The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  And then, after 2 October 1916 Edward had fallen silent. At the urging of her husband Robert, on 15 November that year Elizabeth Tester had sent a letter to the Chaplain of the 11th Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment to ask if they knew where Ted could be contacted. The final letter from France arrived just before Christmas, but it was not from Ted. Instead the Commanding Officer wrote to tell Mrs Tester that her ‘much liked’ son Edward had been killed by a shell on 21 October. Two years later his father Robert, who had suffered for many years from a weakness of the lungs, confided to his remaining daughter that with the death of Ted he had ‘lost the will to live’.

  A broken-hearted man, Robert had succumbed to the vicious influenza that had started to appear in communities up and down the country. Two of the Testers’ other children, Arthur and Daisy, had never known about the war, as both were too fragile to live beyond their second birthdays. Bobby, the youngest boy, was suffering from a condition that severely restricted the maturing of his mind. But Norah, the eldest child, despite the loss of her brother and her fiancé in the trenches, was eager to help her mother. They both loved children. And Elizabeth had a canny business sense that helped to ensure her decimated family would remain clothed and fed. They would continue their prewar practice of taking foundling children into the laundry. The small sum paid to them by shame-faced relations for looking after children conceived but unwanted would be a help. And if Elizabeth was to face life without her husband, or Ted, Daisy or Arthur, at least she could show her love to those children denied a loving home.

  Ten-year-old Tom Mitford, lover of food, books and football in that order, was halfway through the autumn term at his boarding school in the country when the ceasefire came. For three days the pupils of Lockers Park in Hemel Hempstead had been practising singing ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ in preparation for a service to be held just after the announcement. A collection would be taken for the school Memorial Fund, and plans for a memorial window dedicated to the pupils who had died in the war were already under discussion. But in his weekly letter to his mother, Tom was more preoccupied with the cigarette cards that he collected than in the declaration of peace, begging her to send the cards as soon as possible so he could show his friends a complete set of fifty ‘gems of Belgian architecture’ and the matching collection of ‘military motors’.

  His mother was not resistant to his request, and it made a change from the usual weekly plea for cake. No one was capable of refusing Tom anything, even if he coveted something that already belonged to someone else. His sisters knew of the trick that he had been perfecting since the age of seven and which between them was referred to as ‘The Artful Scheme of Happiness’. Tom was so practised at getting his own way that he could make his voice ‘positively sag with desire’. But annoying as he could be, the five daughters adored their only brother and always showed that they, in his eldest sister Nancy’s words, had missed him ‘dreadfully’ when he returned for the holidays. His mother secretly hoped that she might one day have another child and that it would be a brother for Tom.

  Three-year-old Jeremy Nicolas Hutchinson was caught up in the excitement of the day. Standing with his parents in the garden of their rented house at Robertsbridge in Sussex he suddenly heard a whoop and a cheer. Galloping towards them bare-backed on the farm pony and at an unnerving pace was the figure of the farm boy from next door. In his urgency to deliver the most dramatic piece of news of his life, he had completely forgotten to saddle up. Unable to control the speed of the animal, he attempted to come to an elegant standstill in front of his small astonished audience but instead was catapulted into the November mud, landing face down in the country muck. The spread-eagled imprint that remained in the mud after the boy had stood up and breathlessly announced the end of the war was pronounced by the amused adults to be the boy’s ‘trademark’. This was the first long word that young Jeremy had heard and he knew that he would never forget either the word or the circumstances in which he had first heard it.

  For ten-year-old Daisy Brooker, the day was one of the rare occasions when her parents and all her nine brothers and sisters were together in one place. Now that she knew the war was over, she was looking forward to getting rid of the hated oblong ration books, ‘with a sort of faint paisley pattern on the pages’, that entitled the huge family to one tiny allocation each of margarine and plum jam. ‘The faggots were so full of pepper and the peas pudding so dry it was agony to get it down my throat,’ Daisy grumbled. ‘I vowed I’d never buy it when I had a choice.’

  To celebrate the Armistice the whole family, including baby George, went on an outing to the sea front at Brighton and along to the West Pier. ‘Everyone seemed to be singing and dancing, soldiers and sailors in uniform the worse for drink, staggering around. We then walked back through the town and we all went in a café where Dad bought a large jug of tea and one cup which we took turns in drinking out of. My legs ached with walking and I longed to have a ride in the pram, if only someone would carry George, but no, it did not happen.’ But being with her family, knowing the war was over, made 11 November 1918 a day she would never forget.

  That evening Lloyd George made a speech at the Guildhall. Those who heard it and those who read the reports the following day should have been in no doubt. Despite the millions of deaths that had occurred in the name of love of country, patriotism remained undiluted. The Prime Minister was cheered at almost every phrase. He spoke of ‘the unity of effort, sorrow and sacrifice’. ‘Now’, he declared, ‘we have our brotherhood of joy.’And to enthusiastic cheers he cried: ‘Let it not end here. Let us resolve that we shall place loyalty to the land we love first and last, the land whose efforts on sea, in the air, and on the earth have done so much to redeem the world from a scourge that was menacing its liberties.’ And rising to his emotional theme he concluded: ‘We sank all our sectional interests, all partisan claims, all class and creed differences, in the pursuit of one common purpose.’ Such patriotism, he hoped, would continue to unify the British throughout the challenges of the coming years.

