I had a cup of tea but wouldn’t sit down. I said, ‘Look, Mum, I’m very lousy. I’m going to have a bath.’ There was a big rain barrel in the back yard and Mum used to do the washing in there with a big poss stick to agitate the water. So, we got the water boiled again and took it out to the yard, put in some carbolic crystals and I got stripped off and got into the barrel. And she went off to get me some clean clothes. All the neighbours were there, all shouting ‘Hello’ over our back wall and, ‘Welcome home, Joe,’ and all that sort of thing. Well, I had my wash and then I had to get out of the rain barrel with all these folk there and I was naked of course. I thought I’d lost all my modesty in France, but I didn’t like to stand there drying myself, so I ran in with just a wet towel round my waist and went in front of the fire and Mum dried me – just like she’d done when I used to come home from the pit as a little lad.
A soldier’s seven days’ leave started officially the moment he arrived at the main-line station nearest his home destination. Before the new ruling, travelling had taken up hours and even days of the precious seven days’ leave and it had been commonplace for soldiers, whose homes were in the Hebrides or the far north of Scotland, to arrive home just in time to turn around and set off on the journey back.
For soldiers, like the Colonial troops, who had no homes to go to, London was the Mecca. Many had new-found relatives to visit; many more were at a loose end. From the moment they arrived at Victoria Station, London received them with open arms. There was the YMCA All-Welcome Hut where pretty girl volunteers dished out tea, sandwiches and smiles. There was Paddy’s Bar, thick with troops and thick with the smoke of pipes and Woodbines, where from early morning until late at night blasée barmaids pulled endless pints of beer, shrugged off the advances of Tommies who had not seen a girl for months, and prospered on tips from the lavish Aussies. They never bothered to pick up copper coins in their change and were known throughout London as ‘the Silver Kings’.
The YMCA was well aware of the temptations of the big city to healthy young men, long deprived of feminine society, and organized leave hostels where a bed could be had for ninepence and a square meal for the same price. They set up canteens, rest and recreation huts where a soldier could enjoy the luxury of a comfortable armchair, a game of draughts or billiards, as many cups of tea as he could consume and the society of pleasant young women of unimpeachable character. At the Shakespeare Hut for New Zealand troops, there were more than two hundred such volunteers, working in shifts, because the ever-vigilant authorities had concluded that a frequent turnover of smiling faces behind the tea urns was the best insurance against the indiscretions and unsuitable attachments that were almost inevitable in the highly charged atmosphere of wartime. They set up Leave Enquiry Bureaux where kindly advisers would arrange accommodation, suggest a sightseeing programme or persuade soldiers to join one of their own free tours around London, to Hampton Court or to the Zoo.
The YMCA extended its vigilance to soldiers who disdained such innocent pleasures, and set up night patrols to scour the back streets of Soho and the West End. They were groups of well-meaning volunteers of mature years, ‘doing their bit’ in work of… a delicate personal nature requiring the utmost tact to separate men from women of known disreputable character.
Most of the boys were content to goggle at the sights by day and to retire at night to their ninepenny beds, whistling or humming whatever song had been the highlight of their evening at the theatre.
In the theatres and music halls the emphasis was on light entertainment, and every performance was packed out. Few soldiers returned to the front without being able to boast of having seen at least four shows in his seven days’ London leave. There was Ye Gods, advertised as ‘a scream’, at the Aldwych. The beautiful Alice Delysia was starring in Pell Mell at the Ambassadors. A. E. Matthews toyed sentimentally with Moya Mannering in Peg O’ My Heart at the Globe. There was Chu Chin Chow at His Majesty’s, naughty Teddy Gerard in Bric à Brac at the Palace and, best of all, among a score of other revues and musicals, George Robey and Violet Loraine at the Alhambra in The Bing Boys are Here. Their famous duet was the success of the summer:
If you were the only girl in the world
And I were the only boy,
Nothing else would matter in this world today,
If we could go on loving in the same old way.
