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You could not check a coin or banknote that carefully, nor did you want to, because most of your fellow countrymen would be as unknown - as incomprehensible, even - to you as any foreigner. Travel - by taking you out of your home, and your workplace if you had one - more often threw up encounters with people unlike yourself, even though people unlike you might not notice social differences, nor care (which was itself one difference between ‘gentlemen’ and other men). The weekly Tamworth Herald printed one example, signed only ‘WM’, about a train journey in July 1914 - maybe by one of the newspaper’s reporters on a holiday to Scotland. He began on a London and North Western Railway (LNWR) Sunday midnight express north. In third class, he wrote, you could always expect to come across ‘sons of the Empire on furlough or on their way to their outpost’. At Crewe, two seamen came into the carriage. One burly man dumped his box in the corridor, sat in a corner, ‘and then genially pulled a large bottle of beer from an inner pocket and invited all present to have a drink from it’. WM did not say if he or anyone else in the compartment took a swig; he, and his readers, may have taken it for granted that it was bad manners to sip out of a bottle, let alone after a seaman had put his lips to it. “He afterwards placed the bottle under my seat and left it there untouched for over three hours while he retired to sleep. Happily the window remained open and we had fresh air.” Again, WM implied, without having to spell it out to his readers, that the seaman might not have washed lately, and might smell, and the other passengers would be glad of fresher air. WM had chosen to buy the cheapest class of ticket, and so was in the company of the sorts of people who could not afford anything else. “The other seaman was inclined to take a nap on my shoulder,” WM went on - readers with imagination would feel how unwelcome that invasion of privacy would be - “so I engaged him in conversation and found he was a stoker just arrived at Bristol from Buenos Ayres and on his way home to Glasgow to his wife and children. He considered the trip from England to Buenos Ayres the hardest a stoker could have. It means 40 days’ continuous stoking ... the poor chap was worn and thin. He was travelling in his shabby go ashore clothes and had no bundle or money, not even a match for his pipe, but he had a Board of Trade certificate for his full pay and would draw the money at Glasgow.” The midsummer dawn came in Cumberland, the train arrived at Carlisle at 4am, and WM had two-and-a-half hours before his next train. He watched the overnight work - hard, unsociable and out of sight, done by men like the stoker. Porters tumbled empty milk churns from handcarts and shivered the air under the glass roof of the station with thunderous noises. Post Office officials came out of the mail trains carrying coats and umbrellas. They lit their pipes and went home. Morning papers from Liverpool, Manchester, York and London littered the platform. Even on the historic edge of England - if you saw Scotland as a separate part of Britain; and Guy Paget, who loved England and the Scots Guards, did not - men spread the things that bound a country together as tightly as the string that bundled the mail and the provincial newspapers on their way to breakfast tables.
II
Eric Bennett, too, was on his way home from Buenos Aires in July 1914 - but on a different ship than that unnamed Scottish stoker’s; Bennett’s landed at Tilbury. In a memoir in old age he was mistaken when he suggested war was looming when he sailed. According to him, the German, French, Dutch and Danish passengers were ‘hurrying men’, and ‘the one thing we were bursting for was news’, on a ship carrying mainly refrigerated beef. Without wireless, the only messages came from passing ships by semaphore. His brother Harry met him at the docks and took him into London to their booked room at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square. Harry had tickets for the big boxing match: between the Frenchman, Carpentier, and the American, Gunboat Smith. The fight, for the ‘white heavyweight championship of the world’, was on the Thursday night, July 16, at Olympia. Not one in a million in Europe, except perhaps the Austrian and German emperors and the men around them, was even thinking of a war within a fortnight.
