death about their fathers, husbands, sons or brothers in the war, they tried to look on the bright side.’
Olive Everson, growing up in Suffolk, noticed only minor differences to her daily routine: ‘It didn’t affect our small village to any great extent – at least not the children. We noticed that some of the young men went away, and that our parents were careful to black out the windows at night because nasty things called Zeppelins dropped bombs from the sky. Ration books were necessary to take with us when we went to a shop. Flour, to make it go further, was adulterated with other substances and our mother’s home-made bread no longer tasted as before and was a light brownish colour and sticky in the centre. My father was just too old to be conscripted and in any case he was engaged in work of national importance. He joined the volunteers and wore his uniform at weekends.’31
Yet for many families, especially in the poorer parts of the big cities, the early months of the war were a time of desperation. Many lost their main breadwinners quite suddenly, and the economy took months to settle into its wartime routine. Sylvia Pankhurst, who had been running a women’s suffrage campaign in the East End of London, was shocked by the state in which she now found some of the children she knew in Stepney and Bow: ‘I met little Rose Pengelly, one of our junior Suffragettes. “What are you doing in Ranwell Street?” I asked her, knowing the chronic poverty of that little alley. “All out of work, all helping each other,” she chirruped gaily, flashing a merry smile to me, from her clear green eyes, her red plaits tossing. Yet I saw she was pale, and her gait not as buoyant as usual.’32
The wife of a ship’s ‘greaser’ told Sylvia the government had commandeered her husband’s ship, and since then she had had no money nor any word as to his whereabouts. She had six children, and the family had gone four days without food. Sylvia said she saw ‘a wilted look’ growing upon the children: ‘They seemed like fading flowers.’ A photograph taken at the time by Sylvia’s friend Norah Smyth spells out the appalling hardships faced by some East End families in the early months of the war. In it is a child of maybe eighteen months, clearly close to starvation, legs stick-thin and hands clutching one another, almost claw-like in their frailty. The child – impossible to tell whether a boy or a girl – has only tufts of matted hair and its expression is a haunting mixture of curiosity and terror.33
Soon, the former Suffragette headquarters in the Old Ford Road had become a feeding centre for babies: ‘Here, and in the passage through the house, the queue of distressed mothers extended: Already the babies were ill from starving; they could not digest the milk now we had got it for them.’ Later, Sylvia would open a nursery in an old pub, renamed the Mother’s Arms, along with cost-price restaurants and a toy factory. Yet many of the children were already in too poor a state to be helped: ‘Several times it happened that after a baby had been nursed patiently to apparent health, and had been sent away to the country to assure its stability, it would return home, catch a chill or some childish ailment, collapse and die, quite suddenly, as though the physical well-being we had built for the little body had been merely a house of cards.’34
Sidney Day, born not far away in north London, was six when war broke out. His father spent almost the whole time in France, driving the horses that pulled the infantry guns. Sidney remembered regularly going without. ‘While me Dad was away, me Mum had to keep the seven of us on rations. I would go round and get food from Buckingham’s shop. Mum would say, “Take the cup with you and get an haporth of jam, a pennorth of sugar, a bit of tea, a tin of evaporated milk and a lump of margarine.” We hardly ever seen any meat.’ If Sidney thrived, it was largely through his own ingenuity: ‘Every day I nicked something from the shops and stalls around Archway, specially the greengrocer’s. If you are hungry you got to live.’35
Another major issue, Sylvia reported, was the growing number of illegitimate babies for whom there was little or no support. The army’s separation allowances did not extend fully to unmarried partners and their children. The navy deducted sixpence from the daily pay of each sailor to send to his wife and children, but ‘in respect of a bastard child, fourpence’. In many cases, even this paltry sum did not come through. Many of these now-absent young men would have married their sweethearts if they had known they were pregnant or had had the time to do so, Sylvia said – though there were als
o reports that men ordered by the courts to support their children were escaping their responsibilities by joining up.
