Wakefield in the Great War, page 5
Protesters from the women’s suffrage movement campaigned for the chance to do their bit.
But whilst it seemed everyone was keen to do their bit, for the moment there wasn’t really anything for most people to do whilst others were overwhelmed. The barracks at Pontefract were home to two regiments, both of whom were struggling to bring their regular battalions up to strength with recalled reservists whilst at the same time trying to make sure their Territorial Force battalions were prepared. Now they had to cope with a sudden influx of New Army volunteers for battalions that didn’t yet exist. As the system broke down under the enormous pressure, men got bored and sought out whatever entertainment could be found, leading to one local citizen to complain that the young men hanging around Pontefract were ‘a rowdy lot’ compared to the Germans he had seen in Brussels as he made his way home at the start of the war. The comments prompted an angry response from another reader who pointed out that ‘it is not easy for thousands of young men to remain sedate in a town which has over twenty licensed premises within 200 yards of the Parish Church’ and that they were, on the whole, well behaved.
Newly vaccinated recruits. Many, including medical experts, objected to the practice.
With nothing much to do and nowhere to entertain themselves when off-duty, bored soldiers began to desert in order to enlist in other regiments where the prospects of action seemed better. Others simply tagged on to drafts of men being sent off to training camps around the country and hoped no-one would notice the extra bodies.
As those who had enlisted waited to begin training, those left behind looked at what they could do. Many young, professional men were in a position where joining up would mean leaving behind family businesses that might not survive without them but at the same time the very real threat of invasion meant they could not sit back and do nothing. Almost overnight, across the country, new groups formed based on the Ulster Volunteer Force that had been created as a citizen’s army ready to defend their homes. By December, the Wakefield Athletes Volunteer Force was 120 men strong and began drilling at the Wakefield Rugby Union ground at Thornes and practised rifle shooting at a range provided by E. Green & Sons in Calder Vale Road. Like all such groups, members had to personally pay for their training and equipment and received no help from a government worried about the prospect of an armed citizens’ militia on the streets of Britain without any central control. Many Belgian civilians had been executed by the Germans and men of the volunteer force would have no protection under the Geneva Convention if the Germans did land, but equally could get under the feet of the Territorial Force who were trained for just such an attack. There were also concerns that joining the volunteers on a part-time basis might be seen by some as an alternative to joining up to fight. Such was the momentum, though, that in 1915, the Volunteer Training Corps was formed as a national body and would remain active even after the Armistice, providing the blueprint for the Second World War’s Home Guard.
Training in the use of the bayonet took up a large amount of the recruit’s time.
The Athlete’s Volunteers highlighted the major problem facing the country as summer turned to autumn in deciding who should serve and who should stay behind. Men were needed at the front but would be of no use if their equipment wouldn’t work as it was meant to. In the rush of enthusiasm back in August and September men had enlisted who were in reality far more use at home and, as the situation settled, some found themselves still in uniform but back at their old jobs. Others considered essential had been told to carry on with their civilian jobs in engineering or munitions but by then the patriotic fervour sweeping the country meant that anyone not in uniform was being targeted as a ‘shirker’ and sometimes presented with a white feather as a symbol of cowardice by women on the street. Embarrassed by an incident where a man was presented with a white feather shortly after receiving his Victoria Cross at Buckingham Palace, and others where wounded soldiers home on leave were being branded cowards, the government tried to put a stop to the practice but failed. Instead, it began to issue special badges to those employed on essential war work in an effort to try to distinguish between those who were needed and those who simply chose not to go.
With little military training available to them, volunteers take part in a route march.
