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

Stuart Hallifax

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

Seitenzahl: 184

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The First World War claimed over 995,000 British lives, and its legacy continues to be remembered today. Great War Britain: London offers an in-depth portrait of the capital and its people during the 'war to end all wars'. It describes the reaction to the war's outbreak; charts the experience of individuals who enlisted; shares many first-hand experiences, including tales of the Zeppelin raids and anti-German riots of the era; examines the work of local hospitals; and explores how the capital and its people coped with the transition to life in peacetime. Vividly illustrated with evocative images from the newspapers of the day, it commemorates the extraordinary bravery and sacrifice of London's residents between 1914 and 1918.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is drawn from research for my doctoral thesis on Essex during the Great War and for my ongoing blog on wartime London: greatwarlondon.wordpress.com

My thanks therefore go to those who have helped and supported me on those projects. To my parents for supporting me through my doctorate; particularly my mum, for proofreading both my thesis and this book. To Adrian Gregory, for his supervision of my doctoral research. To Louise Peckett, for her support and patience while I have worked on the blog and this book. And to everyone with whom I have corresponded by email, through comments on blog posts, or in person, in the two years I have been writing my blog.

Thanks also to Mrs J.E. Sneddon for permission to quote from Alf Page’s letters, and to the copyright holders of material quoted from the Imperial War Museum’s archive, whom every effort has been made to contact.

The posters reproduced in this book come from the collection of the US Library of Congress; other images come from the Illustrated War News, wartime editions of the Illustrated London News, and items in the author’s collection.

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Timeline

Introduction

1 London Goes to War

2 The War Spirit

3 Work of War

4 News from the Front Line

5 Home Fires Burning

6 Armistice and Peace

Select Bibliography

Copyright

TIMELINE

INTRODUCTION

On the eve of the Great War, London was the largest city the world had ever seen. It was the centre of the largest empire on Earth and of the financial world. Greater London was home to around 7 million men, women and children. The war that the United Kingdom entered on 4 August 1914 brought profound change to the British Empire, to the economic balance of the world, and to the lives of those millions of Londoners.

To tell in full the wartime experiences of this great and diverse city would take numerous volumes. Indeed there are already numerous histories of areas of London, ranging from those produced in the wake of the war itself, such as H.F. Morriss’ Bermondsey’s ‘Bit’ in the Greatest War and H. Keatley Moore and W.C. Berwick Sayers’ Croydon and the Great War, to Tanya Britton’s recent series of pamphlets on areas in the modern borough of Hillingdon, John King’s Grove Park in the Great War, and numerous home front diaries and memoirs. A distinguished group of Great War academics, led by Professor Jay Winter, have produced two volumes of comparative history of London, Paris and Berlin entitled Capital Cities at War, which have been invaluable in the writing of this book. This short book attempts to give the reader a sense of both the broad changes and some of the countless individual experiences that war brought to London and its citizens. I hope that it will inspire Londoners to investigate the wartime stories of their neighbourhoods and boroughs.

Around a million men from London served in the armed forces of the Empire: they fought on all the battlefields, from Ypres to Archangel, and from the Dardanelles to Dar-es-Salaam. Women from the city served around the world in an increasing range of roles in the military. At home, people’s lives and work were changed by the war: blackouts darkened the city; bombs were dropped from Zeppelins and aeroplanes onto London homes and businesses; factories shifted from peacetime production to manufacturing weapons and war equipment; soldiers flowed through the city on leave and to hospitals; women moved from domestic work to munitions factories, the service sector and transport; food became scarce and pubs closed early; and the lists of Londoners who would not return from the battlefields grew ever longer.

These events could not have been foreseen. Even those who expected war in the years before 1914 could not have thought that the effort needed to win it could be maintained for fifty-two months at a cost to the Empire of a million lives and many millions of pounds.

In this volume we will see the war’s impact on London. My focus is on the experience of the war in London, told through broad citywide trends, local and individual examples, and the first-hand accounts of people who lived in the city. A small number of these witnesses recur in these pages, including solicitor’s wife Georgina Lee, restauranteur Mrs Hallie Eustace Miles, writer Mrs C.S. Peel, journalists Michael MacDonagh and Milton Valentine Snyder, nurse Vera Brittain, and soldiers including Jock Ashley and Len Smith. While I have included stories from across London, there is a slight bias towards central and eastern areas of the city, largely because the events of the war had a more observable impact in these areas: food queues grew and the aerial raiders visited there more often than West London and the suburbs.

When the war came, it crept up on Londoners and their contemporaries across Europe. Of greater concern in 1914 were tensions in Ireland, industrial unrest (after large strikes in 1912) and the campaign for women’s suffrage, which had included arson and attacks on artworks in London’s galleries.

