by Mark Rowe
Omnibuses and motor transport on the Strand in central London. Note the bureau de change at Charing Cross station, where Georges Carpentier arrived from France
Westgate Street in Gloucester as retired teacher William Swift would have seen it on shopping trips from his nearby village of Churchdown
Germans at Bitsch in Lorraine, then part of Germany, now part of France, 1914
The new aeroplanes fascinated men. The Englishmen posing behind the aeronautical backdrop are undated, presumably at Blackpool
Burton-on-Trent Territorials posing light-heartedly at summer camp at Bow Street outside Aberystwyth, 1912. The Burton photographers J S Simnett took this picture – evidently they saw the trip as worthwhile business. The firm is still trading in the town
Mobilisation of Croydon Territorials, August 5, 1914; officers on horseback, men march
Admiral Lord Charles Beresford: Conservative politician, public speaker, private bully
A French postcard from 1914 of English wounded
Second contingent of Army volunteers from the Staffordshire village of Abbot’s Bromley, September 9, 1914
Some of the Characters After 1914
Robin Page Arnot (1890-1986) wrote such Communist works as Fascist Agents Exposed in the Moscow Trials (1938) and, less dubiously, a multi-volume history of British miners.
Soon after Ostend George Aston (1861-1938) commanded a similar expedition to Dunkirk. He retired in 1917 with the rank of major general. He wrote several books, mainly on the navy, or fishing.
Frank Balfour worked in the Middle East during and after the 1914-18 war and in 1920 married ... not Irene Lawley, but another Honourable; Phyllis Goschen. For the Balfour family tree see The Letters of Arthur Balfour and Lady Elcho 1885-1917, edited by Jane Ridley and Clayre Percy (1992).
Eric Bennett served in France in the artillery. In April 1918 he won the Military Cross for bringing six wagons of ammunition to safety despite artillery fire. He lived to old age in Staffordshire; two of his brothers were killed in the war, one invalided out.
As for the men linked by the outburst by Lord Charles Beresford (1846-1919) at the Carlton Club on August 27, 1914: the anti-German campaign worked. Prince Louis Battenberg (1854-1921) resigned as First Sea Lord in November 1914 and left public life. In 1917 Battenberg translated his name to Mountbatten, as King George V asked his relatives to un-German their surnames. A few months before Prince Louis died, he became an admiral of the fleet on the retired list thanks to the First Lord of the Admiralty - Arthur Lee (1868-1947), by then Lord Lee of Fareham. Lee donated his home, Chequers, on the edge of the Chilterns, to the state as a weekend retreat for the prime minister. Winston Churchill had to resign in 1915 over the failed Gallipoli campaign and was out of office for not quite a couple of years.
Possibly as it was the only way to stay in his job, Robert Blakeby put his name in for the ‘training corps’ at his employer, the London West End draper’s Peter Robinson, at the end of September 1914. He kept a diary until at least the 1940s.
Alan Brooke was in France by the end of 1914. He was the driver of a car in which his wife Janey died in an accident in 1925. By the Second World War he rose to become Churchill’s CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff). For more, see War Diaries 1939-1945 Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (2001).
The Derby railwayman and reservist Arthur Bryan was in France by the end of October 1914 and killed at Givenchy on March 10, 1915.
A T Daniel retired after 22 years as Uttoxeter Grammar School headmaster in December 1923. He had taken leave after the armistice to do ‘education work with the troops in France and Germany, a task for which his wide interests and continental experience were most valuable’, according to school historian and old boy W G Torrance.
Clifford Gothard (1893-1979) ended 1914 as he began it, shooting; and lunched on venison he had shot. He gained a BSc in mechanical engineering in July 1915. He served in the heavy artillery in France. He became an accountant and company director and a leading Conservative in Burton-on-Trent and was knighted. My father as a railway signalman in one of the town’s many railway signalboxes in the 1950s sometimes saw him arrive at an office: “He used to come in an old Rover. If anybody was in the box, I used to say, watch him. He would go in and come out again because he had left his attaché case; he did it every time.” Sir Clifford married in 1961 and was childless.