The vexed question of who should serve also spilled into the sporting world with a long-running debate about whether professional football should continue in wartime. Some argued it was vital for morale and drew large crowds for the recruiters to work on; others pointed out that footballers who enlisted would be in breach of their contracts and would never play again; still others called for footballers to enlist in order to set an example and lead their fans into the army. The same debate was taking place in other sports, too. Horse racing and fox hunting were both supported on the grounds that the army would need good horses for the cavalry and stablehands enjoyed protected status throughout the war. Cricket was over and players had no real excuse not to enlist. The Yorkshire Rugby Union recommended that play be stopped in the county for the duration of the war but J.B. Cooke, Wakefield Trinity’s representative on the Northern Union argued as follows: ‘It seems to me far better that the ordinary course be followed rather than the programme abandoned, more especially because of the effect on the public at large. The fact that so many have already volunteered for service is some evidence that the great bulk of players are prepared to do their duty and if others are required they will be in far better trim when wanted if they continue to play the game.’ Some players did join up, others didn’t. As the season progressed, gate receipts fell and clubs found themselves in financial difficulties. A 25 per cent reduction in wages was ordered by the Northern Union League and soon professional players were threatening a strike. ‘Whatever the local opinions as to the players attitudes may be’, explained the Yorkshire Post of 7 November, ‘… it is pretty certain that the public at large will not have their dwindling respect for professional football arrested by the present trend of events’. A month later, Wakefield Trinity was forced to call off a match against Hull because of a players’ strike, although the club seemed less than dismayed: ‘As a matter of fact,’ one of the Committee told the Yorkshire Evening Post, ‘the strike has simplified the matter for us. We were running the club at a loss every week. So long as the players remain on strike we shall save that loss. The players are not hurting the club, they are only hurting themselves and if they are well advised they will meet the committee in a friendly way while they still have chance’. It was not an idle threat. Gate receipts had fallen by 50 per cent and most clubs were struggling. A special fund had been set up to assist impoverished players but it was those on the highest wages who complained loudest. By the end of the 1914–15 season, when the decision was taken to stop all competition until the end of the war, 1,500 players in the Northern Union had enlisted, twenty-six of them from Wakefield Trinity.
Professional sportsmen found themselves at the centre of a controversy over what they should do, honour their contracts or enlist?
As a settlement was being reached, everyone involved was given a sharp reminder that there were bigger issues to worry about. On the morning of 16 December, German ships appeared off the North East coast and began bombarding the ports of Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough, killing men, women and children, and sparking a panicked evacuation of the towns as civilians fled the invasion many thought had begun. The raid had caused widespread damage, especially in Hartlepool, but it was the shelling of Scarborough that triggered the fiercest response. Known to many as a peaceful holiday destination, ‘Remember Scarborough!’ became a rallying cry for recruiters everywhere.
By the end of 1914, the war in France had settled into the stalemate that would last until 1918. John Tate from Crigglestone had been among the first to die, killed serving with the Lincolnshire Regiment on 24 August, leaving a widow, Blanche, to collect £2-9s-3d from his unpaid wages. On 26 August, 2 KOYLI were in action and Wakefield men Algernon Cockell, Thomas Gill and William Nottingham were killed. Joe Winrow, also known as Alfred Dyer, was lost somewhere on the road from Mons and presumed dead, his wages paid to his widow, Ann.
With Christmas approaching, Wakefield people tried to find ways to celebrate. There were shortages, true, but the railway companies laid on cheap fares and special excursions so that families could get together. Men came home from their training camps and those overseas received a special gift of tins containing tobacco for smokers or sweets for non-smokers, along with a card and pencil so they could write home. Special funds were set up to ensure no local man was left without something from home to let him know Wakefield was thinking of him. Under the circumstances, it was a good Christmas.
Shell damage, Scarborough, December 1914. The attacks on coastal towns became a rallying call for recruiters.
CHAPTER 3
The Enemy in our Midst
At the turn of the twentieth century Germany was still a very young country but it had already made a lot of enemies. Founded at the palace of Versailles outside Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, the German Empire brought together no fewer than four kingdoms, six grand duchies, six duchies and seven principalities, along with three independent city ports, all under the overall control of the King of Prussia, Wilhelm I as ‘Kaiser’ (or Emperor). Wilhelm I ruled a united Germany that stretched from Alsace on the French border deep into the Baltic, covering modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and eastward to Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) in what is now Russia. When Kaiser Wilhelm I died in March 1888, his place was taken by Frederick III, who lasted just three months before dying of throat cancer, and the throne passed to his 29-year-old son, who was crowned as Kaiser Wilhelm II in June, and immediately began to make it clear that he intended to rule the empire himself, forcing out his Chancellor, Bismarck, and setting Germany on what he called a ‘New Course’, which would bring it into conflict with neighbouring countries.
