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Herefordshire and World War One

Contents Introduction

Page 02

Foreword

Page 03

Medicine and World War One

Page 05

The Canary Girls

Page 14

The Dymock Poets and the War Machine

Page 22

The Dymock Poets and World War One

Page 32

Painters of the First World War

Page 37

An Agricultural Settlement for Ex-Servicemen in Bosbury

Page 46

The Conscientious Objector in World War One

Page 52

We Will Remember Them

Page 58

Dr Jane Adams

Julie Orton-Davies David Jones

Peter Arscott Jill Salmons

Dr Sylvia Pinches

Chris Twiggs

Jennifer Harrison

Produced in October 2015 © Copyright Workers’ Educational Association 01

Herefordshire and World War One

Introduction This publication forms part of an educational project entitled ‘Exploring the Impact of World War One on Herefordshire’ delivered by the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), West Midlands Region.

Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund’s First World War: Then and Now programme, the project was designed to enable rural communities within Herefordshire to learn more about the role their local area played in the First World War. A team of experienced volunteers from WEA Hereford and Ledbury branches worked with WEA staff (Katherine Brown, Project Co-ordinator), to create a programme of engaging educational visits, talks and workshop sessions for around 200 people, increasing knowledge and understanding of what life was like in Herefordshire and its surrounding areas during the Great War. A total of 11 activities took place between October 2014 and September 2015 delivered by WEA tutors and other highly respected historians and academics. Working in partnership with local archive and resource centres the project also raised awareness of the rich collections held locally.

The project explored the significance of local places and popular culture with First World War associations including the provision of agricultural settlements for ex-servicemen in Bosbury, the impact of war on medical services in Herefordshire, the role of the ‘Canary Girls’ at Rotherwas Filling Factory, the influence of war on the ‘Dymock Poets’ and Conscientious Objectors. A range of community venues such as museums, resource centres, village halls and churches were used to host the activities in order to reach as wide a range of people as possible.

Feedback from participants identified many outcomes including increased understanding of the impact of war on people and places and increased awareness of local expertise, collections, museums and archives available within the County. Here are some comments made by those taking part: ‘war had much wider implications than I had realised’ ‘very impressed with teaching techniques, preparation and knowledge and unique interpretation’ [It has] ‘Increased desire to read more about the subject’ ‘Glad to hear of sources available for research…I will do some of my own research now’

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This publication provides a lasting legacy of the project as many of the teaching and learning materials produced are likely to be used by WEA, as well as other adult education providers and partner organisations in the future. This booklet provides a sample of articles submitted by facilitators to complement the visits, talks and workshops that took place and we hope you find it of interest.

If you wish to learn more, you can visit https://www.herefordshire.gov.uk/ leisure-and-culture/local-history-and-heritage/first-world-war-centenary.

This is the home of the County Council’s ‘Herefordshire in the Great War: telling the story 1914-18’ project, which is exploring life during the war through the exhibition and digitisation of unique local material.

Howard Croft

Projects Development Manager WEA West Midlands Region Our thanks go to the volunteers from WEA Hereford and Ledbury branches for their creative approach and hard work on this project: Ann Jackson, Rosy Athay, Chris Lansberry, Gail Thornley, Sue Gough, Viv Arscott, Vicky Austerfield, Jenny Silcock and to Branch Treasurers Peter Gwatkin and Bob Littlefair.

Branch volunteers at The National Memorial Arboretum with Katherine Brown from the WEA.

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Foreword by Anna Jarvis, First World War & Anniversaries Adviser, Heritage Lottery Fund.

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) launched our community grants programme ‘First World War: then and now’ in May 2013, to encourage communities to explore their First World War heritage and increase understanding of the war’s impact. At HLF, we encourage communities to look at the war from a range of perspectives and that is exactly what this project has done. From the role of conscientious objectors, to women working in Herefordshire Hospitals, to the agricultural settlement in Bosbury for soldiers returning from war all of these stories enrich our understanding of the war and help us understand how it relates to our lives today.

Congratulations to everyone who made the project possible.

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Dr Jane Adams is an Associate Lecturer with the Open University in the West Midlands and teaches European history 1400-1989. She is a specialist in the social and cultural history of medicine, and completed her PhD and post-doctoral work at the University of Warwick.

Her first book, Healing with Water: English Spas and the Water Cure 1840-1960,was published by Manchester University Press in 2015.

