Great War Britain Birmingham: Remembering 1914-18 E-Book

Sian Roberts

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 170

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The First World War claimed over 995,000 British lives, and its legacy continues to be remembered today. Great War Britain: Birmingham offers an intimate portrayal of the city and its people living in the shadow of the Â'war to end all warsÂ'. A beautifully illustrated and highly accessible volume, it describes local reaction to the outbreak of war; charts the experience of individuals who enlisted; the changing face of industry; the work of the many hospitals in the area; the effect of the conflict on local children; the women who defied convention to play a vital role on the home front; and concludes with a chapter dedicated to how the city and its people coped with the transition to life in peacetime once more. The Great War story of Birmingham is told through the voices of those who were there and is vividly illustrated through evocative images from the archives of the Library of Birmingham.

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to the memory of Pam Gwynfa Williams – Birmingham teacher, historian and friend.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Timeline

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Mobilising the City

2. Exile and Refuge

3. A Hive of Industry

4. Writing Home

5. Determination and Dissent

6. Peace and Aftermath

Legacy: Mourning and Memorials

Bibliography and Sources

Copyright

TIMELINE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all my colleagues in the Learning Resources Team of the Library of Birmingham for their help and support, particularly Charlotte Tucker and Kathryn Hall from the Digital Team and Nhia Huynh from the Conservation Team. Grateful thanks are also due to Anne Elliott from the Music Library for the information about music in the period, to Dr Andy Green for his initial research in the newspaper collections, and to Professor Ian Grosvenor with whom I have collaborated on the research into children during the war.

I am grateful to Sarah Foden and the Cadbury Archive, Mondelez International for permission to reproduce the images on pages 35, 110, 140 and 144, and to Jo-Ann Curtis and Birmingham Museums Trust for access to the oral histories at the museum and permission to quote from the interviews. I would also like to thank the Barrow family for their kind permission to reproduce the two illustrations by Joseph Southall.

INTRODUCTION

‘Sorrow seems on every hand.’

Elizabeth Cadbury, August 1916

‘Do we realise what historic times these are?’

Henry Gibbs, January 1919

The two voices above both appear in the First World War archives of the Library of Birmingham. Both represent different experiences of living through the conflict in the city. Elizabeth Cadbury, an affluent and privileged woman of influence, who would later be honoured for her part in the war effort, was writing during the summer of the Somme. The second writer, Henry Gibbs, was a boy just turning 14, reflecting on the advent of peace and the last four and a half years of his childhood a few days before he left school.1

The First World War touched the lives of every man, woman and child in Birmingham. All aspects of life were affected – from the price of food, to family life and a child’s education at school. How an individual experienced the conflict, however, was profoundly coloured by age, gender, social class, nationality, and economic circumstances. A person’s religious beliefs or political perspective could radically determine the choices they made or the paths they followed. For some the war brought a chance to expand their horizons: to serve their country, learn new skills or earn higher wages, even if these opportunities were only temporary. For others the war brought permanent change, fracturing their world through death, disability or grief for the loss of loved ones.

This book aims to tell some of the stories of how war was experienced by people in Birmingham, as told through the city’s archive collections. It is not intended as a complete history of the city and its people at war as that would be far too large a task for one book. The first history of Birmingham and the war was published by Brazier and Sandford in 1921, and for several aspects of the conflict it remains the standard reference work. With the notable exception of Terry Carter’s Birmingham Pals, many aspects of Birmingham and the First World War remain largely under researched and untold.

One of the aims of this book, therefore, is to draw attention to the potential riches of the Library of Birmingham’s archive and local history collections, and encourage people to use them to explore the history of their families or local communities during the conflict. It also hopefully brings to the fore some of the lesser-known aspects of Birmingham at war, such as the experience of children, the tensions and issues faced by families, and the real dilemmas faced by individuals as they responded to circumstances that are hard for us, a century later, to comprehend.

All the images, and the vast majority of the quotations from archives used in this book, come from the collections of the Library of Birmingham unless stated otherwise. Document reference numbers are given in the endnotes to each chapter, and the original spelling and punctuation has been retained when quoting from archive sources.

