Wakefield in the Great War, page 13
Members of the Volunteer Training Corps could buy dummy rifles to carry on parade or even on guard dutues.
Most importantly, they must understand that there would be no government funding: volunteers would have to pay for everything themselves. To become an officer meant taking two courses: the first was a general military syllabus taking up 3 hours per day for six days a week over three weeks, followed by 6 hours of examinations, followed by a drill course lasting 2 hours per day for three weeks costing a total of 3 guineas. Ordinary volunteers had to pay for training in Map Reading, First Aid, Signalling and a host of other skills. When, in 1915, regulations allowed for volunteers to have a special grey/green twill uniform, they had to pay for them. One rule stated that an officer could carry a sword if all his men were armed – but in the West Riding around 12,000 volunteers could muster just 750 rifles between them. A market developed in dummy rifles with wooden models for drill training and metal and wood replicas for guard duties. A major part of volunteer work was simply fund raising.
Wakefield gained its own branch of the Athlete’s Volunteer Force by mid September 1914 when up to seventy men per week under the command of Honorary Secretary C. Beaumont attended drill sessions at the Wakefield Trinity ground led by Sergeant Leadbeater with rifle training under Sergeant Major Lingwood at the rifle range in Cradocks Rope Works. In December, a crowded meeting in Council Chambers of the Town Hall and attended by the Bishop of Wakefield, the Chief Constable, Colonel Hind and various other dignitaries, discussed the formation of Wakefield’s own official Volunteer Training Corps. The Bishop explained that an invasion was quite possible and the enemy would make straight for industrial areas. ‘Unless they had trained men to meet a possible invasion they might as well put women and children to keep soldiers back; they would simply be providing food for the guns.’ The Volunteer Training Corps, he explained, would mean that there would at least be some military training available for men who were otherwise unable to serve. ‘It was decided to form a corps’, the Yorkshire Post reported, ‘and a large number of men at once joined.’
The Wakefield Volunteer Training Corps was formed in January 1915, organised jointly by Thomas Craven and J.T. Mills, the local agents for the Liberal and Conservative parties, who had abandoned their political differences for the duration of the war. Percy S. Craddock was appointed as the Commandant, and officers from the West Riding Constabulary and Wakefield City Police were brought in as drill instructors. Initially, the Wakefield men were divided into nine companies but this was quickly reduced to just four, with headquarters in the Bull Ring, and communication was largely by means of advertisements placed in the Wakefield Express that gave the weekly timetable for route marches, parades and training. Drill parades were held at the new West Riding Police Headquarters in Back Bond Street (now Laburnum Road), at Ings Road School, Wakefield Corn Exchange or at Sandal Council School. Following the December meeting, almost a thousand men from the Wakefield area had signed up from all walks of life, including Wakefield councillors and aldermen, the headmaster and other masters from Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, local solicitors such as W.H. Coles (later Wakefield’s diocesan Registrar) and leaders of local industries such as Charles Rhodes of Joseph Rhodes & Sons Ltd, the engineering firm based at Grove Iron Works. Despite the apparent enthusiasm from the Bishop and Chief Constable, an application for a grant from the City Council was refused, so most men paraded in civilian clothes, even after permission to wear the Volunteer uniform was granted.
A fund-raising card to support the local VTC. (Courtesy Kate Taylor)
Cap badge of Wakefield’s 10th Battalion.