The roots of the war can be traced back to the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership in the mid-nineteenth century, and its departure from Otto von Bismarck’s policy of peace with Russia. As the new century began, international tensions were increasing, with suspicion between Germany and its neighbours France and Russia, who soon became allies. In 1904, Britain formed an entente cordiale with France that would see them stand together if one was attacked. This was soon followed by a similar agreement with Russia. It is debateable whether this alliance and that between Germany and Austria-Hungary helped to bring about the war, but they certainly shaped the responses of the major players in the Balkan Crisis of June and July 1914.

Unlike the more localised Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by a Serbian nationalist sparked off a chain of events that resulted in a continent-wide war. Serbia could not accept all of the demands made in Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum following the assassination, and leaders in Vienna would not compromise. In the crisis that followed, Germany backed Austria-Hungary while Russia backed Serbia, bringing the prospect of the great alliances becoming involved. On 28 July, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia; Russia then began to mobilise its armed forces. Germany’s leaders, fearing that Russian mobilisation would give them an advantage in the coming war, also mobilised. The German war plan, in recognition of the Franco-Russian alliance, was to knock France out of the war first, before Russia could get all of its forces in the field. To avoid French border defences, the plan took German troops through neutral Belgium. Whatever the United Kingdom’s commitments to France and Russia, it was the invasion of ‘poor little Belgium’ from 3 August that brought British political and popular opinion behind involvement in the war. Each of the great powers was able to describe the war as defensive, which helped to secure popular support.

Watching the lamplighters at work in St James’s Park on 3 August 1914, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey famously remarked, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ London, the United Kingdom, and the British Empire were about to enter a war, the course of which none could predict. The effect of this conflict touched every home in the British Isles, and its impact has reverberated through the century since.

Stuart Hallifax

2014

1

LONDON GOES TO WAR

A huge crowd gathered outside Buckingham Palace to cheer King George V. Several thousand people – mainly young, middle class men – crowded around the Victoria Memorial and up Pall Mall in response to the news that Britain had entered ‘the European War’ on the side of France and ‘poor little Belgium’. It was the evening of 4 August 1914 and Britain was at war with Germany. The scene provides the classic image of 1914 ‘war enthusiasm’.

It came as a shock to most people. Until late July, most saw the escalation of tensions in the Balkans as simply another local conflict. Georgina Lee, a solicitor’s wife, wrote on 30 July that, ‘Grave rumours of a possible terrible conflict of Nations are on everybody’s lips and have been for some days.’ The next day, the London Stock Exchange was closed in reaction to Russia’s declaration of war against Austria-Hungary. On Saturday 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia and France mobilised its armed forces. The London correspondent of the New York Times reported that people now thought that the UK being ‘drawn into a great European war … is now a probability rather than a possibility’, but not yet inevitable. People’s opinions about the war were divided: in Trafalgar Square, for example, a large anti-war rally passed a resolution in favour of international solidarity and peace on Sunday the 2nd; that evening the first crowds began to gather outside Buckingham Palace. The government extended Monday’s bank holiday by two days to avoid a financial crisis when the stock markets reopened.

The German army’s invasion of Belgium on 3 August convinced most of those who wavered over British involvement to accept that the nation would and should take part in the conflict. An ultimatum was sent to the Germans on Tuesday 4 August, due to expire at 11 p.m. (midnight in Berlin), demanding that they leave Belgian soil and honour its neutrality. As the moment approached, vast crowds gathered in Westminster; when Big Ben struck the fateful hour the people celebrated the declaration of war. Over the next few days, crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace and in the West End and, according to the New York Times, ‘Street vendors, shouting “Get your winning colors” [sic] were doing a rushing business, selling tiny Union Jacks, which the demonstrators wore on their coat lapels. There was also a brisk demand for French and Belgian flags.’

Elsewhere in London, crowds also gathered on 4 August to hear the news – there was of course no radio or television to inform them in their homes. In Fleet Street, crowds sang the British and French national anthems, but dispersed soon after the declaration of war was announced. In Ilford, according to the Ilford Recorder, ‘Little knots of people gathered outside the local Territorial offices, and at various points all the way down the High-road from Chadwell Heath to the Clock Tower and railway station … awaiting the fateful declaration of war, and it was not until long after the momentous hour of midnight had struck that they began to disperse.’

