by Ian Porter
There followed a heated discussion, rather unprofessionally held in front of all and sundry in the restaurant, as to the benefits of roughage as provided by potato skins. It finished with Ruby losing her temper.
“Mrs Richmond, we are a charity who rely on benefactors! People bring us crockery, utensils, chickens, eggs, homemade pickles, jams. One man brings us a dozen loaves a day. Many send us money. If word gets out we are serving this muck we will lose their goodwill! People have had to learn to like your unseasoned butter beans, spinach, brown breadcrumbs and grape nuts, but potato dirt is too much! You have already poisoned poor Miss Pankhurst with your pulses and now you’re going to starve the people of Bow into defeat quicker than our own stupid government are by not introducing full rationing!”
There was silence in the restaurant. Everyone was either staring at Ruby or had suddenly found the scuffs on their shoes most fascinating. Mrs Nash had gone way too far. And she herself immediately knew it. This war was fraying her nerves, and the shock of her recent fall had clearly left a mental scar.
She couldn’t think of what to say. It had been her experience throughout life that whenever men had reached a point in an argument where they could no longer think of anything more to add, they would simply state they were ‘going up the pub!’ and would then storm off slamming the door behind them. She did something similar.
“Oh, do what you like! I’m off to the toy factory!”
******
The Nashes usually ate at the Cost Price restaurant but as relations were rather strained with that establishment at the moment, the man of the house had been packed off to line up to get some meat from the butcher’s. Unfortunately for Nash, word had spread like wildfire that a supply of rabbits and some beef brisket had come in. The line stretched for hundreds of yards. He blasphemed to himself before taking up his place at the rear. He was not usually one for making small talk to anyone, let alone strangers, but he could see he was going to be on his feet for half an hour or so before passing through the butcher’s doors, so he started up a conversation with the young woman in front of him. It would pass the time. He vaguely recognised her. She was a local munitions factory worker who had a little one at the Mother’s Arms. Nash had no idea whether her tot had been one of those he had taken off the roof. He thought it best not to bring up the subject.
“How long do you reckon?”
The woman crooked her neck to look back. She recognised him and smiled.
“Queueing?” she said.
It was the start of a rather staccato conversation.
“Eh?” asked Nash. He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. The only cueing he knew of was in a snooker hall.
“You asking how long we’ll be in the queue Mr Nash?”
“In the what?”
“Queue. Line up. Queue’s what they call a line up now. You want to know how long we’ll be?”
“Yeah.”
“Couple of hours I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Christ! Bleeding butcher likes gassing to everyone I suppose?”
“No, it just takes longer nowadays, by the time you hand over your meat card, then your bacon card if you’re of a mind to get bacon an’ all, and then they have to stamp it. All takes time don’t it?”
“I fought this new rationing lark was supposed to get rid of line ups.”
“It has mostly. It’s only because they’ve just had some rabbits in. You don’t have to queue for sugar or marge or coal no more like you used to. And you get your fair share. That’s the most important thing, I say.”
Nash grunted his grudging agreement.
“Saves all them lot in Mayfair getting it all I suppose. Like they have been,” he said.
It was her turn to grunt in agreement. She was about to change the subject but was not given the opportunity.
“Oi! Chinkey!”
An errand boy cycling past was likening the young woman to someone of Chinese extraction because her skin had been turned yellow by working with TNT in the munitions factory. Such women had acquired the generally used nickname of ‘canaries’. The target of the abuse did not react to the lad’s more unpleasant epithet but Nash did.
“Come ‘ere!! You little cowson!”
The errand boy may not have been the brightest crayon in the box, but he knew enough not to follow that sort of order. He took his right hand off the handlebars, turned his wrist and without so much as a backward glance at his protagonist gave him the two fingered salute.
Nash immediately looked into the gutter for anything resembling a projectile. There was a piece of rotting fruit lying there. He grabbed it and threw it at the boy. But Nash’s heavily muscled arms meant he lacked the speed of lever required. His effort fell well short of the fast disappearing young scamp, splattering on the pavement next to those standing further up the queue. A member of the Volunteer Force inspected his newly decorated shoes with less than enthusiasm.
