by Peter Parker
Such behaviour was not confined to troops still serving abroad, and January 1919 proved a testing time for Lloyd George’s coalition government, which – apparently without consulting the army – had promised rapid demobilisation. While General Byng was dealing with the RAOC in Calais, General Trenchard of the RAF had been sent to quell a disturbance at Southampton, where 20,000 soldiers had mutinied and taken over the docks. To his considerable surprise, Trenchard was manhandled by the troops he had come to address and was obliged to summon armed troops from Portsmouth together with a detachment of military police. These men surrounded the unarmed mutineers, who, perhaps aware of Trenchard’s reputation for ruthlessness, called off their action.
Mutinies were not simply confined to the army. Five hundred members of Trenchard’s RAF stationed in squalid conditions at Biggin Hill in Kent reacted to a particularly disgusting supper one evening by convening a meeting at which ‘The Red Flag’ was sung and a decision was taken to disobey orders. The following morning, as at Val de Lièvre, reveille was ignored and a deputation was sent to the commanding officer with a long list of demands. The authorities agreed to inspect the camp and capitulated almost at once, sending the men on leave while the whole place was overhauled. Meanwhile, there were small individual mutinies in the navy. The red flag was hoisted on a patrol boat at Milford Haven, while, encouraged by dockers and ‘agitators’, the crew of a large cruiser at Rosyth refused to sail to Russia. Further mutinies and demonstrations by soldiers awaiting demobilisation took place at Shoreham, Dover, Folkestone, Bristol, Sydenham, Aldershot and at Osterley, where in January 1919 some 1,500 members of the Army Service Corps, who had learned that they would be the last troops to be demobilised, commandeered lorries and drove them to Whitehall, where they obstructed the entrance to the War Office. The following month, finding food and transport entirely inadequate for their needs, 3,000 fully armed soldiers setting off back to France from Victoria Station decided instead to march on Horse Guards Parade. A nervous Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, receiving assurances that he could rely upon the loyalty of a reserve battalion of Grenadiers and two troops of the Household Cavalry, gave orders for the demonstrators to be surrounded and disarmed. Threatened with machine guns and fixed bayonets, the protesters surrendered, and like all the mutinies mentioned, this one ended without bloodshed.
Once demobbed, men still faced problems returning to civilian life. The thousands of servicemen who had been severely wounded in the war had to readjust to a drastically circumscribed world. Over 41,000 of those injured had lost one or more limbs, while a further 272,000 had suffered other sorts of incapacitating wounds. Others, who showed no visible signs of injury, were suffering from shell shock, ‘neurasthenia’, or other forms of battle trauma which made them unsuited to an immediate return to work: some 65,000 of them were awarded disability pensions. Even those who had emerged from the war able bodied and sound of mind often found themselves out of work. Andrew Bowie, who had served with the 1st Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders and would live to the age of 104, was just twenty-one when the war ended. ‘I was happy to get out of the army and to return home,’ he recalled, ‘but the prospects were very bad.’ Before the war he had worked in accountancy, but his small firm could not afford to re-employ him when he was demobbed. ‘You go away as a boy and come back as a man. What are you going to do? There were so many people like that. There seemed to be no future for you.’
Luckier veterans, mostly those who had been self-employed or in work as skilled craftsmen, found their jobs still waiting for them – though they were often expected to take a cut in wages. Many of the younger men had been apprentices before the war. This system, which stretched back to the Middle Ages, allowed youths to be taken on by a master craftsman who would teach them a trade in exchange for a guarantee that the apprentice would continue working for a set period after he had become skilled. A small wage would be paid while the apprentice learned his craft and the contract between him and his employer would be recorded in a document called an indenture, which would be cancelled at the end of the set term. Corporal John Oborne of the 4th Dorsetshires had been an apprentice joiner in Bath since the age of fourteen, and when the war started was put to work making boxes for shells and torpedoes while waiting to come of military age. After the war ended he stayed on in the army until the beginning of 1920 in order to save up the £50 he would need to buy a set of tools when he returned to his peacetime profession. His old firm was prepared to take him back to complete his apprenticeship, but the pay offered was less than what he would receive if he stayed in the army. He nevertheless completed his apprenticeship and remained with the firm until he retired in 1975, living on to the age of 104.