Soon, though, even the most affluent homes were coming to terms with the horrors of war. Hermione Llewellyn, her mother and her brother Owen returned to her grandmother’s large house after her father’s departure for Egypt, only to find it had been turned into a hospital. Each week ambulances would arrive bringing bandaged soldiers: ‘Owen kept asking who had hurt them and they always said, “The bloody Boche.”36
‘Sometimes in our house grown-ups talked French, or stopped talking at all, when Owen and I were around. One day when Cook was having her afternoon rest Owen and I looked at her newspaper on the kitchen table: we saw dreadful pictures of men without arms or legs, and there were pictures of men all huddled together sleeping. Owen was five and owned a tricycle and explained it all to me: “There’s been a quarrel between the Kings and Emperors,” he said. “And now all the good men are fighting all the bad men.” He told me the sleeping men in Cook’s newspaper were dead but they were heroes and would go to heaven.’37
War work
Harry Watkin was six when the war started, the second of ten children born into a poor family in the slum district of Hulme in Manchester. Even at this tender age, and in the absence of a father who had joined up, it was his job to run most of his mother’s errands. Later, he would remember thick fogs, broken only by candles carried in jam jars, and queues for everything.38 ‘The longest and slowest-moving queues in which I waited were those at the Medlock Street gasworks to buy coke. It was overall a wearisome task. First a wagon had to be borrowed from Jack Booth’s coalyard in Duke Street. I had to beg, looking as humble and as grateful as I could, for the loan of one. They were very strong and heavy with iron handles and wheels and made a noisy clatter as they bumped along over the flags and setts. These coke errands meant half a day off school and I would take one of the children with me, riding in the wagon.’
Many children had work to do in wartime. In addition to his regular domestic duties, Harry took part in a national scheme to raise funds for refugees, which involved selling scent cards: ‘They were coloured and strongly perfumed and every boy at school was given about a dozen to take home and sell. Well, I didn’t even consider asking mother to buy one and I wouldn’t have dreamt of trying to sell any to our neighbours – one never bothered with or spoke to women unless specifically sent by mother. So I just kept the cards until we were told to return all money and unsold ones. Obviously mine were soiled and creased, for there was no place in our house where they could have lain untouched. In spite of that I was given another batch. The procedure and result were as before.’39
Elsewhere, too, children were being pressed into the service of the war effort in all kinds of roles. If the Scout movement was ever to come into its own, now was the time. It was set up to build the physiques and the characters of the nation’s youth – particularly the poor – for just such an eventuality as this. By 1918, it would boast 300,000 members, and a quarter of a million current or former Scouts would have served in the forces. Girls, too – in 1909 Baden-Powell had conceived a theory that middle-class girls needed to be less mollycoddled and more able to manage, if necessary, without the help of servants. ‘You do not want to make tomboys of refined girls, yet you want to attract and thus to raise the slum girl from the gutter,’ he had written in his Headquarters Gazette, adding: ‘Girls must be partners and comrades rather than dolls.’ And so the Girl Guides had come into being.40
If World War One has a major significance in the history of the English child, it is perhaps connected with this: the very notion of childhood now began, through children’s war roles and through the growing influence of the Scout and Guide movements, to change. Even as the ‘ideal’ child’s physical presence had begun to grow stronger in the years before the war, ultimately he had remained a somewhat wraithlike figure. Now a far more robust child began to solidify in the public imagination: a stout, capable child who had been trained in practical skills and who was willing to step up to the mark in a time of national emergency.
Baden-Powell’s role in this transformation would be hard to over-estimate. Even before war broke out, he had offered the services of the Scouts as lookouts who could watch trunk lines and telegraphs between London and the coast to prevent sabotage by German infiltrators. Soon, Scout troops were also watching reservoirs, acting as messengers in public offices, hospitals and Red Cross centres, and helping the coastguards. By 1915, the Scouts were also serving refreshments to the troops in France from specially constructed ‘huts’. Within months of the outbreak of war, thousands of Scouts were away from home on extended tours of coast-watching duty which lasted for many weeks at a time.
