August [1914]

by Mark Rowe

  Clifford had much to live up to, for Frederic Gothard had risen in the world. The son of a tailor on the high street, Frederic had studied chemistry and became the head of the brewing and malting departments at Worthington’s brewery - the man to make sure the beer was right, thanks to Burton’s underground water - and a company director. He was 57. As the local newspapers remarked, Mr Gothard had not given any sign of illness. Whether he had worked too early in the morning on the private bowls green opposite his home was the most the papers could speculate. If Frederic Gothard had felt unwell in front of his family, Clifford wrote nothing of it in his diary. No matter how high your place in a town, death could strike you any night.

  II

  Death found the Gothard family; William Thomas Pickbourne sought it. Not that he wished it on his wife and four sons, or anyone. He did go to his brother-in-law’s funeral in 1912 - in Winshill, as it happens. He and his own could hope for long and healthy lives: his father turned 90 in April 1914. The old man still enjoyed his food when he stayed with the Pickbournes in Northampton for a couple of months in the summer of 1911, though he was growing ever more deaf. Pickbourne took him one Saturday on the train to the Crystal Palace in London, ‘though it nearly knocked him up’, as Pickbourne put it in his diary. Pickbourne had a busy but comfortable life; once a commercial traveller, then a colliery agent, and for decades a part-time Methodist preacher. Whether in his own, Regent Square, chapel in the village of Upton, or around the district, or sometimes on invitation much further afield, he took services every Sunday. He never wrote in his diary about his job; only chapel. In March 1914 he told of a Sunday at Brixworth, the other side of Northampton:

  Mrs Allcock, whom I visited for many years passed away about a fortnight ago in great peace ... she has been bedridden for years and was a great sufferer but oh so happy, so peaceful and so thoroughly ready. After tea I visited her relatives and three or four other families between tea and Service as I generally do and at night we had a very fair congregation turned out. Brixworth people however do not hurt themselves by too many services on Sunday. Once generally suits them. Some of our officials even stay at home and sleep in the afternoons! Rather cool I think. I verily believe nothing short of an earthquake would startle some of our so called Methodists into earnestness. They do want waking up!

  Pickbourne was hardly the only, or the last, man to grumble in his diary about people’s shortcomings that he could not say to their faces. Pickbourne had a point; he was going to some trouble for these people. On the morning of July 12, 1914, he cycled over six miles to Moulton, the other side of Northampton - a fair task for a man who turned 54 the next month. He found a congregation of nine: “... not a very inspiring number but nevertheless they were there and wanted all the help they could get and I must say they did get help. On my own way home got caught in a shower and got wet through, had to change my clothes.” As so often, he took a young men’s class in the afternoon, and was ‘at his own place’ in the evening.

  Methodism bonded these men and women, even unto death. In July Pickbourne recorded the death of a fellow preacher, John Perkins: “A week ago he fell in his bedroom and seemed to quite collapse.” Dead also was a Sunday school teacher ‘and a very earnest worker’, a young woman, Miss Burnett: “She was only ill two or three days.” And as for an old man that Pickbourne visited, Mr Rushton: “He too is fast reaching his end, gets weaker every week and he too will soon be joining the majority in the upper country.”

  Just as Pickbourne tried with his preaching to help his listeners, to make sense of their world and to prepare for the next world they believed in, so he, too, was helped. Christianity, when it all came together, felt real to the believers. When in 1912 he went to the Methodists’ conference in Liverpool, ‘from the very beginning we were conscious of the presence and power of God’, he wrote. In February 1914 he felt ‘the master’s presence’, and after one Sunday’s nearly full chapel ‘a very gracious influence rested on us all especially at night and I am certain a good spirit was doing His office on many present’. That grace - as wonderfully and tantalisingly available to the common people of Northamptonshire as it was to the apostles - had to be something powerful, to take Pickbourne and his congregations (even the small ones) from one Sunday to the next.

