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

Dr David Parker

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

Seitenzahl: 177

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The First World War claimed over 995,000 British lives, and its legacy continues to be remembered today. Great War Britain: Exeter 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 Exeter is told through the voices of those who were there and is vividly illustrated, including many evocative images from the archives of the Devon and Exeter Institution.

Leseprobe

To my son Neil and daughter Cheryl – with love

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is based largely upon a host of primary sources. They include the letters, diaries, memoirs, magazines, newspapers, school logbooks, city council minutes and reports, and files from various wartime committees and organisations deposited in the Devon and Exeter Institution in the Cathedral Close and the Devon Heritage Centre in Sowton.

I am grateful to the staff of the Heritage Centre and colleagues at the Devon and Exeter Institution for their readily given advice and support. My thanks go to Su Conniff, Sadru Bhanji and Darren Marsh for their help in identifying documents and finding many of the illustrations. I owe much to the critical interest taken in my research by my ex-university colleagues and friends Chris Lee, Bill Leedham and Tony Ovens. The errors that remain are all mine.

In particular, I am pleased to take this opportunity to offer my thanks to Tony Ovens for taking all of the pictures in this book, many of them from poor quality images in contemporary newspapers. It was a time-consuming and skilled task, and I am very grateful.

Map of Exeter just before the First World War.(Devon and Exeter Institution)

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Timeline

Introduction

1 Outbreak of War

1914 England and Exeter in 1914

2 Preparations at Home

The Wartime Expansion of the Devons

3 Work of War

Women and the War

4 News from the Front

A Soldier’s Life in the Trenches

5 While You Were Away

Conscientious Objectors

6 Coming Home

The Peace Treaties

Postscript: Legacy

Bibliography

About the Author

Copyright

TIMELINE

INTRODUCTION

The murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, merited a brief mention in the Exeter Flying Post on 28 June 1914, just as it had in the British national newspapers. Regular readers would have known that assassination was an occupational hazard for Continental royal families at this time. King Umberto I of Italy, Grand Duke Sergei (uncle of Tsar Nicholas II), King Alexander I of Serbia, King Carlos of Portugal and the Empress Elisabeth, the consort of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary, had all died violent deaths within the last quarter of a century.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife had been visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, and their shooting by dissident Serbs provided a ready excuse for Austria-Hungary to chastise Serbia for opposing its annexation of neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. It seemed a minor Balkan affair, but a disastrous chain reaction was set in motion. Austria-Hungary presented Serbia with a humiliating ultimatum that would reduce it to almost a satellite state, and declared war the moment it was rejected on 28 July. Russia, Serbia’s Slav ally, then started to mobilise its armies against Austria-Hungary, its long-standing Balkan rival. On 30 July, Germany mobilised in support of its ally, Austria-Hungary, and demanded that France, Russia’s ally, stayed neutral. France said nothing, but its armies were mobilised by 2 August when German troops invaded Belgium and approached the French border. On 4 August, Great Britain declared war on Germany when it ignored its ultimatum to withdraw from Belgium.

The war was far from being all about Serbia. In 1904, Great Britain had signed the Entente Cordiale with France that fell short of a military alliance but nevertheless publicly signalled its deep suspicions of Germany’s rising naval might, commercial rivalry and aggressive empire building. Not surprisingly, this did nothing to stem Imperial Germany’s ambitions. And an almost forgotten treaty of 1839 ensured that Great Britain, which was always wary of hostile powers establishing control over the major Channel ports opposite its shores, would preserve the de facto independence of Belgium.

In practice, Germany’s declaration of war on Russia meant that its armies had to defeat France first – and quickly – before Russia’s vast forces had time to mount a serious attack from the east. In order to achieve this, Germany planned a massive curved attack through north-east France aimed directly at Paris, and Belgium lay right in the path of the intended invasion route. In the event, the plan failed – just. German forces were brought to a halt, and within a few weeks Germany faced the war on two fronts it had feared. Ironically, in 1890 it was Germany that had thrown France and Russia together when the impetuous new kaiser, Wilhelm II, refused to renew a treaty of mutual support with Russia because it opposed Germany’s growing influence in the Balkans.

Lying on the River Exe a few miles from the South Devon coast, the ancient city of Exeter seemed a long way from the battlefields as the interminable conflict seized nation after nation in its grip and rapidly spread across the globe. Yet local families and institutions were caught up in the war from its outset. City men served in many different regiments and warships, and participated in numerous battles on land and sea. Over 900 were killed, and many more injured. Exeter was always full of men in uniform – in training, in transit, on leave, or recovering from wounds or illnesses. The city’s women endured the agonising silences between news from their menfolk and, worst of all, the fear of a knock on the door with a telegram boy’s news of the death of a loved one. They coped with busy family lives as best they could, but hundreds of women from all social classes helped to raise thousands of pounds for wartime charities, readily took over the absent men’s jobs, and ensured the city’s war emergency hospitals wanted for nothing in their care of thousands of casualties.

