Wakefield in the Great War, page 7
Lofthouse Civilian Internment Camp.
Like British army officers held in German Prisoner of War camps, inmates could apply for ‘parole’, allowing them out of the camp for personal business. Captain Robert Campbell, for example, was even allowed to travel back to Britain for a fortnight from a German POW camp in November 1916 to visit his dying mother on condition he return to captivity afterwards. Having given his word, at the end of his allotted time, Captain Campbell duly made his way back to Magdeburg via neutral Holland and returned to captivity. In comparison, allowing German civilians out for day trips seemed reasonable enough to many. Those who gave their word returned to camp at the end of their paroles but there were others who were interested in a more permanent break from prison life.
On 1 June 1915, a report in the Yorkshire Evening Post of the mysterious disappearance of two prisoners from Lofthouse Camp, first noticed at roll call on 29 May. Lieutenant Colonel Gordon-Cumming, the Camp Commandant, refused to tell reporters what had happened other than to say that the wild speculation around how they had managed it was wrong. Some said that they had broken their parole whilst others thought they had walked out of the gate unnoticed by the guards. Locals said the fence was electrified so the notion that they had cut their way out was immediately dismissed. The mystery was solved later in the month when a report in a Stockholm newspaper and later the Frankfurter Zeitung described the adventures of Frederick Wiener and Alfred Klapproth after they walked out of the gates of Lofthouse and disappeared.
Wiener, aged 35, had settled in America and had been captured as he tried to make his way back to Austria. He had transferred to Lofthouse from a camp near Edinburgh and spoke English fluently with a strong American accent. Klapproth, aged 30, was a naval reservist who had been employed on Hamburg-Amerika Liners, and so spoke some English. Together the two men set about digging a tunnel out of the camp but gave up when they realised how long it would take. Instead, they hit upon a simple plan, they would walk out of the gate.
Having managed to get together about £30-worth of gold, they ordered new clothes from the camp tailor to make them look as British as possible. Wiener, at 5ft 11in and ‘slight of figure’ with a slight stoop, was last seen wearing a dark blue suit and a Tyrolese hat, whilst his stoutly-built friend wore a brown suit. They requested a meeting with the Camp Censor, knowing he would not be in at that time. From there, they went to the Guardroom where Wiener’s English was good enough for him to claim they were both off-duty British officers and they then walked out, heading for Leeds and the railway station. There, they bought two first-class tickets to Manchester but travelled third class to Liverpool instead, spending their days wandering the streets and spending their nights in cafes and bars as they read about the intensive search for them in Manchester. After reading about Wiener’s American accent, the two men switched to speaking French and passed themselves off as Frenchmen, even sending a postcard to the Commandant to tell him what they were doing. Eventually, they were able to persuade the crew of a Danish trawler, the Tomsk, to smuggle them to Copenhagen and from there made their way back to Germany.
Security immediately tightened up around Lofthouse but it was soon in the news again with the arrival in the camp of former Ambassador, Count Paul Wolf Metternich. Arrested on his honeymoon in August after marrying the daughter of an English admiral, the Count had been released but re-arrested by order of the Judicial Court and sent to special quarters in Lofthouse Camp. By now, the camp was the focus of attention, especially regarding the privileged lifestyle of men seen by the papers as enjoying ‘many of the luxuries peculiar to a first class hotel’. Certainly, many locals saw the camp as more a resort than a prison and Frederick Booth, MP for Pontefract, asked the House of Commons whether it was ‘aware that there are two kinds of treatment accorded in this camp, and that those who are inclined to be liberal in the way of tips are treated a great deal more leniently than the rest?’
A court case in April 1916 did little to help locals sympathise with the plight of the internees. Leeds-based wine and spirit merchants Hebblethwaite, Denham & Co. sued Richard Hartley, a market gardener at Lofthouse, for the return of empty bottles from the camp. Hartley, it was said, owed £11-10s and damages for failing to collect the ‘210 dozen’ empties he should have returned to the suppliers, and a bemused court heard that some ‘fifty to eighty dozen bottles of wine and spirits’ were supplied to the prisoners every week. At a time when food shortages were beginning to bite this was a sore point for ordinary British civilians, particularly when compared to stories emerging from British prisoners of war in Germany of starvation in the camps. As other reports filtered back about the conditions British soldiers were held under in German Prisoner of War camps, the seemingly luxurious conditions at Lofthouse came in for criticism, but however comfortable they might be, the men held there were still prisoners torn from their families and jobs with no foreseeable end to their sentence. In reality, the Geneva Convention demanded that prisoners be adequately fed on the same level of rations as soldiers. The British blockade was highly effective, leaving Germany so short of food that at Lofthouse’s counterpart, Ruhleben Camp, near Berlin, by 1918 visiting wives and families frequently smuggled food out of the prison from supplies provided for their menfolk. By 1916, Lofthouse housed 1,322 Germans, 122 Austrians and three Turks and had grown to include a 3-acre sports field, fully-equipped gymnasium and eight tennis courts. Prisoners had arranged a full programme of lectures and classes that it was hoped would lead to recognised qualifications, there were painting and drawing clubs, gardens for each compound and a lively theatre group. Three kitchens provided meals with government rations supplemented by extras paid for by the men themselves. The camp was, according to an official report, for ‘a superior class of men’ and inspectors noted that ‘the beef and Hamburger steaks … attracted our particular attention on account of their excellence’.
