Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  Welsh accents are transcribed very rarely – Graves gives an example of some officers, ‘strictly brought-up Welsh boys of the professional classes’, one of whom, ‘very Welsh’, says ‘I did was my fa-ace and ha-ands’, the transcription catching the drawn-out vowels, and a ‘very Welsh Welshman from the hills, who had an imperfect command of English …: ‘Sergeant tole me was I for guard; I axed him no …’.354 More common are transcriptions of Northern English accents: John Crofts has a ‘stolid Yorkshire miner’ saying ‘A’reet, a’reet’,355 Aubrey Smith transcribes a Northumberland sergeant as saying ‘brought soom [bombs] along’ and ‘all you’ve got to do is take the pin oot and buzz it’,356 and Ian Hay has a soldier from Manchester saying ‘’alf clemmed’.357 Cpl Harry Ogle carefully transcribes a North Country accent: ‘I don’t say you know nowt about it, but acts as if you don’t, bein’ in a ‘urry, an’ I’m goin’ to schoo’master you’.358 Capt Billy Congreve wrote in his diary the words of a Durham man: ‘I come to a trench and in I tumbles, roight on top of two other blokes, One of ‘em was dead, t’other aloive.’359 These cases show middle-class officers noting and in text imitating the sound of regional accents used by men of what was a different social class. Some transcriptions are recognisable as North Country, without any details of the speaker’s origin: Emma Duffin gives ‘wot a fooss’,360 and W. H. Downing’s Digger Dialects in a rare use of something other than cockney for a typical British soldier accent, gives ‘fooker’ as the catch-all Australian slang for a Tommy. West Midlands accents are occasionally noted – ‘Some hail from a place, which is known to the natives as Berminghum’ and ‘Yo’ see it’s like this ‘ere. Ah uster be the champion lead swinger of this little lot …’;361 and ‘when they knew that I came from Birmingham, I got the accent thick and fine “Gor blimey, ‘ow are ye, then, ole townie?” came the rich, Black Country accent’.362 Mottram in Journey to the Western Front remembers a Norfolk accent, given as ‘Them Jarmins! Feverish beggars I calls ‘em. ‘Ont let y’ sleep’.363

  What became clear during the war was the predominance of the London accent, and identification with London, in the army’s ‘other ranks’, and specifically of the army in the trenches. The first British place names used as trench names were London street names, and these remained a strong source for trench names, with Sassoon and Blunden noting how the West End cropped up along the line.364 An advertisement for War Bonds not only links the front line to London, but draws a direct line making London the portal through which the whole empire experiences the war: ‘There, on the bloody fields of France, the Londoner reaches the true “outer defences” of his own great city – of the island homes of Britain – of the British Empire!’365 This may all have been a fiction – a complaint was published in the Birmingham Mail that not all London soldiers were ‘ “h”-less Cockneys’,366 and E. B. Osborn in his introduction to The Muse in Arms complained about the ‘strange literary convention whereby the rank and file of our fighting men … are made to speak a kind of cockneyese of which no real Cockney is capable’;367 for many Kipling was at the root of this misconception. But if it was a fiction, it was a fiction that preceded the war: a brief article from 28 July 1914 proposed a direct linguistic connection between London and the army, claiming that ‘London slang is daily adding to its extensive vocabulary. “Look at ‘im ‘aving a dekker at you,” I heard a woman with a baby on her knee say to a friend.… It must have been introduced into London slang by soldiers home from India.’ This was from the Manchester Guardian, and published in the Yorkshire Evening Post.368 And a close relationship between army slang and cockney seems to have been a given in discussions of slang during the war: Julie Coleman quotes a review of Kitchener’s Mob (1916), which highlights the author, J. N. Hall’s fascination with cockney.369 The overwhelming majority of accents in post-war sound dramatisations of the Front use cockney accents, with local markers, such as ‘Lumme’, adding to the representation of the war in the 1920s as an identifiably cockney experience.370

  What became clear during the war was the predominance of the London accent, and identification with London, in the army’s ‘other ranks’, and specifically of the army in the trenches.

