by Mark Rowe
Here was the other, connected dilemma: whether the authorities should warn the locals beforehand, so they would know what best to do (at the risk of panic by the weak and stupid ruining it for everyone else); or should the authorities say nothing (at the risk of panic if the Germans did come). In another unrealistic compromise, police at headquarters told local stations to explain to locals what might happen, ‘but it should be done quietly and without fuss, so as not to cause any excitement etc among the community’. Headquarters did not say how constables should explain the possible invasion without giving people ‘excitement etc’. HQs never do. If German sailors had come ashore, after a battle, would they have felt like capturing anything, let alone cows and horses?
Regardless of reality, fear of invasion lingered. Meanwhile police acted on another, intriguing, worry. On August 10 Mitchell-Innes sent a memo about the possibility that “owing to the discharge of industrial employees on a large scale in the big towns, their districts in course of time may well be visited by casual labourers and others severely affected in fairly large numbers and who may be in serious want and therefore likely to be troublesome”. The chief constable suggested that police on their beats approach “representative members of the community with a view to their forming a local organisation impressing other sound and reliable men in subordinate positions such as farm foremen, keepers, stewards, game keepers etc throughout their districts”. In other words, while police were short of men, because reservists had joined the army or navy again, and police were guarding railway bridges in case of sabotage, citizens ought to do their bit to protect their property. Around the country respectable men, in numbers, volunteered as special constables; George Rose did in London, for example. In early September 110 men swore at Newark town hall to ‘keep the peace’ in case of an (unspecified) emergency.
In mainly rural Lincolnshire, Mitchell-Innes was not only thinking of resisting what he called ‘destitute strangers and wanderers’ by force. He suggested that ‘the unfortunates’ out of work and wandering the countryside should have ‘temporary relief’, such as ‘scrap food, old boots, old clothing etc’. How real was this threat of unrest from the very poor tempted, or forced, to steal to survive? Mitchell-Innes’ need to reassure lonely-feeling farmers may have mattered more than the threat. By defending themselves, the panicky property-owners may have felt less afraid of losing their possessions. Homeless but otherwise sturdy folk from the cities did not invade the countryside in August 1914, but they did come; for Britain always had men and women down on their luck and tramping, as vagabonds, or whatever you wanted to call them. They seldom left a trace. One time that a pair of wanderers did show in print, it proved how such aimless people had no grand thoughts of overturning society; and society was far too strong for them in any case.
On Thursday September 3, William Hall, a warehouseman, went to work at 6am at a flour mill outside Southwell in Nottinghamshire. Hall wrapped his brown leather shoes in paper, and put them on a sack of wheat. He meant to take them home, but forgot about them. When he looked on the Saturday morning, the shoes had gone.
William Sharman, the mill watchman, opened the warehouse door on the Friday evening to let the dust out - which was probably why Hall had a pair of work shoes and another pair. Under the flour bags, Sharman found a man and a woman. Sharman asked the pair to leave, then let them stay, whether out of softness or because the couple were too tough to shift - if they would leave things alone.
At 5.50am on the Saturday, a Southwell shopkeeper, Abraham Bee, was sweeping. A man showed him shoes and asked sixpence for them. Bee told the stranger that he did not know that he wanted shoes. ‘Some old toff gave them to me,’ the man said. Eventually - to get rid of him, perhaps - Bee gave the sixpence. Bee must have guessed something was wrong, and said so, because later that morning police constable Copeland was on the vagrants’ trail. First he found the woman - Bridget Hughes, a widow - lying in a lane; then the man, Charles Mackenzie, a seaman thrown out of work at Hull by the outbreak of war. Drifting south, Mackenzie had reached Southwell from Lincoln on the Friday and met Hughes. You wonder what other petty crimes Mackenzie had done in the last few weeks, though as Southwell magistrates sent him to prison for two weeks - Hughes went for four - this was probably the first time Mackenzie was caught.