The Volunteer Force was made up of men who were unable to serve, mostly due to health reasons or being over military age. Others were in a reserved occupation. They were mostly old men often ridiculed in public. They wore GR armlets which had given rise to them being given the poetically licensed nickname, Gorgeous Wrecks. This particular sixty year old had been assigned to patrol the queue to ensure no disorder occurred. When a shop ran out of a popular foodstuff before those who had been lining up for hours had received their fair share, it could lead to some unpleasantness in the best of places. In the East End it could end in a riot.
The man looked down the queue and spotted the fruit-throwing troublemaker. He then slowly sidled up to Nash with the passive aggressive body language only a seasoned jobsworth could perfect.
“What’s your game?” he enquired.
“Not cricket, that’s for sure eh gov?” said Nash smiling. He had almost called the man Gorgeous but had just stopped himself in time.
“Never mind all that,” replied the man waving away Nash’s bonhomie with a backhanded flick of the wrist a table tennis player would have been proud of, “look at the state of my shoes!”
Nash appreciated the old boys in the VF. They were just trying to be useful after all. And he had seen them doing good work moving patients during air raids and helping returning soldiers at mainline railway stations who were too tired, bewildered or simply ignorant of London to understand how to get themselves home. And he was himself rather too close in age to some of the Volunteers than he cared to admit. So he was far more conciliatory than he would normally be, and accepted the good talking to, he no doubt deserved. This included Nash being told that if there was any more trouble from him, a special constable would be called. Nash had nodded in all the right places but his contrition did little to improve the old man’s mood. The conversation ended with Nash being told in no uncertain terms that had the Volunteer been ten years younger he’d have given him a good hiding. And with this he strutted, stiff-backed up the queue.
“That was good of you to let him have his moment Mr Nash,” said the young munitions worker.
Nash winked at her.
“And thanks for going after that little perisher. I’m Anne by the way. Anne Geoghegan.”
She now changed the subject to the one she had in mind as soon as she recognised Nash. She started by asking a question to which she already knew the answer.
“Anyhow, I did hear of Mrs Nash having a bad fall. How is she?”
“She’s all right. Tough as old boots she is. She’s up and about. She’s already upset ‘em all down at the restaurant, so there can’t be too much wrong with her can there?”
“Running round doing all them jobs for Miss Pankhurst and with husband at home to look after. Keeps her on the go I’ll wager. She looks fit and strong mind.”
“Well she don’t have to do a twelve hour shift in a factory and then look after five kids like some, does she? But yeah she
’s fit and strong all right.”
It was time for the question Anne had been angling towards.
“Don’t suppose she could play football Saturday afternoon? My shells team are playing forgings but our factory welfare officer won’t let me and some of me mates play on account of us being yellow. They like us canaries to keep out the way when we’re not in the factory. Don’t look good see. So we’re a bit short.”
Nash sighed deeply, gave the wryest of smiles and shook his head. He did not even bother to make his thoughts known on a country that didn’t mind its workforce poisoning itself, just so long as the fewest number of people knew about it. After all, it was only the same as the cannon fodder in the trenches.
Anne took the shake of the head to be a refusal. She upped her sales pitch.
“She don’t have to be no good mind. And one of the girls is bound to have the same size feet so can lend her some boots. And we’ve got team shirts, socks, caps and shorts. You’d be letting her do a good turn. The match is in aid of the Disabled Soldiers Fund mostly. And for poor children. And for Stepney railway station buffet.”
The last sentence was so absurd that it tickled Nash’s funny bone. He appreciated his mood being lifted away from the war for a moment.