Her current research focuses on the history of holistic healing in Britain 1900-1960.

Medicine and World War One Dr Jane Adams World War One has been described as the first ‘total war’, one in which all society’s resources were engaged and directed towards achieving victory. The national response to meet the medical emergency brought about by the war linked medical services on the home front in Herefordshire to the battlefield. Historians have long debated the impact of World War One on social change. The complexity of these debates is explored through consideration of initiatives to improve access to medical services and women’s roles in nursing and medicine in the county in the post-war years.

The impact of WWI on medical services in Herefordshire Statistics of the numbers of British casualties during World War One are sobering. Some 2.3 million men were wounded out of 6.1 million deployed with an estimated 750,000 military deaths over the course of the war.

The scale of injuries and fatalities arose from the destructive capacity of new weapons including shells, grenades, machine guns, aircraft and poison gas. Soldiers also died from hunger, exhaustion, dirt and disease. The nature of trench warfare on the Western Front led to an integrated system of medical services that linked the battlegrounds in Europe to convalescent hospitals on the home front. First aid was 05

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provided by medical orderlies on the battlefield, casualties were later transferred behind the lines for triage, dressings and emergency operations before being transported onwards to Casualty Clearing Stations. From here soldiers either returned to active service or were sent home to Britain for further treatment, convalescence or discharge.

This system is illustrated in the letters written by Ronald Craigie, an officer serving in the Shropshire Light Infantry, to his parents in Weston under Penyard, near Ross-on-Wye. This wonderful collection of 263 letters and postcards written between July 1915 and November 1917 is held at Herefordshire Record Office (HRO BT 92).

Ronald’s letters give a vivid impression of life at the front and the inconveniences of day to day life. Many letters refer to cold, lack of sleep, hunger and the shortage of facilities for bathing and washing clothes. Others request supplies including tobacco, fuel, food and medicines. Ronald comments on military equipment, weapons and injuries among his colleagues. While most were treated successfully in France before returning to the frontline, the letters also record some instances of serious injury and a few fatalities.

In November 1916 Ronald’s parents received a letter from his Commanding Office, Harold Welch, informing them he had been injured. ‘Dear Mr. Craigie, Your boy has had a bit of an accident but the doctor tells me its not at all serious.

The Lewis Gun Officer let off a round by accident and the bullet hit some parts of the gun which had been stripped off and were lying in front and splinters from these parts cut your boy in the head neck & hand.

The doctor of another regiment was near and did him up. And I have just been to see him, he says I can tell you, you need not be at all anxious, he has a gash on the side of the head to the bone but the bone is not injured. And quite a slight one in the neck & hand.

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I did not see him myself as he had walked off to be dressed before I heard of the accident. The doctor says it may take 6 weeks or so before he’ll be fit & he thinks very likely he may get to England. I hope he will get a good rest at home if he does’.

Ronald later wrote to say that his injury was ‘not a Blighty’ after all; that is, it was not severe enough to require treatment in Britain.

Instead he was treated at the Casualty Clearing Station at Rouen for some three weeks before facing a medical board. Although deemed fit to return to the Reinforcement depot on 22 December his discharge was delayed due to an infected tooth. On 21 January he was ‘standing by…to go up to the front’. Ronald was lucky to survive the war without further injuries.

When Robert Callaghan was wounded by a shell at Arras in 1917 his injuries were such that he was transferred back to Britain for convalescence before discharge back to his family at Harwich. He had joined up in 1914 aged just 16.

Although from Essex, Robert was sent to Herefordshire for convalescence, receiving treatment at Hampton Grange in Hereford and Hightree House in Leintwardine. These were two of the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) hospitals set up in the county under the management of the Red Cross. Others were at Beechwood in Hereford, Bromyard, Colwall, Kington, Ledbury, Hampton Court, Sarnesfield and Caradoc Court. Together these auxiliary hospitals provided several hundred convalescent beds and treated over 4,000 patients over the course of the war. Most were set up in large country houses and several owners took on management roles as Commandants. The nursing staff were local women who received a short training. Medical support was provided by the local doctor.

Miss Gertrude Crawshay, of Hightree House, Leintwardine, offered her home as an auxiliary hospital with 27 beds. She became superintendent and managed the hospital with the help of her neighbour, Mrs Jebb. The War Office paid a daily allowance towards the cost of caring for patients but the local community also contributed money and resources. A postcard message written by a 07

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patient there shows appreciation for the period of respite he found in the quiet Herefordshire countryside (Leintwardine History Group Journal, March 2006).