Carpentier arrived in London a couple of days before Bennett, by boat to Folkestone, and train to Charing Cross station. What the newspapers called the ‘French colony’ in the city, and Londoners too, mobbed the boxer, his manager and sparring partners. The crowd unyoked the horses from his carriage and pulled it - flying a tricolour - to the Hotel Metropole, where Carpentier was to stay. On July 16 the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, for one, sniffed that such enthusiasm - anyone close enough patted Carpentier or shook his hand - was ‘not entirely admirable’. That said, as Carpentier had already knocked out two English boxers, this public tribute to a Frenchman was ‘about as effective a token as could possibly be given of the reality of the entente cordiale’. Again, the writer had no way of knowing England and France would be in a war together within three weeks.
The newspapers, the commentators on fashions, did not know what to make of boxing, or to be exact what the Sheffield Telegraph termed the ‘over-idolising of crack boxers in general’ by ‘sensation-seekers’. The Bennett brothers sounded as if they were seeking sensations; Eric and Harry met Alfred at Euston station, went sight-seeing and, Eric recalled 70 years later, ‘had a marvellous meal of steak and chips at the Holborn Hotel’. At Olympia, in one of the contests before the main bout, as the boxers broke from the clinch, one knocked out the referee by mistake. “The main contest proved to be a bit of a farce,” Bennett recalled, a common view at the time, “because in the fifth round Gunboat Smith caught Carpentier with a good punch felling him to his knees; whilst in this position Smith struck him again and was immediately disqualified.” The brothers took the train to their hometown of Stoke-on-Trent the next morning; that afternoon Carpentier collected a cheque for £3000 from the offices of the Sporting Life, and Smith’s manager Mr Buckley (the ‘beaten’ boxer not showing his face) picked up £2000. Carpentier left London - smartly dressed as ever, in suit and tie, carrying gloves and cane - on the Saturday morning train for Paris, having already promised a match against one of the Englishmen he had beaten before, Bombardier Wells.
What made the people paid to have an opinion on such things unsure about boxing? At least some of the watchers were rich enough, as the Bennetts’ spending proved. The newspapers deplored the rougher sorts of men drawn to watch boxers, seeking the thrill of a knock-out blow. It reminded those who harked back to the Roman Empire of how the commoners of Rome enjoyed rather too much for comfort the gladiators’ fights to the death. On the other hand, as the Sheffield Telegraph admitted, men in the sport of boxing were now of an ‘improved type’, making boxing a ‘healthy and manly recreation among all classes’. Boxing taught you to take a knock, and give one back according to the rules - rules that everyone had to follow, even the failed challenger for the title of white heavyweight champion of the world. Boxing could channel the anger and sheer spare energy of young men, that otherwise might spill out into drunken, disobedient ‘mafficking’, named after the mischief that used the patriotic celebrations for the relief of Mafeking, in 1900 during the Boer War, as an excuse. It was no accident that the Army taught boxing, nor that the Church of England was behind something as military-sounding as the Church Lads Brigade. The Army and the Church were not looking to put out the violent fires in young men, but to discipline them. Likewise countries did not necessarily keep armies to start a war, but to punch back if someone picked a fight; or at least to stay on their feet long enough until someone stood by them. For a war between nations, even ones as civilised as France and Britain, might not carry on, or even start, according to any rules.
III
As Captain Neville Hobson, the captain of the Beverley company of the Church Lads Brigade, said at the opening of the east Yorkshire market town’s new drill hall, in May 1913, drill and discipline were ‘a means but not an end’. It cannot have felt like that for at least some of the ‘lads’ aged 14 and over, judging by the journal of one of the sergeants. The 18-year-old Arthur Ellerker Ross plainly cared about the Brigade enough to keep a handwri
tten diary of it, and in July 1914 to become joint secretary of the new Old Comrades Association - new, because the first Lads like him were becoming old enough to have to leave. Even so, Ross tells a truer story of the Brigade than the forever favourable newspaper reports he pasted onto the pages - some articles surely written by his father Harry Ellerker Ross, a reporter for the weekly Beverley Guardian. The same things that attracted lads to the Brigade - the smart uniforms, the comradeship - they rebelled against, when carried to extremes. At an evening inspection on Thursday January 29, 1914, for instance, Captain Hobson sent a lad, Walter Welburn, home ‘to change his jacket, because it had some grease on’. Incidentally, to belong to such a group, with its white shirt, brown tie, puttees, haversack and boots, and the cost of keeping them clean, took some money. Capt Hobson left the parade, meaning that when the inspecting officer - from the East Yorkshire Cyclists Territorials - arrived, Arthur Ross had to take charge. Afterwards, Ross ‘went to see Welburn and after persuasion he went down with me to say he was sorry to Capt Hobson. His parents did not like it and they sent in Walter and Tom’s resignations’. Other times, lads tried to fool around or stir up trouble. A sergeant’s lot was a weary one, of telling off one lad for ‘slodging feet’, and perhaps being told off himself for not being strict enough.
