In 1914 the population of Australia was around five million. Some 416,809 men enlisted, almost ten per cent of the population. Of these, sixty thousand were killed, and another one hundred and fifty-six thousand gassed, wounded or taken prisoner. Most of the Australian troops were sent initially not to Europe but to Egypt, to counter the threat from the Turkish Ottoman Empire which, keen to extend its influence in the Middle East, had formed an alliance with Germany. The Australians together with a large contingent of New Zealanders, and French and British troops, landed at the now-infamous peninsula of Gallipoli on 25th April 1915. Unable to make any significant headway, there they remained for seven long months, under constant attack from Turkish forces, before being evacuated on 19th and 20th December 1915.
After the farce of Gallipoli, the Australian units were reorganised and shipped off to Northern France, where they were deployed in March 1916. With insufficient training, the ANZAC troops were totally unprepared for the horrors of trench warfare. In their first significant engagement at the battle of Fromelles, the Australians suffered five thousand, five hundred and fifty-three casualties in the first twenty-four hours. By the end of 1916, just five months later, forty thousand had been killed or injured. The following year, there were a further seventy-eight thousand casualties as the Australians fought at Bullecourt, Messines and Passchendaele. However, it was not only upon the battlefields of France and Belgium that Australian lives were lost; some units were deployed in the Desert Campaign, defending the Suez Canal, recapturing the Sinai Desert, before eventually pushing on to “liberate” Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
The massive casualty rate was not sustainable, and began to cause tensions back in Australia as popular support for the war began to waiver and political divisions began to emerge. Families and businesses across the nation began to feel the financial implications as they lost breadwinners and employees. As in Britain, Australian women had to step in to take over the jobs of the menfolk serving overseas. Losses were so significant that the Australian government wanted to introduce conscription. Referenda were held in 1916 and 1917; the country was divided, resulting in civil disturbances and riots. Even amongst the citizens of Mount Tamborine there was discord. On each occasion, the majority of Queenslanders voted against conscription, but feelings ran high. In 1917 a fight broke out down at Upper Coomera between two families of opposing views. The situation quickly got out of hand and the police were brought in who eventually broke up the fighting, but not before reading the Riot Act.58
How remote from the theatre of war ten thousand miles away were the little communities on Tamborine Mountain and Upper Coomera, and yet still the Great War cast its shadow. Many of the district’s young men had volunteered when war broke out. Ernie Jenyns and Frank Curtis were killed in action, along with Topsy’s cousin Sid Bignell, who died at Bouzencourt, in the Somme, on 10th April 1918, just seven months before the armistice, aged twenty-five. The fiancée of Topsy’s younger sister Ivy, Douglas Hollindale, who grew up on the farm next door to the Campbells, was gassed whilst fighting in France. Douglas was one of the lucky ones – he survived his injuries, returning to the mountain after the war, and he and Ivy were married shortly afterwards.
The mountain villagers held numerous fundraising events throughout the course of the war, while the local women knitted hundreds of sets of hats and socks and gloves to be sent out to France. The Bignells and the Campbells helped organise some of the fundraisers, one of which is recorded in the Beaudesert Times newspaper:
“On Saturday 19th October 1918, a most successful picnic was held in the grounds of ‘Wilmont’ in aid of the War Nurses Fund. The grounds were gay with flags, the Union Jack and the Australian Flag floating on either side of the entrance gate. Games and sport for the young folk passed the time most pleasantly … refreshments were provided by the ladies of the south end of the mountain in their usual generous manner. In the evening a dance was held, Mr A T Bignell [Alf] kindly leading the room which was beautifully decorated with ferns, zamia palms and flags, by Mrs W Campbell [Topsy] of Guanaba, assisted by Mrs F Young of the mountain.”59
Topsy was in her element when she was entertaining and playing the role of hostess; however, her ambitions in this area would ultimately have heartrending implications for the Campbells. At the Armistice, Bill and Topsy were parents to three small children, a second daughter Kathleen Mary having been born in January 1917. A third girl Irene Sarah (named after the grandmother she never knew, but always known as Betty) was born in September 1919, followed by another boy, Alfred James (Jimmy), born in October 1921. By the time she was twenty-seven, Topsy was a mother of six children under nine years old. As the eldest of twelve children herself, some of whom were younger than her own, Topsy was unphased. Unlike Sarah Campbell, Topsy had her mother, father, sisters, numerous aunts, uncles and cousins to call upon for assistance. Sarah had had no one.