‘Well Mary, this is the house where I am having a holiday. It is a very pretty part and very hilly. And we are having a good time, plenty to eat and drink and nothing to do. It is a lovely day here today and hot. We have got a donkey and cart to amuse ourselves with, so you bet we are having some fun’.

Unfortunately the central Red Cross archives were destroyed in World War II. The most comprehensive source of information on the Society’s activities in Herefordshire is provided in William Collins, Herefordshire in the Great War’, published in 1919.

In addition to the VAD hospitals the local committee organised an impressive voluntary support effort. Volunteers at their Hereford depot processed 211,716 dressings, 34,635 sphagnum moss compresses and roller bandages, 13,066 many-tailed bandages, 6,344 slippers and 12,307 articles of clothing. The Ledbury depot contributed over 67,000 items of medical and general supplies.

In 1914 the largest medical institution in Herefordshire was the General Hospital (HGH). Throughout the war the hospital treated military personnel but had the added pressure of having to balance these demands with those of the civilian population. In the first weeks of the war the hospital management offered to set aside 35 beds for the use of the military and by 1916 over 240 soldiers had been treated.

In early 1917 the hospital were asked if they could further increase capacity by adding temporary beds but were wary of agreeing to do so ‘owing to the requirements of our civil patients and to the fact that the population of this neighbourhood had been recently increased by about one fifth of the normal number owing to the influx of Munition Workers’. The hospital had agreed to treat these workers, who came to Hereford from all over the country, as well as providing medical cover in the event of a major emergency at the factory. The hospital also treated members from the local garrison. Despite these other 08

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pressures, the numbers of wounded soldiers treated at the Infirmary increased in the final 2 years of the war (HGH, House Management minutes).

This evidence shows how Herefordshire was integrated into the national effort to meet the medical emergency brought on by the war. Hereford Hospital treated wounded soldiers, local troops and adapted to serve a changing civilian population. The Red Cross coordinated a huge voluntary effort through VAD hospitals, the work of its depots, ambulance provision and fundraising.

The longer term impact of World War One Between 1913 and 1918 expenditure at Hereford General Hospital increased from around £4,300 to £8,300 per annum. Much of the additional income came from the central resources channelled via the War Office but by 1920 this was negligible and new sources of funding were needed to replace it. Comparison of hospital income in 1913 and 1930 illustrates the dramatic shift from charitable funding reliant on subscribers and donations to a system in which contributors funded their own access through an insurance based scheme.

Hereford General Hospital: Comparison of sources of Income (HGH Annual Reports)

1913 1930 Subscriptions 1,243 1,899 Donations 387 961 Dividends 1,881 1,948 Contributory Schemes 604 5,103 Patients payments 118 2,951 Other 73 34

Total

£4,306 £12,896

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In 1911 the first National Insurance Act introduced a national contributory scheme for funding access to primary care for working people. Many groups within the population were excluded, for example the families of contributors and the unemployed. During the war an increasing proportion of the population had benefitted from some access to medical services, perhaps through their roles as serving soldiers or as munition workers. New services such as orthopaedics and venereal disease clinics had developed and these continued to be needed in peacetime even though funding flows from national bodies diminished post war.

Central funding for hospitals offering free treatment to all was not introduced until the advent of the NHS in 1948. During the interwar period individual institutions implemented a variety of schemes to address funding and access issues. In 1926 Hereford General Hospital launched a new a contributory scheme open to all across the county designed to improve access to services for the population and to solve the growing gap between income and expenditure. This drew on local resources to fund the hospital as a centre for treatment for the population of Herefordshire (HGH, Contributory scheme minutes).

The difficulty of assessing the impact of war on the rights and roles of women has been much debated. How far did WWI offer new opportunities for women and, if it did, were these sustained in the post-war period? The complexity of assessing changing attitudes is illustrated with examples from the experiences of women working as doctors and nurses in Hereford.

Pressures on services at Hereford General Hospital during the war were compounded by a shortage of medical expertise as male personnel left to join the army. In December 1915 the hospital management committee was forced to consider appointing a female doctor for the first time. There were no male applicants for the position. Mrs E. B. Stallard, a married woman with a small son whose husband was abroad, was appointed to the job. This pattern was common across the country, but in many places women were forced to step down when men returned to their jobs at the end of the war.