Why did anyone stick it? Not every lad did; several of the 55 or so in the Company were made to leave. They may have hung on, much like the adults in the Territorial Army, for the entertainments - the fund-raising social evenings, the sport, the exercise, the parades around the town, and the camp every August. For instance on the Whit Monday holiday in 1914, the lads took the train to nearby Cherry Burton and marched to Dalton Park for manoeuvres. Then they took on Dalton villagers at cricket. Dalton were all out for 55, only for the lads to lose five wickets for nine runs; then Tom Welburn, presumably one of the brothers who resigned over a greasy jacket in January, made 28 not out and Beverley won. ‘Tea was provided at the village inn,’ Ross added, ‘after which a short display of drill was given on the cricket ground.’ After a church service, they marched back to Cherry Burton and caught the 9.13pm to Beverley. It might not sound much of a day, except that in 1914 it offered more than anything a lad could hope to do by himself. Like-minded lads made friends. The Brigade - and similar groups such as the Boy Scouts - appealed to young men, and their parents, because they saw it as another way to rise in the world. Arthur Ross worked for John Bickersteth, the clerk to the East Riding County Council in the town. Ross pasted uplifting quotes from Shakespeare in his journal, and lived in a terrace of villas next to a house called, to this day, ‘Enterprise Cottage’. Far from everyone wanted to, or could afford to, submit to uniformed groups; Ross tallied 157 Lads, Boys Brigade and Boy Scouts on a parade in May 1914, out of a Beverley population of 13,600.
Often, however, those on parade were the ones in any town with something about them, such as Arthur Allinson. One Saturday in July 1914 he was walking to the cricket ground, when he saw a runaway horse, yoked to a cab: ‘... dropping his cricket boots he ran to the horse’s head, seized the reins, and brought the animal to a standstill after running with it for about 100 yards,’ the Beverley Guardian reported. Allinson may have learned the skill from his father, Beverley’s police inspector - police textbooks taught that exact method of halting a runaway, quite a common hazard. Allinson may have known horses, in an era when Beverley and most small towns were physically and culturally not far from fields. Or the lad - who worked in a railway drawing office at York and came home at weekends, and who held a silver bugle as best bugler at Church Lads Brigade regional camp - may have had the very thing that all the uniformed groups were trying to drill into boys: in a word, ‘pluck’.
Pluck, another word for courage, tellingly, is a word long gone out of fashion. Was it something any man, or any organisation, could drill into a boy? To have pluck, like Arthur Allinson, you not only had to do the right thing, and not leave it to someone else; you had to know right from wrong. By having to set up groups such as the Church Lads Brigade, were you in fact admitting that modern life no longer gave someone pluck? What was stopping young people doing plucky things, such as risking their necks for the good of others? Was it the machines taking over ever more of life, the easy-come pleasures of the ‘picture houses’, spectator sports and the seaside? The worship of money, and the advertising everywhere? If men of pluck won Britain the Empire, and if it would take pluck to protect it against envious rivals - not only Germany, but Russia, and maybe France; Japan, even - did Britain have enough lads of the right sort, the men of the future?
Chapter 4
The Quid Pro Quo
A compromise .... is not always the negation of two opposite policies and the adoption of a middle course between them.