  On the same evening, a young mother was spending a few days at her family cottage in Cornwall. She was alone there with Denis, her eight-year-old son, who thought of his mother as a magical figure. Edna Clarke Hall had been a student at the Slade but her unhappy marriage as well as her grief at the death eighteen months earlier of a beloved friend, the writer Edward Thomas, had propelled her into a state of emotional paralysis. Painting had become impossible for her. Instead she had become accustomed to writing poems, sometimes as many as a dozen a day, in which to record her feelings. Her poem, ‘Peace Night’, reflected a rare optimism that night, a survival of sorts, inspired by the child beside her.

  So I am ‘like a gypsy’ on the dark hill side

  In the weird reflection of a nation’s pride.

  And you are like a pixie o my pretty child!

  And this hill our dixie, strange and dark and wild.

  When we are long forgotten in our mortal dress

  (I, with my red blanket, you, with your sweetness!)

  By the lonely ocean still will we abide

  Elfin boy and gypsy on the dark hill side!

  But another poet, Thomas Hardy, now nearly eighty years of age, raged at the futility of it all, attacking the motives of a world that in its ‘brute-like blindness’ could have allowed this ‘four years’ dance of death’. In a poem written on Armistice Day, a day in which there was peace on earth and silence in the sky, he foresaw the legacy of the preceding years.

  Some could, some could not, shake off misery;

  The sinister spirit sneered ‘It had to be!’

  And again the spirit of pity whispered ‘Why?’

  Virginia Woolf spent Armistice Day at the dentist, returning home to write her diary that night in a state of despair:

  Every wounded soldier was kissed by women; nobody had any notion where to go or what to do; it poured steadily; crowds drifted up and down the pavements waving flags and jump
ing into omnibuses but in such a disorganised, half-hearted, sordid state that I felt more and more melancholy and hopeless of the human race. They make one doubt whether any decent life will ever be possible, or whether it matters if we are at war or at peace.

  Private John Robinson was one of the lucky ones. He had received his demobilisation papers a week before the Armistice and on his arrival home had gathered his family, including his seven-year-old boy, in the front room. As they watched, the former soldier began to remove every article of the uniform he wore until he stood naked before them. Gathering up the muddy, bloody, ragged, sweat-soaked pile of clothes that lay on the floor Mrs Robinson threw the whole lot into the fire as the whole family, including their young son, watched the flames. They promised each other that War would never be mentioned in the Robinson family again.

  Mrs Bullock, who had waved her son goodbye with such pain in her heart, had also been pleased that John had been sent home early despite the reason being prompted by the injuries he had received in the war. She consoled herself that at least he was alive and once again enjoying the park, as she watched from the window marvelling at his remarkable agility as he propelled himself forward with his crutches on his remaining leg.

  Back in London, lurking in the shadows and far from the brightly lit entrances to hotels from where the party revellers were beginning to make their unsteady way home, were the men who could no longer attract the warmth of a woman’s embrace, their faces unable to register relief, joy or any emotion at all. These were the war veterans, facially damaged beyond all recognition. Sometimes a mask was the only solution to any semblance of normality. But the mask itself, immobile, expressionless, resounded with a metallic ping should it encounter any hard object and had become a thing of revulsion.

  Maude Onions found herself in a town ten miles from her stenographers’ base near Boulogne. She had been visiting the wounded. A truck driver stopped and asked her if she wanted a lift back to Wimereux. He cautioned her however that she might not like it, as there was a fellow passenger in the back of the truck. The ‘passenger’ had glimpsed his own face in a mirror and seeing it to be ‘battered out of recognition’ decided what he must do next. The driver told Maude that he ‘did away with his identity disc first and himself afterwards’.

  Trying to cheer up her driver as she sat up in front with him, the corpse with his shattered face lying in the back, Maude attempted to make conversation. ‘So it’s over at last,’ she said. But the driver could not agree. ‘I’d change places with him gladly,’ he assured her, with a jerk of the head towards the corpse in the back. ‘The war – for me — is only just beginning.’

  Maude’s chauffeur had heard that his wife had been sleeping with another man and the prospect of home as a place of refuge and warmth had been destroyed. The end of the war was, for this soldier at least, the end of the happiness he had known and the start of a life of uncertainty.

  3

  Denial

  Christmas 1918

  As women prepared for the homecoming of their men, shiny lipstick and new teeth found their way into even the poorest homes. No matter what the expense, a ‘mouthful of flashing pots’ was the goal of many waiting for the return of their husbands. The poet T. S. Eliot lived above a pub and heard the discussions.

  Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

  He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

  To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

  You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set.

