Wakefield in the Great War, page 21
Families were encouraged to cut back on everything.
Some areas had already introduced voluntary rationing schemes but, as Dorothy Peel recalled, the problem of feeding a family was becoming serious. ‘The conduct of certain tradespeople who at this time shut their shops to the general public and sent out meat and other goods to favoured customers via the back door infuriated the people and occasionally the luckless butcher boys were held up and the contents of their basket looted. The knowledge that some well-to-do folk were hoarding food also caused discontent. It was these annoyances which made local authorities adopt rationing schemes before national compulsory rationing came into force.’ A major campaign was launched to get people to eat less and reduce waste. Public lectures were given on how to produce meals for 4d a day and recipes for loaves made from rice, maize and pearl barley were circulated as local schoolchildren sang ‘Each Loaf Saved Drives a Big, Long Nail’. Elsie McIntyre, a munitions worker in Leeds, later recalled:‘The most awful thing was food, it was very scarce. As we are coming shift, someone would say, ‘There is a bit of steak at the butcher’s.’ And I would get off the train and then go on the tram and I’d get off at Burley Road and run to the shop. Only to find a long queue and by it got to my turn there would be no more meat, only half-a-pound of sausage. You see, that’s coming off night shifts, you went straight into a queue before you could go to bed. Then my mother would be in home needing half a stone of flour for the kids, you see. We were lucky if we got up to bed by 11.00am and up again at four to catch the train, five o’clock to Barnbow.’
Local schemes encouraged people to use even less than the government ration.
Finding enough to eat became the focus of everyone’s attention and queueing became part of daily life. ‘We had the ration books’, recalled H. Middleton, ‘and we all used to stand in the queues for cigarettes, meat and what have you. If we were walking up the road and saw a queue at a shop we used to stand in it … to see what they’d got and whatever it was we used to get some’. Schools reported a growing problem with absenteeism as children were sent to wait for hours in long queues for whatever rationed items could be found. Maud Cox, aged eight in 1917, remembered ‘Mum took me up there and put me in the queue and she says, “Now stand still and don’t move until I get the other ones away to school and I’ll come back. But keep my place”. Of course I was standing there and the snow was deep, it was right up over your feet. The next thing I knew, I was lying on a bench in the dairy. I’d fainted.’
Charged with the task of maintaining food supplies, the West Riding War Agricultural Committee began sitting at County Hall in November 1915 and opened by discussing the use of 12 and 13-year-olds as farm labour and the possibility of releasing older children from school and work to stay at home and look after their younger brothers and sisters so their mothers could find full-time work. After the army had taken all available horses, the committee arranged for some to be loaned back for farm work and in early 1916, soldiers from nearby training camps were sent to help with ploughing. At the same time, the Education Committee gave permission for boys and girls between 12 and 14 to be released from school to work on farms or to let their mothers go to work whilst they provided childcare. Plans for convalescent soldiers from Wakefield’s auxiliary hospitals to be brought in as labourers were also considered.
School attendances fell as children were kept away to wait in the many queues a shopping trip required.
In May, British Summer Time was introduced to allow extra working time on the land and provision was made for the training of around fifty women workers found by Lady Catherine Milnes-Gaskell. Conscription was threatening farmers as much as anyone and limits were put forward: A farm should have one man per fifteen cows if there were women or boys to help. One man would be needed per 100 sheep or one labourer per 100 acres. As more and more men were conscripted, the limit was raised to one man per twenty cows and a troop of boy scouts was offered for work on market gardens, again by Lady Catherine. Although that autumn pensioners were being approached to volunteer as labourers, a plan to identify market gardens willing to employ conscientious objectors from the Wakefield Work Centre failed when none could be found. January 1917 saw a survey of all available land in the area that could be used for crops or allotments and by May, 1,000 soldiers had been released to work around Wakefield alongside the Women’s Land Service Corps. A year later, 2,110 men of the Agricultural Battalion at York had been sent to help. The shortage of horses was slowly being made up for by the introduction of motor tractors from 1917, but it would still be a close run race as to whether the Germans would be defeated before Britain starved.
Ever growing casualty lists, long and dangerous hours at work, food shortages and the threat of bombing all meant that raising a family was more challenging than ever. Shortly after the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, Westgate Chapel magazine reported on its Sunday School feast day in a field provided by Mr Swallow and with catering by Charles Hagenbach. ‘The younger scholars happily do not realise the significance of war sufficiently to allow the thought of it to spoil their pleasure in the feast day but the seniors, the teachers and the parents could not but think of the young men who but for the war would have been present at the feast and especially of those who had taken or were then taking part in the great battle on the Somme and about whom news was anxiously awaited.’
