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

Jo Bath

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

Seitenzahl: 224

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

First World War claimed over 995,000 British lives, and its legacy continues to be remembered today. Great War Britain: Tyneside offers an intimate portrayal of the area 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; 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 Tyneside and its people coped with the transition to life in peacetime once more. The Great War story of Tyneside is told through the voices of those who were there and is vividly illustrated with evocative images from the collections of Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums and other archives across the region.

Leseprobe

I would like to dedicate this book to three very different, but equally remarkable, gentlemen:

My dad David, who, as well as being generally marvellous, patiently proofread this book for me;

his father Edward, conscientious objector and local historian, who I wish I had known better;

and his father Francis, soldier at 15 years old, workhouse nurse, and private in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1914–18.

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Timeline

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Tyneside in 1914

1 Outbreak of War

2 Preparations at Home

3 The Home Front

4 Work of War

5 Home Fires Burning

6 Coming Home

Postscript: Legacy

Further Reading

About the Author

Copyright

TIMELINE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In piecing together the amazing story of Tyneside during the First World War, I have called upon the help and expertise of many people and organisations, and I would like to thank them here for their support. Firstly, at Tyne & Wear Archive & Museums Service, Alex Boyd, Helen Vasey, Ian Whitehead, Roberta Goldwater and Adam Bell dived into their collections on my behalf and came out with treasure from the Discovery Museum, South Shields Museum, the Northumberland Hussars Museum, and Tyne & Wear Archives. Everywhere I have hunted for images I have found supportive and enthusiastic people, so much so that the image copyright credits should be read as a second acknowledgements list; behind each organisation name, there is at least one individual who made my life easier and this book better. Of particular note are Janis Blower, Norman Dunn, Sarah Mulligan, Catrin Galt, Diane Leggett, and Rob Langham (who truly went above and beyond for a stranger). Additionally, I have found invaluable assistance at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, the West Newcastle Picture History Collection, the Tynemouth World War One Commemoration Project, and the North East War Memorials Project; and picked the brains of John Sadler, Rosie Serdiville, and Richard Stevenson. Snippets of information are to be found wherever you look, from blue plaques on house walls to photocopied parish newsletters placed in church entrances. I thank all those who brought these things to light, or helped me to find them … There is still a lot more research to be done, and the hardest part of writing this book was making myself stop!

INTRODUCTION: TYNESIDE IN1914

When we think about the First World War, the images that come first to mind are probably those of the Western Front – of mud and blood, trenches and barbed wire. All these things, and the loss of lives on all sides, in many lands, deserve our remembrance. What is often forgotten is that the war also had a dramatic effect upon those left in England. Here on the home front, every life was turned upside down, often in unexpected ways. In 1914, Tyneside was home to over 750,000 people – more than half the population of north-east England – and it is their stories, and the impact of war on ordinary lives, that this book aims to illuminate and commemorate.

Edwardian Tyneside was bustling, prosperous and largely optimistic. At its heart was the Tyne itself, polluted and swarming with ships. Here, massive wooden staithes were the loading points for the transportation of 20 million tons of coke to 400 ports around the world. Alongside the staithes were a wide variety of engineering workshops and factories, from ironworks and chemical plants to roperies and potteries, visible for miles around by their columns of smoke by day and fires by night. They produced much of the 4 million pounds worth of manufactured goods which left by river every year. Only a tenth as much came the other way. Elswick, with the Armstrongs works and shipyard and other plants, was home to the biggest industrial complex in Europe. There were fourteen shipyards on the Tyne, building vessels from massive luxury liners to tugboats and wherries. At Palmers Yard, ‘ore went in one end and a battleship came out the other’, while Swan Hunter held the world record for gross shipping tonnage constructed per year.

This Edwardian map shows many of the shipyards and other industries of the Tyne. (Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, TWAM D.NCP/1/15)

The major manufacturers, together with the still-flourishing pits, could find jobs for almost every working man in the area. This was a world in which most men worked with their hands, while women stayed at home and raised families. Family sizes were often large, and most women’s lives were dominated by the weekly round of washing, cooking and cleaning just as surely as men’s were circumscribed by the works’ buzzer. While middle-class Jesmond was satirised by Yevgeny Zamyatin as a suburb inhabited by identical gentlemen with identical newspapers and top hats, passing by the gleaming doorsteps of their large houses to greet each other on a Sunday morning, many more lived in gridded streets of relatively newly built Tyneside flats. These terraces, ordinary from the outside, were two-storey dwellings with each floor having its own entrance and household. This meant small homes, and a list of the most overcrowded urban areas in England would be topped by Jarrow. Here in 1914, 37 per cent of households were living more than two people per room. Next would come South Shields, Gateshead and Newcastle before the rest of the country had a look in.

