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

Peter Walters

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

Seitenzahl: 158

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The First World War claimed over 995,000 British lives, and its legacy continues to be remembered today. Great War Britain: Coventry offers an intimate portrayal of the city and its people living in the shadow of the 'war to end all wars'. 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 Coventry is told through the voices of those who were there and is vividly illustrated through evocative images from the archives of Culture Coventry.

Leseprobe

In memory of my grandfathers

C.J. Walters (11th Hussars)

J.L. Sheldon (Essex Regiment)

Soldiers of the Great War

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am hugely indebted to the following people, without whose knowledge, support and enthusiasm the story of Coventry in the First World War would have remained a closed book to me: Jim Brown, Carolyn Ewing, David Fry, Chris Holland, Huw Jones, Damien Kimberley, Mark Radford, Keith Railton, Terry Reeves, Martin Roberts and Brian Stote.

Church folk on the march while in Sarajevo an assassin’s bullet triggers the First World War.

COURTESY OF DAVID FRY

CONTENTS

      Title

      Dedication

      Acknowledgements

      Timeline

      Introduction

1    Outbreak of War

2    Preparations at Home

3    Work of War

4    News from the Front

5    Keep the Home Fires Burning

6    Coming Home

      Postscript: Legacy

      Bibliography

      About the Author

      Copyright

TIMELINE

INTRODUCTION

On a summer Sunday morning, bathed in brilliant sunshine, the parishioners and clergy of St John the Baptist, one of Coventry’s oldest churches, marched through the streets in joyful procession to mark their annual saint’s day.

More than a thousand miles away, at the other end of Europe, an assassin’s bullet was ending the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg empire. The date was 28 June 1914. Within six weeks Europe was at war, with millions of men mobilised and marching towards a conflagration the scale of which the world had never before seen.

Yet that summer in Coventry thoughts were far from fatal alliances and the collapse of empires. It was a city of the young, with more people under the age of 20 than over it, and they were intent on having a good time.

High wages in a city that had pioneered both the bicycle and the automobile industries had fuelled a boom in shops and places of entertainment. Earnings, wrote one disapproving Coventry clergyman, were being ‘too largely expended on crude and trivial satisfaction’.

In this heady boom town, local concerns focused on congestion – too many motor cars for the narrow medieval thoroughfares of the old city and not enough homes for a population that had exploded since the turn of the century, mostly with young, able-bodied immigrants drawn from bigger cities like London and Birmingham in search of that good life.

Radford Garden Suburb, Coventry’s first serious response to crippling housing shortages, had been officially launched in June 1914, with plans for 200 homes on a 14-acre site. In late July councillors nodded through a £300,000 road-building project for two new city centre streets, Corporation Street and Trinity Street, that would ease traffic congestion and sweep away clusters of medieval buildings described by one prominent member of the council as ‘germ breeding houses’.

If there was a niggling worry amongst those who were thinking beyond their next payday it concerned Ireland, where on 23 July thousands of hard-line Protestants had flocked to take up arms in defiance of the government’s proposals for Home Rule.

The fashionable girl about town in Coventry.

COURTESY OF MARK RADFORD

The Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, delivered on the same day, caused barely a ripple, even to a British Government still confident that it could stay out of any conflicts on the Continent. As late as 2 August, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was assuring the German ambassador in London that Britain would not intervene, as long as his country didn’t invade Belgium.

By that Sunday night more than 25,000 of Coventry’s residents, revelling in the new-found excitement of proper industrial holidays, had already left by train for what promised to be a dazzling Bank Holiday weekend at their favourite seaside resorts in North Wales and Lancashire.

The city they would return to days later, a little punch-drunk at the speed of events, was destined to become one of the powerhouses of Britain’s war effort, a munitions centre labelled the ‘busiest town in Britain’ and compared by The Times newspaper in 1916 to the US industrial dynamo that was Detroit.

Not for the first, nor the last time in its history, Coventry was on the brink of seismic change.

