Words and The First World War

by Julian Walker

  Women and children

  Women and children were enveloped in the language of the war from birth as they were given names like Somme or Poppy; their books were appropriated for satire (Malice in Kulturland, Swollen-Headed William) and their comics for anti-German propaganda; they became boy soldiers or munitionettes; elderly women provided a model for the caricature of DORA, the Defence of the Realm Act.

  The linguistic record indicates that there was a long way to go before women would achieve a reasonable level of respect let alone equality. Women were belittled, mocked and judged: a soldier undergoing facial reconstruction was taken by a nurse to see the Walter Ellis play A Little Bit Of Fluff, a typical term for a young vivacious woman;104 the frequently used term ‘my best girl’ to describe a close relationship carried an underlying verbal implication of comparison; female sexuality was mocked in postcards showing elderly women standing near placards announcing Kitchener wanting thousands of men, with the caption ‘I only want one’, or double-entendres to do with billeting (‘How many can you take?’); the Daily Mirror gossip writer wrote an entry ‘Women who annoy’, listing four points, the last of which was ‘talking inappropriately’;105women’s influence at high levels was castigated as ‘petticoat influence’.106 Even women who volunteered as nurses, if they were felt to be more concerned with ‘doing their bit’ than actually nursing, could find themselves described as ‘useless amateur angels of pity’.107

  Despite the extraordinary part played by women in the war, including fighting, munitions work and nursing, they were constantly verbally belittled. The enduring female images of the war, of women saying ‘go’, handing out lapel-flags or white feathers, or receiving telegrams, reflect a reality of secondary citizenship. In contrast, when men were incapacitated by shellshock they were seen as unmanned by hysteria,108 while Father Eric Green wrote at Gallipoli of ‘sights that would have unmanned anyone’;109 ‘woman’ itself was a term of abuse – Graves reports a staff-colonel referring to a colleague as ‘a silly old woman’,110 while elsewhere a conscientious objector is referred to as ‘Ethel’ in Alfred Lester’s 1915 review ‘Round the Map’, and Burrage refers to women in England as ‘Old Tabbies’111 (Fraser and Gibbons give ‘tabby’ for ‘a girl’). And there was semi-official pressure on the position of women in the military context: Emily Galbraith wrote to Kitchener proposing that young women should be trained to serve as home guards, but received Kitchener’s reply that ‘he didn’t approve of women fighting; it was the men’s job to look after the women’.112

  FIGURE 4.4 Undated postcard; the message reads ‘Dear Eva, what do you think of the postcard – can you do anything for me as I thought I would send you one to see if you can put me up’.

  FIGURE 4.5 Postcards sent in 1919 and 1918: the ‘Granny-dears’ card was printed in Britain, with a French translation to the caption, and with the message in French, sent to the writer’s mother.

  In this environment the use of the suffix ‘-ette’, ‘always belittling’,113 was pervasive. There were famously suffragettes and munitionettes, but also ‘peacettes’, ‘conductorettes’, and ‘policettes’,114 even ‘orderlettes’115 and ‘canteenettes’;116 Punch described the German Crown Prince’s daughter as a ‘burglarette’, but it did not catch on.117 The suffix ‘-ette’ had been applied to several new (i.e. imitation) fabrics: ‘leatherette’ from 1880, ‘silkette’ and ‘moirette’ from 1895, and ‘suedette’ from 1915. The sense of ‘imitating but less than’ provided a model for occasional startling neologisms: Woman’s Weekly in autumn 1914 ran a page of ‘Husbands’ Storyettes’, while a writer to the Derby Daily Telegraph criticised an editorial by calling it a ‘leaderette’.118 As Lynda Mugglestone points out, ‘-ette’ was not only belittling, but also indicative of the less authentic, and the less serious, and in this context, the less realistic.119 The term ‘flapper’ had been applied to young women from the early 1900s, often with admiration, but after the outbreak of war it came to carry overtones of inappropriate frivolity: the flapper was ‘a problem’, teachers and social workers were told at a 1917 conference,120 while ‘Truth’ in the Daily Mirror claimed that ‘many a soldier would far rather be lonely than have these forward and feather-brained girls perpetually worrying him.’121 Disapprobation for flappers continued after 1918 – an article on the Bishop of London’s severe disappointment at the ‘disgraceful conduct of young women and girls and that of officers and men who in association with them had disgraced their uniform’ was headlined ‘The Flapper Problem’,122 but the word had already been extended into compounds, such as the ‘flapper-bracket’ on motorcycles.123

  WORDS AND OLDER WOMEN

  Just as the popular support for the war contributed to the wider acceptance of new army language, any failure to come to grips with the new phraseology, projected or real, was noticed, and highlighted; the group singled out more than any other for this linguistic disenfranchisement was older women. Countless cartoons appeared in magazines and on postcards with variations on: ‘And were you wounded in the Dardanelles?’ ‘No miss, in the leg’, or ridiculed older women as the butt of verbal jokes. Cartoons normalised voyeurism and jokes about female sexuality and stupidity. In the context of this casual misogyny, women of the older generation were cast as failures, stooges, jokes and outcasts in the new linguistic community, unable to recognise or use the new wartime slang.