Sian Roberts, Collection Curator,

Library of Birmingham, 2014

Endnotes

1 MS 466/1/1/15/3/13; The Cradle, January 1919.

1

MOBILISING THE CITY

Birmingham at the outbreak of war was a leading city of the British Empire, where huge wealth and opportunity sat side by side with extreme poverty and hardship. It had grown dramatically from the small town of the eighteenth century to a manufacturing and industrial powerhouse, and the major employers – Cadbury, Dunlop, Nettlefold and Austin – employed thousands of workers. Granted city status in 1889, it was then expanded considerably by the Greater Birmingham Act of 1911 which almost trebled the city’s geographical area and brought Aston Manor, Erdington, Handsworth, Yardley and most of King’s Norton and Northfield within the city boundary. A month before war was declared, on 2 July 1914, the city’s best-known politician and elder statesman, Joseph Chamberlain, died and was buried at Key Hill Cemetery.

Even before the war began, the impact of European uncertainty was felt in Birmingham. The end of July and first few days of August 1914 saw a significant rise in the cost of living as food prices rocketed. On Saturday, 31 July the price of butter, bacon and sugar went up alarmingly.1 A few days later the local press reported a run on food shops and many closed their premises.2 By the end of the first week of war, the price of sugar had increased from two and a half pence a pound to between five and six pence, and bacon from between ten pence and one shilling per pound to over a shilling and two pence a pound. Some of the immediate wartime measures made the situation worse, the military requisitioning of forty-five of the Co-operative Society’s horses, for example, meant that routine food deliveries were impossible.

Playbill from the Gaiety Theatre advertising a war news film, August 1914. (Theatre Playbills Collection)

The hike in prices was accompanied by a depression in trade. Contracts and orders were cancelled or put on hold due to uncertainty about the situation. Countless people were made unemployed or put on short time which dramatically affected their pay. Firms such as Tangye, Metropolitan Waggon Works and many of the jewellery firms made drastic reductions to the working week, down to half time in many cases. William Henry Norton worked in the stores department at Veritys Plume and Victoria Works in Aston. On 7 August he received a letter from the firm:

Owing to the war … an immediate reduction in expenses is necessitated. Able-bodied unmarried men will not be required, as such can go to the Front and fight for their Country and homes, while the services of most of the lady members of the staff will be dispensed with temporarily; others will be put on reduced pay. In your case your salary will be reduced by 50% as from Monday, August 17th. If the war continues further reductions may be necessary.3

The local labour exchange dealt with double the normal rates of unemployment. In July 1914 there were 2,600 men and 600 women registered as unemployed. By the end of August this had increased to 6,200 men and 1,700 women. Male unemployment reduced during September and there were fewer than 4,000 men registered by the end of the month. In contrast the number of unemployed women increased to 1,766. Although the problems were short term and industry and employment would see a recovery very soon, there is no doubt that it caused significant hardship, particularly to the poorest who had no savings on which to fall back and so had to turn to charities for help. The records of the children’s charity Middlemore Emigration Homes illustrate how the outbreak of the war affected the poorest, and those whose circumstances as single or widowed parents exacerbated their difficulties. On 28 September, George Ball, a single father who worked at Brotherton & Co. in Nechells, turned to Middlemore for help when he could no longer maintain his child on his own. His earnings – twenty-two shillings a week when in full-time employment – had decreased substantially and he was in considerable debt. Similarly, in November, Ellen Elsmore – a single mother and hand-press worker – reported that her weekly earnings were normally between nine and twelve shillings but for the previous several weeks she had been paid only seven shillings a week and, as her rent alone was three and six, she had fallen into arrears.4

Great hardship was also caused in the early weeks of the war by the failure of the army to pay the separation allowance (a financial support due to the wives and dependants of soldiers who had enlisted) on time. Local schools reported an immediate effect on children in the poorer parts of the city as families who had lost a wage earner struggled to make ends meet. On 24 August 1914, Mr Tipper, the head teacher of Dartmouth Street School, recorded in his logbook that ‘Owing to the War there is much distress in this district. About 40 fathers and 60 brothers of our boys have been called up. The number of Free Brk. [breakfast] Cases has risen from 30 to 70. Next week will see it doubled.’ The numbers peaked on 25 September, when 300 boys were receiving free breakfasts at school. By mid-October the separation payments were beginning to come through and the hardship cases decreased accordingly.5

