by Ian Porter
His main contact was a man by the name of Fritz Patemann who worked directly with a network of spivs. But the old farmer would also do business with any of the semi-professional cadgers who ventured into the countryside on foraging jaunts, on behalf of relatives, friends and neighbours. They all paid him a lot more than the legitimate market did for his produce, so he kept his official output as low as possible, but just high enough to stop any snoopers from a government ministry asking questions he could not answer.
Klaus was due to receive a visit from Patemann, but wanted to make his rounds beforehand. He set off to see how his British POWs were getting along. He spoke a bit of English and had to admit that he rather enjoyed a bit of banter with the enemy. Before the war he had encouraged a robust sense of humour between his workers. He remembered one occasion when a university agriculture student had asked him if he could come along and measure how the men worked. The young man had turned up with a stopwatch.
“You don’t need a watch lad,” Klaus had boomed for all his men to hear. “You need a calendar to measure this lots’ speed of work!”
Cue much good natured swearing at their employer from his workforce.
But now the injured ex-soldiers he had working for him were a mix of the physically and mentally delicate, so he tended to be respectful and rather formal with them. And though ribald with men, he had never liked the sort of coarse talk that was often the norm between men and women working together. And flirting was out of the question for the happily married old farmer, so he had always been rather guarded with his new army of women farmhands. But he missed his robust manly badinage. So the arrival of POWs had allowed him to revert somewhat to his old self. They had been a forlorn lot when they arrived, but soon picked up on the twinkle in his eye when he insulted them, and started to enjoy giving as good as they got.
Klaus now arrived in his first field to find a small group of men standing on a large mound of hay in a cart, making hard work of emptying it on to the ground. A one-legged German soldier hobbled nearby, carrying a shotgun, supposedly to ensure the enemy did not suddenly run amok with their pitchforks.
“Fussballindianer!” shouted Klaus.
Soon after they had first arrived on the farm, the Englishmen had been both perplexed and amused by being told that German trench soldiers called their enemy counterparts ‘Football Indians’. Perhaps the football was a reference to the Christmas ceasefire matches that had been played at the start of the war. But what did Indians have to do with anything?
“Dreckfresser!” came the Englishmen’s reply, mostly in cockney accents.
It was quite a mouthful for a Londoner to get his tongue around. But calling their German host a ‘mud glutton’, a term taught to them via a game of translation charades by their non-English-speaking guards, appeared to keep the old farmer in a good mood, so why not?
But the injured German soldiers had got one over on their captives. The POWs had been led to believe they were using a term of abuse used against farmers, but in fact it was another expression used to deride Allied soldiers in the trenches. The Englishmen were themselves the mud gluttons.
The rest of the conversation took place in English, but the quality of debate did not rise.
“Poor bloody infantry! How are my coat-hangers today?” Klaus inquired.
Klaus had been most amused when, during their first conversation together, the men had told him that British Tommies called themselves PBI – poor bloody infantry. And that they were ‘something to hang things on’, referring to the amount of kit they had to carry to the Front.
A few more epithets were volleyed back and forth while Klaus handed out cigarettes. He told the men that German doctors believed that cigarettes were good at staving off the flu. Factories had cancelled their no-smoking rule and workers were now actively encouraged to smoke in the workplace. The Englishmen were dubious, stating that ‘fags’ must surely be bad for the flu, given that both attack the chest. They implied the old farmer was trying to kill them as a crafty enemy ruse. But they all took the cigarettes and lit up in any case, much to his amusement.
Klaus was quite outspoken with his thoughts on the German government’s war effort when it came to all matters relating to food supply in general and farming in particular. None of the German soldiers on the farm knew a word of English, so it would not go any further. And it did him good to vent his spleen to some fellow working men, even if they were the enemy.
At one point the farmer asked Albert Walker, a man he already knew from a previous conversation was a conscientious objector, whether there were any Englishmen who were, like Klaus, not conscientious but simply objectors.
Albert told of him of a chap he knew back in London. A fellow called Smithy. The man had been his protector for a while. Despite being in his fifties, Smithy had been the scariest, most intimidating man he had ever met. He had told Albert stories of some of the things he had got up to in his younger days in the East End. It was frightening stuff. He was most certainly not the sort of man you would expect to be a conchie sympathiser. So Albert had asked him once why he was helping men like him, and he simply said the war was not his fight. He had nothing against the German people. And that once the war was over, both country’s businessmen will have made a few bob on the deal, and then everything would just go back to as it was.
Klaus nodded, momentarily deep in thought. He then, having previously added ‘fags’ to his glossary of English words, now inquired as to what ‘bob’ meant.
And after providing the translation, Albert went on to say that on being arrested he had been beaten up and threatened with being sent to the Front, where he would be expected to fight, and if he didn’t he would be shot for cowardice. Or he could tell them about the man who had protected him, and then they would arrange for Albert to be either a despatch rider for a non-combat unit or a stretcher bearer at the Front. He was ashamed to admit that he had been so worn down by being a conchie that he had agreed to their terms and told them what little he knew of the man called Smithy.