In terms of war service, though, there was little for the Wakefield Volunteers to do. To begin with ‘discipline was almost a matter of choice’ until volunteers could be encouraged to sign up to a formal commitment to serve and a system of fines introduced for failures to attend as the initial enthusiasm wore off. Official regulations prevented them from mounting guard unless they had sought permission from the local authorities but as time went on, they were called in to help as sentries at munitions works and to stand guard as prisoners of war were transported through town as well as helping with security at the Lofthouse Camp. For the moment, their activities were limited to alternate weekends when they underwent drill sessions or had a long country walk billed as a more military sounding ‘route march’. One Sunday in April 1915, some of them assembled at Newton Lodge, home of company leader and solicitor William H. Kingswell, for a church service, singing ‘Fight the good fight’ and ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ but more often drum-head services were held at Heath Common, attracting a crowd of onlookers. On a Saturday morning in June, the Volunteers met the band of the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment at Kirkgate Station and paraded through the streets to the Town Hall in Wood Street and often used their route marches as a means of recruitment, marching on one occasion to Ossett and Horbury and back to Wakefield and on another from Wakefield to Durkar and Crigglestone – where being Wakefield men they knew the best place for a recruitment rally would be the Gardeners Arms.
The unit’s secretaries, Craven and Mills, arranged training weekends at country houses including one in August 1915 at Temple Newsam, placed at the Volunteers’ disposal by the Hon Edward F.L. Wood, MP. The men marched there from Newton Lodge and were billeted at Colton School, but despite the Saturday outings, many of the men had to be treated for blisters at the end of the journey. The ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’ name still stuck and the volunteers were often at the receiving end of many jibes, not least from the Wakefield Express. During manoeuvres at Heath Common that same month, they practised passing on messages. The paper noted that they played Chinese Whispers and claimed that the information ‘The enemy approaching in force’ became, as it was repeated, ‘The enemy entering on all fours’! The reporter also remarked that ‘the slackers slacked and the lukewarm followed the maxim of pleasure as usual.’ On another occasion, they carried out ‘tactical exercises’ at Heath Common when, according to the paper, the swampy nature of the ground ‘caused the experience to be the reverse of comfortable.’
By September, when they were inspected on the playing field of the Grammar School, they were beginning to look the part, and a new branch, the Motor Volunteers, had been formed for anyone who owned a vehicle. They soon found themselves busy transporting the wounded and providing lifts for soldiers home on leave as well as training for a role supporting the other volunteers in case of attack. Later that month they marched to Nostell Priory, spending two nights at Wragby School as part of a weekend filled with early morning drill, a Sunday parade at Wragby Church, a route march, and a chance to look round the grounds of the hall. There was good food and an evening smoking concert in the Riding School in the Priory grounds with the Volunteers themselves providing the entertainment. They were awoken on Monday at 6.00am to march back to Wakefield, and the general impression was one of a jolly outing that at least one Wakefield soldier objected to. In a letter to the Wakefield Express he, like many others, took the view that the Volunteers were a way of avoiding real service: ‘I was reading about their marching to Nostell Priory. I wonder how they would like walking single file down a gutter in the road swept by German machine gun fire in order to make our way to the trenches.’
An unidentified member of the West Riding Volunteers.
By October most men had some sort of uniform. In November, they were issued with a new cap badge, paid for out of his own pocket by Percy Cradock. As 1915 drew to a close, Kitchener himself acknowledged the useful role the VTC was playing in preparing men for military service. The demand for more troops at the front had brought a reduction in medical standards, and many who had been rejected as totally unfit in 1914 found that a year later they had no difficulty in passing the military medical examination. The coming of conscription in 1916 meant that volunteers of military age were increasingly subject to being called up, and the role of the corps began to change. Military tribunals often required men to join the VTC as a condition of their exemption so that even those who would not be going out to France would have at least some sort of training in case the feared invasion ever did come to pass – still seen as a very real possibility as late as the summer of 1918.
