The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  By January 1922 the number of unemployed had passed two million, among whom were some 50,000 to 60,000 former servicemen. Morale among unemployed veterans was very low indeed. As a former sergeant wrote to the Daily Express:

  Life has reached the stage when it is an overwhelming burden. Those for whom we fought in the War have taken from us our means of existence. We are informed that we are not wanted. Industry can carry on quite nicely without us.

  This, then, is our reward: to exist on a pauper’s pittance, helped out by what we can borrow from a lean and uncertain future.

  I look at the wording on my Victory medal.* I think of my hopeless present and my doubly hopeless future, and I curse the system under which I must deny my children and myself even the bare necessities of existence, until, worn out, my mortgage perhaps still unpaid, I sink with a sigh of relief to the grave.

  In the run-up to 11 November that year so many ex-service-men found themselves in a similar state that the London District Council of Unemployed decided to join in the Armistice Day ceremony and organise ‘a big procession of a fitting character to march past the Cenotaph’. They wrote to the police to inform them of this plan and were told that although they could not join the main procession they would be permitted to march past the Cenotaph and lay a wreath once the official ceremony had finished.

  Some 25,000 of the unemployed assembled on the Embankment on the morning of 11 November, then lined up in Northumberland Avenue awaiting a signal from the police that their march could commence. The large crowd that had gathered to witness the official observance had yet to disperse and had not expected this addition to the day’s events. And it must have been an impressive sight, not least because each contingent marched under a banner on which hundreds of medals had been pinned.

  Out of the grey mist came the wail of the fifes from the unemployed bands and the measured tread of tramping men. Into Whitehall came the long trail of drab humanity, with their medals hanging from the red banners and the pawn tickets pinned on their coats, as an indictment against the system which praises the dead and condemns the living to starvation. On they came, steady and inevitable. Bemedalled and bearing obvious signs of poverty they stirred the dense throng of sightseers to a sense of deep emotion and a realisation of the injustice which was being meted out by man to man.

  ‘Who are these people?’ asked one young woman to another on the sidewalk. ‘Why – they’re the unemployed.’ ‘Then good luck to them,’ said the first girl bitterly, almost savagely. ‘Disgraceful,’ snorted a red-faced old man, with a fur-clad young creature on his arm. ‘Those men are Bolsheviks,’ he said. ‘But look at their medals,’ said the girl. A woman in a black shawl turned on the old man. ‘Shut up your bloody gap! If you’d been out of work as long as my old man, you’d be a Bolshevik.’ A murmur of approval went through the crowd.

  Wal Hannington, from whose book this colourful description is taken, does not say whether the murmur of approval continued when, after laying a wreath bearing the inscription ‘From the living victims – the unemployed – to our dead comrades, who died in vain’, the ex-servicemen passed out of Whitehall to the strains of ‘The Red Flag’ and ‘The Internationale’. The march undoubtedly did, however, make people realise that many of these men who had fought in the war being commemorated that November day were returning to ‘cold hungry homes’. That said, this impressive and moving demonstration went unreported in The Times’ account of the day’s proceedings.

  Groups of unemployed ex-servicemen could still be found marching through the streets collecting money to relieve financial hardship. ‘In the main,’ Hannington wrote sniffily, these ‘Local Unemployed Ex-service Men’s Organisations’ ‘had no clear working-class policy and they appeared to be formed purely for charity-mongering purposes’. By now, however, these numerous groups had been organised into one representative body. In June 1919 the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers decided to open its membership to commissioned as well as non-commissioned officers, while the National Association of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers began to shed its links to the Trades Union and Labour movements. An attempt to bring these two organisations together with the Comrades of the Great War under the umbrella of the Empire Services League had earlier failed because there was a general feeling that this idea had been sponsored by the government for its own ends. The League had in fact been set up partly to oversee the distribution of the residual funds of the Expeditionary Force Canteens and the Navy and Army Canteen Board. During the war these two bodies had provided canteens run by the Army Service Corps, where men on overseas duty or on leave back in Blighty could buy food and drink to supplement the rations they received at the front. Considerable profits had accumulated, and it had been decided that these should be used to help former servicemen. Eventually the Admiralty set up its own Royal Naval Benevolent Trust, leaving the army and air force’s share to be administered by the United Services Fund (USF), overseen by the same General Byng who had been dispatched to quell the mutiny at Calais in 1919.