“Blimey, why didn’t you say before girl?!” he said with eyes wide open with enthusiasm. “I’ve had many a good plate of whelks in Stepney station. You don’t have to get my permission mind. Just ask her yourself. ”
Chapter 3
“Why is Mr Utz bad now? They’ve been buying tripe off him for years and he wasn’t bad then. Has the badness got something to do with the brawn or has it got something to do with Utz himself, with the very name Utz maybe?”
Melanie McGrath, Silvertown
– An East End Family Memoir
Conscience. Conscientious. Strange words; strange notions. That was, as far as Nash was concerned. There had been a time in his life when, as a young man living by nefarious means in the East End of London’s Whitechapel slums thirty years earlier, neither word would have related to him.
And even now, he found it difficult to understand what all this conscientious objection lark was all about. Conchies were rum coves. Why would a man refuse to fight just because of some religious belief he held?
Yet, conscience now drove him to protect the conscientious. He spent most of his waking day hiding men, who refused to fight for their country, from the authorities.
Weeks earlier, Nash saw irony, and now he was ashamed to remember the tiniest flicker of jet black humour, in a desperate British government raising the maximum age for conscription to the army to fifty one years of age. He was just too old a fly to fall into that spider’s net. Pity. He would have loved to have gone to an Objectors’ Tribunal to tell them of the beatings he had handed out to many a man over the years, many of whom would have been in uniform, because they had dared to be, or at least been unlucky enough to find themselves, in opposition to him. And then, just when the inquisition’s faces would have failed to hide their consternation at this seemingly ideal bit of cannon fodder in front of them refusing to fight, he would have told them why he was there and where they could stick their war. No conscientious objection. Just objection. It was not his fight. It was as simple as that.
He was brought up in a part of Whitechapel which had a large German population. Nash had lived close to the German Lutheran Church in Alie Street. Some of the German lads living in the area were members of the street gang that he led in his teenage years. He fought with them at his side. He felt he had much more in common with them and other German working people than the British establishment who had taken the country in to war against them.
As far as he was concerned, if that lying cowson of a Prime Minister Asquith and his blithering idiot of a Foreign Affairs wallah Grey, and Asquith’s replacement, that self-seeking weasel Lloyd-George, wanted to fight the Germans, let them do it. These and their other merry men in Cabinet, were the very opponents he had been fighting against for the past six years since his recruitment into Sylvia Pankhurst’s women’s suffrage campaign. He failed to see why, just because he had been born on the same bit of turf as them, he should fight their battles for them.
And when he and his colleagues had finally won their battle for Votes for Women two months ago, he too, as a man of the urban poor, had won the right to vote for the first time. He had not been able to vote at the last general election, and neither had a good chunk of the British army, many of whom had been near-starved into voluntarily taking the king’s shilling at the start of the war. But he was luckier than many of them. He had no children to support or aged parents to keep out of the workhouse. He had a wife, but she didn’t need support from anyone. He had not voted for the Liberal government that took the country into war; had a very low opinion of the present coalition mob that obstinately continued the disaster; and would not have fought for either lot even if he had voted for them.
As for his new conscientious objector friends, they were sometimes religious men, sometimes not. Some simply pacifists who could not take another man’s life, or even assist in helping others take lives. And other people, such as his Bow neighbour Sylvia Pankhurst, were always going on about the evils of capitalism, and why this terrible war was just a capitalist power, money and land grabbing exercise, using the workers as their poor, unknowing tools in the greatest confidence trick in history. He didn’t know anything about all that conchie or commie talk. He just knew that fighting the men of Germany simply because our politicians could not come to terms with their lot, was wrong.
Nash also had an old fashioned Victorian sense of fair play. It was what had drawn him into the Suffragette struggle. He had initially had no particular interest in Votes for Women, but once he saw how the government were treating the opposite sex in their struggle, he dug his heels in and helped the women in any way he could. And now he didn’t like the way conscience objectors were being treated. After being court marshalled they were given the most severe sentence possible in law, which earlier in the war had been one hundred and twelve days hard labour, but was being increased more and more as the conflict proceeded. The sentence began with a month in solitary on bread and water, performing arduous and boring tasks such as breaking stone, hand-sewing mailbags or picking oakum. After release they could be immediately arrested again as a deserter, court marshalled and returned to prison.
