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

Mike Pringle

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

Seitenzahl: 195

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The First World War claimed over 995,000 British lives, and its legacy continues to be remembered today.Great War Britain: Swindon offers an intimate portrayal of the town 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 town and its people coped with the transition to life in peacetime once more. The Great War story of Swindon is told through the voices of those who were there and is vividly illustrated through evocative images, many from private collections.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

Timeline

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Outbreak of War

2 Preparations at Home

3 Work of War

4 Keeping the Home Fires Burning

5 A Women’s War

6 West Country to Western Front

7 Moonrakers Across the World

8 Coming Home

Postscript: Legacy

Bibliography

Copyright

TIMELINE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book could not have been written without the help and advice of many people. In particular, thanks must go to Mark Sutton, Swindon’s leading Great War authority, whose enthusiasm, breadth of knowledge, and vast collection of images and ephemera about Swindon’s fighting men have been invaluable. Thanks are also due to Frances Bevan and Katherine Cole, and the other staff of Swindon’s Local Studies Library, as well as all those others whose research and works have provided invaluable sources of information. Finally, a huge debt of gratitude is due to W.D. Bavin and his remarkable record of events, Swindon’s War Record, the definitive description of Swindon’s Great War, published in 1922. This book is simply a retelling of the story Bavin captured while the war was tearing down lives around him a century ago. Unattributed quotes in the book are words/phrases from Bavin’s book.

All period photographs used with kind permission from the collections of Mark Sutton, the Swindon Society (courtesy of Bob Townsend), and newspapers of the time (Swindon Advertiser and North Wilts Herald, thanks to the Swindon Advertiser and Swindon Local Studies Library).

Maps and extra photography by the author, except Mary Slade’s OBE, photograph by Frances Bevan, with thanks to the Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre, Chippenham. Period artefacts are courtesy of Mark Sutton and information relating to Purton is courtesy of Bob Lloyd.

INTRODUCTION

In the early 1800s Swindon was little more than an agricultural village perched on the top of a hill surrounded by the tranquil beauty of the Wiltshire countryside. It had a population of less than 2,000, two main streets, a cattle market and the requisite number of inns. All of that changed with the Industrial Revolution, first with the arrival of the canals and then, in 1841, when Isambard Kingdom Brunel decided to site the colossal Works of the Great Western Railway (GWR) near the base of the hill.

At the advent of the Great War in 1914, the town had grown to a population of over 60,000, with all the developments and amenities that such a bustling population demands. Along with the GWR was also the Midland & South West Junction (M&SWJ) railway, making it the perfect place to help troops get from one end of the country to the other. At that time, the GWR Works employed over 10,000 people, making it one of the largest industrial centres the country had ever known. To give a simple illustration of the scale: over the four years of the war, the Swindon Works were a major contributor to the GWR’s production of an astonishing 216,350 vehicles, from locomotives and ambulance trains, to open-sided horse wagons and water carts. In addition, the workers of Swindon turned out 250,000 artillery shells, nearly 500,000 fuses, 5 million cartridge cases, countless weapon components, many guns (anti-aircraft guns, 4.5in howitzers, 60-pounders) and even some large naval artillery pieces.

Partly because of the nation’s need for the sort of heavy engineering the GWR could provide, Swindon initially prospered during the war, with employment high and many smaller companies doing well too. The Imperial Tobacco Company’s factory (owned by W.D. & H.O. Wills) was taken over for munitions, and another factory opened up for the manufacture of rope and sails, employing fifty girls. Meanwhile, McIlroy’s department store won an order from the War Office to produce 45,000 beds. Things changed, however, as the war dragged on, and Swindon suffered along with the rest of the country. As well as coping with over 5,000 men away at war (10 per cent of the population, of whom some 1,300 never came home again), the people endured the hardships of incomes going down and food controls going up through 1917; the crippling rationing of food, fuel and just about every other necessity became part of a daily struggle by 1918. Nonetheless, the resilience and generosity of the town’s people, and their commitment to local industry and their society, carried Swindon through.

