by Mark Rowe
As the watershed between a largely peaceful previous few decades and a pair of world wars and a potential third, August 1914 provoked many reminisces and soul-searching about what it did to Europe. Two examples from different eras are World War: Its Cause and Cure, by Lionel Curtis (1945), and the inaugural lecture by Prof A G Lehmann at the University of Hull, published as a pamphlet The Unities of Europe (1979). A book I grew up with, about the town I grew up in, County Borough: History of Burton upon Trent, Part One, by Denis Stuart (1974) has its own poignancy, drawing on ageing townspeople’s memories of former things such as trams, temperance and pawnbrokers. Part Two (1977) has a pen-portrait of Clifford Gothard on page 218. For the Meynell family see the evocative Hoar Cross Hall Staffordshire: Portrait of a Victorian Country House, by Gareth Evans (1994); for A T ‘Dan’ Daniel’s years as headmaster, see W G Torrance’s The History of Alleyne’s Grammar School Uttoxeter 1558-1958, (1958), pages 59-66.
You can walk down long Ella Street in Hull as the architect and diarist George Thorp did, and I have been inside Clifford Gothard’s old house at the top of Bearwood Hill Road in Burton, now a retirement home. Anyone can pay to go in Francis Meynell’s Hoar Cross Hall, now a spa. You can walk as Arthur Ross must have done from his home, then on the outskirts of Beverley at 101 Grove Hill Road, into town, over the railway crossing, and to his workplace, county hall. Any sense of 1914 anywhere is, however, elusive. Likewise in my cricket book The Victory Tests, about matches between England and an Australian Services XI in 1945, it struck me how hard it was to find anywhere that had stayed the same. It must have been easier for someone in England in 1914 to find places that had not changed since 1814, since the age of Jane Austen and the stagecoach. Villages such as William Swift’s Churchdown, then physically and economically free of nearby Gloucester and Cheltenham, have merged into towns.
We best seek 1914 not in the cities or in the deserted parts of the country, but in between, places such as the Essex coast as painted by George Rose on holiday; or towns that were small then as now, such as Ledbury, visited by William Swift and his son Leonard for the day on August 6. “It is a fair walk up into the town from the station like it is in Berkeley,” Swift wrote. “We lunched on some sandwiches brought by Leonard and some very fair ale.” Even then the houses to Swift’s eyes were of a ‘former age’.
Or, we can enjoy the seaside towns, built to cater for that era: such as Scarborough, Skegness, Southsea and Ilfracombe. Or the grand railway stations where passengers, then as now, changed trains; Carlisle, Bristol, York - to name only places I have lived in. I recall particularly how, when I began work at the evening paper in Carlisle in August, 1995, my walk from home to work could take me through Carlisle railway station, over the platforms, where post trains still stood at night, though the provincial press - whose bundles ‘WM’ saw at dawn - was, even then, not what it was. Some buildings dating from 1914 - Newark Drill Hall, the Burton-on-Trent museum - still stand, though their use has changed, or ended.
I imagined myself closest to 1914 in Beverley, not in the now pedestrianised shopping streets but the dignified streets off the minster and the market place. I must have been walking where Arthur Ross and the Church Lads Brigade once marched. I was sad to read the short, almost brutally so, list in his journal of his dates home on leave from the war, such a contrast to the comradely feelings that must have prompted him to keep his peacetime journal about his service with the Church Lads. The war killed something inside Arthur Ross, even before his physical death in France.
At the risk of leaving the humbug and deceit intact, sometimes the only dignified response is silence. Hence I did not go into the myth of the ‘angel of Mons’ and alleged German atrocities, covered ably by John Terraine in the first two chapters of his The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War 1861-1945 (1981 edition). For evidence of how some Boer War and earlier soldiers liked to place letters home in newspapers, see the article ‘Military correspondents in the late nineteenth century press’, by Prof Edward M Spiers, in Archives, volume 32 (April 2007). Capt J C Dunn, in The War The Infantry Knew, wrote for September 20, 1914 (page 65) how soldiers were writing ‘lurid’ and ‘highly coloured’ letters home, tongue in cheek, to earn money from newspapers printing their ‘adventures’. That said, I would argue that men sending letters home earlier, before they heard of such newspaper offers, and wounded men sent home and interviewed in England, would feel like telling the truth, as best they could, rather than inventing something (and what?).
