On the HOME FRONT

Families left behind when their menfolk marched off to war fought battles of their own

WORDS: KATE HUNTER

In August 1914 Teddy Reynolds of Lower Hutt wrote to Lord Liverpool, Governor of New Zealand: “Dear Governor, Wold you let me come to the war. I am eight yers old. I am in the first standard I want to come to the war my father is going to the war and i wood like to go and fite for our country’ [sic]. Teddy’s father William had enlisted in August, which was unusual. It was much more common for children to farewell their brothers and uncles, and for parents to face their sons’ enlistments.

Railway worker Len Hart wrote to his father from camp, explaining his decision to join up: “I feel certain that you would not be put out by it”. Samuel Hart replied: “Well Len, I feel proud of being your father. Good men like you are going to save the Empire.”

Len knew that his mother’s response might not be so positive, admitting “she would not perhaps be exactly pleased”.

In the end Caroline Hart must have resigned herself to the war’s pull because both of Len’s brothers, Harry and Adrian, enlisted as well and their sister Connie took advantage of new wartime work to become a typist.

The Great War changed the lives of families all over New Zealand. While it risks being a cliché, the notion that no family was untouched by it is perhaps quite close to the truth. The war infused newspapers, workplaces, classrooms and Sunday sermons. Topicals – short news films – at the cinema preceded every feature film and patriotic fund-raising became the focus of almost every leisure activity.

Everyday, innocent pastimes became imbued with new meanings so that a game of rugby raised questions about the loyalty of every fit man on the field, and conducting a Lutheran church service in German was regarded as so dangerous the community changed to English within weeks of the war’s declaration. New Zealand may have been as far from the battlefields of Europe as it was possible to be, but the war was very real for New Zealanders.

The country was surprisingly militarised in 1914. Although there was no standing army, there was a pool of 25,000 reservist territorials created by the compulsory military training for boys and young men that had been enacted in 1909. Raising a volunteer force in the first months was not difficult and the main body of 8000 men embarked in October 1914.

The appearance in New Zealand newspapers six months later of the casualty lists from the Gallipoli campaign sobered the enthusiasts and confirmed the predictions of the war’s opponents. The return of the troopship Willochra in July 1915 was also a significant event because it carried the first of the eventually 40,000 wounded. Recruits and their families could no longer be innocent of what awaited them in the “European war”, and this was still eight months before the New Zealand Expeditionary Force was deployed on the Western Front.

However, men continued to volunteer, in waves rather than as a steady stream. Their motives were various; a sense of duty drove many, including the young parliamentarians William Downie Stewart and Thomas Seddon, who enlisted together in 1915 so as not to upset the balance in Parliament.

Personal conviction also motivated some men in the Labour movement who felt they could not oppose the introduction of conscription in August 1916 if they were not prepared to volunteer themselves. For many others, the army offered travel, steady pay and allowances and generous pensions in the event of disability or death. Few workplaces offered such benefits and some industries, such as mining and forestry, were just as dangerous.

Communities all over the country threw themselves into the voluntary efforts to support “our boys”. Women and children learned to knit; even children could manage pyjama cords that were only seven stitches wide but a seemingly endless 150 centimetres long. Groups of women sewed in their lunch hours at work or in the evenings in homes and halls, and men’s sports teams rolled bandages and assembled packing crates.

School activities became strongly focused on fund-raising galas, bottle drives, knitting and sewing. School prize winners gave up their medals and books in favour of donating the money to soldiers’ funds, or the school boards decided for them – decisions that still rankled many years later. Those who were children during the war recall the enormous fun of peace festivities and school fund-raising, but also the cancelling of birthday parties; New Zealand was “very Spartan”.

The enlistment, then conscription, of more than 100,000 men had serious consequences for a large number of families and the decision to enlist was often made around the kitchen table. Most rural and working-class families in the 1910s were reliant on the earnings and labour of all adult family members, with men commanding wages twice as high as women’s.

Leslie Adkin’s Horowhenua family decided that one of their sons needed to remain at home to help run the farm and Leslie, although the elder, was a more experienced farmer than the younger Gilbert.

It was clear from the appeals against conscription, heard by local military service boards from late 1916 onwards, that there were many cases where a man’s enlistment would cause undue hardship to his family.

Ernest Napier’s argument against his call-up was that he contributed 32 shillings to the family each week which was far more than he would be able to allot from his weekly army pay of 35 shillings. The board was not satisfied with this appeal and granted Ernest exemption from service only when the most intimate details of his domestic situation became clear (and were subsequently published in the newspaper): his mother was an amputee and his father “suffered from such severe rheumatism that he was unable to dress himself”.

Few of these appeals were granted immediately; it was more common for the board to give a man a few months’ delay so he could put arrangements in place.

The absence of soldier relatives could put pressure on the women of farming families in particular.

Wairarapa girl Katarina Te Tau, aged 15 at the outbreak of the war, recalled bitterly that she had “a hard working life because my elder brother... was enlisted into the war and my dad was growing wheat by the acre, acres and acres of it. I was the eldest one, so I had to give up school and help dad.”

For many families, the absence of kin was not just temporary; by the end of the war 18,000 men were dead and thousands more died in the 1920s. The influenza endemic of November 1918 claimed 8600 lives, adding to the trauma of the war.

Featherston farmer Harry Whishaw twice survived being wounded at Gallipoli but was killed in action at Armentières in 1916. Harry’s brother Bernard and their sister Mabel also served. Bernard, the youngest child of the family, enlisted in November 1915 but died of disease in Cairo in October 1918. Mabel served with the New Zealand Army Nursing Service at Featherston Military Camp where she was the night sister for three years. She remained responsible for their ageing mother, Kate, which prevented her volunteering for overseas service. She died of influenza in November 1918.

The toll on the families of thousands of wounded and dead men, as well as on their communities, was immense and long lasting. Patriotic societies, which had raised funds to support soldiers’ dependants during the war, continued to assist them for decades afterwards with hospital costs, rent and children’s education.

William Reynolds, whom Teddy had so desperately wanted to follow to war, returned to New Zealand in September 1916, discharged as unfit for further service. He had contracted rheumatic fever in Egypt, which made his joints swell painfully. It also probably damaged his heart and perhaps accounted for his premature death in 1930. He was not the father Teddy had farewelled, and life for the whole family was altered forever.