Against such a background, wives and mothers attempted to keep the family together. Over £2 million per week was paid via the Post Office to just under 3 million dependants of men fighting overseas, but the allowances were small and rarely enough to keep pace with rising costs. One small, but very significant rise came in June 1918. In 1913, a rural town might expect up to twelve postal deliveries a day but by 1918 there would be only one as deliveries by road were reduced to conserve fuel and Travelling Post Offices (trains that conveyed mail) had their timetables adjusted to accommodate these service reductions. The Treasury had been drained by the huge costs of the war and the government needed to raise extra revenue by all possible means. The standard national postage rate of one penny for letters had stood for seventy years but it, too, fell victim to the war when the price was raised by a half penny.
As the war drew to a close, a final and even more deadly menace surfaced. In October 1918 reports were coming in of an increasing number of cases of a new strain of influenza. There had been sporadic outbreaks throughout the war, including one in March, but this was different. In the United States, army doctor Dr Roy Grist was working at Camp Devens near Boston: ‘These men start with what appears to be an ordinary attack of la grippe or influenza, and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheekbones, and a few hours later you can begin to see cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white … It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes … It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two, or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies … We have been averaging a hundred deaths per day … It takes special trains to carry away the dead. For several days there were no coffins.’
Widely known as Spanish Flu because neutral Spain had no press censorship and could report freely on the worldwide epidemic, the symptoms shown by its victims soon gained it a new nickname – ‘the blue death’. It struck with such devastating speed that someone symptom-free at breakfast could be dead by evening and unlike other strains, this flu appeared to strike healthy young people aged 20–30 more than the young or old and, it seemed, those who should have had the strongest immune systems were, unexpectedly, the most vulnerable. Troops in the front lines came to regard being hospitalised as a virtual death sentence. As one survivor later recalled, ‘It didn’t last long – it would either kill you, or just go. The ones that went into hospital, we were hearing the day afterwards that they’d died. It would kill you in 24 hours – two days at most. That’s when men started refusing to go into hospital. I know we lost more men from flu, day for day, than we did during the war.’
At home, special measures were put in place. In many areas schools closed completely for weeks at a time and restrictions were put on children attending cinemas, churches and shops, which all emptied as people sought to avoid contact with potential carriers. Newspapers were filled with adverts like those for Veno’s Lightning Cough Cure promising ‘instantaneous relief’ or preventatives like Jeyes Fluid which was recommended for spraying ‘the atmosphere of the office, factory, home and cinema … disinfect lavatories, sinks and drains’. The News of the World advised readers to ‘wash inside the nose with soap and water each night and morning: force yourself to sneeze night and morning, then breathe deeply; do not wear a muffler; take sharp walks regularly and walk home from work; do not “dope”; eat plenty of porridge’. None of which helped. The Yorkshire Evening Post was more practical: ‘Do not ignore a feverish cold, no matter how slight the symptoms may be … Go to bed and remain there until the symptoms abate. Keep entirely apart from children and old people … use your common sense under all circumstances, and think of others’.
Figures for flu deaths in Wakefield were not published but every week the paper contained stories of local people who had fallen victim. Some measure of the scale of the disaster comes from Sheffield where the week up to 4 November had seen 468 people die – more in a single week than the Sheffield Pals battalion lost in the entire war. In neighbouring Leeds, 409 people died that week, 202 directly of influenza with 207 flu-related cases of complications like pneumonia. The death rate, it was reported, stood at 51.2 per thousand instead of the normal 15 or 16. Men came home from years of war to find their families wiped out by disease at home.
Worn out after four years of deprivation, illness, fear and stress, the people of Wakefield could celebrate the end of the war in 1918 but would take generations to come to terms with what had happened in those momentous years. The Defence of the Realm Act had reached into every aspect of daily life and the war had touched every man, woman and child in the country. It is a time remembered for seeing the death of a generation but the national tragedy owed as much to germs as to Germans. In six months Britain lost an estimated 200,000 civilians at a rate double that of the worldwide war. Today, the impact of Spanish Flu has largely been forgotten but the shock of the epidemic would be felt for years to come. At home, rationing had actually improved the diet of the poor. Women had found a strength, ability and independence unthinkable just a few years earlier. Sometimes for the worse, often for the better, the war had changed everything.
CHAPTER 9
Armistice and After
In 1917, the infamous Passchendaele Offensive had been launched to try to dislodge the German navy from Belgian ports and relieve the threat to merchant ships bringing supplies to Britain. At the time, the government had reckoned that the country would be facing starvation within months. As 1918 dawned, rationing was widespread and compulsory ‘meat free’ days had been introduced every week. One note of optimism came from America’s entry into the war and it was this that prompted Germany to launch one last, desperate gamble to break the Allies before they could be reinforced. At 4.40am on 21 March, 6,000 German guns, supported by 3,500 trench mortars, rained 1,160,000 shells onto the British trenches as specially trained ‘Stormtroopers’ crept through thick fog and smoke to infiltrate the lines and pave the way for an attack by sixty-six divisions of infantry. The sudden attack was devastating on the depleted British front line as it tried to adjust to a reorganisation forced on it by the government in order to avoid having to send out more troops, despite the thousands of trained men currently being held in Britain. With so many shortages, troops were needed to shore up agriculture and industry at home and that, for the moment, took priority.