Later, as the war dragged on, not only the bad things about war, but the fraud - the difference between what was said about it at home and what war was really like - soured men and coarsened life, for long afterwards. August 1914 has a long reach, into this century, even. Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who counted King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II as family, attended the coronation of her great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. She described her August 1914 on pages 140-1 of My Memories of Six Reigns (1956; paperback 1961).
Now I can fold away my Bartholomew’s 1:1,000,000 scale cloth map of France and the Low Countries (1950). The ten-volume 1895 Chambers’s Encyclopaedia that my father bought as a not-quite complete set has been a help for its articles and maps. As a good omen, I have not wished for the missing volume four (D to H). As my father has had to learn as an amputee, and as many learned after 1914, a man can go on even when something is missing. My thanks to Dr Amanda Field of Chaplin Books for bringing my work to print.
Mark Rowe
Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, August 2013
Sources by Chapter
Chapter 1: First Shots
Gerald Legge letters from Sudan: Staffordshire record office (Stafford), D 859/⅓/8. Clifford Gothard’s diary, Stafford, D4054/2/4. For a description of Kordofan province (about the size of France) in the 1920s, when Staffordshire Regiment soldiers served there, see the Staffordshire Knot annual for 1928, pages 11-12.
Alan Brooke’s letters from India: Liddell Hart centre for military studies, King’s College London (KCL).
Eva Tibbitts’ letter from Canada: Gloucestershire record office (Gloucester), D5049/2.
Chapter 2: Ways to Die
William Thomas Pickbourne’s journal: Nottinghamshire record office (Nottingham), DD2560/1/5.
Robert Blakeby’s diary: City of Westminster archives (Westminster), Accession 1489/7.
Inquest cases from newspapers: Walsall history centre, glue factory worker burned to death, Walsall Observer, May 23, 1914; miner’s wife died of burns, Walsall Observer, April 11, 1914.
William Thomas Swift diary for 1914: Gloucester, D398¼5.
Lord Charles Beresford’s unveiling of statue to the captain of the Titanic: Lichfield record office (Lichfield), Lichfield Mercury, July 31, 1914.
Chapter 3: What is an Englishman?
Philip Gibbs’ story of arrest in Belgrade in 1912: Newcastle central library, The Graphic, August 1, 1914. See also his memoir The Pageant of the Years, (1946), page 93.
Guy Paget memoir: Leicestershire record office (Leicester), DE 4795/26/1.
Overnight journey by ‘WM’ to Scotland: Tamworth library, Tamworth Herald, August 8, 1914.
Eric Bennett memoir: Stafford, File 4274.
Carpentier-Smith heavyweight boxing fight: Sheffield central library, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, July 15 to 18, 1914, among other newspapers of those days.
Arthur Ellerker Ross’ scrapbook and account of the Beverley Company of the Church Lads Brigade: East Riding archives (Beverley). For his father Henry’s occupation, Kelly’s North and East Riding Directory (1913), page 466.
Chapter 4: The Quid Pro Quo
Lord St Aldwyn’s speech at Sandon: Wolverhampton archives (Wolverhampton), Express & Star, July 24, 1914.
Richard Holt MP’s journal: Liverpool city archives (Liverpool), 920 DUR 1/10.
Sir
Richard Cooper MP’s ‘frank’ speech: Walsall Observer, April 11, 1914. Ben Tillett’s speech, Walsall Observer, May 23, 1914. Philip Ashworth speech, Lichfield Mercury, May 1, 1914.
Suffragette assault on Mr McKinnon Wood: Market Harborough Advertiser, July 21, 1914, for example. Bow Street magistrate’s remarks: Holborn library, London borough of Camden, St Pancras Gazette, July 3, 1914. Crowd unfriendly to shouting suffragette outside Buckingham Palace, Wolverhampton Express & Star, July 23, 1914, for example.
New Scotland Yard memo and militant suffragettes’ photo-parade: Lincolnshire record office (Lincoln), Constab 2/2/3/1.
Chapter 5: On the Brink
Robin Page Arnot, typed memoir, dated 1974: Hull history centre (Hull), U DAR (2)/2/6. With the Fabians for one night only was Leonard Woolf; see his Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918, (1964), page 167.
Gordon Shephard helping with famous delivery of guns to Irish nationalists at Howth: Royal Air Force museum archives, Hendon, north London (RAF Museum), Memoirs of Brigadier General Gordon Shephard, privately printed, (1924), edited by Shane Leslie.