The scale and global importance of Swindon’s GWR Works have led it to being called the ‘Cape Canaveral’ of its time.

William Bavin, author of Swindon’s War Record, published in 1922.

This book is in honour of the people of Swindon, and the sacrifices they made. It commemorates those who endured the horrors of war, whether their part was played in the mud and shells of Flanders, or in the vast support network behind the lines. The book also celebrates the countless unnamed individuals who were left behind and, through their own heroic efforts, kept the ‘home fires burning’, providing direct and indirect help throughout the four years of conflict, ensuring a stable future for those who returned, their families and their descendants.

In 1918 the local council commissioned W.D. Bavin to compile a record of Swindon’s activity throughout the war. Bavin noted that:

It may possibly strike some that much of the substance of this work is trivial – ‘the rustic cackle of our bourg’ – without interest beyond the limits of Swindon. But the sketch of the civil life of a large community during such a momentous period as that through which we have passed is not trivial, and if such an account could be found for some town of England during one of the Great Wars of the Plantagenets every detail would be prized by historians.

This book, nearly 100 years later, is written in the same spirit.

1

OUTBREAK OF WAR

At 7.40 p.m. on Tuesday, 4 August 1914, the hooter at the Great Western Railway (GWR) Works in Swindon gave out ten mighty blasts to announce that Britain was at war. The town that responded was a booming, modern centre of industrial power and success, dominated by the Great Western Railway’s massive Works since 1841. But that was not the whole picture of life in this Wiltshire town as the country went to war.

National Crossroads

Swindon is a place where roads meet: a place of connectivity and access by virtue of its geographical location. The southern approach to Swindon is dominated by two Iron Age hill forts, at Barbury and Liddington, overlooking a gap in the chalk hills of the North Wessex Downs and the country’s oldest road, the prehistoric Ridgeway. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Swindon is firmly situated in the ancient Wiltshire landscape that includes Stonehenge and Avebury, the connections to that prehistoric world are strong. As well as Bronze Age round barrows, there is even a small stone circle on the southern side of Swindon, on Day House Lane. When the Romans arrived, the geographical location was again capitalised on for connecting different parts of the country and two major roads were built amid a rich area of settlement. Like their prehistoric forebears, the Romans utilised the land for agriculture, with abundant trees for wood, clay and stone for ceramics and building, and grasslands that were ideal for raising cattle. After being mentioned in Domesday Book, the place continued to grow, sometimes sporadically, through the medieval period, eventually achieving a market charter in 1626. Benefitting from the dreadful effects of plague elsewhere, and the growth in fame of its local Purbeck Limestone, Swindon prospered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and developed into a small, well thought of country town. In the early 1800s, the town again benefitted from its geography, being an ideal place for canals to pass through, connecting it to new places and creating opportunities for the burgeoning quarry industry. Then, as the Industrial Revolution really got under way, that same geography made Swindon the ideal choice for the railways, and, in 1841, Brunel decided to site the colossal Works of the GWR nearby. Indeed, the connectivity of the place has remained strong, with rail and the M4 now connecting east and west, and the A419 joining Swindon to the M5 and M6, connecting north and south-west. Being such a confluence, it is perhaps no surprise that Swindon is famous today for its Magic Roundabout. And, as mentioned in the Introduction, it was this facet of Swindon that made it so important at the outset of the war in 1914.