Peter Walters, 2016

1

OUTBREAK OF WAR

To more feverish imaginations it might have seemed like a destructive omen of the conflict to come.

As Coventry journalist Henry Wilkins and his wife knelt in prayer during the Sunday service at Holy Trinity, the peace of the fourteenth-century church was shattered by two loud crashes as heavy stonework detached itself from the south face of the tower and fell on to the roof of the organ loft.

Nobody was hurt and in his Journal of the European War, Wilkins recorded the incident, on the morning of 2 August 1914, without comment. Yet by then other prominent Coventry citizens already knew that the die for war had been cast.

The day before, Siegfried Bettmann, the city’s German-born Mayor and the founder of the Triumph Company, had called an urgent meeting of Coventry’s biggest manufacturers at the request of representatives from the War Office.

As they discussed motorcycle production, Bettmann asked a senior official where all the machines they required were to be used. He was told Belgium and at that moment, he wrote later, he knew that the fate of Europe was sealed.

AN ALIEN MENACE

The first wild rumour of the war swept through Coventry during the night of 4 August, as Britain’s ultimatum to Germany ran out. The German Army, it reported, had landed at Flamborough Head in Yorkshire and was marching south towards the Midlands. Distant rumbles and flashes of light in the sky were evidence that a major defensive battle was taking place somewhere to the north-east.

It turned out to be simply a distant thunderstorm but the sinister interpretation placed upon it was evidence of the jumpiness infecting many now that conflict was a reality.

Within four days, Ministers had rushed through the Aliens Restriction Act, which required people of German extraction to register with the police. In Coventry that initially meant around seventy individuals, mostly shopkeepers and hotel staff.

In theory at least, this new regulation also applied to Coventry’s Mayor and the Triumph Company founder, the Nuremberg-born Siegfried Bettmann. He had become a naturalised Briton in the 1890s, taken an English wife and was, in his own words, ‘proud to be an Englishman, not only by law, but by marriage and sentiment’.

This most patriotic and loyal of Coventrians was suddenly a target for smear and innuendo. A group of ‘loyal’ citizens had petitioned the Home Office for his instant removal as Mayor, a request that was turned down, but the Foreign Office did decree that he should not serve a second year as Mayor, as custom dictated, when his first term ended in November.

Nationally, anti-German sentiment, stoked up by rabble-rousers like the swindler Horatio Bottomley and his John Bull weekly magazine, quickly caught Bettmann in its snare.

The London Evening News ran a story that German investors held almost all of the Triumph Company’s £130,000 capital. It was a lie for which its sister paper, The Times, later had to issue a public apology. But the damage had been done. Bettmann, embittered by the lack of trust shown in him, announced on 8 September that he would be stepping down when his term of office ended on 9 November.

German-born Siegfried Bettmann, proud to be English.

COURTESY OF THE HERBERT ART GALLERY

What War?

Bettmann’s prescience did not extend to Coventry’s newspapers. For weeks, the distant rumble of impending hostilities had been largely ignored in favour of the hustle and bustle of summer fêtes and company sports days.

The city’s evening newspaper, TheMidland Daily Telegraph, had reported the death of Franz Ferdinand in its 29 June edition under the headline ‘Austrian Tragedy’. But it had not commented on the growing tensions across Europe until mid-July and even as peace finally came to a shuddering halt, at 11 p.m. on the night of Monday 4 August, there was the sense of a story missed.

The first front page of the war – a Warwickshire scene at sunset.

COURTESY OF MARK RADFORD

On the following day the paper, its front page purely advertising, as usual, led its news columns inside with the curiously downbeat headline ‘Great Britain has declared war on Germany. That is the vital fact of today’s news.’

The weekly Coventry Herald, making its first appearance of the war on 7 August, commented somewhat belatedly, ‘Coventry has never passed through such a thrilling week as the present one has been.’ Its chief rival, the Coventry Graphic, published on the same day, was almost word for word. ‘Never before in living memory,’ it declared, ‘has Coventry experienced such a week of sensations as this Bank Holiday week.’