Chapter 5
“We will fight for what we choose to fight for; we will never fight simply because we are ordered to fight.”
No Conscription Fellowship,
1917 Manifesto
Nash may have been too old to be conscripted into the army but he had always looked after himself, and still retained the fine physique that had made him the toughest man on the cobbles back in late Victorian Whitechapel. He still looked, and could be when the occasion required, a nasty bit of work. His tough looks belied his years so hardly a day went by without him being stopped by a policeman and asked for his discharge or exemption papers.
He had just been stopped and asked the question by a police officer.
“Don’t have any. I’m a Cuthbert,” said Nash.
Nash always enjoyed these little contretemps. He particularly liked the irony of telling a policeman that he was a conscientious objector. Or Cuthbert to use a nickname in common parlance which was his preferred term of choice for those men whom he helped.
He then wasted the policeman’s time, being as evasive, uncooperative and confrontational as he could, before the inevitable mention of arrest crossed the policeman’s lips.
“You ain’t going to arrest me boy,” warned Nash with menace, as he moved his hand inside his coat.
The policeman made for his truncheon, only for Nash to whip out ID that showed him to be just too old for conscription.
The policeman attempted to tell Nash the error of his ways while receiving nothing but the grimmest of smiles in return. The one-way conversation ended with the almost obligatory “next time I’ll nick you for wasting police time” when both he and Nash knew that was not going to happen.
And with the closest thing Nash ever had to a spring in his step, he made his way to a meeting with his latest Conscription Fellowship contact.
******
John Jameson had told the tribunal that he was conscientiously objecting on religious grounds, to which the chairman took exception.
“You are exploiting God to save your skin, a deliberate and rank blasphemer, a coward and a cad, nothing but a disgusting mass of quivering fat!”
Another tribunal member, who was the owner of a wood mill business which had reserved occupation status for some of its workers, tried a more considered approach.
“Will you do non-combatant work? A considerable number of Society of Friends are doing ambulance work.”
The Quaker was shaking his head.
“I cannot be governed by their convictions. My conviction is such that I cannot take any sort of non-combatant work.”
Tribunal members had become increasingly bewildered and angered by such a stance. They could perhaps just accept, however much they disliked it, an objector who was prepared to do something for his country as long as it did not involve bearing arms, but a conchie who would do nothing at all to support the war effort in any way was beyond belief.
This Quaker was too much for the chairman.
“It seems to me that there are two things you possess – cowardice and insolence. It is the duty of Christians to fight the Devil, and if the Kaiser is not worse than the Devil I am a Dutchman!”
On entering the room, Jameson had recognised some of the men in front of him. They were local businessmen and councillors. He addressed them directly.
“Is it asking too much of grocers, haberdashers and retired colonels to rise above the general body of mankind to such a height to behave with reasonable forbearance?”
Fearful his now purple chairman was about to have a seizure, the tribunal clerk took up the cudgels.
“The conscientious objector is a fungus growth. A human toadstool which should be uprooted without further delay. You are the most awful pack that ever walked on this earth. To think that you would not defend our women and children from the ravages of the Germans. Is that Christianity?”
Jameson failed to understand why these men had to be quite so rude. And even a Quaker could be brought to sarcasm by such behaviour.
“Perhaps you would prefer if I objected on political grounds? I am also a socialist.”
“Since you are a socialist you cannot have a conscience!” declared the clerk with the superior air of a man who had reached a QED moment. “You sir are only fit to be on the point of a German bayonet!”
The Quaker was duly dispatched to France where his absolutist stance had him soon receiving Field Punishment no. 1, trussed to a gun carriage wheel, arms spread-eagled in the crucifixion position for two hours. He was then sent to the fish market on Boulogne Docks, which had been turned into a punishment barracks. Here he joined several other such men in a twelve feet square cell, where they were each fed water and just a few small dry biscuits all day. They were eventually taken out together to stand in line outside the adjutant’s field office. Jameson was the first to be ordered inside. He was accompanied by a soldier carrying the charge sheet. As they marched side by side the soldier appeared to haphazardly allow Jameson to catch a glimpse of what was written on the paper. Printed at the top in large red letters and doubly underlined was ‘Death’. As Jameson came to attention in front of him, the adjutant read out his name and serial number, the charge, then the sentence.
“Sentenced to death by being shot.” There was then a pause before he continued. “Confirmed by Sir Douglas Haig”. A second pause was longer, then, “And committed to ten years penal servitude.”
Two weeks later he stepped ashore at Southampton Docks where jeering bystanders had gathered to throw eggs and tomatoes at him and his fellow objectors.
