The Stroud Valleys in the Great War E-Book

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

Seitenzahl: 261

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The First World War claimed over 995,000 British lives, and its legacy continues to be remembered today.Stroud's Five Valleys in the Great War offers an intimate portrayal of the region and its people living in the shadow of the 'war to end all wars'. This highly accessible volume explores themes of local reaction to the outbreak of war; the experience of individuals who enlisted; the changing face of industry and related unrest; the work of the hospitals in the area; the effect of the conflict on children; the women who defied convention to play a vital role on the home front and how people coped with the transition to life in peacetime once more. The Great War story of the Stroud Valleys – including Stroud, Brimscombe, Chalford, Bussage, Woodchester, Stonehouse, Minchinhampton and Rodborough – is recalled by those who were there and is vividly illustrated with photographs, postcards, documents and other First World War ephemera.

Leseprobe

First published in 2017

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2017

All rights reserved

© The Five Valleys Great War Researchers Group, 2017

The right of The Five Valleys Great War Researchers Group as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8185 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Peter Evans

INTRODUCTION

Camilla Boon and Diana Wall

SETTING THE SCENE

Diana Wall

1 UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:

THE STROUD HOME FRONT, 1914-1918

Marion Hearfield

2 STROUD’S VICTORIA CROSS:

LIEUTENANT EUGENE PAUL BENNETT VC, MC

Steve Pitman

3 RODBOROUGH

Julie Mountain

4 A MINCHINHAMPTON PERSPECTIVE

Diana Wall

5 MINCHINHAMPTON AERODROME

Diana Wall

6 CHALFORD, FRANCE LYNCH AND BUSSAGE

Camilla Boon

7 THE WOODCHESTER WAYSIDE CROSS:

‘THE FIRST WAR MEMORIAL’

Philip Goodwin

8 WOODCHESTER

Barbara Warnes

9 STONEHOUSE

Stonehouse History Group

10 BRIMSCOMBE:

THE COLE FAMILY’S EXPERIENCE

Tina Blackman

11 AFTERWORD:

AFTERWARDS

Peter Evans

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND SELECTED SOURCES

FOREWORD

National identity is alive and well. Local history societies flourish. Genealogists search for roots and ancestors. The commemoration of the First World War centenary provided a great incentive for historical research, as I found at an exhibition in Brimscombe in the summer of 2015, with local Great War servicemen and women detailed and pictured in Stroud district villages. That was only part of it. Names matter.

Edwin Budding was unknown in the Westminster village. He was an engineer building and repairing machines in local cloth mills. He was on to a world-beater. On 31 August 1830 he patented ‘a new combination and application of machinery for the purpose of cropping or shearing the vegetable surface of lawns, grass-plats and pleasure grounds’. This was the world’s first lawnmower. He got the idea for his lawnmower from the cross-cutting machines that were used to finish woollen cloth. Scythes were used before his invention. Think of that, members of the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) at Lords, or designers of garden cities, or when you next cut your grass at home.

A beer was named after him, produced by a local craft brewery, itself a reinstatement of identity. The old Stroud Brewery, a matter of local pride, was shut. It wasn’t required by big business any more. But now on a Saturday night folk can buy Budding beer at a renewed Stroud Brewery in quart jugs and join their family, friends and dogs in a hubbub of jollity and talk.

Do you know the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and particularly the one of the peasant wedding in 1568? There they are sitting on benches at bare trestle tables, a medieval invention, and there they were on my Saturday night in the local village also on benches at bare trestle tables, just the same really. I was drinking a pint of Budding beer.

Every so often a pizza in the making from properly crafted flour would be tossed in the air in the adjacent kitchen, cooked, scrumptious, over a wood fire. Never before or since have I had one like it, so light and tasty.

I gave a talk in a village up the road, Brimscombe, where I was born in the same house as my father, who saw as a child a procession up the hill celebrating the relief of Mafeking. I am so old – 84 now – that I am regarded as an artefact myself, remembering what is now diligently researched and asked about – shops in the village, where they were, what they sold and who ran them.

People want to know. It is as if they are re-cultivating a field which has lain fallow for too long. My father’s secondary school logbook from Brimscombe Polytechnic in 1909 recalls what has since been forgotten – education for work, not as theory. It could actually be the basis of a manual for teaching today. He has drawn in it the first aeroplane and writes that he made a model of it. Pupils of my old local grammar school, Marling, and the nearby Girls’ High School recently helped to create and build a real aeroplane. The first jet in Britain and America to fly, made by the then Gloster Aircraft company, was powered by Whittle’s engine – on which my uncle worked. He began work as an apprentice in the village boat-building company where one of my grandfathers was foreman and the other worked with members of the family on river vessels exported across the world. The canal where they were launched is currently being revived.