Despite the censorship, the city was never short of wartime news. Although the build up to military initiatives was kept secret, once they were underway news of their progress – initially celebratory, but invariably more measured soon afterwards – quickly reached the city through newspapers, letters home and men on leave or in hospital. The horrors of war became public knowledge long before the end of 1914 – the earth-pounding and ear-shattering noise of bombardments, the sudden deaths of comrades standing nearby, the bodies blown to bits, the shattered trenches, cloying mud, ever-present rats and lice, and the terrifying advances on enemy positions. The descriptions of battles and the long lists of casualties kept appearing, and the dreadful attrition rate helped power not only the endless recruitment drives, but also the controversies over why so many men failed to enlist, or sought exemption when conscription was introduced in 1916.

In sharp contrast to the generally dark wartime news, more ordinary things went on in the city. There were films, plays and revues to enjoy – and not all of them were connected with the war. The very popular bicycling and motorcycling clubs remained active, the city’s cafés and restaurants did well, and days out to the seaside and the moors resumed their familiar role as moments to escape from the world of work – and family worries. Although some European imports were badly affected, most shops adjusted quickly and remained well stocked, at least until the weeks of food shortages in 1917 and 1918. Clothing and furniture and other household goods remained readily available, and at all prices. There was a semblance of normality, but that was all it was.

The newspapers are now brittle, the letters fragile, and the bindings of diaries and memoirs are falling apart. But the contents of these fading documents still shine a bright light on the aspirations and anxieties of local people during more than four years of unprecedented conflict. When the fighting finally ground to a halt, nothing would ever be quite the same as it had been before.

This book is about what it was like to be in the City of Exeter during these momentous years, during which every human emotion must have been stretched to breaking point – and sometimes beyond.

1

OUTBREAK OF WAR

For much of 1914, domestic issues dominated local newspapers in Exeter, much like elsewhere in the country. The violent tactics of militant suffragettes – setting fire to pillar boxes, damaging works of art, disturbing religious services, burning churches, and smashing shop windows – incited sonorous editorial condemnation in the Flying Post, especially when a Venetian watercolour by the Exeter artist John Shapland was ruined in London’s Doré Gallery. A great deal of space was devoted to well-attended meetings of Exeter’s branch of the League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage. Women speakers delighted their audiences with assertions that only men could enforce laws and therefore only men should make them, that equal pay was nonsense as equal work was impossible, and that working-class women would not know what to do with the vote if they possessed it.

THE PANKHURSTS, VOTES FOR WOMEN & THE WAR

Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. Dedicated to female suffrage, it achieved notoriety through its confrontation with an intransigent government through violent attacks on private and public property. Two of Mrs Pankhurst’s daughters, Adela and Sylvia, began to oppose the mounting violence, and in 1914 the rift became official when Mrs Pankhurst and third daughter Christabel supported the war, whilst Adela and Sylvia campaigned for peace and against conscription – and even hid conscientious objectors.

However, not everyone in the city was opposed to giving women the vote. In December 1913, Mrs Pankhurst was arrested on the White Start liner RMS Majestic at Plymouth and taken to Exeter Prison, where she went on hunger strike. Suffragettes flocked there from across the city, county and country but had to endure insults and ‘rough horse-play’ from groups of local men. One suffragette was only just saved from falling over the parapet of the nearby railway bridge. In May 1914, Canon Masterman of Exeter Cathedral and Sir Henry Hepburn, Vice-Chairman of Devon County Council, spoke publicly in favour of enfranchising women. It would, they claimed, enrich women’s lives and help break down the barriers of party politics.

Another issue working local editors into frenzies was the alleged threats to national stability and prosperity posed by the wave of crippling strikes and what many thought were their driving force, the destructive creed of Socialism. In 1912, Exeter felt the force of a national coal strike and a sympathetic walk-out by many railway workers. Local quarries, paper mills and Messrs Willey’s extensive iron foundries on Exe Island were forced to close. City charities reopened their soup kitchens and clothing centres, and the police helped distribute the dwindling stock of coal to needy families. In the summer of 1914 a bitter, and sometimes violent, strike erupted in the Teign Valley granite quarries a few miles outside Exeter, and on 1 August 1914 building workers within the city downed tools. Labour relations were distinctly poor, and social unrest widespread and deeply worrying.