But the region was more than a population of industrial workers providing fuel and equipment for the nation, and their genteel bosses. Edwardian Newcastle had fashionable department stores, enough cinema and theatre seats to comfortably house every local once a week, and an unusually large amount of open space and parkland for recreation. Some 200 electric trams carried nearly a million passengers a year in Newcastle alone, and the route to the coast had the country’s first electric train outside London, luring day trippers to the beach in their thousands. It was a golden era for Newcastle United, with three League wins and five FA Cup Finals (though only one victory) in the period 1904 –13. Tyneside was also a crucible of ideas, with a strong tradition of engagement with religion, politics, intellectual pursuits, trade unionism and the suffrage movement.

Men and boys standing in Market Street, near H. Samuel the jewellers, 1911. Many of these lads would have been in combat a few years later. The smaller building next door is the Albion pub, and the decorated building is the Empire Palace Theatre, celebrating the coronation of George V. (Newcastle Libraries)

No one in the summer of 1914 could have imagined the changes that the area would see throughout the long years of the Great War. Tyneside would be called upon to provide both men and machines – and it did both of these things to a staggering degree, and with huge consequences.

Jo Bath, 2014

1

OUTBREAK OFWAR

When in June 1914 the heir to the throne of Austria, Duke Franz Ferdinand, was shot dead by a Serbian nationalist in the streets of Sarajevo, the news made all the papers – but few viewed it as an international disaster. With hindsight it is possible to see the way in which all the nations of Europe and beyond were delicately balanced, held in equilibrium by a web of alliances and agreements. Whether, and on what scale, war was inevitable, is well beyond the scope of this book. But the summer of 1914 witnessed a slow slide into regional and then global war as each country in turn either felt obligated to become involved, or felt that involvement would forward their own interests. It was arguable right up to the last moment whether Britain would, or even should, step in. Some thought that this was not Britain’s fight, or that it made more sense for Britain to support Germany than to side with Russia.

There was little sense of impending doom, or the inevitability of the war to come, among the general public. Contrary to the myth that would have us envision jingoistic crowds egging the government on to a declaration of hostility, public opinion was mixed, and judgements more carefully considered. Ruth Dodds – a young Gateshead diarist whom we will meet several times in these pages – was to reflect soon after war was declared that, ‘a week ago we never dreamt of it. There was a small war far in the East, that was all … Perhaps we were butterflies dancing on the brink of a precipice after all.’ Newcastle man George Harbottle was similarly unprepared, writing later that: ‘the clouds of war suddenly appeared; there had been such things before but they had blown over and peace had returned. This time, however, it was quickly, though quite unexpectedly, realised that war was upon us in fact. Most people were soon trying to assess what effect it would have upon them, and what action they should take to mitigate its effect.’

Still, some were quietly preparing for the worst. On 28 July, Tyneside’s Territorial Army brigade (formed in 1908) were sent to guard local fuel depots. Three days later, Ruth Dodds ‘saw the first soldiers guarding the High Level [Bridge]. & Father laughed at it so much that we all laughed too.’ Apparently they weren’t that good at it and, according to Dodds, the chief constable said that ‘my men would guard the bridges twice as efficiently without any fuss … take away your drunken soldiers, and let me do the work they can’t stand to do, or, if you won’t, at least make them behave’.

On 2 August, Germany gave an ultimatum to Belgium, demanding an unimpeded route through the Belgian countryside in an attempt to outflank the French and quickly pacify Paris. This gave extra fuel to those in favour of an alliance with France. The following day, Belgium refused to give Germany free passage, and Germany declared war on France. The day of 3 August was a warm Bank Holiday Monday, and saw the region torn between holiday excitement, and worry about the future. The North East Railway Company had spoiled many holiday plans by cancelling all the special excursion trains for the weekend. Still, Ruth Dodds’ diary entry that day was largely taken up with musings about box-pleats and magyar sleeves, fashionable lace cuffs and sashes of rose and amethyst. She was hoping that war could be avoided, she wrote, that perhaps not all that she had heard about the onward march of the German Army was true. Britain had not yet declared war; perhaps Germany would withdraw. That same day, George Harbottle sat with fellow members of his cricket team debating ‘what our personal actions should be, if, as already seemed certain, war would be declared next day’. The opposing team had not turned up, probably because several members were in the Territorials.