Only now are we realising what has been lost. It seems to me that there is a great willingness to learn from the past, not least that people matter in this hi-tech world. There is a new surge of vigorous local enterprise, shops and pubs that care, with eager staff, women these days as well as men.

My strong impression is that the real Britain which matters has been asleep, but is now waking up. The Five Valleys are wonderfully active and true to themselves, as this book shows.

You could call it a re-assertion of identity, of what we have been and are.

Peter Evans, 2017

INTRODUCTION

As the centenary of the Great War approached, local history societies wondered how best to commemorate the subject of the effects of the conflict on their own towns and villages. For many groups, the obvious point of departure was the war memorial standing – for much of the year barely regarded – in the middle of their community. Such neat lists of names, each one, however, represents a personal tragedy. ‘Lest Ye Forget’ warns the monument in Chalford. The trouble was that the individual men had been largely forgotten. So the researches began, using online resources, old newspapers and other documents. Local historians sat in their own homes, in the local libraries, in the Gloucestershire archives, gradually uncovering the stories and the characters behind the names. The wider story of the ripple effect of war came into focus – the knitting and sewing parties, the lighting restrictions, the food shortages, the effects on local industry, the VAD hospitals, the increased opportunities for women, the Volunteer Training Corps, the constant background of uncertainty and worry.

Realising that there were many overlaps in our researches, several of the local history societies came together to form the Five Valleys Great War Researchers Group, which has provided a happy and supportive framework in which to develop our ideas and continue working.

In 2015 an exhibition entitled ‘Stroud District and its part in the Great War’ was held at Brimscombe, to coincide with a visit from Tina Blackman of New Zealand. She had completed research on the Cole family, and especially her great-grandfather and his three brothers from Bourne House in Brimscombe, who had served in the conflict; three had died and were commemorated in her publication, The Three Uncles: The Cole Brothers in the Great War.

Local publisher The History Press exhibited at the event, as did many of the villages and towns represented within the Five Valleys Great War Researchers. Peter Evans, a distinguished journalist and leader-writer for The Times, retired now, gave a fascinating talk, evoking his childhood in Brimscombe between the wars. Other short lectures and presentations took place and from this arose the idea of a publication to bring the research to a wider audience. Not all areas would be included – some were publishing their own accounts of a particular village, others were disseminating information via the Internet, and some were intending to continue working until 2018. However, it is hoped that the following will provide an overview of our area at this momentous time. The copyright for each essay remains with the individual authors and every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge the many illustrations that appear in the book.

Camilla Boon and Diana Wall The Five Valleys Great War Researchers Group, 2017

SETTING THE SCENE

The coronation of King George V and Queen Mary took place on 22 June 1911 and was a cause of much rejoicing in Stroud and the surrounding areas. The cousin of many kings and queens throughout Europe and ruler of a worldwide empire, George was seen as the epitome of a modern head of state. The communities of the Five Valleys, and indeed many much nearer the heart of government, could not anticipate the shadows of war which would soon be gathering.

Stroud was the natural hub of the parishes lying along the five river valleys (Frome, Stroudwater, Painswick, Nailsworth and Slad) and the higher land lying between. The geology of the area gave it its character – the Greater Oolite (limestone) forming the plateaux with the Liassic clays exposed in the valleys. The limestone supported prosperous farming, both arable and livestock, and many of the men in the upland parishes were agricultural workers. Stone was still extensively quarried, especially around Rodborough and Minchinhampton. Over the previous century the woollen industry had become concentrated in large, highly mechanised factories in the river valleys, such as Dunkirk and Longfords mills, but new industries moved in to the smaller mills, including iron-founding, shoddy-working, silk-throwing, and the manufacture of pins, walking sticks and ready-made clothing. The 1911 census shows the importance of these in the economy of the area. In Nailsworth bacon-curing, brewing and engineering became prominent, attracting workers from agriculture.

Stroud had been much enlarged during the nineteenth century, mainly as a result of better road infrastructures and the coming of first the canal and then the railway. In 1914 the town was continuing to attract commercial and industrial development. Nailsworth also grew into a small town and from the late years of the century Rodborough was encroached on by the suburbs of Stroud, but much of the area remained predominately rural, with Minchinhampton, Painswick and Bisley becoming favoured residential areas.