A grandson of Queen Victoria, Wilhelm II was related to several members of European royalty, but was widely regarded by them as arrogant and rude, with one member of his court complaining in 1908 that ‘he is a child and will always remain one’. Prone to tantrums and beating or even stabbing servants, even his close friend Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, described him on one occasion as ‘pale, ranting wildly, looking restlessly about him and piling lie upon lie, he made such a terrible impression on me that I still cannot get over it’. British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury thought him ‘not quite normal’ and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey reported he was ‘not quite sane’. His relationship with his British relatives were especially bad and he resented what he saw as a lack of respect for his position as Emperor, particularly from his Uncle Bertie, the Prince of Wales. When Britain went to war in South Africa in 1899, Wilhelm openly supported the Boers and in 1905 angered both the French and British by showing support for a growing anti-French movement in Morocco. For the British, who had long regarded themselves as Anglo-Saxons and thus closely related to the German state of Saxony, Wilhelm began to be seen as a growing threat to the Empire and to his European neighbours as he increasingly ignored advice from his political advisors.
Charles Hagenbach’s shop. Swiss born, Hagenbach was spared the abuse that German shopkeepers faced.
The late Victorian era saw an outpouring of books about imagined invasions of England by various foreign armies, with France and Russia as popular potential attackers, but as early as 1871 The Battle of Dorking introduced the idea of Germany as an enemy. Written by former army officer George Tomkyns Chesney, it is set in 1921 when a veteran of the war describes to his grandchildren how, in 1871, German troops landed in England and were faced by a British army weakened by spending cuts and unable to resist. It was a theme enthusiastically picked up by others. In 1894, William Le Queux’s book The Great War in England 1897, described an invasion by French and Russian forces with the weakened British saved by the arrival of German allies but after the political climate changed when Britain agreed an entente with France a decade later, his next invasion novel saw a German force landed at Goole. In his 1906 novel The Invasion of 1910, Le Queux described how the Germans pushed south towards Doncaster and Sheffield, with barely any resistance:
The people of the West Riding, and especially the inhabitants of Sheffield, are stupefied that they have received no assistance – not even a reply to the Mayor’s telegram. This fact has leaked out, and has caused great dissatisfaction. An enemy is upon us, yet we are in ignorance of what step, if any, the authorities are taking for our protection. There are wild rumours here that the enemy have burned Grimsby, but these are generally discredited, for telegraphic and telephonic communication has been cut off, and at present we are completely isolated. It has been gathered from the invaders that the VIIIth Army Corps of the Germans have landed and seized Hull, but at present this is not confirmed. There is, alas! no communication with the place, therefore, the report may possibly be true. Dewsbury, Huddersfield, Wakefield, and Selby are all intensely excited over the sudden appearance of German soldiers, and were at first inclined to unite to stem their progress. But the German proclamation, showing the individual peril of any citizen taking arms against the invaders, having been posted everywhere, has held every one scared and in silent inactivity.
Commissioned and promoted by the Daily Mail, Le Queux’s book proved popular, selling over a million copies and was translated into twenty-seven languages (including a pirated edition published in German). It came among a flood of around 300 such works produced in the decades immediately before the outbreak of war, including H.G. Wells’ The War in the Air and even The War of the Worlds. Alongside invasion literature came stories of German spies such as Robert Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands and in 1906, the best selling Boy’s Own paper advised readers that most German tourists in Britain were spies on the basis that they wore jackboots in bad weather, leading an 8-year-old Evelyn Waugh to form a gang dedicated to drilling and preparing for an invasion. In 1909, Guy du Maurier’s play An Englishman’s Home, played to packed audiences with its tale of the takeover of a middle-class house by foreign troops and live performances of staged battles of British forces against ‘German’ troops were performed at London’s Crystal Palace, leaving no-one in any doubt as to what was expected at some point. For many, the supply of German-made Mauser rifles to Irish Republicans in 1914 simply confirmed that the Kaiser was intent on trying to undermine Britain and its empire.