TYNESIDE REGIMENTS

Two army regiments covered Tyneside. North of the Tyne were the Northumberland Fusiliers, and to the south were the Durham Light Infantry (DLI) – though members were not always locals. There were also small unaffiliated units like the Northern Cyclists Battalion, based at Hutton Road Drill Hall, Sandyford.

Standing towards the photographer and fourth from the right in this 1914 photograph of the King Edward Bridge is a military guard. He was probably over 45 years old, and a member of the Amble section of the National Reserve (seeSoldier, March 1992). (Newcastle Libraries)

Debate was fuelled by the newspapers. The Evening Chronicle was selling well at twice its usual price, and reported that ‘everywhere were to be seen little knots of people listening to the latest information being read out by some obliging gentleman’. On the 3rd, the Illustrated Chronicle was presciently predicting ‘the most awful war in history’. South Shields author Catherine Cookson was only 8 at the time, but long remembered those last days of peace, when she sat and listened as family members read each other pieces from the newspaper each night, and argued over their implications.

On 4 August, German troops crossed into Belgium, a country whose neutrality Britain had almost fifty years previously agreed to protect. As Ruth Dodds put it, ‘now for the life of me, much as I hate it all I can’t see what else we can do as Germany has attacked Belgium. Belgium would probably not have dared to insist on her neutrality if she hadn’t believed that we would uphold the treaty.’ Britain immediately responded with an ultimatum of its own. The Germans had until 11 p.m. on the 4th – midnight in Germany – to agree to withdraw to within their own borders, or Britain would declare war.

That day the tension gradually wound up in the busy city centre and beyond. The newspapers reported the arrest of an East Prussian man found wandering near the naval yards with plans and measuring gauges. In the morning, three more men were arrested near the Swing Bridge and High Level Bridge as suspected spies. As they were escorted to the station, a large crowd gathered to hoot and jeer. Bystanders gathered at the German consulate, as at least 200 German nationals met to begin their journey homeward, before war left them stranded. Frenchmen, called up by their own army, also headed for their consulate, and then Central Station. The Evening Chronicle noted that this group included forty Breton ‘onion men’ in ‘characteristic dress and wooden sabots’! Such men would continue to leave over the next few days, singing ‘La Marseillaise’ as they went.

Crowds in the city centre, already in their hundreds on the 3rd, only intensified as the 4th wore on. Reverend James Mackay watched them converging around the Evening Chronicle offices and Central Station where news might come from London, hanging around beyond 11 p.m. in the hope of some certainty. He wrote, ‘there were no great demonstrations of excitement. The people took things very calmly.’ But as the appointed hour came and went, Germany had not retreated from Belgium, and Britain’s ultimatum had not been met. The nation was at war.

On the morning of the 5th, the declaration of war must have been the main subject of conversation everywhere. In Kiddar’s Luck, Jack Common’s fictional alter ego Bill Kiddar portrayed the lads of Heaton as welcoming the war:

We thrilled to the prospect of great British victories, new Trafalgars and Waterloos, and if the cost was a few fathers killed, well, we reckoned we could stand that. There was even a certain amount of eagerness to see fathers march off to glory leaving us as the only man in the house. We saw ourselves grabbing the best chair as by right, getting first cut off the joint, smoking publicly and unrebuked at our own firesides. As plotted out at the corner-end, war seemed to be just the thing that boys had always needed.

But there was also fear, including fear of an east coast invasion. That first day, young Catherine Cookson went down to the coast expecting to see German warships blazing their way into the Tyne. Had her nightmares somehow been realised, the warships would have met the default defences of the Port of Tyne, whose importance to the industrial strength of the country was no secret. Two Regular Army companies, and one Territorial company, were stationed nearby. Additionally, there were three cannon at Tynemouth Castle, two at the Spanish Battery (a stone’s throw from the castle, at the mouth of the Tyne), and three at Frenchman’s Point Battery in South Shields. Thankfully, while the Owen Committee recommendations of 1905 resulted in Frenchman’s Point Battery being reduced to training purposes only, the Admiralty had restocked it in 1913.