It was as if the war had simply stolen up on everybody.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Coventry was still recognisably an old weaving town, with a population of just under 70,000. By the outbreak of the First World War its new industries had swelled that figure to 114,000, and by 1918 it had reached 142,000, making it the country’s fastest growing urban centre.

Marching to War

For the Territorials of the 7th Royal Warwickshire Regiment, a battalion full of Coventry men, the Bank Holiday weekend had begun with a journey by train to their annual summer training camp at Rhyl in North Wales. There, they were still waiting for some of their equipment to arrive when orders were received to turn around, return to Coventry and prepare for mobilisation.

Marching to war. Coventry says farewell to its Territorials.

COURTESY OF THE HERBERT HISTORY CENTRE

They spent the night of 4 August, as war was being declared, at the city’s Drill Hall in Queen Victoria Road, where, as the news broke around midnight, crowds gathered to sing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue’ in an outpouring of patriotic excitement.

The battalion left Coventry the following evening, marching to the railway station through streets lined with cheering crowds, despite official attempts to keep its time of departure a secret.

Eyewitness accounts in the newspapers spoke of ‘stirring and memorable scenes’ as, shortly after 7 p.m., the battalion band struck up the light infantry march ‘Sons of the Brave’ and led the 850 men of the 7th Royal Warwickshire Regiment up Warwick Road to the railway station to two special trains that were to take them south, to war. One correspondent wrote:

Attracted by the pulsing music of the band, people rushed breathlessly from every direction to swell the throng and lend their voices to ringing farewell cheers which were given. Windows of the houses on the route were hastily thrown open and handkerchiefs waved. Women and girls – mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts – hastened along the side of the ranks bidding encouraging and cheering farewells to their loved ones.

That same evening, the men and horses of C Section, Warwickshire Royal Horse Artillery, left their base at the city’s Smithford Street barracks and took the road to Leamington to meet up with their comrades in other Warwickshire batteries. Within a week, the 4th South Midland Howitzer Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, another unit with many Coventry men in it, had followed the Territorials to the railway station.

The public farewell given to these later military departures was more muted. Coventry never had a Pals Battalion in the infantry, as such, but the part-time soldiers of the 7th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment were as close as the city got to one.

Nor did cheering crowds gather to see off up to a thousand Coventry reservists – former servicemen being recalled to the colours – who in the first week of the war slipped away in ones and twos to rejoin their regiment or their ship. But there was an awareness that these men in particular were husbands and fathers and that their families must be looked after.

Kitchener’s call to arms.

COURTESY OF MARK RADFORD

In stirring words, local newspapers recalled the public’s generosity during the South African War fifteen years earlier, when a Reservists Fund, largely raised by the working men of the city, had supported many families in their hour of need. And they called on the well-to-do and the middle classes to get involved this time too:

Our citizen soldiers have taken the rifle to defend us. Our reservists have gone back to their posts in the regiment and the battleship in our interest as much as, if not more than, their own.

What of the mothers and wives and children which so many of them have left behind in humble little homes in our city? Their welfare must be a sacred charge upon others. If we allow the helpless dependants of these our fellow men to fall into grinding poverty and lack any of the common comforts of life, we shall show ourselves less than men.

Mayor Bettmann was quick to show leadership, making a passionate speech in support of the Prince of Wales’ national war fund, but also raising more than £6,000 in quick time for his own Mayoral relief fund, resisting the government’s preference for every fundraising effort to be routed through the national body. Over the course of the war this local fund would raise more than £100,000 for the dependants of Coventry’s fighting men.

The War at Home

To forestall a run on the banks, the Asquith government’s first action was to extend the Bank Holiday until Friday 8 August, thereby depriving many of Coventry’s manufacturing companies of the funds they needed to put in a highly productive week.

In an atmosphere of intensifying war fever, 200 Boy Scouts, somewhat bizarrely, were deployed to guard important installations such as the gas works, electricity substations, telegraph lines and the Coventry Canal. Local industrialists, led by machine tool manufacturer Alfred Herbert, set about raising a local defence force, a move that was quickly abandoned when the government made its disapproval known. Instead, Coventry’s Chief Constable, Charles Charsley, was given permission to recruit up to 600 special constables as enlistment began to thin his own ranks.