  Cartoons in Punch that involved the services show the development of this. Throughout 1912 there were eight cartoons, which show 11 standard voices, 10 cockney voices, 2 Irish voices, and 3 Scottish voices, cockney voices making up 38 per cent. For January to July 1917 there are 35 with identifiable cockney or urban south-east England accents, 39 with no accent shown, 1 Geordie, 3 Irish and 8 Scottish accents; cockney voices here make up 45 per cent, an increase of 18 per cent.

  Publications such as 500 of the Best Cockney War Stories (1930), the mention of Piccadilly and Leicester Square in what became the identity-marking ‘Tipperary’, and the continuation of Bruce Bairnsfather’s ‘Ole Bill in Fragments from France after the war cemented the relationship between London and the Great War. T. S. Eliot in the introduction to In Parenthesis in 1937 writes that ‘as Latin is to the Church, so is Cockney to the Army, no matter what name the regiment bears’.371 Partridge felt equally that Parisian slang transformed was one of the three main components of poilu slang,372 and the author Herbert Vivian wrote an article for the Daily Express in which he ‘translated’ Parisian slang into cockney, using the iconic ‘muvver’373 (Greenwall’s Driver Smith goes into a shop in France and asks ‘Got any Woodbines, muvver?’374).

  What also became noticeable was how one accent was seen as a cuckoo in the nest of other accents. On 20 March 1915 the Birmingham Daily Mail carried an article titled ‘The War and Slang’, which included: ‘What shall we say when to the full diction of the Birmingham street arab there is added the colour of Oriental words picked up from the lips of returned warriors? As thus: “ ’Ere, Bill, maro the silly ooloo. Strike me pink yer burra guddha watcher mean? Ye’ve pukeraoed by [my?] bhiddees. ’Ere, where’s the Khubber-ka-khergaz? Let’s have a dekko. What’s won? Well, if this ain’t a nice bloomin’ Komofick. Nor ‘arf.” Yes, it sounds promising.’ A development noted by some was that the cockney accent was influencing Scottish accents: ‘In the army you will hear a Scotchman doing what he never did before – dropping his aitches. He has caught it from his English comrades. You will hear him say “Not ‘arf” – an inane tag which, despite its popularity in London, failed to find any foothold north of the Tweed before the war. “Not ‘arf” was mouthed by Sassenach comedians on the music-hall stages of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and was grinned at for what it was worth: the streets did not adopt it. Now the streets will hear it and will use it: it is one of Jock’s souvenirs from his campaign.’375 John Crofts notices a Scottish soldier ‘using a purely Sassenach idiom [‘a baastard, ain’t it’] which he has picked up somehow’.376 Philologists such as John Nicholson had already noted that railways, the telegraph and school boards were killing local dialects,377 as urban accents spread out into hinterlands, the urban south-east accent most of all; working-class urban accents permeated the army – before conscription nearly a third of Britain’s industrial workers had enlisted in the forces.378

  Occasionally non-European accents were transcribed, South Asian, or Chinese, such as a Lascar saying ‘tea-veree-hot’ in a private’s diary of the 9th Royal Scots, February–March 1915, but American documentation of African American speech is widely seen, usually in contexts disadvantageous to the speaker, such as misunderstandings, anecdotes or cartoons. That names from within the Indian army community caused problems can be inferred from the comment on the back of a weekly washing chit from February 1916: ‘How would you like to pronounce these names every day?’

  FIGURE 3.4 Pte F. Hopkinson conveys his concerns about the pronunciation of Indian names on a chit, the word ‘chit’ coming from Hindi.

  Other languages in use within the BEF, South African, Anzac and Canadian forces included French, Maori, Afrikaans (seen on bilingual victory medals), and Asian languages including the Nepali of the Gurkhas, Marathi, Urdu, Gurmukhi, Hindi, Pashtu and Guj
erati.379 The experience of the regular army staff of decades of using Indian languages380 meant that there was a strong awareness of the need to use a wide range of languages for efficiency. As well as linguists being involved in censoring letters home from soldiers using Indian languages, Indian recruiting posters and Field Postcards were printed in Urdu, and trench names were written in Indian characters.381