Drifting towards domestic disaster. H.H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, is rowing the boat.(Trewman’s Flying Post,13.6.14)

Alongside the threats posed by the suffragettes, Socialists and strikers, the city newspapers reported that the home rule controversy in Ireland was spiralling out of control. By 1914, both the Irish Nationalists and the Ulster Unionists possessed armed paramilitary forces, enabling the former to rise up in arms against any attempt by the British Government to renege on home rule and the latter to oppose the imposition of Irish Roman Catholic tyranny on Ulster Protestants. Henry Duke, Exeter’s Conservative MP, was a fervent Unionist and frequently spoke to appreciative city audiences about the perils facing Irish Protestants, especially in the north. Civil war seemed inevitable as 1914 dawned and the September date set for home rule drew near. In December 1913, a train carrying Sir Edward Carson, the charismatic Ulster Unionist leader, to Plymouth stopped at Exeter St David’s station. A crowd, including the workmen rebuilding the station, soon gathered around him and cheered his brief speech declaring that Ulstermen would never be placed ‘under the heels of the declared enemies of England’.

During the summer of 1914, the kaiser believed that Great Britain was so absorbed with its domestic problems, notably Ireland, that it would do anything to avoid embroilment in a European war. Conversely Herbert Asquith, the British Prime Minister, later acknowledged that the outbreak of the war defused, at least temporarily, a particularly explosive situation within the British Isles. Indeed, on the last day of July 1914, the touchpaper of Irish Civil War could easily have been lit when a British Army unit was attacked by armed Nationalists who had been caught, it was alleged, smuggling weapons and then stoned by an angry crowd. The soldiers opened fire, killing three and wounding sixty protestors.

Exeter lay deep in the West Country, but its relatively small size and provincial position belied its significance in national affairs. It was a historic city, as symbolised by the remains of a Roman legionary fortress, the substantial ruins of Rougemont Castle, the much repaired city walls and the centuries-old Anglican cathedral. It was the centre of Diocese of Exeter affairs and county as well as city administration. All important committee meetings were held there. The barracks of the the Devonshire Regiment (the ‘Devons’) and a section of Royal Field Artillery were in Exeter, and the county assizes were held in an eighteenth-century courthouse deep within Rougemont Castle. During the war, the city continued to be the natural centre for numerous county and regional organisations concerned with the creation of emergency hospitals, a host of fundraising charities, the settlement of thousands of overseas refugees, and implementing the draconian regulations for the production, distribution and price of food.

In national and city elections Exeter’s voters swung between favouring the Liberals and Conservatives, although overall the Conservatives had the edge. In national elections they had given a large majority to the Conservative Sir Edgar Vincent in 1900; just eighty-five to the Liberal Sir George Kekewich in 1906; a mere twenty-six to the Conservative Henry Duke in January 1910; and just one to Duke in December 1910 – but only after two recounts had favoured his Liberal opponent before a formal investigation declared several Liberal votes invalid. The clergy and businessmen within the city, and the country gentry residing just outside it, dominated Exeter’s affairs, and it has to be said that the city’s Liberals were far from radical while the Conservatives still possessed a touch of noblesse oblige.

THE DEVONS

Raised by the Duke of Beaufort, the regiment became permanent in 1685. It fought in Ireland (1690), and in many battles against the French in the eighteenth century. It became the 11th Regiment of Foot in 1751, and the Devons in 1881. In the Napoleonic Wars it was in the West Indies and then in Spain, earning its nickname the ‘Bloody Eleventh’ during the Battle of Salamanca (1812). In Queen Victoria’s reign it was on Imperial garrison duty, and fought at Ladysmith and Spion Kop in the Boer War (1899–1902). Its motto is the same as the city’s – semper fidelis (always faithful).

The population, including Heavitree, was about 59,000 and growing, but only slowly. The greatest area of male employment was building and construction, followed by workers in shops and other small businesses, with railway-related jobs coming in third. Domestic service in private houses, great and small, and in commercial properties such as cafés and hotels was by far the greatest employer of women. Dressmaking, either in workshops or as home commissions, was second.

In 1914, roads of great antiquity connected Exeter to other towns, and as more and more motor cars, lorries and charabancs began to use them the Flying Post carried notices of small penny-pinching improvement schemes, usually the traditional repacking of stone surfaces but occasionally the tarmacking of a further section of main road. Far more frequent, though, were the newspaper’s warnings to travellers in its ‘Motoring Matters’ column of local hazards such as sharp corners, steep hills, narrow bridges, hidden junctions and the sudden appearance of farmers’ wagons, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep.