  While the USF did much to bring the various veterans’ groups together, it was another controversial military figure, General Haig, who was largely responsible for the eventual founding of one organisation: the British Legion. Whatever veterans may have thought of his conduct of the war, Haig won widespread favour after the Armistice by refusing a viscountcy and the substantial pension that went with it until the government had sorted out the payments due to ordinary servicemen. A Joint Conference on Unity was held in August 1920 at which delegates from the five major veterans’ organisations (the Federation, the Association, the Comrades, the National Union of Ex-Servicemen and the recently formed Officers’ Association) came together under the chairmanship of the Federation’s T.F. Lister, who had served in the war as a gunner. One of the principal stumbling blocks for unity was the various political affiliations of these groups, which Lister insisted had to be abandoned in favour of a non-party approach to the lobbying of Parliament. The least amenable to such a suggestion was the NUX, which had been excluded from the United Services Fund and whose members were described in the official history of the British Legion – not entirely objectively, one senses – as ‘militants and, perhaps, Marxists, lacerated by their experiences into a bitter, brooding group’. Also suspicious of the proposed coming together of these disparate organisations was the Officers’ Association, which had successfully raised funds for itself, including a hefty £637,000 from public donations, and did not wish to see this hard-won money disbursed among other veterans. Indeed, it had already set about applying for a royal charter in order to safeguard these funds. In spite of the very different concerns of these two organisations, and the objections of a loyally leftist senior representative of the Federation, the decision to amalgamate the veterans’ associations went through. The troublesome NUX subsequently withdrew from discussions, and shortly thereafter ceased to exist, but over the next few months a draft constitution for what became the British Legion was drawn up and approved at a further conference in December.

  Choosing a name for this new body took a great deal of further discussion. Among the suggestions was the Imperial Federation of Comrades and the Warriors’ Guild, the latter scotched when some dissident at a conference responded audibly: ‘The Warriors Gulled!’ The less imperialist and militarist ‘British Legion’ was eventually agreed upon and formalised at a three-day conference at the Queen’s Hall in London in May 1921, at which its principles and policy were formulated and its officers elected. Haig became the Legion’s president, and the Prince of Wales its first patron. The conference had begun with a silence honouring the dead, and it ended with a Sunday morning ceremony at the Cenotaph, where four representatives of the participating veterans’ associations, their rivalries now behind them, laid a laurel wreath.

  The fundamental differences that had set the former associations against each other were dealt with in the first principle of the Legion, which was that it ‘shall b
e democratic nonsectarian and not affiliated to or connected directly or indirectly with any political party or political organisations’. Rather than tugging in different political directions, they now all pulled together for the greater good, while in the regions by the end of 1921 small and rivalrous groups had come together with varying degrees of enthusiasm and reluctance to form 1,478 local branches. Individual members each paid an annual subscription of half a crown. According to its ‘principles and policies’, the Legion had been ‘created to inaugurate and maintain in a strong stimulating united and democratic comradeship all those who have served in His Majesty’s Navy Army Air Force or any Auxiliary Forces so that neither their efforts nor their interests shall be forgotten that their welfare and that of the dependants of the fallen may be safeguarded and that just and equitable treatment shall be secured to them in respect of the difficulties caused in their lives as a result of their services’. An initial membership of 18,106 in 1921 had leapt to 116,426 by the end of the following year, and to 312,506 by the end of the decade. A sense of comradeship, particularly in small communities, was perhaps what appealed most to former servicemen, the opportunity to get together with those who had undergone similar experiences. There remained some veterans, however, who simply wanted to put the war behind them. Some never joined the Legion at all: Harry Patch had nothing to do with the organisation until very late in his long life, and was not enrolled as a member until 2008.