The vast majority of people did not join these crowds, and those who did were often there seeking news rather than cheering on a war. While many people backed entering the war, most were not enthusiastic about what it might bring. In Croydon (according to the borough’s war history Croydon and The Great War), ‘our people braced themselves for their greatest war effort. There was bewilderment at first, but there was no panic. … Nor was there any war-fever, that enthusiasm which finds expression in flag-flapping, cheering, boasting, and the singing of patriotic songs. It was, as one acute observer remarked, “a war without a cheer”; it was too serious a matter.’

Germany’s Anglophile ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, leaving London in August 1914.

On Carlton House Terrace, near the Mall, people watched in a ‘strange silence’ as the German ambassador prepared to leave the embassy. According to the Daily Mirror, one man booed but was shushed by the crowd and led away by the police. The remaining crowd watched quietly as a workman removed the brass plaque bearing the German eagle from the outside of the building.

We should not get too carried away with an image of complete calm in London, however. Some celebrated, while others were panic-buying food in case supplies ran short or prices went up, with the predictable result that prices rose and shops ran low on goods. The dominant attitude was resolve or resignation, though: the war had to be fought, had to be put up with, and had to be won.

How long the public felt the conflict would last is very hard to tell. The phrase ‘over by Christmas’, so beloved of historians and novelists, was only rarely used in 1914. If people did expect a short war, the mid-August appeal for 100,000 men to join the army ‘for three years or the duration’ told them how long the nation’s military leaders (especially Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War) felt the war could last. Whether people thought it would last a few months, a year, or three years, few – if any – imagined the eventual scale of the conflict and the ways that it would affect life in London.

London Before the War

In August 1914, London could be described as being the centre of the world: it was the capital of an empire that included a fifth of the world’s population and the centre of a system of trade that linked nations across the globe.

London had grown rapidly during the nineteenth century: from under 1 million people in 1801 to nearly 2 million in 1841 and over 4 million by 1891. By the start of the twentieth century, the growth of the city itself had almost stopped, but the urban area did not stop growing. While the county of London had reached 4.5 million in 1901, an ‘outer ring’ that made up the rest of Greater London grew from less than 1 million people in 1881 to 2 million in 1901. By 1911, it made up over a third of the 7.25 million people living in Greater London, the largest city on Earth.

The county of London – its new county hall on the South Bank was under construction in 1914 – was made up of the Cities of London and Westminster and twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs. The largest were Islington and Wandsworth, each with over 300,000 inhabitants; Lambeth, Camberwell and Stepney also had more than a quarter of a million inhabitants each. Most metropolitan boroughs had at least 85,000 inhabitants, with Chelsea and Holborn among the smallest, with only 66,000 and 50,000 residents respectively.

The outer ring of Greater London comprised: the whole of Middlesex (1.1 million people in 1911), which included Hendon, Ealing, Edmonton, Willesden and Finchley; areas of Surrey containing 500,000 people, including Croydon, Wimbledon, Barnes, Richmond and Epsom; Kent districts, including Beckenham, Bexley, Bromley and Erith, containing 172,000 people; the urban areas of south-west Essex containing Barking, East Ham, West Ham, Ilford, Walthamstow and Leyton, with over 800,000 residents; and an area of Hertfordshire with 55,000 inhabitants, including Watford, Barnet and Bushey.

Over such a broad area and so many people, there was of course a wide variety of labour and living conditions. Many of the Victorian suburbs that encircled the city in the ‘outer ring’ were home to clerks and professionals working in Central London, while the area in the docks either side of the Thames in East London included large numbers of dockers and warehousemen. East and West Ham were also home to a large amount of heavy industry (helpfully, the London rules on factory emissions did not apply over the River Lea in Essex), while the Royal Arsenal was situated on the other side of the river, at Woolwich.

Just under half of the 1.4 million male workers in the county of London worked in the service sector, and 12 per cent in transport (on rail, roads and the river, including the Port of London Authority). Another 16.6 per cent worked in commerce and 2.7 per cent in banking and insurance alone. Soldiers, sailors and marines made up another 15,000 workers. A third of London’s workers were women, primarily in service (over 200,000 domestic servants, plus 35,000 laundry workers and 30,000 charwomen) but a large number worked in the clothing industry, as well as an increasing number employed as clerks (32,000), teachers (18,000) and nurses (16,000). Two of the largest cross-London employers were the London County Council (LCC) and the Metropolitan Police. The latter broadly covered the area of Greater London, while the council was for the county itself. Both organisations employed large numbers of ex-servicemen.