Harry Patch, on the other hand, refused to accept the terms offered by his old company, also in Bath. He had served three years of his apprenticeship as a plumber, from the age of fifteen, before being called up, and was expected to complete a further two years, at the same paltry wage of ten shillings a week, when he returned. ‘I was effectively being penalised for serving my country,’ he said. He was now twenty-one and about to be married and so refused the offer, doing odd jobs and private work instead. The problem for him now was that his old firm would not sign his indentures. He consulted his father’s solicitor, who offered the opinion that the war had rendered such contracts invalid. Even if Patch’s contract with his employer had not effectively been broken when Patch was called up, it was certainly broken by delayed demobilisation. Those who volunteered or had been conscripted had signed up only ‘for the duration’: by failing to release Patch from the army as soon as the war was over, the government had broken the contract once more. Patch nevertheless felt, as a matter of pride, that he was entitled to have his indentures signed. After a great deal of wrangling, and after he had accepted a job with another company, his employers eventually agreed. He remained in the plumbing trade for the rest of his working life.
Some veterans had gone to the war straight from school without ever being trained for any sort of job other than fighting, and had no experience of the workplace. Others had spent so long in the services that through lack of practice they had almost forgotten the skills they once had, or had missed out on the technical advances that had been made in their absence. Employers were reluctant to take such men on, and this bred even more resentment among the veterans towards those who had stayed behind and were preferred as employees. It was reckoned that around one million men returned from the war to find they had no job. The government provided those who had served in the ranks with unemployment benefit, but former officers were supposed to have sufficient private means to keep them going and were left to fend for themselves. While still in France awaiting demob, Guy Chapman’s battalion was visited by representatives of the commission for the employment of ex-servicemen. Chapman was told that at twenty-eight he was ‘far too old’ and that consequently nothing could be done for him. A fellow officer was told that ‘military distinction was a quite useless recommendation for civil life’. The writer Gilbert Frankau, who had joined up immediately at the outbreak of war and served as an officer at Loos, Ypres and on the Somme, spoke for many in his poem ‘Only an Officer’:
Only an officer! Only a chap
Who carried on till the final scrap,
Only a fellow who didn’t shirk –
Homeless, penniless, out of work,
Asking only a start in life,
A job that will keep himself and his wife,
‘And thank the Lord that we haven’t a kid.’
Thus men pay for the deeds men did!
Unemployment among all classes would remain a major problem in the immediate post-war period, and veterans sporting medals reduced to playing barrel-organs in the streets or peddling matches, shoelaces and other small items became a common and shaming sight. A poignant postcard of the period, on which a poem about the sacrifices made in France and the broken promises about employment back home was printed, came with the foll
owing message:
PLEASE READ THIS. Can you help this Ex-service Man by buying this Poetry. PRICE TWOPENCE. So please patronise an Ex-Soldier, Out of Work. NO PENSION. NO DOLE. I am a Genuine Discharged Soldier NOT AN IMPOSTER. I am compelled to sell these to keep myself, wife and children.
Sold entirely by unemployed Ex-service men.
Even those in employment were often dissatisfied with wages and working conditions. In Glasgow in January 1919 an agreement negotiated on behalf of engineers and shipbuilders between the trade unions and employers for a forty-seven-hour working week was rejected by the Clyde Workers’ Committee on the grounds that a forty-hour week was preferable because more people – in particular discharged servicemen – would be needed for jobs. Accustomed to the ‘red’ reputation of the Clyde, the employers and government did not take too much notice of the strike called by the CWC at the end of January. After four days, however, 40,000 men had laid down their tools and were joined not only by Glasgow’s electrical workers but by 36,000 Scottish miners. Ex-servicemen were used as pickets, naturally arousing public sympathy, and on 29 January some 60,000 people attended a demonstration in George Square, Glasgow, while a delegation was granted an audience with the Lord Provost. A vain attempt to disperse the crowd by mounted police led to a pitched battle not only in the square but in other parts of the city, and many were injured. Fearful that Scottish troops might side with the strikers, the government sent massed English troops to Glasgow, some of them in tanks. Peace was restored and on 10 February the strike was called off, its aim unrealised. Politicians nevertheless feared that without the war effort to hold the nation together, discontent and dissension would spread throughout society.