Private Arthur Pearson, of the Leeds Pals, later recalled the sense of urgency as news broke of the German attack: ‘In the middle of the night, we runners were turned out as urgent messages had to be delivered to recall outlying detachments. Jerry had broken through our lines and was rapidly sweeping all before him. I was detailed to contact our boxing team and lead them to a point where the whole battalion was to be picked up by buses and rushed to the line. We got into ‘‘battle order’’, piled our packs in a field (we never saw them again, or our personal effects) and followed our guide across country to a line of old trenches which were held by the remnants of a battalion who had been badly cut up and had been retiring for days. We took over from them, stayed that night in those trenches, then, in daylight, began to retire.’ His colleague Percy Barlow remembered: ‘We arrived, after a 12-hour ride, at a lonely spot on the shell scarred road, from which we could see several villages on fire, the ruddy glow lighting the blackness for miles. Here, after dumping all unnecessaries, we were collected together … and then we were quietly told that our task was to hold a trench one foot deep and to hold it at all costs.’
Lieutenant Cecil Slack of the East Yorkshire Regiment wrote home to say, ‘The whole ‘‘show’’ has been absolute Hell. Several times we have been surrounded, and yet have managed to get away. There have been times when we have been almost touching the Boche – he with vastly superior numbers – and it has been a case of giving ourselves up or running for it, and we have run for it, and some of us live to fight another day. I felt an awful coward the first time I ran, but the only alternative was to become a prisoner. Once I was shot at by a party of Boches at under 50 yards range … The nights have been very cold, and sleep an unheard of thing, just an odd hour here and there … I cannot as I said before tell you all, what I have written only gives a tiny fraction of what has happened, I thank God I am alive to tell it.’ For a time, it looked as if the Germans might actually be able to destroy the Allied armies. In a Special Order of the Day on 11 April, the Commander of the British Expeditionary Force, General Haig, made no attempt to conceal the danger: ‘There is no other course open to us but to fight it out, every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement; with our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.’
Fortunately for the British, the German army was suffering the impact of years of blockade by the Royal Navy and the attacking Germans lost momentum as troops looted British supply dumps for food and equipment. Two days after Haig’s message, the War Diary of 1/4 KOYLI noted that the battalion had captured seventeen Germans in the nearby YMCA canteen. By the end of the month, the offensive had ended. For 1/4 KOYLI, it had cost around 140 men dead from all causes and over 300 wounded. Caught in heavy fighting around Bucquouy, near Arras, 2/4 KOYLI lost fifty-two killed, eighty wounded and 268 missing, between 27 and 31 March alone. Along the lines, thousands of British troops were captured by the advancing Germans. In the wake of the March Offensive, Private George Ainley, of Sheffield, became the only KOYLI Territorial to be executed for desertion. Ainley served with 1/4 KOYLI and in January had been court-martialled for causing a self-inflicted wound. In July he was again tried, this time for two counts of desertion and one of being absent without leave. At the time, a charge of desertion meant that the accused had not intended to return to his unit, absent without leave meant he had not been with the unit but there was no evidence he intended to never return and despite popular belief, very few men were actually executed for ‘cowardice’ – a separate military crime. The facts were that 20-year-old Ainley had deserted twice and made two other attempts to avoid service in the same conditions as the rest of the battalion. It is easy from a twenty-first century perspective to claim he was the victim of post-traumatic stress and of an uncaring and barbarous military system, but every soldier arriving in France was made fully aware of the consequences of desertion. Ainley attempted to avoid serving in the front line, the rest of his unit didn’t. As a result, they would have to work harder and take greater risks to make up for his absence. It is worth noting that he wasn’t tried after his first attempt or even his second, when the risk of being shot would no doubt have been explained to him in no uncertain terms and he was reported as ‘altogether lacking a sense of responsibility and his military character in consequence is not good.’ For the military authorities, there were few options. A prison sentence would encourage desertion if the only punishment was to be the safety of a prison cell far behind the lines. At the same time, over 90 per cent of death penalties were not carried out and of those that were, some were on men who had previously been through the court martial system, been sentenced to death, shown leniency and yet had then done it again. There was often little sympathy among soldiers for those who deserted: ‘If you desert,’ one said, ‘and let your friends down and left them to do your fighting for you, you deserved what you got.’ Whether Ainley truly deserved his fate is open to debate but, along with the others who were found guilty of desertion, he was granted an official pardon in response to a political campaign in 2006.