  In addition to this there were languages other than English used within the British Isles which were used and managed in various ways. Recruiting posters were printed in Welsh, with few if any using Irish or Gaelic text, but there is evidence for Scottish and Irish Gaelic speakers in the forces. An entry in the Berliner Lautarchiv, a dialect and accent study among British prisoners of war made from 1915, shows a recording was taken of Duncan Gunn, a soldier whose first language was Gaelic. There had been Irish Gaelic speakers in the British Army for centuries and references to the speaking of Irish Gaelic appear frequently: an article in The War Illustrated about the use of clubs as trench-weapons by both sides is headed ‘Erin-go-Bragh’ (success go with you)382 – the phrase was also used by Irish visitors to the battlefields in 1928;383 Brophy and Partridge note the word ‘skite’ as coming from the Irish ‘blatherumskite’ (it more likely came from the Scots ‘blatherskite’); and there was uproar in Ireland when a court martial president was reported as making disparaging remarks about the Irish language, an article in the Derry Journal quoting a question asked in the House of Commons by Alfie Byrne MP noting the ‘Irish speaking soldiers of the Connaught Rangers and the Munster Fusiliers and other Gaelic-speaking soldiers at the front’.384 Many of the Royal Guernsey Militia who volunteered for the 6th Royal Irish were French-speaking,385 and there were even, as seen in A Book of Manx Songs, compiled for the use of Manxmen and Manxwomen serving in His Majesty’s Forces (1915), fragments of Manx being circulated among troops.

  Some situations arose with the management of these languages, particularly Welsh. The different worlds of the army and home are shown in the lack of clarity as to whether Welsh could be used in writing letters home,386 and one diary shows a soldier using Welsh until he arrives at barracks, when he promptly switches over to English. Lloyd George (whose first language was Welsh) in September 1914 stated that he wanted to see ‘a Welsh army in the field’,387 but the Welsh Corps was a source of disagreement between Lloyd George and Kitchener, who ordered that Welsh should not be spoken on the parade ground or in billets.388 However, possibly as a result of Lloyd George’s initiative, a large amount of recruiting literature was produced in Welsh, and soldiers not only wrote home in Welsh throughout the war, but were, after a ban in 1916, quickly repealed, permitted to speak the language while training in Britain.389

  FIGURE 3.5 From A Book of Manx Songs, published in 1915 ‘for the use of Manxmen and Manxwomen serving in His Majesty’s Forces, and the Manx Societies throughout the World’.

  There is no evidence to suggest that the use of languages other than English proved problematic in the BEF at the Front, in the way that was experienced by other multilingual country’s armies. The Austro-Hungarian armies had to manage up to a dozen languages on an equal footing, sometimes with results reminiscent of Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik; longstanding tensions regarding Breton soldiers resurfaced in the years 1914 to 1918 as Breton monolinguism was strongly linked to Breton separatism. M. MacDonald describes a ‘foreign legion’ in which he served in the French army, with Russian, Italian, Rumanian, Spanish, and other languages spoken; within this corps were Alsatian soldiers fighting for the liberation of Alsace from Germany, who spoke their first language, German, much to the anger of their colleagues; the group was eventually ordered to use French.390

  Naming our side

  ‘Tommy’ as a generic name in France for the British soldier took the place of ‘un godam’ according to John Masefield;391 not having been involved in a European war for several generations, for the British and for a few Europeans ‘Tommy’ was associated with service in India, Africa and the colonies. The term had come originally from a generic name for soldiers serving in the Napoleonic wars, and was popularised by Kipling. It was specifically a name for ‘other ranks’, not officers, was seldom applied to NCOs, and never, according to Partridge, to colonial troops like himself – though Grace Pulvertaft mentions meeting ‘an Australian Tommy’ in her diary entry for 11 November 1918.392 However, far from being a universally accepted and cherished term, ‘Tommy’ was widely disliked. ‘An Ensign of 1848’ wrote to The Times 23 October 1914:

  May I … suggest that the time has now come … to put a period to the use of the nickname ‘Tommies’? … To hear these British soldiers referred to in deprecatory patronage as ‘Tommies’ by those who stay at home … is unseemly and exasperating.