The enemy, as seen by Punch.

COURTESY OF MARK RADFORD

The citizen newly at war was not short of official advice, as the government took space in The Times, followed up in many local papers, to offer some ground rules under the heading of ‘How to be useful: The duty of citizens’:

First and foremost, keep your heads. Be calm. Go about your ordinary business quietly and soberly. Do not indulge in excitement or foolish demonstrations. Explain to the young and ignorant what war is and why we have been forced to wage it.

Do not store goods and create an artificial scarcity to the hurt of others. Remember that it is an act of mean and selfish cowardice.

The medical magazine The Lancet joined in, urging its well-to-do readers to cut down on household expenses, but not to get rid of the servants.

In Coventry, the anti-hoarding message was reinforced by the Mayor, who called on wealthier citizens not to plunder food shops at the cost of the poor, an issue that would have dramatic consequences in the city later in the war. But by the time Mayor Bettmann spoke out, a run on foods like flour, sugar, bacon, oatmeal, tinned meats, tea and coffee had already caused many shopkeepers to run out of stock and close.

Despite reassurances given to the Coventry Herald newspaper by the manager of one large provisions store – that as long as the Royal Navy could keep trade routes open, there was no need for food prices to increase – it was already happening.

In the second week of August the government felt obliged to issue a guide to maximum food prices nationally. It capped sugar at 3s ¾d a pound, imported butter at 1s 6d, British bacon at 1s 3d and colonial cheese at 9s ½d.

It also announced its intention to introduce a standard loaf which was quickly, and not fondly, dubbed War Bread. This was not the soft white bread the public was used to, but was a coarser, wholemeal loaf, which was much healthier, but more importantly less costly in terms of imported flour.

Britain’s own harvest in 1914 had looked promising, but in the early weeks of the war there was considerable disquiet that recruiting for the army would draw too many men off the land, leaving many women and the elderly physically unable to get in the harvest.

Government agents were also active in the streets and on the farms, buying up horses for the Continental campaign to come and in some cases literally taking them from between the shafts of carts as they went about their daily work. Without horses, farmers complained, how could they get in oats that had already been cut and the rapidly ripening barley and wheat harvests?

Opposition to War

At the outbreak of war, it was reported that so-called Passive Resisters in Coventry had fallen in number from eighty to around ten, but there were influential voices raised locally who had grave misgivings about the conflict.

Coventry’s Liberal MP David Marshall Mason, who had succeeded his namesake the novelist A.E.W. Mason in 1910, had for months been opposing naval spending in Parliament, in defiance of his own Liberal government.

A banker by profession, Mason made himself a one-man awkward squad in the House of Commons, voting against the government more than thirty times in the early months of 1914. On the eve of war, he claimed that the idea of Germany attacking Britain was nonsense, suggesting that spending on the army and the navy should be cut, not increased.

Accused of not supporting the government in a crisis, he was attacked by the national press in a campaign orchestrated, it was said, by some of the big players in the munitions industry, including Coventry Ordnance Works.

Coventry’s Liberal MP David Marshall Mason.

COURTESY OF DAVID FRY

Reluctantly, he came to acknowledge that his trust in Germany had been misplaced. In a letter to his Coventry political agent in mid-August, he wrote, ‘This was a bad business, but there appears to have been no doubt that Germany did wrong and she ought, and probably will, suffer for it. We must present a united front to the enemy.’

Mason would go on to become an important figure in the peace movement in Britain between the two world wars. But the electors of Coventry never did understand his point of view and when Parliamentary elections resumed in 1918, he had to run as an Independent Liberal. He finished last in a field of five to the Conservative Edward Manville, who was chairman of the Daimler Company.

Another who expressed strong reservations about the war was the influential Christian Socialist vicar of St Peter’s church in Hillfields, the Revd Percy Elborough Tinling Widdrington.