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

Tim Lynch

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

Seitenzahl: 161

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The First World War claimed over 995,000 British lives, and its legacy continues to be remembered today. Great War Britain: Sheffield offers an intimate portrayal of the city and its people living in the shadow of the Great War for five years. A beautifully illustrated and highly accessible volume, it recounts the tale of a Boy Scout leader's journey to Gallipoli, the terror of the first air raids, and the university's best and brightest who formed their own Pals battalion only to lose poets, writers and students on the Somme. It contrasts the strikes and political unrest with patriotism and sacrifice in the city they called 'the armourer to the Empire'. The Great War story of Sheffield is told through the voices of those who were there and is vividly illustrated with evocative images.

Leseprobe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Research for a book of this kind relies heavily on the kindness of a great many people. I have been fortunate to have the assistance of the staff of Sheffield Libraries and Archives, the Sheffield 1914–18 Project and the opportunity to swap stories with Kate Linderholm of BBC Radio Sheffield, whose work on the stories of South Yorkshire during the Great War has produced a fascinating insight into local life in those turbulent years.

Fran Cantillion at The History Press offered me the chance to write this book and has been supportive throughout a sometimes turbulent process. Fellow Yorkshire authors in the series Lucy Moore and Kathryn Hughes have been generous in passing on any snippets of their work that related to Sheffield and have produced their own works in this series.

Most of all my thanks, as ever, go to my patient family. To Jacqueline, for keeping things together when I was off in my own little world. To Josh, for realising that frequent demands for drinks, toast and conversations about Spiderman are essential to any creative project. My thanks in particular to Beth Lynch for research work and her photography.

Uncredited photographs are taken from the author’s collection. It has not been possible to identify copyright holders for the images used and no infringement is intended

CONTENTS

Title

Acknowledgements

Timeline

Introduction

1. ‘Damned Bad Place, Sheffield’

2. ‘The Post of Honour Was At Catcliffe …’

3. ‘Ten Acres of Hell …’

4. ‘Will There Be Any Reply?’

5. ‘Oft Times It Has Been Difficult …’

6. Sir Jonas and the Blue Death

Postscript: ‘A Spectacle Both Attractive and Inspiring’

Select Bibliography

About the Author

Copyright

TIMELINE

INTRODUCTION

In late 1917, the Revd William Odom wrote:

For nearly three years, there has raged the most terrible war the world has ever witnessed – one in which its five continents are involved. Everywhere mighty upheavals and changes, dramatic and unexpected, are taking place in national, social, commercial, and religious life. In addition to the great world Empires, other lands, the names of which are familiar to Bible readers, as Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, Salonika (Thessalonica), and Mesopotamia (cradle of the human race), are entangled in the terrible conflict.

In the autumn of 1915, every person in the country was required to register so that they could be assessed by the Ministry of Labour. Those in certain vital industries were marked with a star to indicate they should not be called up for the forces.

Apart from the unspeakable tragedies by land and sea, confiscation, deportation, and slavery, innumerable deaths on the battlefield and in hospitals, huge liners, hospital ships, and merchant vessels have been torpedoed and mined, towns and villages laid in ruinous heaps, cathedrals and churches ruthlessly wrecked, countless homes ruined, and fruitful fields transformed into desert wastes … In this gigantic struggle the killed and wounded are numbered by millions. At the close of 1916 in the burial grounds of France and Belgium the bodies of more than 150,000 brave British soldiers lay at rest. The cost in money to our own nation alone has increased to seven million daily, besides which vast sums are being voluntarily contributed to war charities … From July, 1914, the history of the British Empire is crowded with records of heroic actions and unparalleled sacrifices in the sacred cause of liberty, truth, and righteousness. For love of country brave men and youths have freely offered all they could – their lives … To-day, myriads of wives and parents hold their husbands and lads who have fallen ‘in proud and loving memory’.

In this terrible struggle Sheffield has taken a foremost place. Not to speak of the thousands who have offered themselves for active service, there has been the great army of workers at home – men, women, and girls in our large works forging weapons of war, thus transforming our city into the greatest arsenal in the world…The war has not only discovered new and unexpected powers, and made men – brave men – but it has also revealed heroes. We are learning that it is not what a man gains that makes him great, it is what he gives.