The initial distress caused by the war was so intense that a meeting of social welfare workers from across the city was called at the instigation of the acting lord mayor, Alderman Bowater, on 7 August. They formed the Birmingham Citizens’ Committee, which brought together the existing charitable provision of the City Aid Society and the Birmingham branch of the Charity Organisation Society. The Citizens’ Committee’s function was to relieve distress and administer national relief funds such as the Prince of Wales’ Fund. Bowater also launched a public appeal to raise money. The Citizens’ Committee comprised of a central committee based at the Council House and forty-one district committees across the city. It made temporary grants to those in need of relief and assisted with managing unemployment through a scheme for transferring people who had been thrown out of work in one trade to another where there was a labour shortage. Women, who formed a substantial part of the unemployed, were transferred from occupations such as dressmaking, tailoring, the cycle trade and pen-making into munitions and other war-related work. As government war contracts began to come through the situation improved; by the end of March 1915 there were only 249 cases of unemployment on the books.

Recruiting Office at the Municipal Technical School, c. 1914. (MS 4616/1)

Recruitment poster showing the destruction wrought by the naval bombardment of Scarborough in December 1914. (MS 4383)

BIRMINGHAM CITY BATTALIONS

On 28 August the Birmingham Post appealed to Birmingham men to enlist under the heading ‘To Arms’, and advocated raising a battalion that would be directly connected to the city. On the 29th, Alderman W.H. Bowater, the acting lord mayor, sent a telegram to the War Office offering to raise and equip a City of Birmingham Battalion, on the same principles as the ‘pals’ battalions already formed in Liverpool and Manchester. His offer was accepted. On the same day the Post carried an advertisement – ‘A “City” Brigade. Who Will Join? An Appeal for Names’ – which requested 1,000 men to come forward by the end of the week. The call was answered eagerly and the Post compiled a pre-recruitment list of volunteers which it published over the following days. By the evening of Saturday, 5 September, 4,500 names had been received. A special recruiting office was opened in the Art Gallery Extension and actual recruitment began on 7 September. The required number for the first battalion was reached within a week, and from 14 September enrolling began for a second battalion. Three City Battalions were recruited in total. Money was raised by public subscription from individuals, local firms and organisations to provide the three battalions with equipment. The men departed for their training, the first two City Battalions to Sutton Park and the third to Springfield College, Moseley, with an overflow of men billeted in local houses. Until their uniforms arrived they were dressed in civilian clothing, with a badge in their buttonhole to mark them out as City Battalion recruits. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd City Battalions were later officially known the 14th, 15th and 16th Service Battalions of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

Church Parade, Birmingham City Battalion in Corporation Street, 1915. (MS 2724/2/B/3730)

Even when the army separation allowances were being paid, there were still cases where the family could not make ends meet and the Citizens’ Committee became the local body responsible for the care and relief of dependants of soldiers and sailors. It could give supplementary grants for rent, sickness or in special emergencies. It could provide a maternity grant to poor mothers for four weeks before the birth and three weeks afterwards. It made grants to elderly parents who had lost the wages of one or more sons as well as to wives and children, and it could assist when soldiers returned home wounded. Widows were given help to fill official forms and correspond with official bodies, and the committee later also administered the War Pensions Act locally.6 Like many charitable concerns, the committee’s assistance went hand in hand with moral regulation of the behaviour of those in receipt of their help. The guide that they produced for their social workers indicates that they took a dim view of what they perceived as ‘abuse of grants’, particularly through ‘drunkenness or shirking of work by husband in unemployment cases’. Unmarried mothers were also suspect and could not receive the army separation allowance, although the Citizens’ Committee conceded that under certain circumstances it would consider making ‘a grant from the Prince of Wales’ Fund if a real home has been made for her’.7

In Birmingham, as elsewhere, the declaration of war prompted an outpouring of patriotic feelings and an initial rush to enlist in the colours. There were a considerable number of Army Reservists and Territorials in the city and it was these men who were affected first. The Reservists were mobilised immediately and included hundreds of men who worked for the city council’s various departments and for local firms. Many of them had spent July at their annual training camp and in early August they were immediately drafted into the 1st and 2nd regular Battalions of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. They were in France with the British Expeditionary Force before the month was out.8