It was from this background that men answered the call to arms at the outbreak of the Great War. Thanks to successive Education Acts the rural population was literate, advances in medicine and diet meant that few would be refused enlistment on health grounds, and the strong community spirit of the Five Valleys ensured that there was a network of support for the troops.

The following chapters from the Five Valleys Great War Researchers Group explore these themes in greater detail.

Diana Wall, 2017

1

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

THE STROUD HOME FRONT, 1914-1918

MARION HEARFIELD

In August 1914 the local newspapers were full of enthusiastic support for Stroud’s young men as they queued to volunteer for Lord Kitchener’s Army. There were rallies and public meetings and promises, cheerful farewells and tearful farewells, and a real expectation that the war would not last long and the boys would all soon be home.

At that time, the Stroud News was published on a Friday, so there had been several days to digest the news when the first wartime issue was published on 7 August. That edition conveyed a vivid sense of a changed world, where the Territorials had suddenly been called up, shows and railway excursions cancelled, horses requisitioned, and there had been panic-buying (particularly of sugar and flour, strongly deprecated by the paper’s editor).

When war was declared, all the banks closed for three days to prevent people withdrawing their money. When they reopened, new paper banknotes (£1 and 10s) had replaced gold sovereigns. The paper reported:

Never, perhaps, has a great war been started in a more serious and sober spirit than this. Only the youthful who cannot appraise the terrible significance of war have so far exhibited the excitement which has characterised the mobilisation scenes in many of the great Continental towns.

A cartoon decrying hoarding. (Courtesy of the Stroud News and Journal)

BELGIAN REFUGEES

Belgian refugees had fled the advancing Germans in 1914 and, within the space of six months, 250,000 Belgian refugees were found homes in the UK. They gave worried families something practical to do; if they could not look after their own sons then at least they could look after other displaced people. By early 1915 about 200 people were being looked after in and around Stroud.

The Stroud News of 11 September 1914 reported that fifty Belgian refugees arrived ‘last Wednesday’ at the invitation of Lady Howard of Castle Godwin, Painswick. They were met by Father Fitzgerald and given supper at the Convent (an accompanying black and white photograph of the event hides the fact that the hastily-hung Belgian flag was upside down!).

Local committees sprang up and provided clothes and food, lent furniture, identified lodgings or whole cottages for the bewildered and often angry visitors who had been forced to abandon their quiet lives and homes and been bundled into a different country with a different language. Jobs were found and compromises made on all sides, though it was not always easy. One family was housed at Selsley Vicarage. Gabrielle West, the 24-year-old vicar’s daughter, wrote in her diary how difficult and demanding ‘her’ family was. But she jumped to their defence when the local committee wanted to move them to another house in two days’ time without any consultation.

On New Year’s Eve 1914, Lady Marling and a committee of seven ladies arranged an entertainment at Stroud’s Subscription Rooms for ‘200 of our friends from Belgium staying in the district’. The hall was lavishly decorated by builder Philip Ford and helpers with gaily coloured flags and a ‘gorgeous Christmas tree decorated with all manner of fancy articles and fairy candles’. There was a conjuror, a concert of songs accompanied by Mr S.W. Underwood, presents for every child, a ‘bountiful supper’ and, finally, the floor was cleared for dancing. In the adjacent column the newspaper listed the most recent dead and wounded soldiers from the Gloucestershire Regiment. Life was oddly fragmented.

SPY FEVER

A feature of the unsettled atmosphere during the first year of the war was the hostility and suspicion meted out to those who had foreign-sounding names. One incident concerned Mr and Mrs Jagger, who ran the Cosy Restaurant in Nelson Street. On 4 June 1915 they placed an ‘Important Notice’ in the Stroud News that stated that they were both of English birth and English parentage. They offered a reward of £5 for information leading to the conviction of the person or persons who had circulated the untrue and slanderous statement that they were Germans (the 1911 census shows that Mr Jagger had been born in Cumberland and his wife was a Yorkshirewoman). William Rothenstein, the distinguished artist then living in Far Oakridge, came in for similar treatment, to the extent that he (briefly) changed his name to Rutherston in 1916.

RECRUITMENT

The local newspaper editors had the unenviable and wearying task of encouraging enlistment, explaining shortages, defusing tensions and reporting on every trench death whilst exhorting their readers to carry on supporting the war effort because Britain was in the right and the evil enemy would be vanquished. They reported columns and columns of speeches, resolutions and committee meetings where much was discussed but often too little achieved. They published ‘Letters to the Editor’ – some of which make uncomfortable reading today. At a recruiting rally in August 1915, Lieutenant Fedden told the women in his audience that if their sons were not already fighting in Flanders they should go down on their knees and beg them to go. When an indignant voice protested that she had five sons at the front already, she was congratulated briskly and told to make her friends do the same.