In the immediate aftermath of war, the interests and aims of workers often coincided with those of former servicemen. Indeed, the earliest associations of veterans had a strong political dimension, and the British Legion – associated latterly with garden fêtes and genteel volunteers selling poppies – grew out of surprisingly radical beginnings. The Legion itself did not come into existence until 1921, but a number of other veterans’ associations were founded while the war was still being fought. There had long been charitable organisations set up on behalf of British war veterans, ensuring that old soldiers did not simply fade away in penury. The professional soldiers who fought in the First World War, however, were outnumbered by civilians who, in the language of the times, had answered the nation’s call, either by volunteering or because they had been conscripted. In return, it seemed only right that they should be entitled to benefits provided by the state rather than having to rely upon handouts from charities. Veterans who had left the service began organising themselves into associations that would lobby for pensions and for disability and unemployment allowances.
The earliest grouping, formed in September 1916, was the National Association of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers, which had strong links to both the Labour and Trades Union movements. The similarly named National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers, formed in April 1917, was sponsored by a Liberal MP and held its inaugural meeting at the National Liberal Club. It was open only to those who had served in, or risen from, the ranks, presumably because the Federation felt, as the government did, that former commissioned officers could look after themselves. The Comrades of the Great War was proposed in August 1917 by Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Norton-Griffiths, a Conservative MP (supported by Lord Derby, the then Secretary of State for War), with the express intention of providing an organisation without what he considered the radical, even revolutionary, affiliations of the other associations. The most radical of them all was the short-lived National Union of Ex-Servicemen (NUX). This was founded in 1918 by John Beckett, a former soldier and a member of the International Labour Party who believed that ex-servicemen’s associations could flourish only if they maintained links with other workers’ organisations whose aims were deemed more or less identical. Workers’ organisations often agreed, as may be judged by the pronouncements of Wal Hannington, a trade union official and founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He regarded the unemployed former servicemen ‘who had come from the bloody battlefields only to be cast on to the industrial scrap-heap of capitalism’ as key components in the political struggles of the post-war period. There was a great deal of unseemly infighting among the disparate ex-servicemen’s groups, but by the end of the war they had become a force to be reckoned with.
By the summer of 1919, the Federation was rumoured to have two million members and was described in the House of Commons as ‘a huge shapeless, and menacing mass, on the verge of collapse into anarchy’. Evidence of this had been seen a few days earlier when the Federation organised a demonstration in Hyde Park to protest about the lack of employment opportunities for discharged and disabled servicemen. Having listened to speeches in the Park, and passed a resolution that ‘unemployed ex-servicemen shall immediately be found work at trade union rate of wages’ or, failing that, an increased unemployment benefit of £1 8s (rising to £2 for those with children), the 10,000 or so protesters declared their intention of marching on Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. Prevented by a police cordon at the top of Constitution Hill from approaching the Palace by the most direct route, the demonstrators took another, where their way was once again barred. In Victoria Street the road was being dug up, and this provided the protesters with wood blocks and chunks of concrete, which they hurled at the police, and scaffolding poles, which they used to trip up the horses of the mounted division. Having abandoned their attempt to storm the Palace, they headed for the House of Commons, where they ‘swept away a line of mounted policemen’ in Parliament Square and ‘surged forward alongside St Margaret’s Church, throwing missiles at the flying line of police’. Mounted police reinforcements that had been held in reserve then charged the crowd, ‘drew their truncheons and used them freely’. Numerous people on both sides ended up in hospital. It took almost an hour to disperse the rioters, who departed only after they were addressed by James Hogge, the Liberal whip who had formerly been the Federation’s president and was still lobbying on their behalf in Parliament.