Donald Weir’s July 1914 letter home from India, ‘what with the trouble in Dublin’: Leicester, DE 2913, bundle 2.
Frank Balfour letters from Sudan to ‘my dear Irene’: Hull, DDFA /3/6/26.
War reporter E Ashmead Bartlett’s journey from London to Sofia: Leeds central library, Yorkshire Post, August 15, 1914.
A T Daniel’s cycle holiday in France: Uttoxeter library, Uttoxeter Advertiser and Times, September 23 and 30 and October 7, 1914.
Chapter 6: The Island Club
Captain Sycamore, towed by the German Kaiser: Essex record office (Chelmsford), Essex County Standard, August 15, 1914, a story it admitted it lifted from the East Anglian Daily Times.
Maynard Willoughby Colchester-Wemyss’ letters to the King of Siam: Gloucester, D37/1.
Grey’s line ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe’: from Life, Journalism and Politics by J A Spender, volume 2, (1927), page 13.
Chapter 7: The Long Bank Holiday
Sir Mark Sykes MP’s letter: Hull, U DDSY /x2/½f/27.
H C Mitchell in Brussels: Tamworth Herald, August 8, 1914.
Colin Davidson sending telegrams to tell the British Empire it was at war: Memoirs of a Conservative, JCC Davidson’s Memoirs and Papers 1910-37, edited by Robert Rhodes James (1969), page 20.
Prime minister Herbert Asquith on the ‘cheering crowds of loafers and holiday-makers’ in Downing Street: August 4 entry in his Memories and Reflections, (1928), volume 2.
Emily MacManus in front of Buckingham Palace on the outbreak of war: from her memoir Matron of Guy’s, (1956), page 87.
Anonymous witness in front of Buckingham Palace: Leeds library, Pudsey and Stanningley News, August 14, 1914.
Robert Ramsey diary: London Metropolitan archives, F/Rmy/028. For the suggestion that the crowds in front of Buckingham Palace were not actors in some open-air theatre but were loyally ‘hymning to the king’, see The Men From The Greenwood .... Being the War History of the 11th (Service) Battalion Sherwood Foresters, by Percy Fryer, (1920), page 10. Copy in Nottingham library.
Hearing of the outbreak of war in Wellington, New Zealand: Sydney Morning Herald, August 7, 1914. For a remarkable photograph showing Adolf Hitler among the outbreak of war crowd in Munich, see Ian Kershaw’s Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris (1998).
‘All wars are popular on the day of their declaration’: War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, volume one, (1933), page 42.
Rhodesia Trading Company’s foiled plan to raise prices 15 per cent: Derbyshire record office (Matlock), Microfilm 781, TC 2/520.
George Thorp diary: Hull, L/DIGT. For his home and work addresses, Kelly’s Hull Directory 1914, pages 68 and 542.
Chapter 8: The News
GvC Harper diary: Churchill College archives, Cambridge, HRPR 1/1. James Somerville diary: SMVL 2/1.
Donald Weir, longing ‘to have a dig at the Germans’: Leicester, DE 2913, bundle 2.
Chapter 9: Spies
George Rose diary: Chelmsford, D/DU 418/15.
Burtonians threatened for taking photographs of warships at Grimsby: Burton Daily Mail, August 8, 1914.
Bert Faulkner mistaking northerner for a German: Walsall Observer, August 22, 1914.
Mr Durose mistaking an Indian prince for a German, and other national defence work by Lincolnshire police: Lincoln, Constab 2/3/½/1.
Swearing in of special constables at Newark, and the court case of the missing Southwell shoes: Newark Advertiser, September 9, 1914.
Memo by Major Kell to Winston Churchill on the suspect von Bulow: Churchill archives, microfilm, Char 13/44/57.
Chapter 10: Serving Men
Francis Grenfell’s farewell letter to Churchill: Churchill archives, microfilm, Char 13/45/22.
A drunk asking Christopher Hollis’ father to pray for him: Christopher Hollis, Along the Road to Frome, (1958), page 22.
The drunk Frederick Jewitt at Beverley railway station: East Riding archives, Beverley Guardian, August 8, 1914.
Herbert Strutt and marching soldiers in near-accident on the road: Derby local history library, Derby Advertiser, September 18, 1914.
Chapter 11: Spectators on the Shore
Rev Denys Yonge diary: Chelmsford, D/DCI 358/26.
Dorothy Wright diary: Matlock, D5430/49/5.