National Registration card issued to shipbuilder’s apprentice Stanley Evans, who had just started work at Abdela & Mitchell in Brimscombe. (Courtesy of Peter Evans)

In July 1915 everyone between the ages of 15 and 65 not in military service had to complete a grey National Register form with their name, age, marital status, and a range of occupation codes – forty different groups for men, and thirty-six for women – ranging from unskilled agricultural labourers though clerks to bankers and professionals. ‘No person may regard himself as too exalted or too humble to append his signature to the form, for all have equal obligations to the State’ (Stroud News, 6 August 1915). The results were in by September 1915 and everyone was given a Registration Card.

The government introduced the Military Service Act on 27 January 1916. Voluntary enlistment was stopped and all British-resident men aged between 19 and 41 were deemed to have enlisted on 2 March 1916. Like it or not, they had been conscripted.

Conscripted men were not given a choice of regiment or unit, although if a man preferred the navy it got priority to take him. In May 1916 this Act was extended to married men, and the lower age dropped to 18.

TRIBUNALS

Compulsion brought disagreement, of course, and hundreds asked for deferment, if not complete exclusion. Stroud’s Urban and Rural Military Tribunals, composed mainly of JPs and other pillars of the local community, aided by Lieutenant John Wood as military representative, held their first meetings at the end of February 1916. Claimants were anonymous to begin with, but from 30 June they were named. Here is a summary of a typical Stroud Urban District Tribunal session, held just after Christmas on 29 December 1916, by which time the format and tone of the proceedings was well-established:

· Messrs Bowstead and Co. wished to renew the exemption granted in Sept last to James Devlin (aged 40) married, manager of their Stroud branch at Hound Brand Works in Lansdown, wholly employed on Government work. He had been passed for garrison duty at home and conditional exemption was given.

· R. Townsend and Co. of Stratford Mills, oil and cake manufacturers, appealed on behalf of two of their labourers, both 24, both classified C2. A delay of one month was agreed. They also appealed on behalf of their married seed and corn buyer, E.J. Dash (aged 32). His exemption was granted until 31 March.

· Cotswold Stores Ltd argued that their slaughterman Arthur Neal, 37, married, classified C1, was in a reserved occupation. He was granted three months’ exemption.

· Stroud Brewery, appealing for their married mineral water maker, J.T. Vernall (41), passed for garrison duty at home, was not successful, though call-up would be delayed for a month.

· Lieutenant Wood pressed strongly for W.G. Dyer (aged 41), a married carter working for Wood and Rowe coal merchants. His case was supported by Stroud Urban District Council because he was a member of the town fire brigade. Despite this special pleading, his exemption was refused as long as a substitute carter could be found.

· The case of Charles Osborne (aged 34) marine store dealer of Tower Hill, Stroud, was refused, as was that of Charles Watkins, a married tailor’s machinist (aged 37), who appealed on personal grounds (what these were is not revealed, as the case was heard in camera).

· Eastmans butchers sought exemption for two of their men, F.C. Lawson (aged 40), manager of the sausage factory, and S.O. Burford (aged 38), a slaughterman. The latter received a conditional exemption. In Lawson’s case, however, Lieutenant Wood said that ‘it was necessary for the firm to prove that it was in the national interests that people should eat sausages and polonies (laughter)’ and he was refused.

· Hill Paul and Co. appealed for two of their workers, W.P. Crosby (aged 30) and A.C. Gardner (aged 34). Both were employed as coat pressers engaged on government work, very much in arrears on account of shortage of labour. Crosby was passed fit for general service, with a delay of two months, Gardner for garrison duty at home.

· Stroud Co-op requested renewal of exemptions for five of its bakers, all passed fit for home duties. Lieutenant Wood admitted that the Society had a good case, and the men were exempted until 31 March.

The Urban and Rural Tribunal members dealt with similar claims every week as hundreds of local families realised the impact of losing their breadwinner, or businesses losing key workers and managers. Tempers frayed occasionally under the pressure of hard choices. On 5 May 1916, during an appeal by Hill Paul for a cutter needed to complete a military contract, Lieutenant Wood probably regretted his aside that ‘the military authorities wished to put a stop to the vicious practice of appeals’ although he accepted Mr Paul’s word that there would be no further appeal. Mr Paul somewhat hotly retorted that he was not in the habit of saying what he did not mean.