  III

  Anyone could take time off work for their own funeral; that was about as far as the rights of workers went. Robert Blakeby, who lived in a room at 25 Great Portland Street in central London, received a letter on Wednesday May 12, 1914 from his brother Harry, ‘to say that Dad died suddenly last night’. Blakeby, then 29, worked in the advertising department of Peter Robinson’s, a draper’s on Oxford and Regent Streets. On the Saturday, he bought a black suit for 22 shillings, a pair of braces for a shilling, and a pair of trousers for seven shillings and sixpence - the last sum the same as his rent each week. On the Wednesday, May 19, he got up at his usual 6.40am, and walked into work as usual before 7am. He left work at 1.10pm, walked to his mother’s home near Edgware Road, ‘changed my clothes and had a wash and shave, then to dad’s funeral (at Finchley) with mother, Aunt Ellen, Minnie (my sister), Bill and Harry (my brothers) and back to mother’s to tea. Changed my clothes then back to work at 25 to 7pm. Left work at eight min to 9pm. Walked home to mother’s and had supper there.’ That was a long day; not much longer than his usual working days. Blakeby took meal breaks, ‘breakfast, dinner and tea’, and otherwise worked regularly from 7am until 7.30pm. He might leave work at 8.15pm, have supper at his mother’s, and return to do ‘LU duty’, or locking up. His employer allowed him not quite five-and-a half hours off work to bury his father.

  IV

  These deaths may have been distressing to watch, drawn-out and agonising to go through; at least they were all natural deaths. Death could come to you before your time, where you worked, on the roads, even at home. Harold Fencott was playing with other four-year-olds under railway arches at Bushbury near Wolverhampton in July 1914; he slipped into the canal going after a frog and drowned. Anything hot, heavy or high could kill you. A man could fall from a cart at hay-making time and break his neck; a boy given a ride on the cart could fall under the wheels and die; horses frightened by a passing motor car could throw the carter to the ground. Wagons crushed shunters; cranes knocked apprentices off girders. If anything could go wrong, it did. As the local Church Lads Brigade marched through the town of Beverley in August 1913, a dum-dum bullet in a firearm, thought to be harmless, went off, hit the road, and then a watching boy. He recovered. In May 1914 grease caught fire on the apron of Edward Fletcher, 52, a stoker who had worked for Walsall Glue Company for 34 years, and burned him to death.

  Mines were even worse: gas underground could explode or poison you, roofs could fall on you. For every accident that an inquest coroner and jury heard about, and that made the newspaper, many more near-misses and injuries left people bed-ridden or degraded, unfit for their old work. Some workplaces looked after their injured; if a railway shunter lost an arm or a leg, he could work as a signalman, or a night-watchman. Most cases never made the news, or never went beyond the nearest workmates or family. They had to accept the hardship, because they could no more expect anyone else to help them than they could help others. They had to shrug - unless the pain did not even allow that.

  ‘My dear nephew,’ wrote Sarah Pick to William Thomas Swift, on Monday July 20, 1914. Swift, a retired and widowed schoolmaster in the village of Churchdown between Gloucester and Cheltenham, read the letter the next day. She thanked him for a letter of his, then told him:

  You will be sorry to know that I have had the misfortune to put my shoulder out. It happened up in my room, I hitched my foot in the carpet where it was unsewn, I fell and struck my shoulder against the doorpost. The pain was almost unendurable until Dr Phelps and his partner came and put it back in again. The pain is still very bad now I have no use at all in my arm yet. But I suppose it will come back.

 
A relative was staying until she felt better, she added: “He cannot bend his leg and is still on the club but he does all he can and Mrs Mower bandages my arm and dresses and undresses me.” ‘On the club’, so obvious to Pick and Swift that she did not need to spell it out to him, must have been a friendly society or some such savings club, that paid out at such times. Swift must have answered her at once because on the Friday he had a postcard reply: “I am a little better. My arm pains me a good deal and it has made me feel very poorly in myself. I shall follow your advice to be as cheerful as I can and not worry. Hilda, Sybil and John are coming on Monday for a fortnight.”