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In Mrs Stallard’s case her work during the war years had clearly been valued and in 1922 she regained a permanent appointment to the hospital.

In 1919 the Nurse Registration Act introduced a national register of qualified nurses for the first time along with a three-year training curriculum and a system of national assessment. This is considered an important milestone in the professional development of nursing which, at the time, was an overwhelmingly female occupation. While Hereford complied with the new central requirements, discussions reported in the minutes show that there were concerns about a loss of local control and the potential adverse impact on recruitment of trainee nurses. The Hospital had run its own training scheme since the 1880s with decisions about curriculum content and training schedules decided locally by doctors and senior nurses on the hospital management committee. As there was no possibility to opt out of the national scheme, the hospital joined it and in 1925 three nurses from Hereford were among those completing the first threeyear course (HGH, House Management Minutes).

These examples illustrate the complexity of assessing the relative impact of World War One on attitudes and institutions. While wartime experiences may have raised expectations and introduced greater co-ordination between medical organisations, longer term trends were also important in explaining change in medical services.

The origins of movements for democratic rights for both men and women, evidenced by the Suffragettes and recognised by an extension of the franchise in 1919, as well as trends for greater access to health services had their origins in the pre-war period. In addition to national trends, local initiatives continued to be influential in shaping services in the county in the post-war years.

Dr Jane Adams

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Interior of Hightree VAD Hospital, Leintwardine. Courtesy of John Williams, Leintwardine History Soc.

Robert Callaghan (far right) and other patients at Hampton Grange VAD Hospital, Hereford. Courtesy of John Williams, Leintwardine History Soc. 12

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Acknowledgments My thanks go to Rhys Griffiths and Steven Rexworthy at Herefordshire Record Office, Lauren Price at Hereford Library, John Williams of Leintwardine History Society and to Heather Hurley and Henry Connor for their help with sources and information.

Bibliography William Collins, Herefordshire and the Great War (Hereford: Jakeman and Carver, 1919), pp. 28-40.

Leintwardine History Group Journal, March 2006.

HGH, House Management minutes, 1914-1919, HRO, S 60.

HGH, Contributory Scheme minutes, HRO, S 60.

HGH, Annual Reports 1913-1930, HRO, S 60.

Letters of Ronald Craigie, HRO, BT 92

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Julie Orton-Davies has been an enthusiastic and loyal member of the WEA Hereford branch executive since 2001, and in the past has delivered courses relating to the Ladies of Llangollen and Ponsonby Women.

Historical research has always played an important role in her life and this interest led her into studying the experiences of the young women who worked within the Rotherwas Munitions Factory during the First World War. She was delighted to share their story within the context of the WEA WW1 programme.

The Canary Girls Julie Orton-Davies

Workers of the lyddite section, including local girl Doris Jones.

(Contributed by a family member) 14

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ROTHERWAS FILLING FACTORY No 14 The First World War through necessity provided an opportunity for young women to play a vital role in the defence of Britain.

This challenge was accepted with pride and within the munitions industry nationally 80 percent of all shells were produced by women throughout Britain between 1914 and 1918. Hereford opened its munitions factory in November 1916, producing its first shell on 11 November, precisely two years to the day before the Armistice – a strange coincidence.

War was declared when Britain was completely unprepared, supporting only a small army and no conscription. Rallies were held on the Castle Green in 1914 to encourage young men and women to join together in defence of the nation and as early as 1915 the Hereford Times was recruiting young women to support the boys serving in France by joining the munitions industry.

Girls on the Bridge. (Courtesy of Herefordshire Archive Services).

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Rotherwas Filling Factory was divided into two halves – the Straight Mile separating the site. The plan was to build nine filling factories, seven on the southern side [only six becoming fully operational] and two on the northern side. There was a Great Western Railway link with its own station with two platforms, connecting to Wales and the now extinct line to Ross-on-Wye and Gloucester. Six trains travelled from Gloucester daily, known as the Work Girls’ Special. To enable ease of access for workers to the northern factory, a bridge had been built to span the railway line allowing the workers to cross the lines safely. The bridge has long since been demolished but thousands of workers would have climbed the steps on their way to and from work.