A Garden of Eden, just made for two,
With nothing to mar our joy,
I would say such wonderful things to you,
There would be such wonderful things to do,
If you were the only girl in the world,
And I were the only boy.
The Palm Court Orchestra played it at teatime at the Waldorf, errand boys whistled it as they teetered along on bicycles, and they played it every afternoon at Madame Vacani’s Dancing School at her famous tea dances. The young lady teachers and the more mature and accomplished of their pupils danced impeccably and mooned just a little in the arms of soulful young officers with nowhere else to go. It was romantic, it was exciting, it was quite respectable and it was well worth the five shillings admission. The charge was fixed high enough to discourage lower ranks from indulging in this genteel entertainment and there was no escaping the eagle eye of Madame Vacani herself. She supervised every dance, played the gracious hostess and introduced the officers to partners who were strictly forbidden, on pain of instant dismissal, to accept any invitation other than to dance. But her eagle eye did not extend beyond the premises of her exclusive school. There was privacy on the dance floor, the music was sentimental, the girls were delightful, the officers were returning soon to France, to an indeterminate and possibly brief future. It was not difficult to persuade the discreet dancing partner of the afternoon to be the charming theatre companion of the evening. They all had a wonderful time.
But there was another side to leave and it was a side that most soldiers dreaded. Since he had been away there was hardly a man who had not lost a comrade, hardly an officer who had not lost a colleague. Relatives at home were avid for visits, for news, for information, for any tiny detail of comfort that would assuage the pain of mourning. It cast a blight over even the most joyous of leaves.
Lance-Corporal Len Lovell, No. 18692, 6th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, 14th Division
When I was safe in hospital, out of that hell of France, I scarcely knew how to adjust to decent society after living like an animal for so long. The only thing that kept worrying me was my promise to go and tell Bobby’s people about his end. I dreaded the thought of them asking where he was buried. How could you tell a mother he was blown to pieces? We’d buried him all right, a few yards behind our position in the wood, with a rifle plunged into the earth to mark the grave and his tin hat on top of it. But by the next morning it had entirely disappeared.
Bobby was well in his forties, so his mother was not young. He was separated from his wife – he’d only ever mentioned her to me to rail at her and they had no children. But she was there that day, the day I went to see his mother.
All I could tell them was that he was buried in Delville Wood.
Able Bodied Seaman Joseph Murray, No. TZ276, Hood Btn., The 63rd (Royal Naval) Division
My pal George McCarthy had been killed on 4 June the year before when we were in Gallipoli, and this was my first leave. I had to go to the next village to see his father. He lived in the Aged Miners’ Cottages. It was difficult talking to him. I said, ‘Look, I didn’t see him killed but we did bury him.’ We didn’t of course, because we couldn’t! But he was a Catholic and I knew it would be important to his father so I said, ‘He had a good Christian burial I can assure you of that!’
Next day I had to go and see another pal’s parents. That was even worse. It was another mining family and the father had got his leg broken and he had a permanent limp, so things weren’t so good for them. You’re paid by the jobs and if you’re not fit you don’t get any work – and no pay either. Their boy was an old schoo
l pal of mine. All the time I sat there talking to the father, his Mum didn’t say much and I could sense that she was uneasy. I wasn’t in the house ten minutes when the postman knocked at the door with a telegram to say that the other son had been killed in France.
What can a bloke do then? What kind of man from the war, home on leave, goes into a house to make condolences with a fellow’s family and a telegram comes to say that the other one’s killed?
It spoiled my leave. I felt I could see it on everyone’s faces like as if they were saying, ‘How come you’ve come home and he hasn’t?’
I was sorry I came home on leave. I didn’t enjoy it. It’s funny, but I wished I hadn’t gone. You couldn’t get these things out of your mind.