  In the 1920s, however, the Legion was mainly concerned with improving the material circumstances of veterans. While the National Constructive Programme decided upon in 1921 had international objectives, including working for peace ‘while taking care that the defence of the Empire is adequately provided for’, its principal national objective was to persuade ‘Government, Municipal, and Local Authorities, and other employers of labour [to] give preference in employment to ex-service men and women seeking employment’. The Legion even wanted to ensure that women who had taken jobs during the war and were ‘not dependants of service men or actual bread-winners’ surrendered their jobs to those who had served at the front – though quite how this was to be achieved was not explained. Provision should be made for the retraining of those who had lost their jobs and a guarantee should be given that they would subsequently return to the workforce. Financial and other encouragement should also be given to people starting up their own businesses. Meanwhile, the government should provide ‘reasonable maintenance’ for those who remained out of work until such time that they secured employment. Particular facilities should be made available to the disabled who wished to work; they should be given ‘special preference […] as regards travelling and admission to places of recreation and entertainment’; and their pensions, and those of war widows and other dependants, should be guarded ‘jealously’.

  Given that such things would take some time, and much lobbying, to secure, the Legion needed to take the lead in providing money to ease hardship. Consequently it took over assorted funds for disbursement, including £157,000 collected by the National Relief Fund, which had been set up by the Prince of Wales at the beginning of the war. The Legion’s core income derived from annual subscriptions, but at first these were slow to come in. The organisation derived much-needed additional income from fund-raising events such as Warriors’ Day in March 1921, when various entertainments in theatres and cinemas brought in some £70,000. The seventh anniversary of the outbreak of the war was used to mount a newspaper appeal which raised £10,400. The biggest fund-raising initiative, however, and the one for which the Legion is still best known, was the Poppy Appeal.

  One of the most memorable sights on those parts of the Western Front that had not been turned into a quagmire was scarlet sheets of what came to be known as Flanders poppies. The Flanders poppy is in fact the common field poppy (Papaver rhoeas), then an equally familiar sight in English cornfields. The seeds of this plant can lie dormant for years but germinate when soil has been turned over, either by the plough or – as at the front – by high explosives. The fragile appearance of the blood-red petals belies this plant’s essential toughness, and this, along with the sense it gave of life emerging triumphantly from utter devastation, made it a potent symbol for the soldiers. In one of the war’s great poems, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, Isaac Rosenberg conjures up both the bloody colour and fragility of the poppies, ‘whose roots are in man’s veins’ and whose petals ‘drop’ everywhere. The sense of wonder caused by glimpsing poppies growing amid chaos and carnage is best caught in a passage from Cecil Lewis’s Sagittarius Rising. Trudging along roads of splintered trees, past ruined farms, Lewis witnessed ‘a desolation, unimaginable from the air’:

  Yet (Oh, the catch at the heart!), among the devastated cottages, the tumbled, twisted trees, the desecrated cemeteries, opening, candid, to the blue heaven, the poppies were growing! Clumps of crimson poppies, thrusting out from the lips of craters, straggling in drifts between the hummocks, undaunted by the desolation, heedless of human fury and stupidity, Flanders poppies, basking in the sun!

  The Flanders poppy also inspired one of the most popular poems of the war, written at an Ypres dressing station in April 1915 by a Canadian doctor called John McCrae. ‘In Flanders Fields’ was published in Punch the following December, and its picture of the poppies that ‘blow/Between the crosses, row on row’, followed by an exhortation from the dead who lie there to continue the fight, gained immediate and enduring popularity. It also prompted a reply, endorsing McCrae’s sentiments, from a patriotic American called Moina Michael, who was serving in New York with the Overseas YMCA War Workers. After the war she led a campaign for US veterans to adopt the poppy as an emblem. These artificial poppies were made in France and exported to the States, all proceeds going to French children who had been affected by the war. In August 1921, the general secretary of the British Legion was shown some samples and told that the French manufacturers could supply his organisation with similar ones. Keen to find ways to raise funds, the Legion was nevertheless wary of what sounded like a small operation with no apparent credentials. A representative of the Legion was sent to France to investigate. After he came back reassured, a decision was taken to place a large order for paper poppies that could be sold to the public. By wearing the flowers on Armistice Day people would demonstrate that they were keeping faith with the Empire’s million dead.