The involvement of a VTC unit in fighting during the Easter Rising in Dublin came at a time when the military had recognised the role of volunteers and finally accepted them as members of the armed forces. Volunteers could now officially call themselves soldiers and the Wakefield Volunteers were now known as 10th Battalion West Riding Volunteers. As soldiers, they were now expected to work even harder, and throughout that summer they were involved in increasingly demanding training with a field day at Methley Park, by permission of Lord Mexborough, in June. There were ambitious manoeuvres at Lindale Hill, Wrenthorpe, in September 1916, when the Volunteers marched through Potovens to encounter an ‘enemy’ made up of men from the 2nd Battalion Heavy Woollen District Volunteers. It was a good day for the Wakefield men who captured some of their ‘spies’ and their wagons. A month later they were given training on the railway line close to Stanley Station to learn how to work with trains in the event of an invasion. The Wakefield Motor Squadron was invited to form the nucleus of the 5th Battalion National Motor Volunteers but chose to remain independent, although realising that it would need every car and motorbike in the district to achieve the necessary numbers. By December 1916 it had available 141 cars, 62 lorries, 2 motor ambulances and 69 motor-cycles and sidecars operating from a base in Vicarage Street.
Orders were delivered by post for VTC exercises. (Courtesy Kate Taylor)
It was not all work, though. Normally the Corps operated together but individual companies also undertook their own recruiting and social events. In July 1916 ‘C’ company held a sports day at Kettle-thorpe where the grounds of Kettlethorpe Hall were opened for the public, and Crigglestone Band played. There was an inter-platoon tug-of-war and races for children. Although there was no August Bank Holiday, the Volunteers held a gala in early September in Clarence Park where among the attractions was a demonstration by the newly qualified men from the Wakefield Mines Rescue Station and members of the Voluntary Aid Detachment – the ambulance and nursing organisation – came to give a demonstration of searching for the wounded, bandaging, and carrying stretchers to a dressing station. The Volunteers themselves arranged boxing bouts and a tug-of-war. Other Sports Days in the park were used as fund raisers with the help of Wakefield City Prize Band and Wakefield Old Band who provided the music. A strong sense of camaraderie had developed among the men and when not on duty, the Volunteers also arranged social activities for themselves with a series of smoking concerts at the Strafford Arms in the Bull Ring and the Bull Hotel at the top of Westgate.
By 1917, the Volunteers had become part of the local community and the jokes about ‘God’s Rejects’ had dwindled. Standards of professionalism were rising and the long walks in the countryside had gone. When the Volunteers had a Whitsuntide camp at Nostell Priory in 1917, the Motor Squadron tested their efficiency by making a midnight attack, and battle drills were taken very seriously. By that summer, the Volunteer Corps was fully recognised nationally and its men were provided with uniforms and equipped with rifles and bayonets by the government. Each soldier was required to do 10 hours drill a month and to be able to walk 5 miles carrying equipment as a minimum requirement, and anyone granted exemption if they joined would be called up if they failed to meet their commitment to train.
There was still time for fun. At the 1917 sports event, there was a race planned for girls working on munitions but none of them came forward so instead the runners were all schoolgirls. Elsewhere fourteen of the Volunteer officers vied with each other to demonstrate their martial skills with a competition to decorate a lady’s hat and were expected to parade in their creations for the judging. The inability of some to even thread a needle suggested that holding it near the refreshment tent may have been a mistake. As 1918 dawned, the threat of invasion remained and the Volunteers were seen as potentially needed in case the Russian Revolution inspired dissidents in Britain to follow suit. The risk of Irish Republican attacks in the wake of the Dublin Rising was still seen as real and the ever present threat of invasion across the North Sea remained. Whitwood Amateur Dramatic Society performed ‘The Duke of Killiecrankie’ at Wakefield Empire on 23 February 1918 to raise further funds for the Volunteer Corps. It was well attended.