Though no warships appeared, a widespread reaction to the outbreak of war was panic buying. The Evening Chronicle reported that shopping on the 5th was ‘of an exciting nature’, with many shops completely running out of basic supplies like flour and eggs. Some grocery shops were forced to shut their doors, while open doors were met with ‘something in the nature of a raid’. Ruth Dodds recorded that her sister wanted to start buying emergency supplies, but her father decreed ‘we must act sensibly even if no one else does’. Newspaper columnist John Oxberry, too, noted that ‘people bought recklessly and selfishly’, and drew moral points from the fact that this tendency occurred amongst all classes. Apparently one Wallsend shopkeeper on the first day of war capitalised on the panic by putting the price of flour up from 1s 11d to 5s per stone. In Benwell, similarly excessive price rises led to an attack wrecking two flour dealers’ stores on the evening of the 8th, reportedly by ‘a mob numbering several thousand’.

By this point, Tynesiders were already directly involved in the conflict. In the early hours of 5 August, the light cruiser HMS Amphion discovered the SS Königin Luise – a hastily converted German ferry painted in the black, buff and yellow of a Great Eastern Railway steamer – laying mines off the Thames Estuary. On board the Amphion was Royal Marine John Brown-King, a young man from Windy Nook who is thought to have fired the first shot of the First World War. The Amphion sank the Königin Luise, but a few hours later ran into one of the previously laid mines. Brown-King was badly burned trying to save one of his fellows from the flames, and died a fortnight later. Dodds heard about the incident on the 6th, and recorded that now she could cry for both ships, rather than feeling it somehow wrong that the first casualties should be German even though the British were in the right.

Artillerymen practise at Seaton Sluice in the summer of 1913. (North Tyneside Libraries)

If Britain was at war, it needed to send an army immediately. However, the nation’s well-trained standing force was smaller than the German conscript army. It would take time to train new recruits. As a first measure, the country sent much – though not all, given the fear of invasion – of the British Expeditionary Force to France right away. Among those heading over the Channel during the first few days of war were 600 professionals of the Northumberland Fusiliers. So many people gathered to cheer them off from Newcastle Central Station on the 5th and 6th that it was difficult to move around; railway officials were forced to close the station at the portico to anyone without a ticket.

Somewhere in the chaos would have been the Central Station charity dog. Large dogs with a wooden box strapped to their backs for donations were not uncommon in railway stations at this time, and from the start of the war, the Newcastle hound was collecting for the Belgian and National Relief Funds. By late October, he had raised £52 12s 7d. Nearby, too, was another animal – just before his train left, Sergeant Peter Manley was given a small black kitten. Named Peter, the cat soon became a mascot for the Northumberland Hussars Yeomanry, and survived the entire war living in a mess cart.

THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE (BEF)

Formed a few years earlier, in 1914 the British Expeditionary Force comprised six infantry divisions and five cavalry divisions. They were mobile, well trained and in some respects well equipped, but few in number compared to the German conscript army.

Among the crowds was Reverend Mackay, who saw a pastoral duty in trying to comfort the families of the departing soldiers. He wrote, ‘the sights are heart-rending. Weeping women and children are everywhere. There is no cheering no great ovations no wild enthusiasm just a great stricken mass of humanity broken-hearted as a mother who has lost her only child … There is an occasional cheer but for the most part things are very grave.’ Alongside the regular soldiers were many officers. Asked while ‘passing the port’ at a brigade dinner to sign for an immediate overseas deployment, they had nearly all volunteered on the spot. The following day the list had to be hastily cancelled and replaced with a more thoughtful approach when it was realised that to do otherwise would leave the brigade at home virtually leaderless.

Newcastle Station’s charity dog poses (centre front) with railway workers and VAD nursing staff, published in theNorth Eastern Railway Magazinein November 1914. (Rob Langham)

The next line of defence was the Territorial Reserve, which included men who had left the Regular Army in the previous nine years. Four battalions of the Durham Light Infantry reserve had just been at their annual camp in North Wales. They arrived at battalion headquarters in Gateshead on 4 August and were sent home – only to be mobilised back to Gateshead again the following day! Out of 1,013 men, 996 had arrived by midday. This included the 9th Battalion, largely comprised of miners whose short and stocky build prompted the nickname ‘Gateshead Gurkhas’. Meanwhile, north of the river the 1,776 reservists of the Northumberland Fusiliers, whose regimental depot was the Fenham Barracks, were ordered to mobilise. Post offices stayed open all night, and Herbert Waugh received his blue mobilisation papers at midnight, telling him to be on parade in St George’s Drill Hall a scant six hours later. Although they had signed up for home defence, almost all the reservists volunteered to go abroad.