In 1914, Britain went to war. A century on, historians still argue the rights and wrongs of that decision. Whether for better or worse, the war undoubtedly changed the world. Every man, woman and child in Britain was affected and their sacrifices, great and small, would mean that life in Britain would never be the same again. On every battlefield on land, sea and in the air, the people of Sheffield would come to know only too well the true cost of that change. They would also come to know a new front line as the killing spread beyond the battlefield and into their very homes.

From the Sheaf to the Somme, this is the story of Sheffield at war.

Tim Lynch, 2015

1

‘DAMNED BAD PLACE, SHEFFIELD’

– King George III

At the start of the twentieth century, even the most loyal citizens agreed that Sheffield, for all its great wealth and its vital importance to the steel and iron industry that had built the British Empire, was not a beautiful city: writing on a history of the city on behalf of the Sheffield Education Committee in 1915, Alderman John Derry, one-time editor of the Sheffield Independent wrote:

People who have only passed by the city in the trains that run through its central valley … think of it as a crowded, ugly place, drearily blackened by smoke during the day, and lighted by the wavering glare of many furnace fires; and they sometimes say to each other: ‘How can people pass their lives in a town like this?’

Sheffield may be, as Derry claimed, ‘one of the most beautifully situated inland cities in the world’, but even he admitted that ‘its appearance at a glance is not attractive’. It was a comment that Charles Compton Reade, a New Zealand-born journalist and town planner, whole-heartedly agreed with:

POPULATION

In 1911, Sheffield’s population was young. Of the 454,632 people in 99,069 households recorded by the census that year, 53,884 were aged under 4 and 148,351 – almost a third – were under 15.

In contrast to the wooded hills and the long radiant valleys, nothing could be more powerful or dramatic than the historic and busy centre of Sheffield. Placed as it is in a neighbourhood of wondrous charm and sylvan glory, the city and its immediate environment are hopelessly unbeautiful. From the eminence of Victoria Station, the eye is greeted by a sea of blackened roofs and chimney pots straggling from a gloomy valley to the hills beyond. It lies before one naked in ugliness, what with its miles of crooked and cranky streets, its endless chimney shafts and slated roofs crowding in from remote horizon to the eminence, where the Town Hall points a ponderous and sooty tower to the smoke-stained skies …

Writing at about the same time, historian J.S. Fletcher described Yorkshire as a county ‘of almost violent contrasts’ and nowhere was this truer than in Sheffield itself. Those who could afford to lived on the western edges of town, where the prevailing wind blew across the moors and swept the smoke and pollution eastwards over the crowded slums of the city centre, home to the vast majority of workers. According to records, 27.53 metric tons of air pollution were recorded in each square kilometre of Attercliffe in June 1914 alone. Across the city, an average of 12.86 metric tons per square kilometre per month made Sheffield one of the most polluted cities in the country and it was claimed that the smoke-filled air blocked out a quarter of all sunlight. Between 1801 and 1913 the population had grown from 45,755 to 471,662 as people flocked to Sheffield in search of work, but the new arrivals found a city struggling to accommodate them, adding to the misery of life in the slums.

Compton Reade wrote in 1911:

The houses and streets for the most part in these areas are revoltingly dirty. Nothing could be more repulsive or indicative of the evils that have arisen with the growth of the factory system in England, than some of these historic thoroughfares of Sheffield … Overhead the smoke hangs in a listless brown canopy in the sunlight. In the hot, humid streets and the long, black buildings the fierce, relentless activities of men and women pass unceasingly, and the making of great riches on the one hand and greater poverty on the other tells its story afresh. One looks for beauty in vain. It fled to the hills years ago – the hills where there are so many fine homes and bright, clean faces. Is it not enough to make us wonder how far the riches of the one are the price of the other?

It was said that smoke blocked out up to 25 per cent of sunlight and tons of pollution from thousands of chimneys covered the city every day.