He was thrown into a penal settlement in Ponders End, on the northern outskirts of London, where he had been due to spend the rest of the war doing deliberately valueless tasks. His latest job had him and fourteen other objectors get taken to a farm where they took three weeks to dig a field for oats which a single horse and plough could have completed in a day. They were just coming to the end of the job when there was an air-raid by a single plane. All raids were a shock, but this one being out in the countryside was a greater one than usual. A bomb landed in the reservoir next to the farm throwing up a spectacular plume of water.
Jameson supposed this lone bomber had probably been spooked by anti-aircraft fire, got confused by all the waterways in East London and flown up the River Lea in the wrong direction, away from the Thames. He suspected the plane’s pilot probably spotted the Ponders End reservoirs and assumed they were part of the docks.
The little bi-plane came around again, very low, and dropped a bomb on the main farm building, blowing it to smithereens. Disabled soldiers, land army girls, prisoners of war and conscientious objectors, all of whom had been working on the farm in one capacity or another, ran around like headless chickens. Jameson was no different. Minutes of pandemonium later, he found himself in a forest, alone.
A week later he was about to meet a man called Smith who, he had been assured, would arrange a safe house for him.
Chapter 6
“The new hands they are taking on are only to receive 8s. a week…they cannot live on that – some have children to keep. The profits all around are large, and the Government … is shovelling out the money to help contractors buy machinery.”
East End of London Munitions Worker
letter to Sylvia Pankhurst
Ruby had been amazed at how the introduction of rationing had improved everyone’s morale. The ravages of war were worse than ever. Huge numbers of East End women had died of malnutrition and other related illnesses within months of becoming widowed, due to the government’s failure to care for them. It was not just men in the trenches who were fodder. Old age pensioners were also starving. High rents resulted in mass evictions. There were strikes everywhere. The flu was laying people low. Yet working people were taking it all on the chin because they could finally get hold of a bit of sugar, meat and coal, and do so without lining up for hours. And the wealthy had the same rations so it was believed that they too were having to do their bit for a change.
Nobody showed this spirit better than the munitions girls’ football teams. As well as losing husbands, fathers, sons and brothers at the Front, they had lost grandparents at home, and many had lost work colleagues to poisoning or explosions. And that was just the deaths. Many loved ones and acquaintances were still alive but mere living husks of their old selves, who would never work or laugh again.
Yet as soon as these women escaped their stultifying factories and terrible lives for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon, they came together in joking, giggling, mickey-taking female comradeship.
Many of the shells team were on ‘danger work’, handling explosives. It paid slightly better so those with children, parents, grandparents and avaricious landlords to support, committed themselves to such employment. This work could end with a woman’s remains scattered over the factory floor.
The problem was that most of the shells footballers had been weakened by their duties. TNT was just one of the poisons with which they were working. Others didn’t leave any visual trace on the body so women working with these were allowed to play for their team. But though they worked on their footballing skills while they had practice ‘kickabouts’ against the local lads outside the factory gates at lunch time, they would probably be too weak to be competitive against the healthier forgings team.
Thus Ruby, irrespective of whether or not she had any footballing skill, was a well-received injection of running power and physical strength. And despite her being an outsider who was a decade older than most of her teammates, she was welcomed into the team with open arms. That’s not to say she didn’t have to endure some good natured ribbing as her initiation. She was quickly nicknamed Gorgeous. She was, despite being older, clearly the best looking woman in the team, and it was known that she was
married to a much older man, who was almost old enough to be a Gorgeous Wreck. And she had to field many a barb about that too. But she had to be careful with her comebacks about men, because she knew many of the women no longer had them in their lives.
Given that she was a ringer, she had to be careful; if she got talking to any of the opposition after the game, she was to tell them that she had only just started in the factory, in the TNT section, and the ‘yellow girls’ as they liked to call themselves wanted one of their lot to be in the team, so she had been drafted in at short notice.
Ruby had played a little football during her time working on ocean liners. When a ship was in port, she and the rest of the a la carte restaurant crew had a bit of rare free time so, when there were no officers around, Italy would play the Rest of Europe. Or to be more precise, her friend Claudio and his fellow waiters and cooks would take on a mixed sex team of mostly Swedish, Irish and English in a cargo bay. Her last team and its opposition had all died on one night. And if there was another explosion like the one at Silvertown last year, history could repeat itself. But she kept that thought locked in a dark recess while she enjoyed the company of her new friends.
Ruby had been expecting to play somewhere like the middle of Victoria Park, with the teams carrying their own goalposts to slot them into holes out in the middle of the park, with a few people going round with buckets to collect for their charities. So she was amazed when her team’s horse-drawn charabanc deposited them outside Leyton football ground, which had a little stand and other terracing, all of which was packed full of people who had paid an entrance fee.
Leyton FC had been disbanded soon after the outbreak of war, when most of its unmarried players had volunteered for the army en bloc. And now, not just professional football but all spectator and participation sport had closed down, leaving the great British sports enthusiast desperate to enjoy some action.