Here lay another reason why English holiday-makers on the Continent rushed to the Channel ports for home, despite the discomforts and loss of luggage - or rather, they left their bags to be sent on, so they hoped; in truth someone, probably French, Swiss and German hotel and railway workers, pilfered it. Even if the holiday-makers were not running out of money - and many were - they were not only fleeing danger. They sought their place in society again; while abroad, they were little more than higher-class tramps. A T Daniel, for example, ran out of trains at Amiens and had to buy a second-hand bicycle. Armed with a piece of paper stamped by the British vice-consul - ‘without this my journey would have been impossible’ - Daniel made for Abbeville, stopped at every village every few miles by ‘ignorant and indignant patriots’. This must have been while England hesitated about joining the war because, as Daniel admitted, to many Frenchmen England was ‘a false friend and little better than a traitor’. Having cycled the 70 miles to Boulogne, that left the cheeks of his bottom ‘two huge blisters’, he and a ‘rush of Britishers unused to police interference’ made a farce of the official check on the gangway to the ship home. “It was quite enough to proclaim yourself a British subject in no matter what accent.”
Landing at Dover at 2am, the hotels were full, and the ship’s cabins were forbidden. A railwayman offered Daniel a place to lie down in the telegraph office, adding cheerily: “We put the aliens in there!” Daniel rested there, but could not sleep, ‘because of the shunting and clicking of the telegraph’. By now, Britain must have declared war:
Shortly after four o’clock I got up and saw a brilliant sunrise and had conversations with policemen and watchmen. They were good fellows and one could not help thinking good material but they were singularly inferior in intelligence and singularly ignorant of foreign politics of foreign countries and anything but the very outside of things military. To them this was a war between England and Germany. Little Belgium was plucky, this they conceded but wait till the British Army got there, they would make the Germans run! They seemed to take no account of the French Army whatever.
Daniel went into Dover at 5.30am and found a small coffee house, filled with workmen, ‘mainly of a very submerged type’. They showed no interest in news of the war: “To them the war was mainly a question of the price of sugar and bacon.” One man, Daniel added disapprovingly, used all the expletives he knew, “of course he didn’t know many! To denounce the government. I could not exactly make out why.” Daniel was still 200 miles from home, but had reclaimed his place back in society already, as he was able to look down on (and fail to appreciate) his countrymen. Life-changing events, a war in Europe, made no difference to the thankless lives of roaming, labouring men, surviving on hard or odd jobs, charity, the workhouse, or what they could pocket and get away with.
IV
But to be certain of a situation is not to be certain of a human being.
Maurice, by E M Forster
And for all the fears of agents, invaders, and wastrels, what did the threat to England come to? The London representative of the German makers of armaments, Krupp, sent a petition to Winston Churchill at the Admiralty on August 16, pleading to be allowed home to Germany. On August 5, when about to leave with his family in the German ambassador’s train, he was arrested in his Putney house for espionage. The police search of his letters and belongings had not uncovered anything; newspapers however had called him a spy. Major Kell of the security service did not want to let him go, not because of anything he might have done, but because he might be useful as a hostage or as someone to trade for Englishmen held similarly in Germany: ‘Herr von Bulow belongs to an influe
ntial family’. While a memo for Churchill agreed that von Bulow was not caught with anything incriminating, ‘the Krupp firm like other armament firms maintained a system of espionage’, and von Bulow ‘very possibly’ was part of it, or at least knew about it. This case hinted that British companies did espionage, the same as anyone else. Firms did it to keep ahead, or at least so they did not fall behind rivals. It was business, not necessarily done for the sake of a war. In any case, whether you believed von Bulow when he wrote his conscience was ‘absolutely clear’, you suspect that von Bulow’s worst crime was to make the British feel tricked. In June, von Bulow had accompanied the company’s chief, Herr Krupp himself, on a tour of British armaments factories and shipyards, as arranged by the Admiralty.
Churchill’s decision was characteristically brief. ‘Hold him WSC 19-8,’ he scribbled.
Chapter 10
Serving Men
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.
‘This? Oh, well, I couldn’t wait about for a commission, it might have been weeks.’