Twenty-Five Years: 1892-1916, volume one, by Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1925)
I
England could not agree on anything - even whether all the disagreements were healthy or not. Conservatives, also calling themselves Unionists, believed in the old and trusted authorities: the army, the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church. Liberals had their own beliefs: in liberty, in a life without the nearest priest or lord telling them what to do. Liberals could claim they had won centuries-old battles. They had their freedom to think, to worship God the way they wanted (or not at all, even), and to make money (and spend it) without the state taxing much of it. In 1914 the Liberals had been in power eight years and had won the last three elections. They knew that they had work to do still, and said so, partly as a tactic to keep their side keen, partly because it was true, and they had to explain their shortcomings away.
Rather than go through the politics from 1906, as done and spoken about by the main and best-known politicians - Herbert Asquith, prime minister since 1908; David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer; and Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to name three - it’s of more use to follow the lower-rank politicians. Ministers had to compromise to get anything agreed, and had to mind what they said in public, in case the other side used their words against them. The lower ranks could speak their minds, whether they were men who used to be of top rank, such as the former Unionist chancellor of the exchequer Michael Hicks-Beach, made Lord St Aldwyn; or the Liverpool Liberal MP Richard Holt, starting in parliament after working in the family shipping firm. (Were they freer to speak because they were not in office; or because fewer people were listening?)
Lord St Aldwyn toasted the health of the heir of Lord Harrowby, Viscount Sandon, at his coming of age celebrations, on Thursday July 23, 1914. The estate tenants and workers at Sandon, north of Stafford, ate lunch in a marquee. St Aldwyn admitted that they did not always hear good of the aristocracy. “But were there not black sheep in every class?” he asked, as a local newspaper reported later. “There were commercial men who were not always absolutely honest and there were even labouring men who sometimes scamped at their work. To pick out particular incidents of black sheep and apply them to a whole class was an unfair and a wicked thing to do.” The diners clapped; as their present and future masters were paying for their meal, and watching, they could hardly do otherwise. Even at such an event, where everyone knew their place - or did not have a place at all, as the garden party and a ball later were for grander guests than the common people - the lords had to admit things were not going their way. “They lived in a democratic age,” St Aldwyn went on, “but he was not sure that democracy was not tending towards bureaucracy. For the present, the power was with the democracy.”
St Aldwyn made a shrewd point. Meanwhile, Richard Holt, so he wrote in his journal in July 1914, was “active with business men and some survivors of the Cobden-Bright school of thought against the ill-considered and socialistic tendencies of the Government finance ... we have certainly travelled a long way from the old Liberal principle of ‘retrenchment’ and I deeply regret it. The more I see of socialistic developments the less I like them - the stronger I f
eel in favour of leaving individuals the maximum of personal freedom including the right to make a thorough mess of their own affairs.” This was Liberal philosophy as argued generations back by John Stuart Mill. Lloyd George, making old-age pensions and national insurance, talked of fighting poverty. Liberty, to the reformers, looked like an excuse to leave people in ignorance, in dirty houses, downtrodden by all; as bad as anything by the Unionists. St Aldwyn may have spoken about democracy with a sneer that the reporter could not or dared not carry into print. St Aldwyn however foresaw that ‘socialism’, whatever that meant, might turn the poor - the drunks and the workshy and the decent sort alike - into new serfs, or the mob of ancient Rome, living forever off the state.
Not that politicians or anyone ever had such a debate. They seldom met under the same roof, apart from parliament. The goodwill - and the means of holding such a debate, until the radio - were lacking. Liberal and Unionist politicians, and newspapers, spoke to their own. A speaker would show how bad the other party was, by jumping on a rival’s reported remark; or would simply misquote. The speaker and his side had the right ideas for the country and worked in a statesmanlike way, the other side made plots. A cleverer Unionist speaker would claim that the other side used to have leaders of principle - men now safely dead, such as Gladstone, and Bright - but not any more. In truth a politician the same as any man had to smile, shake hands and do deals with men he might not like, to get through the day. If the party-political speeches were worth listening to, it was because each side said things that the other side did not want to admit even to itself.