A Tale of Two Towns

In the first fifty years after Brunel and Daniel Gooch set up the GWR Works, the combined population of the original Swindon, plus the industry-focused new area, grew from under 5,000 to over 45,000 – a growth of 822 per cent. The national figure for growth over that time was about 80 per cent, while for Wiltshire there was a dip in population, down 8 per cent, perhaps partly due to people moving to the work available in Swindon. However, Swindon was no longer the ‘Old Town’ that it had been, rather it was dominated by the ‘New Town’ that had sprung up to support the GWR Works. And the relationship between these two towns had never been a comfortable one. When the GWR first put forward their plans to site the Works at Swindon, they were hoping to build right at the foot of the hill on which the original town was sited. This would have given them closer access to the town, its people and its facilities. Unfortunately for Brunel and Gooch, the plans were squashed by objections from the local lords of the manor, the Goddard family. As a result, the Works were built 2 miles further north, and with the new location came a need to provide facilities and housing for the enormous numbers of employees required. It was not until 1900 that the two towns actually started co-operating with each other, with houses and side streets being built along Victoria Road, creating a real link between the two areas and the forming of a single municipal borough.

At the outset of the war, the GWR Works was very much in its heyday with non-stop production of locomotives.

Driven by Steam

In the early years of the new unified Swindon, life was not always easy, even before the war arrived. The period followed the severe national depression of the 1880s and early 1890s, which had an adverse effect on Swindon, particularly because of the town’s dependence on the railway industry, as demand for rail travel inevitably fell. Outside the town, the all-important agricultural economy was also affected by the depression and by the developments of the Industrial Revolution. On the positive side, the Industrial Revolution also brought new, different employment in the form of quarrying and canals, with the canals also providing cheaper coal from places like the Welsh coalfields. This was beneficial for individuals and businesses alike. And, even after the two towns had officially joined, the GWR was still by far the biggest employer, overwhelming the agriculture which had previously been such a mainstay of the area’s industry. Fortunately for Swindon, the GWR came out of the depression well, having focused much of its effort on the Swindon Works in tough times, rather than spreading itself too thinly over all the GWR sites across the country. The company worked on making improvements to the way they built locomotives and carriages, meaning that as business picked up again the Swindon site was poised to lead the railway industry, delivering ever higher standards in safety, comfort and rail technology.

In the years leading up to the war, GWR’s success created more jobs, and fuelled other industries locally, such as the many retail and service industries needed to provide for the growing population. The building industry, for example, required a constant flow of men to work on houses for the vast numbers arriving in the town to work on the railways. Thanks to a lack of local planning strategies, and the entrepreneurship of the building trade, red-brick houses shot up all over the town. John Chandler, in Swindon: History and Guide, recounts the tale of ‘Old Charlie’, a tall, thin Yorkshireman who purchased Upper Eastcott Farm along with six stone cottages, and promptly set about the building of six further, brick-built dwellings and a shop. Naming his little terrace York Place, Old Charlie rented the properties out and, one imagines, spent the rest of his days as a prosperous landlord. Old Charlie’s potential tenants would include working-class men who had arrived from as far afield as the North of England, as he had, or Wales. Mostly, the men would arrive singly or in small gangs, but occasionally they would turn up with their families too. All were looking for a way to earn a living, including many of the women, even before the war started to change gender roles in wider ways. Again, Swindon, with its Works, was well suited to these needs. Another industry that benefitted from the railways was ‘the rag trade’ – tailoring and clothes-making. Compton’s clothes factory employed over 1,000 women in Swindon at the turn of the century, with much of their work being the production of GWR uniforms.

Modern Swindon was founded on the coming of the Great Western Railway, but, during the Great War, it was the Midland & South Western Junction Railway station in Old Town that was crucial for getting troops to their destinations in the South.

The official yearbook was a record of Swindon statistics, births, deaths, etc. It was all about to change.

Even so, work was not always available, and with a steady influx of new jobseekers, competition could be tough. Without a job, people would struggle to find somewhere to live and often go hungry. For an agricultural worker on a failing farm, losing a job could also mean losing the family home. Heading into town was an obvious choice for many locals, as well as for those from further afield, but of course, then as now, employers needed the right kind of employees.