  The following article appeared on page 5 of the Chelmsford Chronicle, 14 September 1917:

  Signs of the Times

  In the war communiques we seem to be hearing considerable mention again of Ypres, which reminds me of the wounded soldier in hospital who, in the course of describing to a lady visitor a previous battle in that region, spoke repeatedly of ‘Wipers.’ Each time he mentioned the town the lady gently corrected his pronunciation by giving under her breath, the French rendering – and by that I do not mean the Anglo-French compromise, ‘Eepray.’ Afterwards he whispered to a nurse: ‘What was the matter with that old girl? Every time I mentioned Wipers she went and hiccoughed.’

  Alongside the portrayal of the resented Defence of the Realm Act as an elderly woman, elderly women generally were marked widely as failing to manage the current language, and in doing so they served to show the importance of language as marking membership of the group. Elderly women were mocked and criticised for their incorrect use of terminology, slang, or even for speaking to soldiers at all. Publicly in advertisements, press cartoons and postcards they were held up as the linguistic ‘other’. Punch was a fertile ground for this kind of joke: in the issue for 14 April 1915 (p. 300) a woman displaying ignorance of ranks thinks a lance corporal is higher than a lieutenant. ‘Welcome back to Blimey’ is the greeting from a ‘dear old lady’ to a soldier on 8 January 1919 (p. 20). Another (8 January 1919, p. 27), asked if her husband is going to be released by the army, replies that ‘he’s got a fortnight before he goes back, but by that time ’e ’opes to be demoralised’. George Belcher created many cartoons of this type, published in The Tatler; in one an elderly woman says ‘I think my boy Alf will be alright; they’ve put ’im in the Army Audience’.124 Older women’s failure with language here was an open admission of a break in the supposed unity between the forces and the Home Front, and can be seen in the context of ‘language failure’ proposed by the educational authorities (see page 9).

  Elderly women generally were marked widely as failing to manage the current language, and in doing so they served to show the importance of language as marking membership of the group.

  A Reg Winter cartoon postcard used in 1918 shows a woman asking another: ‘Is your son getting on alright in the army?’; ‘Yes, I think so,’ the other replies, ‘He says he’s in for a court martial.’ Another postcard, singularly aggressive to modern sensibilities, shows an elderly hospital visitor being told to ‘Oppitubitch’, to which she replies ‘Goodness, a Russian’. Elderly female hospital visitors were regularly mocked; Bagnold notes one ‘old lady … at whom … it is the custom to laugh’,
noting that the soldiers followed the hospital staff in finding her ‘comic’.125 Queries as to the causes of injuries eliciting mocking responses usually involved elderly women. Swinton relates a typical story of ‘Ginger’, a hospitalised Australian, who is asked by ‘a kind old lady’ if he was ‘hit in the Dardanelles’ – ‘No mum. I was hit in the leg’.126 A humorous postcard shows an elderly woman visiting a wounded soldier – ‘You weren’t wounded at the Front, then?’ she asks; the wounded soldier replies to the discomfited visitor ‘No, lady! A shell exploded at the base, but the base happened to be mine’. She is embarrassed, while the soldier in the next bed is laughing. In others, an elderly woman talks to a sailor: ‘I see the papers say you were stripped for action – I wonder you didn’t catch your death of cold’, or tells a soldier on crutches ‘I know just what it must feel like, poor fellow – I had a corn plaster on all last week, and it’s been somethink awful’. A postcard showing an old lady talking to a wounded soldier has her asking ‘And what did you do when the shell hit you?’ to which the soldier replies, ‘Sent Mother a postcard to get the bed aired’; overleaf the message reads:

  Sorry to say, some people do like asking us silly questions. One asked me, if I should not like to live in France after the war! And if I was anxious to get home! Of course my answers were (1) Yes! (2) No! It pleased the dear old lady. Love, Ted127