Minutes book of the Burton upon Trent branch of the Soldiers and Sailors’ Families Association (SSFA): Lichfield, D34/1.
Arthur Bryan letters to his wife: Matlock, D5948/1 microfilm M1029.
Lady Gwendoline Churchill letters to her husband: Churchill archives, PCHL 5/1.
Chapter 12: Politics
The kaiser as a ‘poor misguided man’: Market Harborough Advertiser, August 11, 1914.
Speeches on Britain having ‘clean hands’: Ashbourne Telegraph, August 7, and Lichfield Mercury, August 21, 1914.
Lord St Aldwyn letters to his son: Gloucester, D 2455/F3/10/¼.
Lord Milner letter to Philip Lyttelton Gell: Matlock, D3287 MIL 1/657.
Chapter 13: Business as Usual?
Joseph Leslie Dent’s diary: from History of the South Staffordshire Regiment 1705-1923, by James P Jones, (1923), pages 242-59. Copy in Stafford library.
Harold Cook postcard promising to write from Berlin: Lincoln, LLHS 38/4/2.
Socialists assaulted for speaking in public against the war: Harry Pollitt, Serving my Time: An apprenticeship to Politics, (1940), pages 64-66. Herbert Morrison, An Autobiography, page 63. For a Scottish socialist against the war (and all for a fight to defend anti-war meetings), see Pioneering Days by Thomas Bell, (1941), pages 101-4.
Papers of the supplies in time of war sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence: Liverpool, 920 DUR 14/34.
Francis Meynell’s letters to family: Stafford, D861/P/1/12.
J C ‘Farmer’ White having to work on the farm instead of play cricket for Somerset against Yorkshire at Weston super Mare: Bristol central library, Western Daily Press, August 28, 1914.
Chapter 14: Recruiting
Colonel Chichester not seeing any disadvantages to joining the army: Cambridge central library, Huntingdonshire Post, September 11, 1914.
Robert Thornewill’s talk to his workmen: Burton Evening Gazette, September 1, 1914.
Harold Begbie poem, widely reprinted from the Daily Chronicle: Cannock library, Cannock Advertiser, September 5, 1914.
Miles Thomas shocked, angered and shamed by a white feather: Out on a Wing. An autobiography, by Sir Miles Thomas, (1964), page 38-9.
Chapter 15: United?
Labour MP Jimmy Thomas’ support for the war: Derby Mercury, September 11, 1914. See also My Story, by J H Thomas, (1937), pages 37-38.
The letters between Churchi
ll, Lord Charles Beresford and Arthur Lee MP after Beresford shot his mouth off too far at the Carlton Club: Churchill archives, Char 13/43.
An example of the shout ‘shall we be beaten?!’: Burton Daily Mail, August 6, 1914. Also, unrelated, examples of the ‘are we down-hearted?!’ cry: Walsall Observer, August 8, 1914; and British troops shouting it as they landed at Boulogne; The Times, August 18, 1914.
Complaints in newspapers of volunteers for the army having to queue: for example, Sheffield Daily Independent, September 2, 1914; and Derby Daily Telegraph, September 7, 1914 (with official excuse the next day).
Chapter 16: Food
The Charles Dickens quotation comes from The Dent uniform edition of Dickens’ Journalism, volume 4, The Uncommercial Traveller and other papers 1859-70, edited by Michael Slater and John Drew (2000), page 98.
C W Colchester-Weymss and the woman he almost married, Miss C Quinlon Day, are each named in Kelly’s Gloucestershire Directory (1914), page 364.
Chapter 17: Rumours
George Lakeman denying he was a German: Newmarket Journal, August 22, 1914.
Court case of Ashbourne man warning ‘the Germans are coming’: Uttoxeter Advertiser, August 26, 1914.
On rumours of Russian troops passing through England: Memoirs of Sir Almeric Fitzroy volume 2, page 569. Robert Bull diary: Chelmsford, T/B 245/3. For his occupation, see Kelly’s Essex Directory (1914), page 90. Miss Laura Partridge told in France the Russians were coming: Willesden Chronicle, September 4, 1914.
Churchill airing the idea of bringing Russian troops to Ostend: The Churchill Documents volume 6, (1972), page 31.
Chapter 18: First Returns
William Simpson writing home: Ashbourne Telegraph, September 4, 1914.
Colonel Lang with letter from his son in the trenches: Bristol Times and Mirror, September 4, 1914.