Remarkably, despite the demands of six small children, fulfilling the role of a farmer’s wife and looking after Bill and his now ageing father William senior, Topsy took over the family letter-writing duties and struck up a friendship through correspondence with her husband’s family back in County Durham. Perhaps she was keen to ensure that Bill maintained his links with his late mother’s family. So many of the photographs that were sent across the miles to little Edie and her mother back in Seaham Harbour bear Topsy’s handwriting and sometimes child-like descriptions on the back; sadly, not one of the letters which accompanied the photographs survives.
15
On Caroline Street
In the twenty five years since Sarah Marshall had left Seaham for Queensland, the little town had changed significantly. By the time Fanny Threadkell received the news of her sister’s death in early summer 1911, the combined villages of Seaham Harbour and New Seaham (formerly Seaham Colliery) were home to some fifteen thousand people – miners mostly, from Seaham Colliery but also Dawdon pit, which had opened in 1899. There were also railwaymen, seamen, bottle workers, fishermen and labourers, as well as members of the “professional classes” –teachers, doctors, solicitors, ship owners and shipping agents, and colliery managers, and an army of tradespeople and merchants of various sorts. The basic terraced cottages, hastily built to accommodate the town’s influx of workers in the 1850s and 1860s, were no longer sufficient to house the population; overcrowding and squalor were rife.
The ramshackle lanes and back streets which had grown up around the harbour area were in many cases unfit for human habitation, but were crammed with the poorest of the town’s residents and their broods of children. Summersons Buildings (where my grandfather was born in 1917), Hunters Buildings, the bottom end of Frances Street nearest to the docks, and the streets around the railway and behind North Road were, in places, nothing better than slums interspersed with rough drinking establishments. The further away from the harbour area, by and large, the better the accommodation became.
Fanny and Robert Threadkell lived in number 6 Caroline Street, the more “respectable” end of Seaham Harbour, just around the corner from St John’s Church and the National School, which Edie would start attending in September of that year, and opposite the Methodist Church. They had originally lived in 55 Frances Street, just after their marriage, and Edie was born there. None of the original buildings of Caroline Street survive. The only reminder of its existence is the street name itself, carved into the stonework on the side of a building at the top of Church Street, currently a furnishings store. Caroline Street, and Frances Street which joined at a ninety degree angle and ran down parallel to the back of Church Street, were built in around 1865. Halfway down Frances Street there was a public house, the Volunteer Arms. It’s still there, a solitary and seemingly incongruous reminder of days gone by, and of a street of homes long since vanished. After years of standing derelict, it is about to re-open as a smart new café.
The tiny terraced houses in Caroline Street consisted of a single room downstairs, with
a door straight in off the street. There was a kitchen range, a window at either end of the room, a large table in the centre of the room and a pantry next to the back door, which opened out onto a shared yard. Upstairs there was one bedroom and a tiny box room above the stairs. The back yard was shared between the families who occupied 5, 6, 7 and 8 Caroline Street and the two families who lived above 8 Frances Street on the corner. In the yard there was a sink, two toilets (shared between six families) and a laundry, together with a couple of coal houses. There was no running water or toilets in any of the houses, and no bathrooms. Bathing was done in a tin bath that hung by the side of the kitchen range until required, or at the public baths. A washstand with a jug and a basin stood in the bedroom. By modern standards this sounds a quite appalling way to exist; in 1911, it was the norm. Millions of families up and down the country lived in exactly the same way.