INDUSTRY

The impact on Stroud’s manufacturing industries was significant and, though some firms did well, not all were still trading in the 1920s. Stroud cloth had an enviable reputation worldwide and well before 1914 many local mills were providing high-quality cloth for military use. Every mill became involved in production for the war effort, although the Stroud News editor complained that Trowbridge’s mills, working night and day, might send work Stroud’s way!

Even the local flock mills – regarded with some disdain by the high-end cloth mill owners – came into their own. Shoddy and flock did not need modern buildings and equipment and so the mill owners carried on recycling old cloth to be re-woven for cheap suits (shoddy) and stuffing for mattresses and cheap pillows (flock). Now their shoddy was needed to make uniforms. Their raw material increased when they were required to recycle worn or damaged uniforms from the front. One elderly resident remembers seeing railway wagons at Woodchester station packed with blood-spattered khaki, although there was probably more mud than blood.

On 30 April 1915 the Stroud News summarised the current position in Stroud:

The cloth mills are busy with khaki contracts, several engineering works have secured large munitions contracts, and there is very little unemployment in the district. While the output of khaki and navy for the British forces and of mustard cloth for Russia is at present not as great as it was a little time ago, the demands of the French Government for blue-grey army cloths are very considerable. In addition, many mills are now hard at work trying to make up the arrears lost through war contracts in the production of costume cloth. Not only have the requirements of this country to be met in the matter of civilian clothing, but with Lille, Roubaix and Elberfield out of the market at present the mills of Great Britain are the only manufactories of these goods in Europe.

A brief report in the Stroud News of 11 June 1915 shows that Apperly Curtis, for one, did not discontinue its Continental trade straight away. A case of cloth shipped to Constantinople had been stolen but the witnesses – the ship’s captain and officers – were by then interned in Turkey. The judge found in favour of Apperly Curtis.

For the cloth mill managers, the war caused hold-ups and cancellations. Eastern Germany had been the source of fine merino wool in 1914; now it had to come all the way from Australia, avoiding German U-boats. Synthetic blue dye had only been available from Germany; now it had to be replaced by natural indigo, costing 50 per cent more and harder to work (Marling and Evans, fulfilling a contract for pale blue cloth for the French, temporarily turned the River Frome blue!). During 1915 Worth’s carpet factory advertised for energetic girls for carpet weaving. Hill Paul advertised for trouser machinists and finishers, Strachan’s was recruiting boys and girls aged 14 and 15 to work at Lodgemore Mill, and Holloway’s advertised for shirt machinists – experienced or learners.

Holloway’s advertisement from 7 November 1914. (Courtesy of the Gloucestershire Echo)

The majority of British Army uniforms were made in the huge clothing factories around Leeds, but Stroud’s weaving and clothing mills all received orders for khaki cloth or military clothing. Holloway’s reported working overtime on overcoats. A War Office order to Hill Paul in October 1917 was for supply of specified garments for a period of seven weeks, under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) regulations. The cost of making up the garments was left to the manufacturer but had to comply with the new wage clause and be agreed in advance by the Director of Army Contracts.

All manufacturers had problems outside their control. The most instant was the number of staff who volunteered. Local recruits to Lord Kitchener’s Army were sent to Horfield Barracks for processing and, in the first two weeks of the war, fifty men left Dudbridge Ironworks and forty-five from Stroud Brewery. Other industries soon found it hard to get raw materials but the skills of walking stick-makers and pin-makers were quickly diverted to war production.

Dudbridge Ironworks had secured a contract the previous March to make Salmson aeroplane engines, and switched all its staff and capacity to war work for the duration. During a visit by the Minister of Munitions in September 1914, a director of the Ironworks was pleased to announce that they had been asked to produce 16,000 shell caps and by mid-September the works was advertising for ‘Apprentices in all Departments’. By March 1915 a manager told the Stroud News that they were already employed full-time on government work and if more was wanted then the government would have to supply more men. It seems Mr Lloyd George had brought some factories under direct government control without consulting him.