On the whole, Joe Murray was not sorry when his leave came to an end on 25 September. When the night-train from Edinburgh drew into Newcastle it was already filled with troops returning to the front, but Murray squeezed into an overcrowded carriage and sat on his pack on the floor. There was no question of sleep and the talk was all of Zeppelins. Two had been shot down the night before and newspapers bought to while away the journey were full of dramatic accounts. There was a certain excitement in travelling by night through blacked-out England. With the stepping-up of the air raids a new theory had taken hold in the imaginations of authorities, so sensitive about ‘showing a light’ that smokers striking matches in the street were being prosecuted and fined. It was now believed that plumes of sparks from the funnels of engines of express trains were guiding the raiders through England.
Whatever guided them, they had arrived in force the night before last and dropped bombs that killed forty civilians and injured a hundred and twenty-six, including four soldiers who were on leave in London. But this time the Zeppelins had not got away with it.
Since the raids had started more than a year earlier, a considerable number of troops had been kept back from the front to stiffen the Home Defences, badly though men were needed in France. Searchlights and gun batteries were set up on the east coast, around the outskirts of important cities and at strategic points in the cities themselves. It had never occurred to Frank Mayhew that his peacetime training as an electrical engineer would lead him to a position in an open field at Cuffley.
Sapper F. L. Mayhew, No. 2259, London Electrical Engineers, Royal Engineers (TF)
Our main job was to keep the searchlights in good order – because Zeppelin raids weren’t at all frequent. There was always the possibility, but as a rule weather conditions were so abnormal that the Zeppelins couldn’t operate. When the alarm came I was lucky enough to be the operator and to pick up the Zeppelin. It’s an extraordinary sight! A Zeppelin in a searchlight beam looks just like a goldfish in a bowl and one could follow it quite easily. The gun was a thirteen-pounder mounted on a three-ton Daimler lorry and it could fire to about sixty degrees. After that, the angle would be so steep that the recoil would have knocked the bottom of the lorry out. On this particular occasion, after holding the Zeppelin for a few minutes, the gun fired four or five rounds and then the angle got too steep for further gunfire so we were out of action and we had to shut down.
To ‘shut down’ we used to use a copper lid to cover up the beams, but the lamps remained lit under it and a little later the guns thought they should be in action again, so we opened out. Quite by chance I’d sort of mentally followed the Zeppelin and, when we opened out, I was able to pick it up straightaway. But we scored no hits and we had to pass the target on to some other lights.
Trooper Charles Williams, MM, No. 1598, 1st Btn., Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars
It had been a very peaceful day and we were all in bed – except for the people with late passes or the people who’d taken a night off without them. Suddenly there was a whirring noise overhead and we all rushed out and stood looking up and watching. We could see the silhouette up in the sky – a huge cigar-shaped thing caught in a searchlight. Presently we heard the noise of one of our own aeroplanes coming along behind it and the tracer bullets went from the aeroplane to the Zeppelin and the Zeppelin burst into flames and began to fall. It was so huge that it looked as though it was just about half a mile or a mile away.
Some of the fellows rushed in and put on their boots and trousers and started off to see it. There were dozens of them jumping over the fence but most of us stayed behind watching the flare and it was such a blaze that we could even hear the crackling noise from it. While we were watching, the bugles started to sound the alarm and the order to saddle up and get going to where the Zeppelin had come down. We were saddled up and trotting off in no time and, as we went we passed a lot of the boys who were making for the Zepp on foot and we yelled at them that they were wanted and they had to rush off back to the camp to get saddled up and follow us in.
We were to put a guard round the Zeppelin. It had actually fallen some distance away, outside a village just before you get into Billericay. It was much further away than we thought but when we got there it was still burning and it burnt well into the early hours of the morning. What a sight it was! What a sight!