All of which made life uncomfortable for the thousands of immigrants from the German Empire who had settled in Britain over the past half century. Kaiser Wilhelm deeply distrusted Jews, claiming that they had fostered opposition to his rule, and telling friends he believed that they needed to be ‘stamped out’. Similar anti-Semitic views in Russia had led to violent riots directed at Jewish families to drive them out of their homes. Thousands had left, many heading for America, but those who could not afford the fare (and some dumped at British ports after being assured they were in New York) reached Britain. A growing anti-immigrant mood grew amongst people in towns and cities, who themselves were often economic migrants from Ireland, Scotland and rural areas of the country.
The British Brothers League and other anti-immigration groups had won a victory in 1905 with the introduction of the Aliens Act which many saw as a defence against Britain becoming ‘the dumping ground of Europe’, targeting especially refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. Although huge numbers of the immigrants were Jews with no reason to be loyal to the Kaiser, that didn’t stop the notoriously anti-semitic MP William Joynson-Hicks from assuming the worst:
On 15 August 1914 newspapers published notices explaining to foreigners living in Britain what they should do.
I do not move my Amendment with any hostility to the Germans in our midst’, he told the House of Commons in November 1914. ‘For many years England has been the home of foreigners, but I think they should be the first to realise that our first duty is to protect ourselves, and I would rather that irreparable damage should be done to any individual or individuals rather than our country should be placed in danger even for a moment. There are a very large number of aliens registered in this country at the present time. On the 9 September the Home Secretary gave us some figures, and he told us that there were 50,633 alien Germans registered in this country, and 16,014 Austrians. If we were to add ten per cent for non-registration up to that date, then we should get a total of over 73,000 alien enemies. I know it is a very difficult matter to say that A or B is a spy, nor could the Germans or the French say that A or B was a spy before they found him out. I think we are entitled to consider here what happened in the case of France and Belgium. There they have found a complete system of espionage. Soldiers, sailors, policemen, telephonists, tram drivers, professional men of every kind, and men of every class in the working life of France and Belgium have turned out to be spies. Any officer or soldier who has returned from the front will tell you that those countries have been infested with spies. Now England is a greater enemy to Germany than either France or Belgium. The enmity of Germany is more directed against us at the present time and has been for some years past, than against Belgium or France … On the other hand, England has been the easiest country to enter, and therefore it is fair to assume that as we are considered the greatest enemy of Germany and as ours is the easiest country to enter, we have a larger number of spies than either Belgium or France. You may say that this does not matter unless Germany invades us, but we must prepare for eventualities. Personally, I am not one of those who think that we shall be invaded, but we must prepare for eventualities. If there is no possibility of invasion, why is the Government providing against it? Why are trenches, wire entanglements and other reasonable precautions which sane men would take to protect us being prepared by our military advisers? I think those who are responsible for dealing with the spy question should take the same steps to protect the country against the possibility of trouble from spies as the military authorities are doing … I have a return here, not of Germans who are registered to-day, but of Germans who were registered in the Census returns three years ago, and it shows a very small proportion of people registered then as Germans compared with the number of Germans we now find to be in the country. I think I am right in saying that in England and Wales alone there were only about 13,800 as given in the Census returns, whereas now we know that there are something like 56,000. Of that number an enormous proportion were in Kent, Sussex, Essex particularly, and Yorkshire – all those counties along the East Coast of England. Hon. Members may laugh, but why did those men go and settle there, unless it was with some intention of being useful to their own friends if and when the day came, possibly even of an invasion of Great Britain. The Home Secretary has always been an optimist. He dealt with this matter last Session in the most optimistic spirit. He told us that nobody had been shot.