Erinoid was one Stroud company that prospered as a direct consequence of the war, expanding eventually to become BP Chemicals at Lightpill. In 1914 Erinoid suddenly became the main UK producer of casein-based plastic – essential for uniform buttons and fireproof military components. The Erinoid plant was set up by Ernest Petersen to replace a similar company (Syrolit) at Lightpill that had failed in 1912 because of German competition. Petersen had been headhunted from that German manufacturer after meeting a Syrolit director at a Paris exhibition in 1912, and was in Stroud by early 1914. He found new equipment, devised the production method and new trading name, and Erinoid was up and running as war broke out. Then – a great irony – Petersen and his family were confined to the works site ‘for the duration’ because he was an enemy alien. At the end of the war the company’s chairman was proud to say that Erinoid plastic was ‘now used in every battleship, tank, telephone, signalling lamp and aeroplane’.

Erinoid advertisement. (Courtesy of Grace’s Guide)

Another successful company was T.H. & J. Daniels, whose engines and pumps already had a secure place before the Great War in local manufacturing and agricultural businesses. During the First World War, as well as armaments, they made portable water treatment equipment to provide drinking water for the troops; they also fitted out Erinoid, just down the hill, with its first hydraulic presses and extruders.

But the changed circumstances also caused business failures. One of the first was S. Smiths & Sons at Brimscombe Brewery, who called in the receivers within a year. In September 1915 their brewery plant and twenty-four pubs were put up for auction. Immediately after the war, some businesses failed through loss of orders, or customers, or both. Dudbridge Ironworks and Newman Henders – having had to abandon civilian customers in favour of full-time government contracts – found it impossible to get them back and called in the receivers, though both companies were rescued at the last minute by local investors. The Hound Brand Works in Slad Road – the smallest of Stroud’s ready-made clothing factories – went into liquidation on 10 October 1919. Between 1914 and 1923 the number of Stroud small traders fell by about 20 per cent.

This Stroud Journal advertisement from 30 June 1916 shows two small traders selling their businesses because they had to go to war. (Courtesy of the Stroud News and Journal)

Business failure, when it came, was not always immediate. Following the death on the battlefield in August 1916 of Arthur Apperly, the woollen manufacturer Apperly & Curtis slowly failed and the business was forced into liquidation in 1933 – just in time for Redlers to buy the site and set up its own successful business. Abdela & Mitchell, the Brimscombe steamboat builders, produced many Admiralty vessels between 1914 and 1919 and continued producing for overseas customers for a short time after the war, but orders dropped and the company closed after a fire in 1925.

WOMEN’S WORK

In September 1914 Mr Godsell, chairman of Stroud Urban District Council, held a meeting to raise interest in the formation of a local branch of the Queen’s ‘Work for Women’ Fund, but very few people attended and as a consequence no action was taken. But then the women of Stroud, who for generations had quietly run households, kept accounts and organised church bazaars, stepped into the public arena of fundraising with enthusiasm and enterprise. Mrs Ida Hyett, chair of the local War Relief Committee’s sub-committee for Women’s Employment, used the Stroud News to appeal for support for the number of women now short of work. While certain industries (notably cloth weaving) were busier than usual, many others (pin making, carpet and silk weaving, and tailoring) were working short time, causing considerable hardship to the families involved. The sub-committee organised home knitting and sewing work for these women who, Mrs Hyett was pleased to say, had already made 265 body belts, thirty-six mufflers and forty-eight pairs of socks for the troops. (One knitting pattern carried the stern warning ‘only an experienced knitter should undertake this sock’!)

The Stroud News of 5 October 1917 reported that the Holy Trinity Parish Knitting Party, in Stroud, had completed 1,179 different articles of wear, including over 600 pairs of socks. Miss Clissold asked for parcels of old clothes, fit for remaking for local relief, to be left for her at the Labour Exchange on Lansdown. Another young woman persuaded the Red Cross to deliver crates of donated eggs to the front. Practical help was being organised locally, and the women were doing it.

One local young woman was more than ready to experience freedom. Selsley vicar’s daughter Mary Gabrielle West quickly volunteered to work in a Red Cross hospital in Cheltenham, even though she had – as she later told a BBC interviewer – ‘only been trained to run a household’. From there she became a canteen supervisor and within a year was in charge of the nightshift kitchens at Woolwich Arsenal munitions works. She had a special dispensation from the dog-loving Assistant Lady Superintendent to have her terrier with her on night duty. Miss West then joined the new Women’s Police Service and spent the rest of the war as a sergeant, supervising female workers in munitions factories. Miss West recorded in her diary that these mostly city-born working-class women used language seldom heard in Selsley!

In 1915 gathering the harvest was a problem and a letter printed in March 1915 suggested that although few women could handle a scythe, or drive a cutting machine, they could turn the hay, drive carts, and throw the hay up for a man to build the rick.