An unnamed sculptor, a private in the XVth Hussars, in The Garden of Ignorance: The Experiences of a Woman in a Garden, by Mrs George Cran
I
Another letter in mid-month to Churchill came from Francis Grenfell, with his cavalry unit at Tidworth. “I am in command of a squadron and can hardly believe my good fortune of being in the prime of life a soldier at this time,” wrote Grenfell, knowing that Churchill as a former troop leader in the Lancers would understand. On Thursday August 13 Grenfell had been in London for three hours, but had to wait at the dentist, and did not have time to see Churchill before he caught his train back to Wiltshire. “Goodbye my dear Winston. We must teach these foreigners again what a great nation we are, what England means.” It was one of those letters that left much unsaid, because written in haste, and because Grenfell did not have to tell Churchill what he already knew: that an older brother of Grenfell, a Lancer, had died in a cavalry charge with Churchill at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898; and that the chances were that Churchill and Grenfell might - thanks to a dentist - never see each other again.
Such happy and patriotic thoughts as Grenfell’s, brushing aside the prospect of death, have been the stuff of August 1914, on all sides. Whereas Germany and France had millions of men ready-trained putting on uniform, Britain’s new war minister, the Boer War commander Lord Kitchener, began by advertising for another 100,000 men. If the war on the Continent would be over in weeks, as many in England (but not Kitchener) thought, even those first recruits would not reach the front line before their months of training. As Britain had never seen so many men recruited at once, for anything, it would take a while to clothe and arm them, let alone make them soldiers. Exceptions were men who already knew how to do special jobs, such as riding motorcycles to carry despatches: such as the later spy Bernard Newman, and the St John’s College, Cambridge man J K Stevens. They, like Grenfell, were bright young men, well-off enough to ride (a motorcycle, not a horse), and smart enough to know how to get a job - because, as so often, it was a case of who you knew, not what.
Clifford Gothard, who rarely included world news in his diary, began noting war as early as July 27. He did not put his feelings in writing, not even on the sudden death of his father - with one exception. Even on the Monday, August 3, for example, when he wrote ‘everybody seems very excited about the war’, or rather the prospect of Britain fighting in it, he did not say if he was excited. “General feeling seems to be, go to war and smash them,” Gothard wrote, ‘them’ being the Germans. However, when the next morning (still before Britain declared war) a letter came asking Gothard if he would take a commission, if asked, he confided to his diary: “To please mother, entirely against my own inclination, I signed off as unsuitable. I think it is the greatest disappointment I have ever had, having to sign off like that.” For the next few days, Gothard carried on his usual round of shooting rabbits, and finishing the arranging of his father’s estate, though the war was going on around him, and was evidently on his mind. “All the trams passing out house to town have a lot of Territorials in them,” he wrote on August 5.
Did Gothard feel the shame of any young man who could not measure himself against his fellows in battle? Was his shame not so much a feeling of cowardice, but that he would look like a mummy’s boy? Mrs Gothard, we can imagine, did not want to see her son hurt; did she insist as well that no son of hers was wasting his education by going in the army? As so often, did the mother with more experience know better than the immature son?
Kitchener’s appeal for 100,000 men aged between 19 and 35 filled the newspapers. Yet such large advertisements, half-page and whole-page, not only told readers this was important; like any jobs that make the newspapers, perhaps these were the vacancies that could not be filled easily? Some men did seek to join the army, so that they had a place in what the Ashbourne Telegraph, like many, called ‘the greatest war in the world’s history’. Yet the average young man in the Derbyshire market town of Ashbourne had not had the least wish to join the army before August 1914; the pay was poor, the discipline alien, the routine boring, and the years away from home intolerable; as the volunteers were about to find out. Even so early in the war, the Ashbourne Telegraph had to talk up the army, to overcome the centuries-old sense that a civilian only joined the army if he was starving, a fool, or fleeing the hangman: “No man is too good to serve his King and Country as a private soldier. JOIN AT ONCE.” Those capital letters, the printed equivalent of shouting in your ear, were in truth like the ever-more strident tactics of suffragettes: a sign of a losing cause.