Robert Threadkell was rarely at home for any length of time, as he was often away at sea. At the time of the 1911 census, carried out in April, Fanny is described as “head of the household” and there is no trace of Robert elsewhere in the census records. Presumably he was on one of his sea voyages.
Despite the lack of decent housing in the town, large amounts of money were spent by the authorities and by private investors on leisure facilities for the masses. The 6th Marquess of Londonderry had donated ninety-five acres of land near Dawdon for the creation of a golf club, which was formally opened on 15th May 1911. The Boy Scout movement was in its infancy, and the Seaham and District Scout Association was formed in August 1911, followed two years later by the Girl Guides. Headed by the formidable Miss Dillon, the Girl Guides met in a hut constructed in the gardens of Dene House. Edie was one of Seaham’s earliest Girl Guides, joining just after her tenth birthday in 1916, and she remained a great supporter of the organisation throughout her life.
Seaham’s first cinema, the Empire, was opened in 1912, along with a new theatre, the Princess, on Princess Road. The burgeoning population required new schools, so the Upper Standard School was opened in Princess Road the same year, as was Byron Terrace, to accommodate children from New Seaham and Seaton. Byron Terrace School is still going strong, and is today a popular and high-achieving primary school.
Much excitement was caused in the town on Monday 25th August 1913 when crowds of onlookers gathered on Seaham beach for their first glimpse of an aeroplane. A Sopwith Biplane piloted by Harry Hawker, which was competing in the Circuit of Britain Air Race, made an unscheduled landing at Seaham for urgent repairs. Such was the hazardous nature of aviation at the time that of the four entrants in the race, only Hawker’s aircraft actually took off; his passenger, Harry Kauper, had been rendered unconscious by carbon monoxide fumes on the first attempt at the race a week previously. Of the other entrants, one pilot was killed during testing, another aircraft had been damaged during trials and the third suffered engine failure just prior to take off. Thousands of Seaham folk flocked to the beach just near to the Featherbed Rock to see the brave airmen and their amazing machine, and watched as the little plane took off for its next destination, Beadnell in Northumberland. Hawker and Kauper never did complete the Circuit – they got as far as Dublin, but as they were the only competitors they were awarded the huge £1000 prize anyway.
All was not well in Seaham. The relationship between the miners and their unions on the one hand, and the colliery owners on the other, remained fractious at best. Since the days following the explosion of September 1880, the miners’ unions had grown in strength and in membership, and were a political force to be reckoned with. In 1872, the Durham Miners Association had thirty-one thousand members; by 1910 this had grown to almost one hundred and thirty-two thousand. It is difficult to comprehend the size and importance of the mining industry in Britain at that time. At its peak in 1913, there were three hundred and four pits employing over one hundred and sixty-five thousand men in County Durham (which then included Sunderland, South Shields and Gateshead) alone.60 Though much had been achieved in terms of workers’ rights, particularly in respect of pay and conditions, there was still much to do. Coal mining remained an extremely arduous and hazardous occupation; accidents and fatalities remained commonplace.
In the days before the nationalisation of the coal industry, wages and conditions varied hugely, not only from county to county, but even at local level, from colliery to colliery. The Labour Party had been formed in 1906 and the Durham Miners Association joined with the largest of the miners’ unions, the Mining Federation of Great Britain, which had allied itself with the Party in 1908. By 1912, a wave of social, political and industrial unrest swept Britain, accompanied by much talk of revolution.61 This turbulent period in British history is largely overlooked today, overshadowed by the horrors of the Great War.
The miners held the trump card – they could, and did, frequently hold the government to ransom. In a time when coal was the very lifeblood of this great industrial nation, strike action for any significant length of time would paralyse the country. Once the stockpiles had been exhausted, locomotives would stand idle in their sidings. Ports and harbours would be crammed with steamships, the warehouses overflowing with cargo that wasn’t going anywhere. Factories would have to cease production – no coal meant no power. Within days Britain would grind to a halt, as the miners enjoyed support from their comrades in the docks and on the railways. The miners knew it. The government knew it.