  What could cheer Sarah Pick? She could tell herself, though she had no way of knowing, that others were worse off than her. At least she had not tripped on stairs, which could kill; as inquests heard elsewhere. Miner’s wife Polly Henworth, living in what the coroner described as a ‘miserable hovel’ at Bloxwich in Staffordshire, went downstairs one night in March 1914 to fetch the iron plate from the oven, to warm the bed for her ill, visiting, sister. She must have tripped on stairs - called by the coroner ‘the most awkward he had ever seen’ - while carrying a lamp holding about a quart of oil. Frank Henworth awoke to his wife’s screams and found her, in her nightdress on the kitchen floor, in flames from head to foot. She died 13 days later. Even such a sad story did show how families looked after their own. Also sleeping in the Henworths’ one bedroom - divided by a partition - was the dead woman’s mother. You could shudder at such overcrowding; or understand the sharing. Here, then, in the accidents that made life like a guerrilla war, may have been one reason for such public interest in the loss of the Titanic, in 1912. The passengers on that boat, kept apart by the class of their ticket yet with one fate, were a metaphor for Britain. Rich people, who could imagine themselves on such a ship, could see that an accident could catch even them. For the poor, who could only dream of travel, the Titanic’s story spoke of the harsh choices in their own lives. Thanks to the failings of others, beyond the power of the passengers to remedy or even ask about, there were not enough lifeboats, actual or metaphorical, for everyone.

  V

  Though Lord Charles Beresford was a bigoted hypocrite, at least as a hypocrite he could take something as embarrassing as the Titanic and not only put the best face on it, but make it sound glorious. He was just the man for the unveiling of the statue to the captain of the Titanic, Commander Edward John Smith, at Lichfield on Wednesday July 29, 1914. Beresford, a Conservative MP, wearing Royal Navy uniform, had made several voyages with Smith. According to Beresford, Smith was ‘an example of the very best type of British seaman, and of British gentlemen’. Hear, hear, the crowd said; the listeners wanted to hear something good. Beresford and other speakers that day described Smith as brave, gallant, and heroic (and, none of them added, dead). They left out the ignored warnings about the icebergs, the missed distress signals, the false pride of the Belfast shipmakers that called the Titanic ‘unsinkable’, and the avoidable lack of lifeboats. Instead Beresford recalled Smith’s last command, as the waters rose to the bridge of the Titanic: ‘Be British!’ (Had anyone really heard that?)

  So much for the figure of the man now in Lichfield’s park, because other places more to do with Captain Smith, such as his birthplace of Stoke-on-Trent, didn’t want him. Beresford continued the metaphors, by praising the ‘black squad’, ‘those who served below in the engine room and stoke hole, those often forgotten heroes because being out of sight they were out of mind. That so many people were saved was no doubt due to those who remained at their posts working the dynamos, keeping the lights going, although they knew for hours that the ship was doomed.’ Here Beresford praised the world as the Tories saw it; men at the top and, literally, at the bottom, each did their duty at their posts despite certain death. Never mind that efficient seamen would not have had the accident in the first place; rather, Beresford claimed that the British way worked, avoided panic, and saved some of those on board.

  Beresford ended in the present, by calling the Royal Navy and the Merchant Marine as ‘brothers of the sea’: “The Navy were the police of the sea, so that if unfortunately they were called upon to fight they could keep the Merchant marine still plying between our shores and distant climes to provide them,” the listeners, that is, “with raw material and food.” He was hinting at the crisis on the Continent of the last few days; the day before, Austria-Hungary had begun war with Serbia.

  Chapter 3

  What is an Englishman?

  Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace

  To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not.

  Let all the ends thou aim’st at be thy country’s,

  Thy God’s, and truth’s.

  Henry VIII by Shakespeare; a quotation pasted into Arthur Ross’ scrapbook of Beverley Church Lads Brigade

  I

  Even as Beresford was giving words of comfort about his old ship-mate Commander Smith, though so one-sided as to be deceitful, the journalist Philip Gibbs was at work on an article, ‘What I saw of the Servians’, for that Saturday’s edition of the weekly illustrated paper The Graphic. On his way to Bulgaria to report on the first Balkan war a couple of years before, the Serbs had arrested him for sketching reservists at Belgrade railway station. The Serb interrogator could speak only Serbian and it was so obvious that an Englishman would not be able to speak Serbian, that Gibbs left it unsaid in his article. Eventually someone came who could speak to Gibbs in German, and the Serbs told him that ‘as I appeared unmistakably English I might depart in peace’. Yet much more intriguing than the point of the article - how warlike Serb men (and women) were and how they hated Austria - was the question of why the Serbs let him go. What about Gibbs - what possessions, clothes or manners - was so English that foreigners recognised it?