On Sunday, 2 August, despite all the talk of oncoming war in the press, the Territorials departed for their annual training camp at Rhyl, accompanied by the city’s lord mayor, Colonel E. Martineau, in his capacity as commanding officer of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. At 2 a.m. on 3 August, they received an order to return and headed back to Birmingham – the 5th and 6th Battalions to their drill hall in Thorp Street and 8th to their drill hall in Aston. The Territorials left Birmingham on the evening of 5 August for Weymouth, cheered on by a large crowd while Lord Mayor Martineau handed over his civic duties to his deputy, Alderman W.H. Bowater.

Recruitment poster for the Warwickshire Volunteer Regiment, c. 1914–18. (MS 4383)

The local press reported proudly on the local response to the call to arms. By 7 August the Birmingham Post was writing of large crowds of young men outside the recruitment office in James Watt Street. The following day carried another report of the rush to join up in the city’s recruitment office and concluded that it indicated ‘a fine spirit of patriotism on the part of the young men of the city’.9 Additional recruiting stations had to be opened at the Town Hall, where a large thermometer outside the building recorded the recruitment level in the city, and later in the Technical School in Suffolk Street, Curzon Hall and Queens’ College. The Boy Scouts were pressed into action and ‘Birmingham’s Scout Army’, as the Weekly Mercury put it, made itself useful in the Council House and at the recruitment depots.10 A photograph on the back page of the Birmingham Gazette on 27 August showed a Scout holding up a placard emblazoned with the challenge ‘I am too young to enlist. You are not.’11

In an oral history interview with staff from Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1981, Victor Woolley recalled his reaction and that of three of his friends to the call to arms. At the time, Victor was an apprentice at Bucknam Webb’s bookbinders in Church Street:

We there and then, the four of us, decided – although I was only 17½ – that we should join the forces. The four of us had been together all through school and, er, right up to the time of the war being declared and because they were older and decided to go I also decided to join them. The lord mayor of Birmingham appealed for a thousand boys to become the City of Birmingham Battalion but he got three thousand so three battalions were formed. Unfortunately two of my friends were in the Second City Battalion stationed at Powell’s Pool and the Third City Battalion was stationed at Moseley College and I was one of those at Moseley. Erm, being under age, of course, I was a bit doubtful as to whether I should be allowed to stay and, hearing that the Second Battalion was starting a band, I applied and was transferred to the Second Battalion so I was with my other friends.12

He went on to describe his training in Sutton Park, recalling that at first they were in civilian clothes, with their membership of the City Battalions indicated by a lapel button of which he was ‘very proud’. They were later issued with a blue uniform and a peak cap with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment badge.

The story of Harold W. Perry, an employee of Canning who enlisted as No. 465 in the 1st City Battalion and later reached the rank of captain, illustrates the considerations that faced men making the decision to join up. On 4 October 1914, the day before he departed to the training camp in Sutton, he wrote to his employer from his home at No. 38 Hall Road, Handsworth. His main concern was about an allowance of twenty-five shillings a week that the firm had promised to pay to his mother whilst he was away:

I have to pay 25/- into the house each week whether I am there or not & it is absolutely necessary that this amount be forthcoming – the more so now as my two brothers have enlisted & one of them (who is an engineer) will not be paying any money into the house at all during the time he is away. Briefly then it would not have been possible for me to have joined the Army if Mr Ernest [Canning] had not made it possible for me to do so by promising, through Mr Arthur, that 25/- would be paid to my mother during the time I was away. You will appreciate, I am sure, the sacrifice my mother is making in giving up three of her sons in answer to the Country’s Call for men although, of course, she is proud to be able to do so but with regard to myself, as the eldest of the family, I consider that my first duty is to my mother.13

In June 1915, Harold moved with the rest of the City Battalions to a training camp in Yorkshire where they lived in tents. On 7 July 1915, he wrote from Wensley Camp, Leyburn, describing his experiences:

2nd City Battalion, leaving Sutton Coldfield for Yorkshire, June 1915. (MS 4616/2)

Training in Yorkshire, 1915. (MS 4616/2)