As well providing men for the regular army and housing many reservists (ex-servicemen who could be called up in an emergency), London was home to one of the few regiments of the British Army entirely made up of part-time soldiers – members of the Territorial Force, created in 1908 out of the old militias and volunteer corps of the previous century. The London Regiment had twenty-six battalions, including London-wide units such at the London Rifle Brigade, the Rangers and Queen Victoria’s Rifles, those for men with shared backgrounds and jobs like the London Scottish and the Civil Service Rifles, and those for areas, such as Blackheath and Woolwich, Hackney, and Camberwell (the First Surrey Rifles). There were also artillery and medical units, and the Honourable Artillery Company, which (despite its name) was an infantry unit based in the City of London. The Middlesex, Essex, East Surrey and West Surrey Regiments also had London-based territorial battalions. Although it had no Territorial Force battalions, the Royal Fusiliers were the ‘City of London Regiment’.

London Regiment battalions appealed directly to men to join their ranks, in this case for clerks to join the London Rifle Brigade. (Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-10960)

The Call to Arms

As soon as war was declared, the number of men volunteering for the armed forces overwhelmed the recruiting offices. Tens of thousands of Territorials and Reservists were reported for duty, but the more startling sight was that of civilians queuing for hours to join up. At first there were too few recruiting offices to cope with the enormous demand and the crowds became enormous – especially around the Central London recruiting office at Great Scotland Yard, off Whitehall. London Regiment battalions had their own recruiting offices, which were also overcrowded. City clerk Bernard Brookes waited for two or three hours on Buckingham Palace Road on 7 August to join the Queen’s Westminster Rifles (16th Londons): ‘After much swearing outside the building, we were “sworn in”’.

Alfred Leete’s famous image for the magazineLondon Opinionsummed up Lord Kitchener’s call to arms. (Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-3858)

This ‘rush to the colours’ was an extraordinary increase on peacetime recruiting; within eleven days, more men had come forward to join the army than in any of the previous four years: almost 39,000 men (nearly 10,000 in London alone). New recruiting offices were established across the capital: on 7 August, The Times reported new offices opening in Camberwell, Islington, Battersea, Fulham, and Marylebone. The headquarters of German shipping firm Hamburg-Amerika on Cockspur Street also became a recruiting office. By 30 August, over 168,000 men had joined the army, including over 29,000 in London. An even greater recruiting boom was about to begin, though – well beyond anything seen before in the nation’s history.

On 23 August, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) first encountered the German Army at Mons in Belgium, only a few miles from Waterloo, where British and German forces had defeated Napoleon in 1815. Among the men who encountered the Germans at Mons was Lance Corporal Ernest Stretton from Islington; called up from the reserves in August 1914, he went straight into battle and was killed at Mons. The BEF suffered heavily in the fighting there and in the retreat to the Marne that followed it, but the Allies’ fighting retreat eventually brought the German offensive to a halt. Another reservist, William Hurcombe from Walworth, arrived in France on 26 August with the 20th Hussars and entered straight into the retreat from Mons; he survived that battle and numerous others through the rest of the war.

A typical parliamentary recruiting poster of autumn 1914, before the picture posters that characterised the later recruiting campaign. (Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-10872)

News soon got back to Britain about the losses at Mons. On 30 August, a report appeared in TheTimes stressing the threat to the very existence of the BEF and the need for more soldiers: recruiting rates for the army immediately rocketed. Men came forward in droves to help defend their nation. Helpfully, the timing also coincided with the end of harvest in rural areas and the peak of wartime unemployment in London; the recruitment boom also included those men who had earlier decided to join but first needed to sort out their personal affairs. The combination of these factors, public pressure and increased pro-recruiting rhetoric and speeches, brought in 4,000 recruits in London on 1 September (the next weekday after The Times’ report was published), more than double the rate of any previous day. In the first week of September, 24,814 men enlisted in London. Nationally, over 186,000 men joined up that week – more than in the whole of August, with over 33,000 on both the 4th and 5th of that month. Between 4 August and an increase in the height requirements on 11 September, 463,456 men joined up, including 67,276 in London.

A hopeful recruiting poster from the first winter of the Great War. (Library of Congress, LC-USZC4-10946)

This great rush of men came before the big national recruiting campaigns. In fact, it was in the wake of the steep decline in recruiting after 11 September that the national campaign really got going: London’s weekly enlistment rate fell from 15,000 to under 5,000 three weeks later (and the national rate fell from 100,000 to 15,000). The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC) – a national body with branches in every constituency – was formed at the height of the boom and began their work as enlistment declined, with their famous posters coming mainly in 1915. The most widely-known 1914 recruiting image is the ‘Kitchener Wants You’ poster, which was not in fact an official recruiting poster, nor was it very widely used at the time. The image was created by Alfred Leete (who was later responsible for some memorable London Underground posters) for the magazine London Opinion