That was a question being asked by many in the city’s crowded slums, where diseases were common and spread rapidly. By 1900, one in five children died before their first birthday, most often from diarrhoea caused by polluted drinking water or spread in summer by flies swarming from the overflowing privies shared by whole rows of cramped terrace houses. Those children that survived showed an alarming range of physical health problems associated with poor diet and a lack of fresh air that would create problems for military recruiters in the years to come. Already, the Boer War had highlighted the number of potential recruits from urban areas falling short of the basic medical standard required for service in the army. Alarmed by the ‘moral and physical deterioration’ of the British population, efforts began to improve health and hygiene by providing parks and sports facilities, free education and school meals as well as an old age pension. With few homes having plumbing, public baths provided the only opportunity for citizens to wash, rarely more often than once per week. As newspapers debated the experimental idea of mixed bathing at Rotherham swimming pools, Sheffield offered a two price deal: bathers paid tuppence on clean water days, a penny the rest of the week.

It was very much a divided city. Of the 454,632 people recorded in the 1911 census, only 69,807 were eligible to vote, but Sheffield was rapidly becoming a centre for political action. In 1908 more days were lost to industrial action than in the entire previous decade and in 1909, a series of strikes hit the coal industry, causing Home Secretary Winston Churchill to order troops into South Wales to restore peace among the 30,000 striking miners after Prime Minister H.H. Asquith made it clear that the government would use all its resources to enforce order. So began ‘the great unrest’, as between 1910 and 1914 the number of industrial disputes across the country rocketed, reaching a peak of 872 in 1912 with 40 million days lost to strikes – ten times the total of any previous year. Determined to crack down on strikers, the government sent in troops to keep order but the move only heightened tensions and in Liverpool and Llanelli soldiers fired into attacking mobs, killing demonstrators. Like every other industrial town, Sheffield saw armed soldiers on the streets as men of the Gordon Highlanders were called out from Hillsborough Barracks to restore order and keep the peace, causing trades union leaders to call on local men not to join the part-time Territorial Force because it was felt they would be called upon to shoot striking workers.

The main concern for most people, though, was the gangs roaming Sheffield’s streets. The letters pages of the Sheffield Telegraph in August 1913 were filled with complaints about the Gas Tank Gang, the Mooneys, the Park Gang and others who had brought what was described as ‘a state of terrorism that one would have imagined impossible in a city the size of Sheffield in the twentieth century’. One correspondent, signing off as ‘Englishman’, wrote of being prepared to fight back and stand up to the bullies. Soon after, another letter advised ‘any person who has business that keeps him about town, especially at night, to spend a shilling or two in a revolver and a few cartridges and if attacked by any of these gangs to laugh at the nonsense of “Englishman” about using their fists and SHOOT’. Fights that involved smashed glasses as weapons were common and shocked magistrates responsible for the granting of licences heard that even in ‘respectable’ pubs, landlords routinely armed themselves with pistols for protection against armed gangs. Gun and knife crime remained a common feature of news stories in the coming years. In February 1916, for example, 20 year olds Harold Hensop and Clifford Hirst were both fined for firing shots into the air ‘as a joke’. Both told the court that they routinely carried pistols ‘for protection’. ‘As we look back over 1913,’ wrote the Revd P.D. Woods in the Royston Parish Magazine at the end of the year, ‘we must all feel that it was a year marked by a spirit of unrest … Most of us, I feel sure, will not regret the dawning of 1914.’

‘Coal getters’, many of them children straight from school, fought hard for a living wage of 8sa day. When war broke out, few could afford the drop to a soldier’s basic wage of just 1sa day.

Sheffield University allowed women to attend and to earn full degrees from 1905. By 1918 it had women lecturers. Meanwhile, Cambridge University only awarded its first degrees to women in 1948.

Unfortunately for the Revd Woods and his parishioners, 1914 brought no respite. In February, bombs ‘of an Irish Republican type’ were planted at the Leeds Municipal Power Station and at Harewood Territorial Barracks, where police reinforcements were being housed during yet another large-scale strike – this time of Corporation workers – and the chief suspect was an Irishman seen nearby shouting anti-British slogans. Soon after, poorly worded orders were issued to troops in Ireland to prevent military arms stores being seized in case of the expected nationalist uprising. These were interpreted as orders to fight Unionist volunteers, whose stated aim was the protection of British interests in Ireland and which were seen by many officers as linked closely to the army’s own purpose there. As a result, the government faced a possible large-scale mutiny by the Curragh garrison that was only averted by the diplomatic leadership of a number of senior officers. As the government struggled to deal with the threat of civil war in Ireland and fears that it might spill over to the large Irish population living in England’s industrial towns, around 400,000 railwaymen were threatening national strike action at the same time as 200,000 Yorkshire miners were striking to demand a minimum of 7s 11d a day for ‘coal getters’.