‘The horror of horrors,’ wrote Paul Cohen-Portheim, ‘the one which does not lessen with time but goes on increasing, is that you are never alone. Not by day, by night, not for a second, day after day, year after year – barbed wire disease – the monstrous, enforced incessant community with no privacy, no possibility of being alone, no possibility of finding quietude. It is not the men of bad character or morals you begin to hate but the men who draw their soup through their teeth, clean their ears with their fingers at dinner, hiccough unavoidably when they get up from their meal (a moment awaited with trembling fury by the other), the man who will invariably make the same remark (day after day, year after year) as he sits down, the man who lisps, the man who brags … silly trifles get on your nerves and become unendurable by the simple process of endless repetition. So grows an atmosphere of mutual dislike, suspiciousness, meanness, hatred. Men become deadly enemies over a piece of bread.’
First recorded by A.L. Vischer, an inspector from the Swiss Embassy in London, ‘Barbed wire disease’, a form of psychological breakdown began to appear. The first signs would usually be some peculiar behaviour or outbursts of temper. The man would lose his interests, become solitary and perhaps start muttering to himself or waving his fingers. Common symptoms were suspicion of comrades, delusions of persecution or disease, loss of memory and poor concentration. In serious cases the man could be subject to outbreaks of hysteria and raving. Few men interned for six months or more did not show at least some signs of psychological harm as a result and some found it all too much. In April 1915, 39-year-old former Manchester hotel waiter Herman Kraus cut his own throat with his razor and died 8 minutes after being found in the lavatories at Lofthouse.
The presence of so many aristocratic and well connected internees made Lofthouse a very difficult place to manage. The ‘Gentlemen’ could not be treated like common prisoners and many had connections within the British government that made discipline hard to enforce. After the escape, paroles were expected to be escorted, but echoing Frederick Booth’s comments about tipping, in 1918 the Camp’s British Quartermaster, Lieutenant Albert Canning was court-martialed, charged with breaches of military discipline following an argument with the Camp Commandant, Lieutenant Colonel Haines. Over dinner one evening, Canning told Haines that, in his opinion, ‘you have only to be a Baron in this camp to be treated in a preferential manner’, and accused the Colonel of failing in his duties. The trigger had the visits of Mrs Leverton Harris, wife of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Blockade, to Baron Leopold von Plessen, and by other ladies to Count Metternich and Count Nettenblad. Mrs Harris had been given permission by the Home Office to visit the Baron at the request of an American aunt of his but had insisted on her visits not being supervised or time limited as others were. Lieutenant Canning claimed to have overheard her telling the Baron that ‘when this wretched war is over, how happy we shall be’, and said that he thought she might be in love with him despite being ‘old enough to be his mother, if not his grandmother’. In the course of the trial it emerged that the Baron had been involved in an escape attempt but had not lost privileges as a result and that he had been allowed unsupervised visits on the strength of letters from Mrs Harris’ husband. Lieutenant Canning was acquitted.
In what must have been an entertaining debate in 1918, Earl Grey informed the House of Lords of a conversation reported to him by an anonymous source in Bradford who claimed to have overheard an exchange between a local businessman and an interned German out on parole: ‘The conversation which was overheard was that between an interned German and a very prominent partner in what is called a supervised firm, which has been officially declared to be beyond suspicion on more than one occasion recently. I will attempt to read the conversation as it is written in the sort of English which our naturalised aliens use. The interned German said – ‘‘Well, ou arrr yu koin onn een Praatfort?’’ And this was the reply – ‘‘Hoch, fein! Ve arrr orl rreit. I sink orl Inglisschmen moost pee tampt phools; der Vor can ko hon for ass longg ass eet leike – ve arrr orl ferry ’appy an mekking mooch munny; vu haf no hinterranses voteffer.’’’ The main issue for Grey was why a firm partly owned by a German was facing no ‘hinterranses’ in completing business orders placed by the British government. There were many such ‘supervised’ businesses still in operation and working on military contracts overseen by the Ministry of Production but there were also many others competing for contracts. The report, complete with its exaggerated accent, was traced to a rival company.
As the war drew on, more military prisoners arrived and after the Armistice it became a holding centre for German officers. Civilian internees were released, some to go home, others facing repatriation. Frederich Brandauer, a 56-year-old millionaire who owned a pen company, and who had lived in England for thirty years, took poison at a camp on the Isle of Man rather than be forcibly repatriated to Germany. The winter of 1918–19 saw a rash of similar stories from camps around the country as men faced the threat of being forced out of their adopted home to a country many of them could barely remember. For others, a return home was the most important thing in their lives. Even with nowhere to go after the war ended, German officers made several attempts to tunnel out of Lofthouse, with the last being discovered when an alert sentry heard the sounds of digging below his feet in November 1919. It was hardly worth the effort – the camp was reported to be empty by the end of December as the last prisoners left on their way to Hull and home.