Peter the cat, photographed after war’s end sporting medal ribbons around his neck. (Newcastle Libraries; Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

Additional recruiting began in earnest on the 7th, when Field Marshal Kitchener issued an appeal to enlist 100,000 men, to form (initially) six new divisions. Men immediately began to pour in, to the central enrolment office in Grainger Street, to the Newcastle Barracks, and to many other offices across the region. They could choose to join the existing Territorials, but most chose to volunteer for Kitchener’s ‘New Army’. The process was fast. A total of 1,100 men joined the 8th (Service) Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers in the first eleven days; by 7 September they, along with the 9th and 10th Service Battalions, were ready to leave. It is difficult to say how many genuinely expected a quick jaunt, a foreign holiday at the expense of the army, but there must have been some such amongst the first wave of recruits. Ruth Dodds’ father met a young soldier who when asked ‘I suppose you’re dying to meet a German?’ replied ‘A German? By! If a meet a German, A’m off!’

There were many reasons for joining up, from national pride to boyish enthusiasm. Frank Fawcett’s brother William joined on his 18th birthday, 8 August 1914. Catherine Cookson’s uncle Jack signed up early from ‘alcoholic bravado’. H.M.B. Henderson was a trainee accountant at the Newcastle offices of the North East Railway; several of his co-workers were in the Territorials, and he was ‘caught up in the flow of human endeavour at that time, and found myself in a drill hall joining the army the day after war broke out’. Another local lad, who tried to join the Northumberland Hussars (known as equestrian specialists) but was turned away as he was only 16, later reflected that he didn’t really know why he had rushed to join. It was simply that ‘there was a fight on, and I suppose I wanted to get into it. Besides, I could ride.’

An army motorbike and sidecar, 1916. (West Newcastle Picture Collection)

The first few months of war were not characterised by trench warfare, but by quick shifts, by battles in open fields as yet still green, with any dugouts being temporary. Any sense that the war would be ‘over by Christmas’, if it existed at all, can be confined to an initial period in which early victories suggested a sweeping momentum. In fact, within a few weeks the Expeditionary Force had suffered heavy casualties, coming unstuck against an enemy more numerous and advanced than they had expected. On 26 August, Ruth Dodds wrote, ‘now the Germans are victorious, I feel as if the worst had really happened, & yet we all go on calmly enough and the papers have not lied to us about it after all – unless it isn’t true that the British fought well & are not to blame for the retreat’. A couple of weeks later she continued, ‘Bad news today. Of course it comes from the Admiralty – apparently we are never to hear anything more about the Expeditionary Force, except occasional casualty lists, & from German news, the towns that the French and English have lost …’

All the men on this bus have just enlisted at Birtley. Note the prominent Union Flags. (Gateshead Library)

In less than a month, wounded members of the Expeditionary Force were returning from France with their own tales to tell, particularly about the disastrous Battle of Mons on 23 and 24 August. The press chose to embrace their reports. On 3 September, the Chronicle published a letter sent from the Royal Victoria Infirmary by gunner James Scott to his mother in Jarrow. He wrote:

You will be a bit surprised to hear I am back in England. I am not too bad, only my leg damaged, but it will soon be all right again. I hope so, anyway, and I will have another ‘go’ before I finish. I consider I got off lucky to some fellows; they were dropping like logs … We put the Germans down as they came up, but it was like knocking over a beehive. A hundred came up for one knocked down, and we had not enough men to stand up to them.

The following week a similar letter came from a South Shields soldier, Henry Harmor. He said that after the Battle of Mons ‘every one of us thanked the Lord for the mercy shown to us to be alive to tell the tale. There were only 2,000 of us to 30,000 Germans. There were shells falling all around us …’ By 11 October, gossip was so emphasising German advances that Ruth wondered ‘if it is true that the Germans will soon be here. I heard some sort of explosion in the middle of last night & wondered if it was a Zeppelin bomb.’

The stories kept on coming. In November 1914, Ruth Dodds met an injured soldier who told her that ‘it was terrible at the Front & hadn’t even one good word for it. He thought the Germans were very wicked (& he had seen what they did) but he gave his greatcoat, in bad weather, to a starving German prisoner.’ In April 1915, hundreds from the Northumberland Infantry Brigade fought in the attack on St Julien and found themselves in Newcastle hospitals within a week of their arrival in France. One records watching his two friends dying in a trench, from shell blast. ‘We had never even seen a German soldier.’

Additionally, within days the press was reporting numerous German atrocities in Belgium, their accounts from the start a mixture of truth, lies and exaggerations hard for anyone to untangle. For instance, on 18 September the Evening Chronicle