Domestic Soldiers

by Jennifer Purcell

  If Helen had opened The Times, which she read often, on that day, she may have seen this article, and perhaps flipped through the pages until her eyes rested upon the paper’s daily requiem for the dead, the ‘Roll of Honour’. Day after day throughout the war, the paper published a list of casualties, highlighting the officers lost and naming the privates who had fallen; the vast blackand-white monotony of those lists still has the power to strike one with an intense feeling of loss. Living in Newcastle at the time, Helen may have anxiously searched the names of the Northumberland Fusiliers for anyone she or her husband knew. That day, The Times reported twenty-six Northumberland privates who had died in recent action, a small paragraph in a sea of losses comprising over three tightly printed columns of dead.

  She may have been relieved that only one officer had been lost from the Gloucester Regiment, the county where she had grown up. Or she may have wept bitterly if she recognized the name. Though she could not have known it then, the battle that had produced such devastating carnage over the past three months was to end the day after her son was born, when British and Canadian forces finally took the village of Passchendaele. The Third Baffle of Ypres, more commonly known as Passchendaele, sacrificed more than 310,000 British soldiers to the gods of a war many believed futile – and interminable.

  When Helen Mitchell looked at her newborn son, all she saw were the lists and lists of dead and wounded. Between 1914 and 1918, hundreds of thousands of young men lost their lives, and many more were mutilated or psychologically scarred from the action they had witnessed in the trenches during the Great War. The scale of everyday death and destruction in the trenches is unimaginable: on average, nearly 7,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded on any given day; the officers called it ‘wastage’.2 In the end, over 600,000 British soldiers were killed, and more than two million were wounded or missing.

  It is little wonder, suffocating under the weight of a never-ending war, as soldiers were drowned and churned into the mud of the Western Front, that in her son Helen could only fathom ‘future cannon fodder’. Indeed, Mitchell’s vision in 1917 seemed eerily prophetic in 1940, when her son William, now twenty-three, was conscripted into the army. When war on the Continent emerged once again in 1939 for the next generation, those who had personally endured and remembered the random, senseless death of the trenches and the grief of the Rolls of Honour could only imagine the horror that waited.

  Those who lived through the First World War continued to carry the scars of the conflict well beyond 1918. Though different in age during the war – some were married, and others young teenagers – every woman in this story felt the war deeply, and each was shaped by its long-term effects. For Helen, the trauma of the Great War was inbred in her infant, ultimately poisoning the bond between mother and son. But the scars were as varied as they were deep. Returning veterans came home to an uncertain economy and often found that their patriotic service had ruined them for the post-war world.

  Edie Rutherford was a young teenager living in South Africa during the war, but her future husband, Sid, was old enough to fight. He was injured on Vimy Ridge in 1917 and suffered shell shock. Afterwards, he was sent on military duty to Burma, where he endured bouts of malaria and dysentery that adversely affected his health for the rest of his life: his military service left him suffering severe shortness of breath, heart problems and psychological trauma.

  Sid and Edie met in South Africa and were married soon afterwards in Australia, where they lived until moving to Sheffield in 1934. Australia did not experience the depth of economic troubles that Britain did during the 1920s, but Sid’s war disabilities nonetheless made it difficult for him to keep a job for any significant length of time. Reasoning that he could never reliably provide for a family, and feeling it unwise to bring up children they could not afford, Edie and Sid decided to forgo having children. Furthermore, Rutherford explained to M-O, her husband’s shell shock made it difficult to cope with the inevitable racket raised by children. As it was, Edie’s diary had to be suspended when he was home because she used a typewriter, and the noise was too much for him.

  Like Sid and Edie, Irene Grant’s young family struggled to survive the severe economic downturns in 1921–2 and the more famous global depression of the early 1930s. The mounting casualties of the Great War that so depressed Helen Mitchell instead motivated Irene to create life. She couldn’t bear to send her husband to the Western Front without having his child, so Irene and Tom conceived a baby girl just before he left for France in 1918.

  After Tom returned from France, they had another child. ‘But that’, Irene confessed, ‘was a mistake.’ Marjorie was born in 1921, right as the post-war boom collapsed. Irene would have liked four children, but the economic reality of the 1920s made that hope impossible. By 1922, unemployment had soared to a national average of 15 per cent, causing the government to extend both the length of assistance and the monetary benefit of the dole for the unemployed. In July 1922, the rates given to out-of-work men, women and juveniles were raised by 3 shillings a week and the number of weeks of benefit extended from fifteen to twenty-six. The increase was welcome, but it was hardly enough.

  The tension in the hardest-hit areas such as Sheffield and Tyneside rose steadily despite this intervention. On 8 December 1922, during a debate about the rising social unrest, Tom Smith, MP, made it clear that the benefit was not enough to feed a family even in the workhouse – the most despised form of welfare available for the poor. When respectable working men lost their jobs, the MP pointed out, they lost everything. ‘I have seen men come in for food or relief who went to school with me,’ he related:

  … good living men, men who tried to maintain a decent standard of life for themselves and their dependants. The piano has gone, the watch has gone, and they have come for relief. What is worse, they have lost a good deal of their self-respect.