  Or there was simple leg-pulling – De L’Isle reports men telling a ‘lady-visitor’ that they were ‘longing to get back to the firing-line’.128 Or their questions might be dismissed totally: a repeatedly used advertisement for Ariston cigarettes shows a bed-ridden soldier turning to reach for a cigarette, the only thing to do ‘If the dear old lady asks you what you think of the war … in moments of exasperation, of embarrassment, of disquietude …’.129 Enid Bagnold’s A Diary Without Dates is scathing in its portrayal of women hospital visitors’ tendency to say the wrong thing; introduced as ‘the Visitors’, the first of these has a tendency to say the wrong thing so much that the hospitalised soldiers ‘treasure every item of [her] talk for future use’. A joke in Tommy & Jack runs:

  ‘And how many times were you hit, my poor man?’ said the kind lady who visited the hospital.

  ‘Only once’, groaned the weary patient.

  ‘Only once!’ echoed the lady.

  ‘Why, ’ow many times would you like me to be ’it?’ snapped the invalid. ‘You old cannibal!’130

  Memory of the phenomenon lasted well beyond the end of the war. An article in the Aberdeen Journal noted that ‘it was … faintly irritating during the war to hear the old lady talk serenely about the German “cannon”; it is nothing short of exasperating when she tells you some afternoon that you are a “masher” ’, ‘masher’ being very dated by then.131 Helen Z. Smith’s Not So Quiet has the VAD narrator responding to her wealthy mother’s use of ‘cushy’ with the ironic ‘How well up in war-slang is mother!’132 And Brophy and Partridge associated the idea of troops talking derisively with ‘imitating the style of a newspaper or a charitable old lady’.133

  Children were involved fully in the language of the First World War, many from birth or before. Research done in 2016 at the National Archives and the Essex Record Office shows the number of children given names that commemorated battles, heroes or the wartime concepts of peace and victory.134 This was not a new process, several children having been given names of battles during the Anglo-Boer War. What is curious is the fact that the most popular name used in Britain was not that of a battle in which the British forces were involved, but Verdun, and that it was extremely popular in South Wales. Ypres was far behind in the popularity stakes, with other battle names used including Mons, Dardanelles, Messines and Somme; non-battle, but otherwise relevant, names include Flanders and Louvain, Raida, and Cressy (after the ship sunk in 1914). Heroes commemorated included Beatty, Kitchener, Cavell and Haig, while ‘end of war’ names other than Peace and Victory included Poppy, and no doubt influenced the choice of Victor and Irene (goddess of peace). Some words were feminised for girls, Arras giving Arrasa and Arrasiny.135 The motivations of these choices can be seen from website comments pages – commemoration of individuals or general empathy were factors – but topical incidents influenced choices too. Zeppelina Clarke, (later Zeppelina Williams) was born near the site of a Zeppelin crash, on 24 September 1914; the attending doctor suggested the name.136 While The Lady wryly noted early in the war, ‘The habit of naming children after great battles or other dated events is one that is often deeply resented by the unfortunate victims when they grow up’, Mrs Williams carried the name through a long life.137

  FIGURE 4.6 Postcard, not sent. The use of ‘another’ perhaps refers to the famous rumour of a secret Russian army supposed to have travelled from Scotland to the south coast by train overnight.

  The Aberdeen Evening Express described this use of topical names as a ‘craving’;138 it certainly seemed to risk going out of control. The article showed that in the Abruzzi area of Italy, influenced by various factors, including non-standardisation of Italian, and probably lower literacy levels, there had been a sudden use of the name Firmato, meaning ‘signed’. This phenomenon had developed following the wide dissemination of a communique from General Cadorno, with the words ‘Firmato Cadorno’ at the foot of the document. The Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer wondered reasonably whether anglicised place names had been used; would there be somewhere a ‘Plugstreet Brown, or Wipers Jones, or Armenteers Robinson’?139

  FIGURE 4.7 Giving children names relating to the war began very early, in this case eight days after the declaration of war on Germany. The text indicates that the phenomenon was expected as part of the process of war. Daily Graphic, 12 August 1914, p. 10.

  FIGURE 4.8 Postcard sent on 28 August 1915.