A Different Class of Soldier

In the late nineteenth century, Swindon writer Richard Jefferies observed that the GWR, emulating the class system that existed at the time, produced two kinds of employee: the ‘working’ engineers, many of them former agricultural workers or lads growing up in local villages; and the ‘gentlemen’ engineers, highly educated, well-qualified men, often coming to Swindon from elsewhere. This model was carried through to the huge new armies that were created to fight the war.

As elsewhere, Swindon in 1914 had a very visible class system, with the local lords of the manor being the Goddard family on their estate at the edge of Old Town. The Goddard’s manor, known as The Lawns, was a grand affair with library, billiard room and gun room, and, outside, an arboretum, artificial lakes, and ornamental gardens for entertaining, holding garden parties and fetes. The house also had servants’ quarters. On the other side of the town, the St John family owned the splendid Lydiard House. Set in a 260-acre deer park, the house is a Georgian Palladian mansion, redeveloped in the eighteenth century by then owner, John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke.

However, in 1914 the Industrial Revolution had created another layer of well-off folk, which included local businessmen and the gentlemen engineers. A look at the top of the donations to the newly created Prince of Wales National Fund shows where the money was in Swindon as war broke out. At the very top is Thomas Arkell, co-owner of the local brewery, who donated a colossal £100. Next on the list, Thomas’ co-owner and brother James gave £50, as did Lord of the Manor Fitzroy Pleydell Goddard, and Henry Kinneir, a solicitor and churchwarden. George Jackson Churchward, the now-legendary Chief Mechanical Engineer of the GWR, gave a healthy £30, and Henry Stanier, GWR Assistant Locomotive Works Manager donated £25.

At the time of the Great War, Swindon’s GWR Works employed over 10,000 workers.

The value of donations steadily decreased going down the list of Swindon’s well-to-do, but the majority of people did not get onto the list at all. Another Swindon writer, Alfred Williams (see p.20), spent much of his time concerned with the other end of the social spectrum, such as the characters on the shop floor of the GWR where he worked before the war. In a later introduction to his Life in a Railway Factory, which was originally published in 1915, Leonard Clark sums up Williams’ words:

He describes, with consummate skill and admirable economy, the work of the shunters, watchmen, carriage finishers, painters, washers-down, cushion beaters, ash wheelers, road-waggon builders, smiths, fitters, boiler makers and moulders, to name but a few of the trades mentioned – many of them humble workmen but all necessary in the great enterprise of keeping the railways running. He introduces his readers to several of his mates – Herbert, the bricklayer’s labourer, Baltimore, the drop stamper, Tubby, the best furnaceman in the works, Sambo and Strawberry, Budget and Charlie, the moulder – all characters in their own right, often amusing, sometimes tragic, and all seen in the atmosphere of noise, turmoil, coming and going, ceaseless travail. And as if to relieve all this, Williams notes the hares and rabbits that used to trespass into the factory yard, the profusion of wild flowers on the waste land, the rooks and sparrows, and, far away on the skyline, the blue of Liddington Hill with its hedges and chalk pits.

SWINDON’S WAR POET

In 1913, Alfred Williams was working in the GWR Works, living in poverty and suffering from various ailments, including acute dyspepsia. Over the years, Williams’ friends and supporters tried to arrange for financial support, with the interest of three different prime ministers. However, Williams did not want charity, and despite being told he might only live another six months, continued working until just after the start of the war in September 1914, scrawling ‘VICI’ (I conquered) in chalk above his furnace when he finally left.

Williams’ response to the war started with an anti-war (and anti-German) poem being published in the Swindon Advertiser on 24 August. He continued with his literary works, embarking on a collection of local folk songs and, in 1915, publishing his definitive book, Life in a Railway Factory. At the end of the year he had his War Sonnets and Songs published, though he later described them as ‘little war scribbles’ and ‘of no value’. In September 1916, to his surprise and delight, the 39 year old was passed fit for war duty, on home duty with the Royal Field Artillery. But early in 1917 the unit moved to County Cork in Ireland, then across to Edinburgh, Scotland, then south again to the Royal Garrison Artillery in Winchester. In late 1917, Gunner Williams was posted to India, and spent seven weeks travelling on the Balmoral Castle with terrible conditions, food shortages and submarine attacks. In November, after stops in South Africa, Williams finally arrived in Bombay, where the journey carried on by train for another 1,600 miles to Roorkee – ‘a place of noise and evil smells’.