  These hard realities, the MP argued, led previously hard-working, stable, men to become radicalized and to take action against the government. It was a dangerous situation that ultimately culminated in the General Strike of 1926, a national strike in sympathy of coal miners whose wages were cut. Over 1.5 million workers downed tools for nine days – the longest general strike in British history.

  The Grants’ troubles began in earnest when Irene was forced to leave her job. Her husband Tom, one of the ‘respectable’ working men radicalized by his experiences, was in and out of work throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the family could have used Irene’s income as a teacher to keep afloat, but in 1922 married female teachers across the country were forced to resign. The institution of the marriage bar by many local education authorities, requiring all women to leave a career once they married, was meant to help returning veterans find work. Ironically, it nearly devastated the Grants. Throughout the inter-war period, Irene and Tom’s young family barely managed to scrape by on savings left over from Irene’s teaching days and whatever could be laid by when Tom was in steady work. Although she never wrote about receiving unemployment insurance, it seems likely that the Grants were probably forced to turn to the dole during lean times.

  Nella Last also remembered the inter-war period as a time of scarcity in which the domestic skills that her grandmother taught her as a child were indispensable, especially the ‘dodges’ that made the most of the ingredients she could afford. Times were not as difficult for the Lasts as they were for the Grants, however. After the Great War, Nella’s husband Will had taken over his father’s joinery workshop and worked steadily throughout the inter-war period. Those who had work during the depressions of the 1920s and 1930s were generally better-off than they might have been in more prosperous times, because they could take advantage of the lower cost of living that accompanied the downturns. In fact, while the Grants and the Rutherfords struggled to keep food on the table and to pay the rent, the Lasts bought a new house with the help of inheritance money from Nella’s father. Will was never an ambitious businessman, but with Nella’s wise househ
old management they were able to raise their two growing boys.

  Nella and Will were married three years before the First World War, and when he enlisted in the navy, they moved to Southampton, where they spent most of the war. While Will worked in the shipyards, Nella took care of their young son Arthur and volunteered at the local hospital. Nella fondly remembered helping the injured soldiers write letters home and entertaining them. She enjoyed bringing a smile to their faces or a glint of light to their eyes with her jokes and light-hearted ‘monologues’. Nella and Will’s second son, Cliff, was born during Will’s service on the south coast. The birth left Nella desperately ill, but a kindly doctor took care of her and secured a month’s leave for Will to help her recover. Though her health was touch and go for a few weeks, looking back on it, Nella figured she was happier in Southampton than at any other time in her life.

  Alice Bridges recalled the First World War and the 1920s as a particularly difficult time. Born in 1901, she was only thirteen when war broke out. Her father was out of work for most of the war and did not serve in the military. Instead, he insisted that he was the ‘chosen one of God’ and left work for days and weeks at a time to pray at home. This left her mother to fend for the family, and Alice soon became her mother’s main support. Although her mother worked hard to feed and clothe six children on her own, there was never enough and Alice remembered ‘many hungry days’ during the war and afterwards. She believed that these lean years, and the endless hours she helped her mother, ‘ruined’ her health.

  Even in the 1940s, when she wrote for M-O, Alice’s health was always delicate, but for eight years in the 1920s, between the ages of twenty-two and thirty, she suffered severe illnesses. When she married in 1928, her doctor warned her against having a child, as it might put Alice in grave danger. Les and Alice waited almost five years until her health improved before they had Jacqueline. Although she wanted two children, Alice stopped at one. It was not her health that barred her this time, but rather Les’ behaviour that convinced her not to have more. After the birth of their daughter, he became jealous that Alice’s attention was focused elsewhere, and left her to do all the work. Once she realized Les would not lift a finger to help with Jacq, she decided one child was enough.

  Natalie Tanner made the same decision after giving birth to her son in 1933. She considered having three children, but with her husband busy building a thriving engineering firm, and because she felt the first two years of the baby’s life were too ‘trying’ without the help of a nanny, James would be her only child. Although they remembered the large-scale destruction and grief of the war, both Natalie and Hugh were too young to participate directly in the First World War.

  Instead, Natalie came of age during the economic crises of the 1920s, when she threw her support behind the Labour Party. She spent most of her early twenties campaigning for Labour candidates, and even carried out a term as Poor Law Guardian herself. For a stint of two years her radical leanings led her into membership of the International Labour Party (ILP), known especially for its staunch pacifism amid the jingoism of the Great War.