  Children were early immersed in the terms and phrases of the war – The Child’s ABC of the War, published in 1914, has for ‘N’:

  N’s for the ‘No’ that from lips roundly parted

  Comes when we ask ourselves: ‘ARE WE DOWNHEARTED?’140

  Woman’s Weekly carried a few pages for young children, including in 1914 a column ‘For the Ti-nies’; on 3 October 1914 ‘Tom-my’s Un-cle Har-ry’ visits, ‘in un-i-form’, and Tommy cries ‘Oh, I wish I could come to the war, Un-cle!’; on 7 November ‘Er-ic’s Dad-dy’ has thought of a ‘love-ly plan’ by which Eric can support the war-effort – Eric starts saving his pennies and halfpennies ‘and Dad-dy takes them and buys cig-ar-ettes for the sol-diers’.141 Younger children’s comics gradually acknowledged the war, and its terms; The Rainbow published a story on 3 July 1915 (p. 4) in which a boy’s toy soldiers come to life, reveal themselves to have been made in Germany, are beaten back by his older brother’s toy reinforcements, and are eventually ‘interned … in a cupboard, there to remain until the war shall be over’.

  Children adapted to changing linguistic circumstances as pragmatically as adults, and probably faster. French children quickly learned to use appropriate language (‘jig-a-jig’) to pimp their older sisters to British soldiers coming off troop-ships,142 or to sell fruit ‘crying in a monotonous sing-song, “Three apples – une pennee” ’,143 while Belgian refugees in Scotland were reported as quickly picking up the local accent.144 Commonly documented are the incidences of children in France and Belgium either picking up or being deliberately taught slang, taboo words or other offensive language use, such as an incident involving a French girl shortchanging a British soldier, and responding to his complaint with ‘Garn you fuckin long barstid’.145 This linguistic influence did not impress some British soldiers.146 A tone of didactic disappointment is seen in an article in the Folkestone Herald, where the potential for British children to pick up practice in a foreign language is noted as not being taken up – in this children’s world the onus was clearly on the incomer to learn the language.147 But the introduction to unfamiliar language where it could not be avoided brought potential for some dynamic expression. Gavin Bowd has shown how in German-occ
upied Belgium children exposed to the language of the soldiers created their own hybrid texts. When forced to collect berries instead of going to school they created a song:

  Toujours toujours travailler.

  Travailler nicht gut.

  Toujours toujours marmelade.

  Allemands malades.

  Toujours toujours manger choucroute.

  Allemands kaput.148

  Children’s written words showed how closely they observed events, in terms of both direct experience and the nature of the war. Following Zeppelin raids over London on 8 September and 13 October 1915 some of the pupils of Princeton Street Elementary School were given the task of recording their impressions;149 the pattern of essay-writing after Zeppelin raids seems to have been well established, as C. W. Kimmins lecturing to the Child Study Society used evidence from 945 texts by children.150 The descriptions combine observation of the sensation of the airship going over (‘reverberating roar’) with echoes of adventure-story writing (‘like lions when they are hungry’, the airship ‘sheered off in a south-westerly direction’, ‘no sooner had I got out when …’, ‘I was sitting at my ease’, ‘a shell went screaming by on its errand of death’; one of the writers is disturbed from reading Boys’ Friend, so for him the incident was closely linked to adventure-story writing). Previous experiences contribute to the impressions – women and children going into the tube tunnel at Holborn are described as looking like Belgian refugees, and there is no fear of reticence in graphic description in ‘people say that lumps of flesh were found sticking to the walls and posts’. Immediate observations (‘short sharp pieces of red flashing from the muzzle [of a gun]’), excitements (‘As soon as one fire was under control another burst out undone all the firemen’s work’), and later thoughts (‘In Leather Lane there were a wife and two children killed of a policeman and he has gone silly’), show children using a range of expressive language to assess their changing world – one girl wrote that ‘people were running about like mad bulls and the windows were falling out like rain’. J. McHenry and G. A. Rist use the word ‘zep’, and Rist writes that ‘the guns were well on it’ but otherwise these texts, possibly bearing in mind that they were school exercises, do not have slang expressions. C. W. Kimmins noted that ‘the noise of firing bulked very largely in the essays’, and the descriptions of the sounds of bombs and shells – ‘Boom! Whiz!’ or ‘Boom – crash – boom’ – echo transcriptions made by soldiers at the Front. There were expressions of anger against German spies noted in the words of ten-year-old girls, but fear did not feature in their accounts: ‘Mother said she did not want to see or hear the Zeppelins again. I do.’ Another 11-year-old girl, echoing the adult criticisms of how Germany waged war, wrote ‘this kind of thing makes one realise what war is; and yet dropping bombs on harmless people is not war. That night I felt bitter towards the Germans. I felt I could fly to Germany and do the same thing to them.’ Her words express the moral dilemma, implied but not resolved in the children’s books below, that certain types of activity were unacceptable in the waging of war, but that there was an urge to exact revenge for those activities.