Another restructuring of the Volunteer Training Corps took place and Wakefield unit became the 1st (Volunteer) Battalion Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Percy Cradock, now accorded the title of Major, remained the commanding officer of a unit that had grown so much that it now even had its own band. In March 1918, a huge German offensive in France revived fears of an invasion and from all over the country the Volunteers were asked to find 15,000 men to form ‘Special Service Companies’ for full-time duty on the east coast where they would remain until August, when it was clear the crisis was over. That was when the Wakefield unit went away for its most ambitious camp yet when 26 officers and 336 men travelled by special train from Kirkgate Station for eight days at Withernsea. They were reminded on arrival in no uncertain tones that they were under military orders and this was not just a holiday at the seaside. After a tour of the war defence trenches along the coast they practised ‘entrenchment’ themselves. They engaged in rifle shooting, bayonet fighting and anti-gas drills as well as fieldcraft and tactics. They had route marches of 8 miles or more and a swimming competition at Withernsea baths. On Sunday night the air-raid sirens sounded and they moved from the camp to nearby fields from where they witnessed what was described as a ‘splendid display’ of anti-aircraft fire, but it was the nearest they would ever come to actual war and the last of their excursions.
Trenches on the East Coast of Yorkshire.
Women’s work
In September 1914, official figures showed that 190,000 women were officially unemployed nationally. By October, the figure had fallen to 139,000 and by December it stood at around 75,000. But while an estimated 5 million women were in work at the start of the war, almost 13 million were not. Paid labour was still very much a male dominated realm and women were expected to stay at home. Not everyone, of course, was happy with that idea and in common with other towns Wakefield had its own branches of the Suffrage Movement as part of the wider political battle for equal rights. In early July 1913 Florence Beaumont, of Hatfield Hall, organiser of the nonmilitant Womens Suffrage Society, had helped arrange the reception of a large-scale march of women to London. After passing through Leeds where a rally at Woodhouse Moor had attracted 8,000 people, the march headed south to Wakefield and another rally at the bottom of Kirkgate. Although such demonstrations attracted sympathy, the more militant suffragettes were seen as little more than domestic terrorists with their campaign of arson and bomb attacks on property and even physical assaults. In November 1913, four suffragettes had ambushed the prime minister’s car on a trip to Scotland, throwing pepper at him and trying to hit him with a dog whip. On 21 March 1914 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, was on his way to a meeting in Huddersfield but left the train in Wakefield to avoid a threatened suffragette protest.
Writing to the Yorkshire Post in June 1914, C. Ashmore-Ash, of St John’s Avenue in Wakefield, claimed that ‘the disease of injustice is rife, deep seated and you do not seek to cure the disease but punish the sufferers’, and argued that ‘women need to be fed equally as well as men but their pay does not admit of it.’ The editor’s response seemed almost guaranteed to fuel the flames: ‘Our correspondent must revise her facts before we can discuss the fancies or assumptions of which her letter chiefly consists. We take one or two “facts”. The first has to do with the theory that women are (possibly) inferior industrial workers because they are underfed, because they are not paid equally with men, and that equality of pay would lead to equality of feeding. Among people who have no need to stint it is a fact that, on the average, it costs less to feed a women than to feed a man. The larger animal takes the more food. If Miss Ashmore-Ash inquires she will find that lodging house keepers will board and feed a woman for less than a man; she will also find – as we have through careful inquiry – that the cost of feeding young men and women in such institutions as training colleges is approximately 11s to 9s. Therefore … she is wrong in her first statement of facts.’ War brought about a truce in the battle of the sexes with the various branches of the Movement agreeing to suspend their activities in the national interest, but at the same time it would provide women with opportunities few could have dreamt of to prove themselves equal citizens. Almost immediately, committees sprang up dedicated to supporting the soldiers by knitting socks, scarves and other ‘comforts’ or by raising money to send parcels to men serving abroad. Others established groups to provide aid to families of servicemen or to help the refugees arriving in Britain in their thousands. Isabella O. Ford, of Leeds, for example, set up an office in Room 48 at County Hall, Wakefield for the collection and distribution of clothes to the needy of the area and ‘particular consideration will be given to the wants of Belgian refugees.’ All these were seen as respectable female occupations, not far removed from the pre-war charity work ladies of leisure had indulged in but, useful as these activities were, women would soon be called upon to do much more.