  The demand for poppies exceeded all expectations, and hastily improvised additional ones, using somewhat bloodless pink blotting paper, had to be made up at the Legion’s headquarters. It is thought that some eight million people sported a poppy on 11 November 1921. Sales raised £106,000, which in terms of spending power is today roughly the equivalent of £1.3 million, and the poppy would become a feature of Armistice Days and Remembrance Sundays thereafter. The Legion decided that rather than leave the manufacture of poppies to a French company they would set up their own small workshop in rented premises on the Old Kent Road, staffed by five severely disabled former servicemen. The British version of the poppy was far more stylised than those made in France, which had multiple petals and stamens. Two versions were made: cotton ones retailing at threepence and larger silk ones, which sold for a shilling – though it was naturally hoped that people would give more than the basic price. The black central boss bore the legend ‘Haig Fund’, a shortened form of the Earl Haig Appeal, which became the organisation that distributed profits raised by the sale of the flowers.

  The demand grew year by year, with gross receipts increasing on average by some £50,000 a year, and the workshop was subsequently moved to much larger premises in Richmond, where it employed 191 former servicemen. Poppies had rapidly achieved official status, and indeed royal patronage in 1924, when the factory first supplied poppy wreaths for the Royal Family to lay at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day. Since the wreaths were more or less imperishable, and all proceeds from their sale went to help disabled servicemen, people began to follow the royal lead, and wreaths made at the Poppy Factory in Rich
mond gradually superseded the fresh flowers that had hitherto been laid at war memorials. In 1928 an Empire Field of Remembrance was instituted outside Westminster Abbey, in which people ‘planted’ artificial poppies. This was an immediate success, and was made more practical when it was suggested that the poppies should be attached to small wooden crosses, which people could buy and embed in the sward in neat rows, replicating in miniature the war cemeteries of France and Belgium. Latterly, these crosses would be burned after use and the ashes taken to be scattered on the battlefields.

  At the 1922 general election, prompted by the Conservative Party’s withdrawal from the coalition government, the British Legion circulated its members with a list of thirteen questions for political candidates to answer. Most of the questions related to employment, pensions and disability allowances, but candidates were also asked: ‘Do you support the League of Nation’s policy that November 11th should be instituted as a National Day of Commemoration and as a National Holiday?’ This fulfilled the Legion’s pledge upon its formation ‘to institute throughout the Empire a National Day of Commemoration for those who fell in the Great War, and to press upon the Governments concerned the desirability of instituting such a day as a General Holiday’. Although no government agreed to this, Armistice Day was often celebrated in some style once the solemnities at the Cenotaph had been observed, with the evening devoted to balls and dinners. The Legion’s proposal highlighted a difficulty felt by Lloyd George when contemplating the Peace Day in 1919: there was a desire to commemorate the dead and at the same time to mark the joyful anniversary of the war’s successful conclusion. It might well have been a good idea to have had two separate days, since those who attended balls on the night of 11 November were sometimes virtually accused of dancing on the graves of the fallen, even though the proceeds of such events invariably went to charity. Most of these complaints came from people who had not actually endured the trenches; veterans who recalled their feelings of joy and relief when they realised that the war was over and that they had survived were less inclined to criticise. Haig spoke for many when he publicly declared that there was nothing wrong with people, having taken part in ceremonies at war memorials, to indulge themselves in ‘afternoon games suited to the climate’, and in the evening ‘rejoice according to their taste’.