It was a sight that everyone wanted to see. By three o’clock in the morning the road to the farm where the Zeppelin had crashed was jammed with motor-cars, bicycles, pony traps, donkey carts and hundreds of pedestrians who had risen from their beds and walked several miles to gawp, to gaze, to exclaim and to get as near as they could to the wreck. The soldiers, standing guard with bayonets fixed, kept them well back. By dawn there were thousands of people craning their necks from the steep banks of the lane. Some had even climbed trees to get a better look. The wreckage was spread over hundreds of yards and shortly after dawn Bert Williams was one of the party detailed to clear up the area around the smouldering wreckage.
Trooper Charles Williams, No. 1598, 1st Btn., Royal Buckinghamshire Hussars
The worst bit was gathering up the crew. The ground was very soft where they fell and when we picked them up there were indentations in the soft soil of the shape of their bodies, arms, legs, everything – a mould of the bodies really.1 We carried them to the farmhouse. We picked up wicker chairs, loaves of German bread and bits of burnt silk and pieces of aluminium – all sorts of stuff. It kept us in beer for months! Everybody wanted souvenirs and, when the officers weren’t looking, we were selling them to the crowd for half a crown and two bob a time. It was a good morning. Special trains came down with London sightseers and they were all begging us to get souvenirs for them, so those that weren’t actually on guard duty were able to get inside the guard-line without the officers noticing and bring out pieces of burnt silk and broken aluminium, to flog it to the Cockneys. You nipped in, got a piece, tucked it up your tunic and then broke it up into small pieces and sold it for about two bob a time. Sergeant Chiltern was in charge of us and he turned a blind eye. Major Francis was in command, but we easily dodged him.
We did two hours guard at a time and the field kitchen even cooked our Sunday dinner for us there. We had beef, roast potatoes and Yorkshire pudding. Some of the sightseers were envious! Some of them said, ‘Your dinner smells good, Tommy!’ They were starving. They’d been there for hours and hours, some of them, and all day more were arriving. It had been seen for thirty miles around and those that hadn’t seen it for themselves had heard about it. It was a fantastic thing – so huge you wouldn’t believe it. The wreckage stretched across two fields.
At five o’clock in the afternoon the troopers were relieved and rode back to camp. A fair quantity of Zeppelin wreckage went with them. It turned out to be an excellent investment.
The blacksmiths and the shoeing smiths, like Bert Williams, made the largest profits. As tradesmen they were quick to see the possibilities of exploiting this unexpected windfall and soon they were spending all their time off-duty – and a good deal of on-duty time too – in the Battalion forge, zealously engaged in the manufacture of souvenirs. The light aluminium was easily melted down to make crosses and medallions. As a finishing touch, Trooper Charlie Curtis, whose
father worked as a typesetter on the Daily Mirror, obligingly got hold of some type. Business flourished. The boys raised their prices and began to take orders for identification discs and bracelets bearing the appropriate name and number and to embellish rings and medallions with the words: Zeppelin Souvenir. Billericay. 24th September, 1916 stamped into the metal. They hammered it very thin so that it went a long way and they were rich for months.
The 24th had also been an exciting night at West Mersea where the crew of a Zeppelin had, with some difficulty, been captured alive. It was the crew, rather than the captors, who had experienced the difficulty. They hammered on the door of a nearby farmer who was still in such a state of shock at the sight of the monster Zeppelin descending almost in his farmyard that he was too terrified to open up. When the Germans tired of knocking and threw stones at his bedroom window, accidentally breaking it in their anxiety to surrender, it merely reinforced the farmer in his opinion that the beastly Huns were bent on some fresh atrocity. His relief was considerable when he heard them march off towards the village, though he was not reassured by the sound of a salvo of shots as they emptied their pistols towards the sky before tossing them into the undergrowth at the side of the lane. But the prisoners gave no trouble. They allowed themselves to be escorted to the Police Station and accepted cups of tea while awaiting the arrival of a military escort. The Commander, in excellent English, asked politely to be escorted to the Post Office in order to telephone the Dutch Embassy in London who would let his wife know that he was safe. Reporters had quickly arrived on the scene and the next day’s newspapers made much of this piece of cheek – typical, they insinuated, of ‘Hun arrogance’.
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