The miners had three main demands: a national minimum wage, a national agreement, so that all negotiations could be dealt with at a nationwide rather than local level, and nationalisation of the industry as a whole. Strike committees were formed at Seaham and Dawdon collieries, a pattern replicated at every colliery across the nation. The Durham miners voted 57,490 for strike action, 28,504 against.62 On 1st March 1912, eight hundred thousand miners came out on strike, marking the biggest strike Britain had ever seen. Soon a million men were out. The government was forced to intervene and brokered a compromise, and by the end of April, all the miners were back at work. Although the pitmen had achieved their aim of a national minimum wage, the government went back on its word. Deceived by the empty promises of politicians, the miners’ leaders now began to fight in earnest for the cause of nationalisation. In 1913 the Triple Alliance was formed, when the miners’ union joined forces with the National Union of Railwaymen and the National Transport Workers’ Federation. The “Class War” may have begun but it would be stopped in its tracks by the events of the summer of 1914.
A German merchant ship, Comet, was docked in Seaham Harbour on the day that war broke out; the unfortunate crew were immediately arrested, ordered off the ship and then marched up Church Street, escorted by police officers and members of the local Volunteer Force to the police station on the corner of Tempest Road. There is a photograph of these poor sailors, all civilians, who had done nothing wrong other than to be of the wrong nationality in the wrong place at the wrong time, walking up Church Street past jeering crowds of the town’s residents.
As on Tamborine Mountain and across the Empire, the young men of Seaham flocked to enlist as soon as war was declared. To many of them, who had never been further than perhaps Durham or Sunderland or South Shields, it was all a bit of lark, a chance to see more of the world. Among the archives there is a “Roll of Honour”, which lists those of the Marquis of Londonderry’s employees who served: one thousand and eighty seven from Seaham Colliery (including John Clyde, my great-grandfather), seven hundred and twenty three from Dawdon Colliery, thirteen from the Londonderry Offices, twenty-four estate workers from Seaham Hall, twelve from the Engine Works, and another ten from the Wagon Works. This pattern was replicated in every trade, from the bottle works to the Co-Op – every factory, every parish and every colliery had its own roll of honour, and later, its own memorial.
Of the thousands of Seaham men and boys who answered the call, some six hundred and forty-eight did not return. Many were enlisted in the famous Durham r
egiment, the Durham Light Infantry (DLI) which had been formed in 1881 from an amalgamation of other Durham Regiments. In Durham Cathedral, just a few paces from the Miners’ Memorial, you will find the DLI chapel, where the walls are inscribed with the regiment’s most famous battles, Salamanca, Inkerman, Sebastopol, New Zealand, Ladysmith, Ypres, Loos, Somme, Dunkirk, Tobruk and El Alamein amongst them. The ragged, threadbare standards from long-forgotten military campaigns now hang overhead, faded reminders of a once mighty Empire and the men who fought to create and preserve it. A detachment from the 4th Battalion of the Light Infantry was stationed at Seaham, on coastal defence duties, but most men were sent to France in 1915.
The Roll of Honour at New Seaham Working Men’s Club is filled with names still familiar in the town – Scollens, McGanns, Currys, McCabes, Tempests, Curwens, Vickers, Bagleys, Cardys, Guys, and Deftys. Seaham Hall, along with Vane House and other large properties in the town, was taken over by the 28th Durham Voluntary Aid Detachment for use as a military hospital, treating over three and half thousand injured servicemen throughout the course of the war. Other buildings were commandeered for stores, officers’ quarters, billets and canteens.
With so many of the town’s men enlisting, there was always work to be found at the mines; there was a shortage of skilled labour within the mining industry across the country as a whole, due to the vast numbers of men being lost to the war effort. Eventually drastic measures had to be introduced by the government to keep the country’s coal mines operating; some of those who enlisted were sent not to France to fight but down into the pits. Many of these young men had no experience or knowledge of the mining industry, and once again the number of accidents and fatalities began to increase.
The Horsekeeper's Daughter Page 14