The streets within the city itself were gradually changing too. In traditional vein, flocks of sheep were still driven to market within Exeter, but the overcrowding of its narrow streets with an assortment of motorised vans and lorries, horse-drawn wagons and carts, and hand-pulled barrows and stalls was causing citizens and city councillors increasing irritation and concern. In 1914 the annual Cart Horse Parade remained a popular spectacle, but by then the newspapers routinely carried advertisements for motor vehicles, and not horse-drawn ones. The large motorcar saleroom and workshops of Reid and Lee were well established in New North Road, and so were those of Standford and White in Sidwell Street, along with Greenslade’s charabanc business in Queen Street. ‘Motoring Matters’ gave readers regular information on the worth of mechanical innovations, the services of local garages, recommended West Country routes, and the heady but highly fashionable pastime of rallying.

In recent decades a few road-widening schemes had been carried out in the city, resulting in a number of historic but obviously unwanted houses and the ancient but redundant Allhallows church being demolished. In the 1880s, a grand new post office and the popular Eastgate Parade shopping centre had been built on the High Street site of the demolished frontage of the pre-Reformation St John’s Hospital. Also in the High Street, the seventeenth-century, but much repaired, Half Moon Inn was demolished in 1912 and replaced by the city’s richly adorned Dellar’s Café in 1916. In 1895 the decision had been taken to widen North Street by slicing off 8ft of every ancient property on its west side and then rebuilding the foreshortened fronts in red brick. They are still there.

A flock ofsheep is driven across Exe Bridge.(Dr Sadru Bhanji)

Early in 1914, widespread debate surrounded plans to remodel the city centre by extensive demolition and the creation of impressive new public buildings and municipal offices in Queen Street, adjoining the radically remodelled station. Far wider pathways would lead from the High Street to Cathedral Close, extensive city centre gardens would be planted and several narrow but important road junctions would be turned into open ‘circuses’. The aim was to enhance the flow of traffic, create a number of attractive vistas and entice more visitors to a prosperous-looking city combining an ancient cathedral with a host of easily accessible modern facilities. Inevitably arguments grew heated and inevitably the war brought them to a halt.

One city innovation proving immensely popular, though, was the restructured tram system inaugurated in 1905. Electric tramcars replaced the horse-drawn ones and the routes were extended. Lines now ran from Exeter St David’s station along Queen Street to the High Street and Eastgate, from where one line went to Livery Dole in Heavitree and another along Sidwell Street to the end of Blackboy Road. From the High Street, another route ran along Fore Street and across Exe Bridge and then diverged along Cowick Street or Alphington Street.

The trams had a fine safety record, despite their frequent overcrowding, but in March 1917 a tram running down Fore Street jumped its tracks as it neared Exe Bridge, crashed onto its side, slid until it hit the parapet, lurched into the middle of the road and ground to a halt. A woman who had belatedly jumped off the tram was crushed to death as it tipped over. There was talk that essential maintenance work had not been carried out due to wartime economies and labour shortages.

Road transport remained arduous, but by 1914 Devon’s railway system was almost at its maximum extent and heavily used by goods and passenger trains. Exeter was an important junction and this was to be of immense significance throughout the war. From the major London & South West Railway (LSWR) station in Queen Street, a main line ran to London Waterloo via Yeovil and Salisbury, with local branch lines to Exmouth, Sidmouth, Seaton and Lyme Regis.

The first electric tram.(Dr Sadru Bhanji)

At the less convenient St David’s station, the main Great Western Railway (GWR) lines ran eastwards to London Paddington via Taunton and Reading, with local lines branching off to Tiverton and north Devon. Westwards from St David’s, GWR lines ran to Plymouth and Cornwall via a junction at Newton Abbot where another main line branched off to Torquay and Kingswear. In an unusual configuration, LSWR trains also ran from Queen Street to St David’s station, from where one line ran through a dozen villages to north Devon and another curved north and west around Dartmoor to Tavistock and Plymouth.

Station placards and newspaper advertisements regularly announced railway excursions, not only to local seaside resorts but also to Bude, Padstow, Bideford, Barnstaple and Ilfracombe on the north coast, and further afield to Salisbury, Bournemouth, Southampton, London and even Paris. Exeter was well connected.

Within the city, short branch lines and numerous sidings served the wharves and important industrial areas each side of the River Exe and its canal. Small cargo ships frequented the city. In one week in April 1914, for example, the Flying Post reported that the Salvador brought timber from Sweden, the Gleaner potatoes from Dunbar, the Edgar and Anne limestone from Berryhead, the Sirdar limestone from Babbacombe, and the Genesta cement from London.