  After getting married in 1926, Hugh and Natalie moved to Spain for five years; they left in 1931, the year in which the Spanish Second Republic was established. The republic soon, however, became overwhelmed by the infighting that would eventually blow up into the Spanish Civil War. When war did break out there in 1936, Natalie became involved in organizing relief efforts for the Republicans who fought against General Francisco Franco’s Fascists. It was this work that brought Natalie into contact with communists, for whom she gained great respect. Although she accused them of ‘tactical stupidity’ and usually voted Labour, she was nonetheless a staunch supporter of the idea of communism and the Soviet Union from this time onwards. In fact, at a theatre production in 1941, she was appalled by the fact that everyone stood up for ‘God Save the King’, but sat down when the ‘Internationale’ was played. Natalie remained standing, and angrily instructed the rest of the audience to pay respect to the national anthem of their new ally, the Soviet Union.

  The frequent playing of ‘God Save the King’ during the Second World War was one of the many annoyances with which Helen Mitchell coped. ‘Why must we so frequently save the King?’ she muttered when the BBC seemed to play the song continually after Italy capitulated in September 1943. Helen’s less than patriotic feelings sprang from a deeper well than the simple, though exasperating, repetition of the patriotic tune: they can be traced to an unfulfilling marriage and a tragic realization that there was no escape from it. This revelation came to her in 1936, when Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry a divorcee.

  On 11 December 1936, it was announced that King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in order to marry the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. To Mitchell, everything about this episode illustrated the fundamental problems of British society and its conservative stance towards marriage. It was a poignant reminder of her own situation. If the stigma of divorce could not evade even the king, neither could she be immune; if she chose to leave her own loveless marriage, the shame of it would stalk her, too. She was fascinated by the prospects of divorce, and eagerly corresponded with friends who succeeded in breaking away from their unhappy marriages in the 1940s, but something in the abdication kept Helen from leaving her husband. The abdication slammed the door and turned the key on her domestic prison.

  Helen married Peter in 1915 and followed her new husband to Newcastle, where he spent the First World War as an engineer. He was shy and hard working, and she was running from a desolate childhood – the youngest child by nine years, Helen’s mother frequently told her she was unplanned and unwanted. Helen saw little of her husband while they lived in Newcastle, and they spoke even less. She remembered that their first years together were awkward. Neither knew much about the ‘facts of life’, nor was she ‘very thrilled about “sex”’. Upon reflection, she figured he ‘knew as little about the job as I did’. They ‘managed to produce a son after 2 years’, but Helen was intensely lonely. Soon after giving birth, she ‘got less keen on the sex business’ and felt her husband had little interest in her outside the bedroom. He threw himself into his work and rarely noticed her.

  After the war, they moved to the outskirts of Aberdeen, where initially, the isolation was maddening. Helen spent these years alone in mind and spirit. She knew no one, felt painfully rejected by her husband and found little comfort in motherhood. Being the youngest child, she had had no experience with infants. They made her nervous and self-conscious, and she had no idea how to care for her own child, no one to help her and very few tender feelings towards him.

  By the time William was seven, Helen seems to have finally settled into life in Scotland. For several weeks in the autumn of 1926, she presented a local radio programme on ‘Prominent Women of the Eighteenth Century’, but it would be three more years before she truly came into her own.

  In September 1929, she left Aberdeen to study drama and elocution at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London. Helen never explains how she convinced her husband to let her leave, or if indeed she did convince him. Nonetheless, she did leave, and since her sister-in-law lived in London, it seems likely that Helen stayed with her during her studies. At the academy, Helen was introduced to a new and exciting world. She found something at which she excelled – receiving bronze and silver medals for outstanding performances on her annual examinations. Helen also discovered kindred spirits in her fellow actors, writers and producers. And for the first time in her life, she felt truly accepted.

  The ensuing years in Aberdeen were the happiest of her life, and night after night the house was filled with music and laughter. She put on bridge evenings and staged plays, poetry readings and concerts, inviting amateurs and professionals alike to her home for grand social evenings. With her husband, Peter, she founded a local Shakespeare society; both Peter and William spent their spare time together building sets for the plays. This period would see the bond between father and
son strengthened, as the carpentry shed offered the perfect environment for intimate talks, and a place where William eagerly soaked up his father’s knowledge and technical skills.

  Though Helen watched with some sadness as she was increasingly shut out of the close relationship developing between Peter and William, the 1930s were the height of her life. She had made new friends at the RAM and, with a newfound confidence, blossomed in Scotland. With her workaholic husband rarely home, her son at boarding school for most of the year in England, and an efficient servant to take care of the house, domestic life faded into the background and her social life was in the ascendant.

  The abdication crisis in 1936 was the first shock to bring her back to reality. The final blow came a year later when, tired of his work, Peter uprooted Helen from the Aberdeen she had grown to love and sequestered her in an old, rambling house in a quiet village in Kent with few friends and fewer reliable servants. Helen was given no say in the relocation; the decision to move was entirely her husband’s.

  Moving to Kent would place Helen in the centre of the storm that would soon break over Britain. But while she could not know the struggles she would soon endure in wartime, Helen braced herself for the domestic battle of her life.