Militant suffragettes had launched a series of actions targeting political leaders. There were widespread arson and bomb attacks on private properties around the country and, in May 1914, a bomb was planted at the pump house of the Upper Windledon reservoir near Penistone which, had it exploded, would potentially have put the village of Dunford Bridge at serious risk. So widespread was the campaign of vandalism that one man, charged with smashing a shop window, was condemned for his behaviour and asked by the judge if he thought he was a suffragette. Against a backdrop of industrial unrest, political violence and the growing threat of civil war in Ireland as arguments over the Home Rule Bill came to a head, the assassination of an obscure Austrian Archduke in faraway Sarajevo seemed to be of little importance to the people of Sheffield …

At 10.45 a.m. on 28 June 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie left the Town Hall in Sarajevo in a motorcade heading for the city’s hospital. Earlier that morning two Serbian nationalists posted on the route into the city had decided at the last moment not to act but a third nearby had thrown a bomb at Ferdinand’s car, which skidded across the car’s roof and under the car behind, wounding at least sixteen bystanders. After reading a speech – the paper spattered with blood – at the Town Hall as planned, Ferdinand asked to change the itinerary and to go to visit the wounded in hospital. The driver took the car down a wrong turning and directly into the path of 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, another member of the Serbian group intending to kill him that day. Princip fired two shots, hitting both Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. Both victims remained seated upright, but died while being driven to the governor’s residence for medical treatment. As reported by Count Harrach, Franz Ferdinand’s last words were ‘Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!’ Sophie was dead on arrival at the governor’s residence. Franz Ferdinand died ten minutes later.

SHEFFIELD: ARMOURER TO THE WORLD

Henry VIII was the first to encourage the manufacturers of South Yorkshire to develop the skills of cannon making. By the turn of the nineteenth century, local mills were turning out guns and cannonballs for Wellington’s army and Nelson’s navy. By 1914, Sheffield was home to the largest munitions industry in the world.

The murders shocked the world and set in motion a chain of events that would lead to war within weeks, but for the time being, Sheffielders were more concerned when the heatwave that had baked Sheffield for the last month broke at 6 p.m. on the evening of 1 July with a severe storm that brought torrential rain for over an hour and three hours of lightning. ‘The Wicker,’ reported the Telegraph, ‘was like a great river for half an hour’, and cellars in Attercliffe, Neepsend, Heeley and Sheaf Street flooded as the main sewer, unable to cope with the volume of water, burst outside the Upperthorpe Library. A young woman in Field’s Cafe, terrified by ‘a vivid flash followed by a heavy crash of thunder’, collapsed and was taken to hospital, whilst another fainted on the platform of the Midland Station. Two houses on Wynyard Road were struck by lightning and Mr Timperley of Hills Farm at Dronfield had a narrow escape as lightning blasted through concrete flooring in the farmyard.

Clearing up after the storm occupied locals for the next week or two, by which time events in Europe were spiralling out of control. Austria, supported by Germany, blamed Serbia for the killings. Serbia, backed by Russia, denied involvement. Throughout July, the dispute escalated until Germany and Russia mobilised their armies. At the end of the month Russia offered to negotiate a demobilisation but it was too late. On 1 August, Germany declared war. France, tied to Russia by a mutual protection alliance, was forced to mobilise its forces before Germany could execute its long-standing plan to invade France via neutral Belgium. On 2 August Germany invaded Luxemburg and on the following day declared war on France. On 4 August, claiming to be responding to a French attack, the Germans invaded Belgium. Having been one of the guarantors of Belgian neutrality, Britain was now forced to act. With a massive overseas empire, Britain could not allow international law to be flouted, nor could it allow Germany, the only naval power in the world able to challenge the Royal Navy, to establish itself in the English Channel where, once France was defeated, there would be no barrier to an invasion of England.