In March 1918, Williams’ battery moved to the unbearable heat of Cawnpore where Williams suffered, like many others, from diarrhoea, dysentery and fever. Despite the hardship and illnesses, Williams eventually fell in love with the country, writing: ‘The Himalayas are divine … What material I shall have for books – if I live … I would not have missed India for five years of life.’

Two of Williams’ poems in his collection War Sonnets and Songs.

Alfred Williams (right) with comrades in the Royal Field Artillery in India.

Williams did not only make warm comments about fellow workers, and astute observations; his book also illustrates some of the considerably less comfortable aspects of life for those men who found themselves in the ‘worker’ class in 1914. Much to the horror of the GWR management, Williams describes the Works as a place of ‘misery, cruelty, lack of initiative, waste, thieving and moral degradation behind the scenes …’

As war dawned, the romantic notion of ‘the great age of steam’ hid this tougher reality, and the same was true elsewhere in Swindon, and across the country. In Stratton St Margaret, the Swindon and Highworth Poor Law Union ran a ‘busy’ workhouse, a place described as every working-class person’s nightmare. It was a place where anyone could end up through a stroke of bad luck, such as illness, an itinerant lifestyle, inadequate provision for old age, lack of work, or simply an accidental twist of fate. Alfred Williams described the Swindon workhouse residents as tragic characters:

Many have gone there to end their days, to die out of sight of all that is kind and charitable, doubting of life, doubting of love, of truth, fidelity, and friendship, doubting sometimes even of Providence itself – alone, forgotten, deserted for ever, forlorn and solitary.

Tough Times

For the majority, the workhouse was but a relatively distant threat, but life could still be tough. In October 1914, the North Wilts Herald cited an extract from David Hume’s eighteenth-century Treatise of Human Nature, declaring, ‘A man wants food, lodging, and clothing; a wife, children and friends; a daily occupation, by which, with either head or hand, he produces something more than he consumes, or otherwise does his share of the world’s work.’ But in 1914, these things were not always assured, particularly because, perhaps above everything on Hume’s list, what everyone wanted was good health.

When war broke out there was no social welfare infrastructure as we think of it today. Public sanitation and overall ‘health and safety’ was not of the same modern standards that we enjoy, and there was no health service for the general populace. However, despite Alfred Williams’ condemnations, the GWR were one of the more progressive employers when it came to the welfare of their workers. If you were lucky enough to have a job in the Works you had considerable advantage over your neighbours, with the GWR’s Medical Fund Society providing for doctor, dental and surgery services, public baths and the town’s first hospital. Nonetheless, during 1916, even this social aid suffered. With so many men going off to fight in the services, huge gaps were left in the Works pool of skilled labour, and many of the men stopped paying their subscriptions to the Medical Fund Society. Families not only lost their breadwinners but also faced the possibility of losing access to medical help. During that year, the Society started running up debts at the bank, and staff salaries all but dried up. The impact of this ‘trying state of affairs’ led to the formation of a new dedicated committee and a levy which ultimately kept the Society going. The 1916 end-of-year report suggested that ‘State Medical Service will undoubtedly be an ideal for the future, but our present Society could be a model miniature State organisation’. In fact, such was the ultimate success of the Swindon Medical Fund Society, that it became one of the models on which Health Secretary Aneurin Bevan based the National Health Service in 1948. With the extent of industry brought to the town by the GWR, and the positive attitude towards health that the company worked towards, it is no surprise that Swindon’s motto is ‘Salubritas et Industria’ – Health and Industry.

War announced on page 3 of the North Wilts Herald on 5 August 1914.