G C (Geoffrey Coleridge) Harper (1894-1962) survived the First World War, retired from the Royal Navy in 1931, went into teaching, and joined the navy again in the 1939-45 war.
Richard Holt (1862-1941) was the Liberal MP for Hexham until 1918. His shipping company flourished in wartime, but he argued in vain for Liberal principle and against conscription. On that, he wrote in his journal in 1916: “The betrayal has been cruel; war seems to arouse so many bad passions that Liberalism cannot live in its atmosphere. Let us have peace as soon as possible.”
Horatio, Lord Kitchener, was tall, ‘lithe, straight-limbed’, according to a reporter who saw him become a viscount in the House of Lords in July 1914. Minister for War from August 1914, he gave ‘inspired if unorthodox leadership’, in the words of one War Office official, Major-General Sir CE Caldwell. Kitchener sailed for Russia in 1916 and his ship sank on the way.
Gerald Legge was killed in action on August 9, 1915, aged 33. He has no known grave; his name is one of 21,000 on the Helles memorial on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula. There is a memorial chapel to him in the long-shut Patshull Church, near Wolverhampton; and his name is on the roll of honour at Lord’s cricket ground as a member of MCC.
In October 1915, replying to a letter of condolence, his father Lord Dartmouth wrote: “I am grateful to you for your kindly reference to my son. This is not a time however to give way to private sorrow and we have much to console us in our loss. It is a help to have plenty of work to do.” He died in 1936. Among his many public roles, he was president of the Territorial Army Association from its beginning in 1908; and president of I Zingari cricket club. The Dartmouth seat, Patshull House, is now a hotel and golf club.
Gerald Legge’s brother in law Francis Meynell (1889-1941) served in the artillery, first near Ypres in 1915, was wounded home in 1917, and ended the war as a lieutenant colonel. He returned to Hoar Cross and died in 1941.
Oliver Lyttleton (1893-1972) did make it into the Guards, and reached the rank of brigade major. He was a member of Churchill’s war cabinet and became Viscount Chandos in 1954.
Guy Paget found himself over-worked and under-equipped training Northamptonshire recruits from September 1914, who were part of the British Army’s first large attack from the trenches, at Loos in September 1915. Then, according to his reminisces, ‘three-quarters of this magnificent division was just thrown away by the incompetence of the Staff from Division upwards’. He ended the war in Beirut. His son Reginald was Labour MP for Northampton 1945-74.
William Pickbourne (1860-1932) and his wife returned to their native Nottinghamshire in March 1918. Of their four sons in uniform, Wilfred worked in the Army Pay Corps in Salisbury; Stewart survived Gallipoli but was killed at Gaza in April 1917; Frank, a private in the Machine Gun Corps, died of pneumonia at Alexandria in October 1918; and Arthur, the youngest, was wounded at Messines in 1917. Pickbourne wrote characteristically after his final loss: “It was with a very heavy and sad heart I set out to preach the gospel but again as so often before while watering others I myself was watered and helped.”
The solicitor Robert Ramsey (1861-1951) took the train on Saturday August 22, 1914 from London - ‘Peterborough Cathedral stood up white against a thunder cloud with a startlingly beautiful effect’ - and changed at Darlington for a holiday in Teesdale. “We seem here in a kind of backwater far removed from the war and all its terrors and excitements,” he wrote in his full, but very hard to read, diary.
Arthur Ross left Beverley on August 24 to join the 5th Yorks Regiment at Darlington, commanded by Colonel Sir Mark Sykes MP. He had his last home leave in April 1915, ‘before going on Foreign Service in our just cause’. He was wounded in France in March 1916. He rose in the Royal Naval Division to the rank of lieutenant and was killed on October 8, 1918, at Cambrai.
Lord St Aldwyn (1837-1916), as plain Sir Michael Edward Hicks-Beach, twice a Unionist chancellor of the exchequer, took up an offer of late 1914 to become first Earl St Aldwyn of Coln St Mary. He has a memorial in Gloucester Cathedral.