II
Soldiers, in these first few days of the war, had something going for them; and they made the most of it. They were needed. It meant, first, that Territorials could get away with mischief. Usually drink came into it. Christopher Hollis, a 12-year-old son of a clergyman, recalled in a memoir that on the Tuesday, August 4, “a drunk leaned out of a carriage window at Taunton” as his family were going on their holidays and bawled to Hollis’ father to pray for him. “My father promised that he would.” And Frederick Jewitt, a gas stoker from Gainsborough, arrived at Beverley drunk on a train on Wednesday night, August 5. Jewitt threw himself across the tracks in front of a train from Scarborough; Mr Franks, the assistant stationmaster, rolled him clear. As thanks for saving him, Jewitt threw Mr Franks - by now trying to help the suicidal man onto the platform - over his shoulder onto the rails. Mr Franks hurt his back and stayed off work. As the town’s chief constable, John Moore, put it: “If he wants to commit suicide he had better put himself in front of the Germans.” The court let off Jewitt; not because of the woes he claimed - his wife had left him, he had four children, he had been drinking all day - but because magistrates simply sent him to his regiment, after a few days on remand.
Another court case shows that the authorities did give soldiers some respect, now their country needed them to stay alive, at least until they reached the battlefield. Herbert Strutt, a Derbyshire magistrate and a deputy lord lieutenant, was driving from his home at Makeney north of Derby on Saturday August 15, to (ironically) a meeting in the county town in aid of the war. Halfway there, at Allestree Hill, Strutt overtook, at crawling pace, some marching men of the 4th Lincolnshires. Another car driven by a chauffeur, Arthur Smith, pipped its horn and came round a bend fast - at 20 to 23 miles an hour, so Strutt reckoned. Some of the soldiers had to jump out of the way and Strutt stopped his car in a hedge bottom. Before the war, the men on foot might have had to shrug off the near-miss. Someone in a car, or on a motorcycle, was all too willing to be the fastest thing on the road and expected everyone else to get out of their way. Being the richest, the motorist got away with it. But now, as magistrates told Smith, drivers had to be careful because so many troops were about. The court fined Smith £5 and banned him from driving for three months.
Another car story suggests that soldiers understood - and played on - their ne
w, albeit unlikely to last, prestige. Clifford Gothard asked a local man, a Mr Cherry, “ if I would be of any service and to try to get a job as transport driver for Arthur Wardle”; Gothard’s friend. The next day, August 12, Mr Cherry rang Gothard, to suggest Wardle could indeed get a commission in motor transport. Gothard set off into Burton-on-Trent on his bicycle with the news; on the way, on the bridge over the River Trent, he met Arthur Wardle, and a man called Arthur Linsley, in Linsley’s car. Linsley offered to push Gothard’s cycle home, while the young men drove on. The drama, fit for a silent film, had only started:
When Arthur and I had just passed the end of Wellington Street we were stopped and asked to give a lift to two Territorials, one of whom had sprained his ankle and whose mates had carried him two miles and were about ‘done up’. We willingly consented and after putting rugs and macs for him to rest his leg on we drove him down to Allsopp’s maltings and then we put him in one of the buildings. We were told it was the wrong one and so Arthur and I carried the chap into the proper building and I asked the officer if it would not be better for the men to have some bags to sit on, so some were brought. Arthur shaking hands with the man with the bad ankle and the officer commanding.
Finally, Gothard told his friend to apply for a commission at Lichfield nearby. Arthur Linsley had earlier given a lift to the town’s police superintendent, a sergeant and a constable, ‘to try and capture a spy’ in the suburb of Stapenhill, ‘so he had quite a lot of adventures in one morning’. While Gothard did not say any more about the poorly soldier and his mates, and may not even have noticed their cheekiness, we can speculate what they made of their lift. But for the war, would two well-off young men - officer material - like Gothard and Wardle have done a good turn for common soldiers? Would the soldiers have dared to ask for such favours? That Arthur Wardle shook hands all round suggests that he was looking ahead to being part of the army. Thousands of soldiers had been gathering for the previous few days in the ‘maltings’, Burton’s brewery buildings where labourers shovelled barley, but which were empty in summer. As so often that month, the men had to make the best of the basic conditions they were given. We can sense, therefore, that the soldiers enjoyed thumbing a lift, and being fussed over, and would have seen the humour in the rather prim civilian Clifford Gothard telling an officer to bring bags for them to sit on.