It was against this background of military and civil unrest that plans were made to celebrate the peace, and Virginia Woolf was not merely voicing the cynicism of pacifist Bloomsbury when she wrote that there was ‘something calculated & politic & insincere’ about the first of these great public events, the Peace Day celebrations in July 1919. In observing that they were ‘some thing got up to pacify & placate “the people”’, she had a point. Although the Armistice had been declared on 11 November 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the official end of the war, was not signed until 28 June 1919. Peace Day in Britain, which was to be celebrated somewhat paradoxically by a military parade, was originally set for early August to coincide with the anniversary of the outbreak of war. At the suggestion of the King, who wanted this Victory Parade of all the Allies to take place as soon as possible after the signing of the treaty – and possibly did not want to be seen to be lagging too far behind the French, who would celebrate their own victory on Bastille Day, 14 July – the government subsequently moved the date forward to 19 July. Recognising that jubilation would need to be tempered by some acknowledgement of the massive losses Britain suffered in gaining that victory and securing the peace, Lloyd George proposed at a very late stage that a monumental catafalque should be placed on the parade route so that the passing columns of soldiers could salute their dead comrades. Something similar had been planned by the French for their celebrations. Lord Curzon, who headed the Peace Celebrations Committee, declared that a catafalque – technically a raised platform on which a body rests temporarily before a funeral – might do for papist Continentals but would be regarded by the British population as wholly alien. A huge cross at Admiralty Arch was suggested as an unimaginative and somewhat crass alternative, but fortunately someone had the sense to consult Sir Edwin Lutyens, who had been advising on t
he layout of military cemeteries in France and Belgium.
It was lucky that Lutyens was a quick worker. He produced a design almost immediately – supposedly within ten minutes of the idea being put to him on behalf of Sir Alfred Mond, who, as the First Commissioner of Works, was the government minister responsible for overseeing public buildings and statues. Lutyens’ design was of a symbolically empty sarcophagus on top of a pylon, a rectangular truncated pyramidal tower of the sort often used to flank temples in Egypt. Lutyens thereby transformed a catafalque (on top of which an effigy would logically rest) into a cenotaph, which, he explained, was ‘a monument to a deceased person whose body is buried elsewhere’ and was thus wholly appropriate to the circumstances. He understood that as a focus of national mourning for the whole Empire, with its many races and creeds, the Cenotaph had to be non-denominational. It therefore lacked any Christian symbolism or inscription, much to the displeasure of many in the Church. Its decorations were restricted to religiously neutral wreaths, ribbons and flags and the all-embracing words ‘The Glorious Dead’. Resembling solid stone but in fact constructed from wood and plaster, the Cenotaph was reasonably easy to erect in Whitehall during the fortnight left before the Victory Parade took place. No sooner had it been erected than people began to lay wreaths against it. These piled up to such a degree that they had to be cleared away in order to make room for the troops to march past on Peace Day.
It was originally proposed that the march should pass through the East End, but the Peace Celebrations Committee decided that the residents of Vauxhall, Kennington and Lambeth should be favoured instead on the grounds that they ‘were much more British on the whole than the East End which was largely composed of foreigners’ – in other words Jewish and other immigrants who had settled there and were clearly regarded as insufficiently assimilated, even though many of them had fought in the war. As a consequence, the route was redirected south of the river and would extend no farther east than St George’s Fields in Lambeth. On the morning of Wednesday, 19 July, some 15,000 servicemen from most of the Allied countries, arranged alphabetically (starting with the Americans) and led by the British, French and American commanders-in-chief, Field Marshals Haig, Foch and Pershing, set out from Albert Gate at the south end of Hyde Park, where many of the participants had bivouacked overnight. (Haig was evidently in a better mood than he had been at the Armistice when he refused a summons from Lloyd George to take part in a ceremonial drive through the capital with the French C-i-C and the Prime Ministers of France and Italy, declaring in his diary that he had ‘no intention of taking part in any triumphal ride with Foch, or with any pack of foreigners’.) Missing from this parade of the Allies were troops from the Indian subcontinent, whose contribution to the war had been considerable: some 1.27 million men, 827,000 of them combatants, among whom 49,000 sepoys (infantrymen) were killed in action. When bringing forward the date of the parade at such a late stage, the government had failed to take into consideration how this might affect those who had farthest to come. Working to the original timetable, 1,500 Indian troops had set sail from Bombay on 29 June; on 19 July they were still at sea.