William Swift (1842-1915) ended his diary, after 55 years, in mid-sentence on February 5, 1915. He died on February 10 and was buried in Churchdown. His grandson Ernest Swift died on the Somme on July 3, 1916, aged 21, and is buried there.
Donald Weir served in France from 1914, then Mesopotamia, and France again, ending the war as a battalion commander. He returned to India via Malta, having in June 1919 received a bar to his Distinguished Service Order at Buckingham Palace. He died of cholera in India in 1921.
Dorothy Wright (1895-1993) saw her older brother Charlie off from Selby railway station in September 1914 as a volunteer. After the war he finished his history degree at Trinity College, Oxford, and became a schoolmaster. He married in 1922, she in 1955. Both were childless.
Background Reading
‘What 10,000 pities I didn’t keep a diary in 1914 and 1915 - such vital years: the war for one thing.’ So Mrs Henry Dudeney the novelist opened her 1916 diary, (edited by Diana Crook, 1998; the original is in East Sussex record office in Lewes). Mrs Dudeney was right; they were vital years for the country, and for her, as she gave up her lover (eventually) and went back to living with her husband. Might that be why she did not keep a diary?
In a way it’s not a pity, but a relief, as it means one fewer possible source. Like everything, diaries and newspaper reports have their pros and cons. Some diarists and newspapers were more insightful than others; all make an alternative to the usual tired printed sources. Few knew what war had been like and made the effort to be true to it, such as Captain J C Dunn in The War The Infantry Knew 1914-1919: A Chronicle of Service in France and Belgium (1987 edition), who covered August 1914 from pages 1-41. Even he told of August 1914, knowing of the years of stalemate next; only sources from the time can have the freshness, and innocence of ignorance, that marked that month. August 1914 offered a change from everyday life, drudgery if you were poor, boredom if you were rich; gradually the war became another, much deadlier, sort of everyday life.
The number of books about August 1914 are legion; let alone the books with a bearing on that month. Take the people who later became famous, who had something to say about going to war, such as George Orwell, whose first published work was a poem ‘Awake Young men of England’, as juvenile as its title, on page 36 of Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: A Life (1980). Or, the already famous people who were to become yet more famous, such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Never short of a word, he was against the war from the first: see Ray Monk’s biography (1996), pages 367-70. Monk describes Russell as ‘against the multitude’, and indeed as he shows, most literary and public figures came out for the war. Yet beyond their central London and literate world, no end of common people that Russell did not know (and presumably did not want to) were indifferent to the war. Most great events, done by and for the ruling class, were distant from the mass of people; intellectually, and geographically. Someone ought to write a history of indifference.
Truthful reporting was more possible in August 1914 than later in the war, when all sides were at work to force everyone - men of fighting age especially - to conform. The longer the war went on, the less indifferent you could feel to it. There were more signs of it. Books about the war came out at once, meeting the market for them. W Stanley Macbean Knight, ‘assisted by eminent naval and military experts’ (are there any other sort?) finished volume one of his The History of the Great European War in September 1914, and only got as far as August 2. You could even argue that writing books about the war from your side’s point of view was part of the fight, to keep the public satisfied and to win neutrals over, such as the United States. Hence Winston Churchill’s interview with an American reporter, widely carried in the British press at the very end of August. There’s always however at least another point of view.
Some memoirs from the German side touching on August 1914 include The Dark Invader, by Captain Franz von Rintelen (first printed 1933, 12th impression 1942), pages 17-34; and Surgeon with the Kaiser’s Army, by Stephen Westman (1968), pages 30-49, who were at the German Admiralty in Berlin and at the front respectively.
On the British side, equivalents include Old Men Forget: The Autobiography of Duff Cooper, Viscount Norwich (1955 edition), pages 36-7; The Memoirs of Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1958), pages 27-8; The Memoirs of General the Lord Ismay (1960), page 28, who had even less to say of his 1914-18 years, serving in Somaliland; and A Fortunate Life, by Bert Facey (1981), an early Australian volunteer, pages 233-4. William Robertson went with the BEF to France as quartermaster-general, and covered the month in pages 197-212 of his memoir From Private to Field-Marshal (1921; the 2005 facsimile edition by the University Press of the Pacific has ‘Marshall’ on the cover).