For thousands of civilians, both in Britain and Germany, the war was spent in a limbo brought about by the problem of working out whether what mattered was where someone was born or where they chose to belong – a problem that a century later is emerging yet again. After the war, Paul Cohen-Portheim returned to writing and described his experiences in his book Time Stood Still. The title was carefully chosen: for him, the war was almost four years in which ‘the past was dead, the future, if there should be a future, was a blank, there was nothing left but the present, and my present was the life of a prisoner … where there is no aim, no object, no sense, there is no time.’ Yet whilst their fathers languished in prison for the crime of being foreign, their sons were being forced to do their duty for Britain as the Military Service Act came into force, and told them that if their parents were enemy aliens and hunwives, they themselves were British enough to be conscripted.
CHAPTER 4
Conscripts and Conchies
The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) sent to France in August 1914 was soon forced to retreat as the huge German army threatened to overwhelm it, and by the end of August it had been pushed back almost to the gates of Paris, with a German victory seeming to be entirely possible, even likely. A special edition of The Times, on Sunday, 30 August, carried a report from France that spoke of ‘Broken British Regiments’ and reflected the fact that over 15,000 trained men of the professional pre-war army had already been lost in the retreat from Mons and the remainder were still suffering heavy losses daily. By the end of the year, about one in three of the entire British army’s strength were casualties. Realising that the army would need to expand massively if it was to play any realistic part in fighting the enormous numbers of men the German and Austro-Hungarian empires could send to the front, the newly appointed Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, began planning the creation of what would become known as the ‘New Army’.
Conditioned by some twenty years of newspaper propaganda to believe that Germany was poised to invade Britain, and that many east European immigrants were really German agents waiting to rise up in support of that invasion, thousands of young men rushed to enlist, believing that their homes and families were in immediate danger. For some it was their patriotic duty to defend their homeland, but for many it was an opportunity and excuse to escape from dull jobs and join in the great adventure overseas. In the first week of September, over 900 Wakefield men were accepted into the forces, 600 following the recruiting rallies held outside the Town Hall. Fifty-two council employees led the way. Across the country just under 463,000 men enlisted in September alone, joining the 299,000 who had enlisted in August and together completely swamping the system set up for the pre-war army that was designed to accept, equip and train fewer than 30,000 men per year and able to house only around 177,000 soldiers in total. With so many enlisting, checks were basic and the enlistment forms only asked for the recruits ‘apparent age’ so that any young man choosing to add a few months or even a year or two to his age could probably slip through. The minimum age for joining the Territorial Force was 17, the Regulars 18 and for service overseas it was 19 and the ‘apparent’ difference between them was not always obvious. Today, the issue of ‘underage’ soldiers in the First World War remains emotive but almost forgotten are the others who also lied – Lieutenant Henry Webber served on the Somme, outranked by two sons with the rank of Major and a third son a Colonel. He died from a head wound in 1916 at the age of 67, having taken twenty-five years off his age to enlist in 1914. It was technically illegal, but the army did not prosecute those it caught, arguing that many from poorer families might not have birth certificates and so couldn’t actually know how old they really were.
Wakefield’s Artillery Battery prepare to leave the city.
As a result of the flood of volunteers, reports began to filter back of scenes of chaos at the Pontefract Barracks, home to both the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and the York and Lancaster regiments. Not surprisingly, supplies of beds, uniforms, equipment and even food soon began to run out at regimental depots everywhere. Some men were billeted with local families or even stayed at home, commuting to the army just as they had to work. Others camped out in any available buildings whilst more slept in tents pitched around the barracks as the harassed depot staff struggled to maintain any sort of order. Many men simply walked away and went home for their meals or to visit families for the weekend, often without their absence being noticed. Those who lived too far away stayed put and complaints began to appear in local papers about conditions at the depot. On 26 September, under the heading ‘Life at Pontefract Camp – Silly Rumours Contradicted’, the Dewsbury Reporter received a letter from a group of local men:
As the army expanded, new units were formed and adverts similar to this became a regular feature in local newspapers.
Many rumours have been circulated in the district regarding the conditions under which our local soldiers are housed at Pontefract and the treatment they have received with regard to food etc. The following letter has come to hand this week, and we trust that it will put an end to the ridiculous tales: ‘To the Editor of the Reporter, Sir, – Having heard that there have been many rumours about that the Pontefract camp is in a filthy condition and that there is not enough to eat for the soldiers, we, the undersigned, wish to contradict these rumours. We are all Batley chaps who have been at Pontefract for three weeks, and we are all in the pink of condition and ready for anything. The camp is cleared up and disinfected every day, and as for eating, we have enough and to spare. For breakfast we have bread and butter – not margarine – and jam and cheese; to dinner we have boiled beef, fresh every day, along with cabbage and carrots; and for tea we get bread and butter, tinned salmon and tinned herrings or potted beef: so you will see whether we are pined or not’.