The picking of oakum was far too close to home for Nash. It was a duplication of the duties he and his family had performed in the Poplar workhouse, when they had been forced behind its walls when he was a young lad. And being rearrested after release from gaol was far too similar to the dreaded Cat & Mouse Act, which five years earlier the government had rushed through Parliament as a very successful tactic to undermine the Suffragettes. It had almost killed his friend Sylvia Pankhurst, though he had to admit that was as much about her being so bloody-minded, as anything else. But it took one to know one. Nash was now bloody-mindedly helping conscientious objectors whenever and wherever he could.
But as such a notoriously tough, violent man, Nash was the last person the authorities would suspect as having conscience objector sympathies. Yes, he had been Sylvia Pankhurst’s bodyguard for two years during her East End Suffragette campaign, and yes she was one of the most vocal anti-war, pacifist voices in the country, but in defending her, Nash had handed out many a good hiding to anyone who had opposed him. He was certainly no pacifist.
And a twist of fate had sealed Nash in the authorities’ minds as being someone they need not be concerned about. At the beginning of the war, there had been an outbreak of anti-German rioting and many people with foreign sounding names in the cosmopolitan East End, whether they were German or not, had been attacked or their properties ransacked. And after the sinking of the Lusitania, when a new outbreak of anti-German rioting had taken place in the East End, Nash had become embroiled in it. His likeable local corner sho
p owners, the Plotskys, on seeing rioters coming down the street, had quickly painted ‘We are Russians’ on their shopfront. Nash saw what was happening and knew a mob would not be placated by a mere sign. He stood in front of the shop to see what he could do to help. Behind him, a mischievous young man was putting his old school geography classes to good use in painting a P at the front of Russians to give the word a very different meaning. With the mob only yards away, Nash spotted the miscreant.
“Oi!” he shouted as he made a grab for the man, who quickly made a run for it, hitting out at Nash with his paint brush-filled right hand. Nash captured the brush and a splodge of paint for his trouble, but the troublemaker escaped his clutches. Nash turned to find the mob was upon him. He tried shouting at them but there was little he could do against such a large crowd and the shop was duly ransacked.
He had been seen with the paint brush in his hand, shouting at the front of the mob. There was some poor arithmetic involving the addition of two and two, which had Nash implicated in the attack. Two policemen, who had no interest in detaining anyone involved, later questioned him about his part in the melee. Nash had a policy never to tell the police anything about anything, so they got very short shrift. This confirmed his guilt as far as the authorities were concerned, but he heard nothing more about it.
It was shortly after this that the No Conscription Fellowship contacted him. Through their links with Sylvia Pankhurst they knew full well the truth of the story, and of Nash’s dislike of the war. They asked him if he would like to work for them. His previous life on the wrong side of the law had left him with skills that could be usefully deployed in helping conscientious objectors avoid capture by the authorities. He was also known to be the antithesis of a pacifist and thanks to the paint brush incident was now believed to be a German hating patriot as far as the authorities were concerned, which was an ideal cover.
He was duly recruited and worked under the less than original name of Smith to his objectors, though he asked them to call him Smithy. He had successfully worked undetected by the authorities for the past three years. Only Sylvia, his wife and a few trusted friends from either his villainous or Suffragette days knew of his work. He avoided talking about the war but when forced to offer something to a related conversation in a pub or wherever, he would simply state that he would never forgive the Germans for sinking the Lusitania. Everyone knew of the horrors he had faced on the Titanic and in the ocean afterwards, and they also knew not to bring up the subject, so this usually killed the conversation stone dead, which was just how Nash wanted it. And his hatred of the Germans for sinking the Lusitania was true. The difference between him and most of his fellow Englishmen was that when he said ‘the Germans’ he meant purely the German government. Not ordinary German people.