Some books, by leading historians then, have become historical documents, such as George Macaulay Trevelyan’s British History in the 19th century and After 1782-1919 (edition with 1941 postscript). Winston Churchill covered Sir John French, Kaiser Wilhelm, King George V and Herbert Asquith among others in his Great Contemporaries (1937). In Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (1966 edition), Asquith’s daughter Violet Bonham Carter quoted her father’s diary on the Ostend expedition, pages 328-9.
To give just two books on the politics of the day: The Prime Minister, by Harold Spender (1920), pages 177-81; and on the crisis leading to Britain declaring war on Germany, volume two of Randolph S Churchill’s biography of his father, Young Statesman 1901-14 (1967), pages 707-22.
The outbreak of war on the Continent did show who holidayed where. The Alps, Rhineland, France and the Low Countries, future enemy, ally and neutral, were all popular: see D H Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy (first published 1916) for his - how can we put it? - individual, Alpine viewpoint. Also evoking the era and mood: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, from the Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon (1937 edition). Shooting, like hunting, equipped men mentally and physically for war. See A G’s Book of the Rifle, by A G Banks, (first edition 1940; fourth edition reprinted 1958), that hailed the British Army regulars of 1914 on pages 18-19. As that book’s printing history suggests, the teaching of ‘musketry’ by rifle club enthusiasts, and the peacetime emphasis in Army training on rifle fire (as detailed in the War Office manual Infantry Training 1914), cast a long shadow, to the Home Guard of the Second World War.
Long-serving men were able to place August 1914 in their working lives, such as the early ‘air correspondent’ Harry Harper, in his Man’s Conquest of the Air (1942), page 126; the university servant Fred Bickerton, in Fred of Oxford (1953); and the spy Bernard Newman as in his memoir Spy (18th edition, 1947), pages 14-16. On the retreat from Mons’ place in the 1914-18 war, see Basil Liddell Hart’s History of the First World War, which suggests that the Marines at Ostend and even the false rumour of Russians in transit through England, rattled the Germans crucially (page 81, 1972 edition). On warfare more generally, read The Profession of Arms, by General Sir John Hackett (1983), around page 153. On the fighting in France, The Marne 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle that Changed the World, by Holger H Herwig (2011), and more briefly Opening Moves: August 1914, by John Keegan (1973 edition). That must have been one of the first books I ever read, as I coloured in some of the drawings with pencils and felt tips.
The chapter ‘ways to die’, by showing just how harsh and short life could be, also sugg
ests that many people were too occupied by surviving to heed the war. The second edition of The Edwardians: The Re-making of British Society, by Paul Thompson (1992) goes into such topics as war as sport, and game-shooting. An oral history more rooted in home and neighbourhood was Elizabeth Roberts’ A Woman’s Place (1984). For London, see Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887-1920, by Jerry White (1980), especially pages 83-5. For Wigton in Cumbria, Speak for England, by Melvyn Bragg (1976), includes a veteran’s point on page 61 that war was only a ‘bit bigger risk’ than going down a pit. Carl Chinn’s Poverty Amidst Prosperity: The Urban Poor in England 1834-1914 (1995) shows just how hard life was.
Quid pro quo, the English equivalent of the Australian ideal of everyone having a ‘fair go’, was becoming institutionalised around this time, as shown by Keith Middlemas in his Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911 (paperback edition, 1980).
Britain was never as united as those in power insisted. What if Britain had not gone to war in 1914? So Niall Ferguson asked in the collection of ‘alternatives and counterfactuals’ he edited as Virtual History (1997). See also ‘The What Ifs of 1914’ by Robert Cowley, editor of What If? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (2001).
The origins of war in 1914 have a huge literature; the most concise guide is by Ruth, now Baroness, Henig. By discussing ‘deterrence’, The Games of July: Explaining the Great War, by Frank C Zagare (2011) also asks questions of the nuclear, twenty-first century. For the pig’s ear that Britain made of foreign relations, see The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy, 1904-1914, by Keith M Wilson (1985).