  In the first months after the war the act of survival itself had been a cause for celebration and the peacetime silence brought with it a relief that people had long dreamt of. At the pre-Christmas general election on 14 December, when the wartime Coalition Government was seeking a return to office, Lloyd George had promised that serving men would be returning to ‘a Land fit for Heroes’. But the long anticipated reunions often met with bitter disappointment. Wives, mothers, fiancées, sisters, friends were reunited with men who had been changed irrevocably, both physically and mentally, by the horror and brutality they had been subjected to. These men neither looked nor sounded like heroes. Marriages conducted in haste during the war had often taken place in the fear that there would never be another chance. The prolonged absence of a husband gave time for reflection and often led both husband and wife to think again about their speedy commitment to one another.

  The divorce rate began to rise so rapidly that in the twelve months after the war ended the courts processed three times as many divorces as they had in the year before the war began. Judges began to complain of ‘congestion’ in the system.

  Gladys Cooper was considered the most beautiful woman on the London stage. Her audiences cared little about the content of the play. Nor indeed, to the actress’s frustration, were they too bothered about the calibre of her acting. They were simply happy to sit in their seats and stare at her beautiful face. She and her husband Herbert Buckmaster had written to each other almost every day for three and half years during his absence at the front. They had promised each other that they would ‘make up for all this hell of being parted when the war is over’. But on Buck’s return he realised his wife ‘had been accustomed to do without me and to manage her own life’. Gladys’s earnings had shot up from £20 a week at the beginning of the war to £200 at its end. Her new friends were the Prince of Wales, Ivor Novello and Sybil Thorndike. His friends were men like him who had not been blown to pieces in the trenches. He planned to open a club in London where the military veterans could gather and talk about things that no one, especially wives, had experienced. Gladys and Buck realised they no longer had anything in common. Their marriage was over.

  For some whose love lives had been disrupted by the war, there was a guarded anxiety that they might never recover their emotional stability. Violet Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, daughter of the Earl of Minto, Viceroy of India, had been married in 1909 at the age of 20 to her father’s aide-de-camp Charles Petty-Fitzmaurice, youngest son of the Marquess of Lansdowne. The marriage was a love match. People remarked on the beauty and devotion of the young couple. They had two children. A shell unleashed high into the air at Ypres in 1914 and the death of her father in the same year wrecked Violet’s happiness. Her friends wondered how she and her two children would manage, now she was not only widowed but fatherless.

  Two years later, however, Violet had married again. Nothing unseemly or hasty was attributed to this fact. The omnipresence of death and grief was seen as a reason for behaviour that out of the context of war might have been considered inappropriate, particularly among the upper classes. People understood that isolation, particularly in youth, could paralyse a life. A new husband would provide comfort for Violet and a father figure for her children.

  Many friends, men and women, had written letters of congratulation on the marriage and almost all mentioned the blessed news that Violet’s loneliness was at an end. Ettie Desborough, familiar herself with war’s cruel blows, sent her ‘one line of great love and every happy wish that I can think of in the whole world’. The Duchess of Devonshire expressed her ‘delighted’ wishes, while a particularly loving note arrived on Irish Guards stationery from Kerry, from Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Violet’s former brother-in-law. John Renton, the much-adored factor at the estate office at Meikleour, the family house of Violet’s former husband near Perth, wrote of ‘the high esteem in which your Ladyship and the little children have always been held by the tenants’ and hoped that she would continue to come and visit them all there. Only one letter referred to the ‘agony of decision’ and only two confronted and dismissed the concept of ‘disloyalty’. Violet had collected up the large bundle of letters, several of them banded by the black margin of personal mourning, and folded a blank sheet of paper around them. She had written on the paper the words ‘Congratulations. June 1916’ in black ink and put the letters safely away.

  Violet’s new husband was John Jacob Astor, a memb
er of the vastly rich American family who had made their money in the last century in fur trading and real estate. John’s father, William Waldorf, owned the Observer newspaper. A cousin, John Jacob IV, had drowned in the Titanic. A brother, Waldorf, was a Member of Parliament and lived with his wife Nancy at Cliveden in Berkshire, a hub for the most distinguished political and social gatherings of the war.

  Violet did not object when John, a reticent and complicated man, asked his wife to pack away all Charlie’s photographs and possessions. A short while after the wedding John Jacob returned to the war and had his right leg blown off. Back home again, John suffered a continuous and dreadful pain in the remaining part of the limb, and retreated to his rooms, occupying himself with his passion for painting. One day his new wife walked into her husband’s studio to find him at an easel painting a nude model.

  Moving to open the window, Violet remarked, ‘Yes, darling, I do agree, it is hot in here’, and left the room, making no further comment. A woman of impressive resilience, Violet considered silence to be the most prudent response. But deep within the silent recesses of her private sitting room at Hever Castle in Kent was a secret. Here in the place where Anne Boleyn had loved and lost Henry VIII, the lovely and romantic place that her new husband had inherited on his father’s death, Violet had prised open a brick or two and within the cavity behind had placed her favourite photographs, a lock of hair, the cufflinks and the medals that had belonged to the man she would always love best. After the war was over, being with their two children and holding these precious things lessened the loneliness that still gripped her.