‘We had the order to mobilise from the superintendent of police on August 6th at 11 a.m. and at 2 p.m. we started,’ reported J. Barcham Green, Scoutmaster of the 11th CK Troop from Kent in November 1914, after a three-week tour watching the Deal to Dover road:41 ‘We went on duty at 6 a.m., watching the telegraph line and following suspected persons, of which there were a host. Our duty ended at 8 p.m. when the police took it over till 6 a.m. During our stay of three weeks we handed many suspected persons over to the police and military, had two aliens registered, tracked and shadowed many innocent persons whose movements were suspicious, mended various punctures and broken down bicycles and made many good friends. The Scoutmaster was arrested one fine afternoon while watching for a spy who was said to be disguised as a Scoutmaster, and he (our Scoutmaster) had a busy time explaining his identity.’
By December 1914, it was estimated that 100,000 Scouts had been employed in war work. And in that month, too, the first deaths of Scouts were recorded. The lists, which were printed each month in the Headquarters Gazette, would total 10,000 by the end of the war, some in air raids at home and some in action with the forces abroad. Baden-Powell has since been accused of helping to brainwash a generation of young men to go willingly to their own slaughter.42 It is an accusation which is easy to make, for the Scout movement’s founder certainly threw himself with gusto into the preparation of his charges for war.
‘At present, only men of 19 and over, and of rather big size, are being enlisted for the service,’ he wrote in the Headquarters Gazette in November 1914. ‘The time may shortly come when the standard may be lowered, and younger men of smaller size admitted. I want all Scouts to Be Prepared for this and to have our Scouts Defence Corps ready, so that the moment the door is opened we can step in, trained and ready for service. The candidates should perfect themselves in the following duties: Rifle shooting, judging distance, signalling, pioneering, entrenching, drilling in accordance with the Army “infantry training”, Scouting, first-aid, camp cooking.’
The Girl Guides were doing their bit, too, with Baden-Powell’s sister Agnes at their head. But there were strict limits. Too much physical activity could fatally damage a girl’s ‘interior economy’, Agnes explained.43 ‘Do you know that there are more girls nowadays with hairy lips than formerly, and I believe it is due to the violent exercise they take?’ Guides were urged not to use vulgar slang such as ‘topping’ or ‘ripping’ or ‘what ho!’ and were put to work during the war training as volunteer nurses. The Handbook for Girl Guides suggested that ‘really well-educated women’ could also take up translating, dispensing to a doctor, stockbroking, house decorating, accountancy or even architecture as careers.44
The Girl Guides did have one notable victory over the Boy Scouts – early in the war, the nascent intelligence service had recruited a few of the boys as messengers, but had found them prone to getting into mischief during the long hours of forced inactivity. They turned instead to the Guides, who continued to supply them with girls aged between fourteen and sixteen throughout the war.45
On the land, too, children were everywhere pressed into service. This had been common practice before the war, with some areas fitting school holidays around harvest times, and children in many rural areas simply mis
sing school when they were needed to pick fruit or work on the family farm. Now, a huge effort was made, in particular through the Scout movement, to recruit boys to work on the land. By June 1918, forty-six Scout troops from the East End were supplying about 300 boys to help farmers in Peterborough with their crops, for instance. But this was not universally regarded as a good thing, for many commentators tended to feel children were too easily exploited as cheap labour.
In one of his last parliamentary speeches before his death in September 1915, the Labour Party founder Keir Hardie – a vehement opponent of the war – spoke out against the practice. Education authorities all over the country were quietly allowing boys of eleven or twelve to leave school early so they could do agricultural and even manufacturing work, he said. He feared that if this were allowed, it might continue after the war and erode a century of progress in protecting children’s rights: ‘Once the principle is laid down it may become permanent,’ he said, accusing the education authorities of ‘robbing the child of the education which the law has provided for it’.