  It was not an isolated sentiment. In the Liverpool Daily Post there was a report on the Manx Legislative Council and the House of Keys:

  Yesterday, in connection with the provision for relieving soldiers’ estates from duty, the Attorney-General strongly protested against soldiers being popularly called ‘Tommies.’ The term, he said, was ridiculous and offensive, and would not be allowed in any other country.393

  ‘Tommy’ was at the bottom of the status-ladder in the army, which may have been a difficult association for the enlisted soldiers of Kitchener’s Mob, many of them carefully aware of their class status. As an article in the Birmingham Mail put it ‘Those who are well educated, and have given up excellent situations and comfortable homes for the sake of their country, naturally resent being patronised as “Tommies” who cannot speak the King’s English, and whose place of origin is assumed to be Houndsditch or the New Cut.’394 Or maybe Kipling’s 1892 poem ‘Tommy’ had for long established in the public mind that the private soldier was both socially and militarily expendable. There is a possibility too that the term was associated in older people’s minds at that time with older meanings of ‘tommy’, such as those given in J. C. Hotten’s Dictionary of Vulgar Words, Street Phrases and “Fast Expressions”, (1865), in which the meanings given are ‘bread, generally a penny roll’, and ‘a truck, barter, the exchange of labour for goods, not money.’ Any surviving association of the enlisted and conscripted soldiers with a trade or a consumer perishable could not have helped – ‘Tommy’ as the basic material of a war in which a raid was carried out by ‘a couple of officers, some NCOs and the rest were ordinary Tommies who went over’.395

  There was also an English identification to the word – Welsh soldiers were ‘Taff’, Scottish soldiers ‘Jock’ individually, and ‘the Jocks’ as a group (‘Scotties’ if they were London Scottish), while Partridge records ‘The Micks’ for the Irish Guards. The naval equivalent was ‘Jack’, and the emergence of a separate identity for the RFC and RAF brought ‘George’ for an airman, recorded by Brophy and Partridge. ‘Kilties’ as a term for Scottish soldiers was not common, even among the writings of soldiers in Scottish regiments: Stephen Graham, author of A Private in the Guards (1919), and Cpl O. H. Blaze, 1st Battalion Scots Guards, author of ‘A prisoner of war in Germany’ in In the Line of Battle (1916), both use the term once (pp. 321 and 18 respectively), Graham preferring ‘Jocks’ and Blaze using the names of regiments. Brophy and Partridge claim that it was ‘taken from popular journalism and used only mockingly, sometimes for the purpose of starting a row’. Michael McDonagh used ‘kilts’ for Scottish troops in The Irish on the Somme,396 but this metonymic image is rare, though the principle – ‘rifles’ and ‘bayonets’ for ‘men’ – was long established in military language.

  ‘Tommies’ was used for the infantryman in other armies, underlining its class and rank status:

  … a letter written soon after his arrival in France in the spring of 1915 by Captain Lionel William Crouch described his amusement at ‘watching a group of our chaps surrounding a French Tommy who was endeavouring to teach them French’.397

  Enid Bagnold recorded a much earthier, and certainly less literary alternative: ‘I wonder when p
eople will stop calling them “Tommy” and call them “Bill”.’

  Other non-British Tommies appear in The Rochdale Observer, which has ‘a fat French Tommy’,398 while the Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough has ‘the Italian “Tommy” ’.399 To stretch the mind further, six months after the Armistice, the Daily Mirror described the political instability in Germany with some antipathy towards ‘Prussian officers’ lording it over ‘German Tommies’. Weekley even has a ‘Roman tommy’.400 ‘Tommy’ also functioned as an adjective, in ‘Tommy-cooker’.

  The name became a plaything for the press, a widely-used sign of familiarity with the troops, another supposed authenticator. The War Budget March 1916 played with the name using the headline: ‘Tammas McAtkins’s water ration’. Did soldiers bridle at this? Brophy and Partridge noted ‘Tommy’ as being used by English troops only derisively, or ‘when imitating the style of a newspaper or a charitable old lady’.401 Enid Bagnold recorded a much earthier, and certainly less literary alternative: ‘I wonder when people will stop calling them “Tommy” and call them “Bill”. I never heard the word “Tommy” in a soldier’s mouth: he was a red-coated man. “But every mate’s called ‘Bill’, ain’t he Bill?” ’402 Bagnold’s text carries two notable points, first the association of ‘Tommy’ with the red-coated Victorian soldier of Kipling’s poem, and secondly the importance of Bruce Bairnsfather’s observations of life at the Front, ‘Old Bill’ both reflecting and reinforcing the troops’ language.