  Not that men who had never been to England and spoke not a word of English had any more idea of an Englishman, than the English understood foreigners. A shorthand sufficed. The English were stolid, whether because of the diet, the weather, the give and take of parliamentary government, or the military habit of waiting for the enemy to come to you that worked so well at Agincourt, Waterloo and Omdurman (less well at Hastings and Isandhlwana). The French by contrast - to quote the editorial of the Wolverhampton Express & Star newspaper on July 29 - had a ‘ferment of emotions’ personally, and revolutions politically. The stock Irishman, in newspaper cartoons during the Irish Home Rule affair, was someone short and shabby, like a leprechaun. To say something was ‘a bit Irish’ was to call it disorderly, or stupid. This prejudice served - in England and other countries - to make you feel the best, or at least better than someone. No matter how daft, or dangerous, such caricatures did point to differences between countries.

  And what was wrong with that? “My friends say I am full of prejudices. I am,” Guy Paget wrote in a private memoir, Stray Shots by a Guards Gunner, after the war. “I love my school, Eton. I love Mother Lodge; the Scots Guards; and I love my country, England. There may be as good but I know damn well there are none better.” Even such a short, and frank, burst of national pride showed contradictions. His surname suggested his ancestors took English land after the Norman Conquest. He owned land, and Sulby Hall, on the borders of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. He recalled: “The murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Archduchess in June 1914 found me with my wife at Aix les Bains. We were there for her health. She had a very bad breakdown due to overwork at politics in my old division of mid-Northants.” Paget had stood there for the Conservatives at the last election in 1910. Like many of his kind, he took every chance to holiday abroad (to avoid common Englishmen?). Perhaps the best test of what it was to be an Englishman, or anyone, was what it made you do in extremes. Your sense of who you were would decide the tugs between competing loyalties, even if your choice, or denial of a choice, hurt you.

  As the title of his memoir suggested, Paget had pride in being a Guards of
ficer, one of the elite of the British Army. On about Wednesday August 6 - after a long story, as it was for all the English fleeing for the Continent on the outbreak of war - Paget sailed from Dieppe. Paget saw a ‘boy’, who was dirty, without a collar, with a three-day beard, and an unclean hanky around his neck; ‘but still obviously a gentleman’. Paget asked him to have a drink. The boy replied that he would rather have a sandwich, as water was free. “He had travelled three days in a cattle truck from Switzerland, penniless. I discovered his name was Whitbread and he was in the Coldstreams. I cursed him for not calling on me for aid as he saw I had a Guards tie and said I hoped I did not look such a bounder as to be thought unentitled to it. He replied he was so dirty and for the honour of the Coldstreams would not like me to go to the club and say how he looked.” That, Paget wrote, was an example of the Guards’ discipline (that lasted through the war, he added carefully). Here was much of what made men tick - perhaps not all Englishmen, but gentlemen, the sort that could afford to go abroad, for months at a time.

  Paget had tried to reach his wife at Aix with 200 gold sovereigns as spending money, only to give up at Paris, as France began war with Germany. Whitbread - such men as Paget spoke of their fellows by their surnames, formally - preferred to suffer silently, rather than admit he could not afford to keep the usual standards, even though it was not his fault that he could not shave. A tie (or a handshake for a freemason such as Paget) was an unspoken signal for strangers to recognise they had something in common. This required trust, because anyone could wear a particular tie and pretend to belong to something. Men like Paget gave those guilty of such a fraud the name of ‘bounder’; that was not a crime in law, but against custom. How could Paget tell someone was ‘obviously’ a gentleman? That came with experience, from being in a country longer than a mere visitor or journalist. All the places you fitted in - the schools, churches and friends’ homes you went to; all the things that you, and people like you, took in - the newspapers and books, the conversations, the accents, the clues from posture and gait, let alone the outward clothes and cleanliness - all equipped you to judge the man or woman you met. In no time, you could tell if the other person was like you, and welcome them or keep a distance accordingly. You were like a sensible man who did not go to extremes of trouble to check that a gold coin or (less often seen) five-pound note was fake; instead, you satisfied yourself with a sign that it was genuine. Sometimes, when the coin or banknote was strange, if you were not in your usual places and met someone new to you in the same boat as yourself - literally, in Paget’s case - misunderstandings could arise.