These were secretive and dangerous times where both the Hunderton and Eign railway bridges were guarded by soldiers 24 hours a day and the Straight Mile gated with identification passes necessary to gain entry. The factory area was enclosed by five miles of electrified fence and regularly patrolled. All workers were searched on entry and randomly searched on leaving, the purpose being to ensure that all metal objects were excluded owing to the volatile nature of the explosives. Girls were required to work twelve hour shifts, two weeks on days and two weeks on nights and handled dangerous chemicals in the formed of Lyddite and Amatol.

The aim of this article is to introduce the young women who took up this challenge. There were many local girls but the majority came from throughout the country as far afield as Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Lancashire and London. The impact of such an invasion had a devastating effect on Hereford, a predominantly agricultural city. The factory at the end of the war was employing 6000 workers, 68 percent of which were female. Accommodation was always a problem: the town’s people were encouraged to let out rooms and sometimes as many as three girls would share together. The girls were for the first time experiencing freedom and the ability to earn high wages – with bonuses as much as £2 10s 0d per week.

[Railway workers earned roughly half this amount] The community’s tolerance was sorely tested and in order to control this reaction the public houses had restricted opening hours and the girls were 16

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encouraged to join clubs, one of which was positioned in St Peter’s Square, where girls could improve literacy skills, keep fit, dance, sing and socialize - one thousand joined up. For the most successful performers, the now demolished Kemble Theatre in Broad Street provided a platform for performances within plays and musical reviews. Singing played an important role in the working lives of the girls as the monotony of their tasks was lessened within an atmosphere of boredom and tension. Girls working together would form strong relationships and took to wearing scarves and badges to identify different groups.

The young women workers were required to sign up to the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 [DORA]: its aim to defend the country from internal enemies and spies. This of course prevented the girls from talking about their experiences. However in recent years various stories have emerged, for example that of Jessie Derry, a local girl, and supervisor in the paint shop. Each of the factories required an empty shell shed, where shells were prepared before filling, and Jessie kept a diary; a meticulous account of what she did. The shells came in by train and were moved around each of the one acre sites using gantries. The first stage was the off-loading and Jessie described how the shells were moved into the central section and batched leaving sufficient room between each one to allow for turning in the painting process. The shells were cleaned, painted and coded according to size and type. Using the gantries the prepared shells were then moved to the third section of the shed, an area for drying before distribution to the filling sheds.

Annie Slade from the Rhondda, who wanted to do something for her country, worked in the powder mills on the southern side. In an interview she described lodging with her friend Tabitha in Ross-onWye and travelling to and from the factory, singing all the way, on the Work Girls’ Special. She and Tabitha were required to work twelve hour shifts, two weeks in the mill where the TNT and Amonium Nitrate were mixed and crushed. Timing was crucial, as if the explosives overheated an explosion was inevitable. The explosive now known as Amatol, resembling a fine pinkish powder, was tinned and left to go cold, sometimes taking as long as two days.

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After two weeks the girls would then move to the operation known as stemming, where an empty shell had to be filled with Amatol, and pounded down using a mallet and a stem – a piece of wood similar to a broom handle. The exploder and fuse cap would then be inserted and sealed. TNT was strong smelling and girls fainted and lost teeth. However, Annie also talked about the fun they had and described breaks in the canteen on night shifts where the Lancashire girls would be clog dancing on the tables accompanied by the local girls on the spoons.

Winifred Townsend, who also lived at Ross-on-Wye, worked in the Northern factory and was a supervisor in a filling shed. Each shed would employ twelve girls who would work in pairs. The Picric Acid was sifted, heated to boiling point and tinned before being delivered for filling. The empty shells were placed in rows and two girls would fill the shell; one pouring and one measuring, using a special gauge.

Each layer was carefully checked before adding a second and third layer, which would include a candle shaped mould. After military inspection the team would then remove the mould and insert a TNT exploder followed by careful sealing. Winifred described an incident on 17 December 1917 where she tripped whilst carrying a boiling can of picric acid, burning her face and hands and forcing her to be off work for eight weeks. The girls had to produce 360 shells each 12 hour shift and were paid £2 per week. Winifred was paid an extra 2s 6d as supervisor.

Another worker by the name of Gabrielle West, gave further insight into factory life. Gabrielle and her friend Buckie decided to join the Women’s Police Service, having both worked in the canteen at Woolwich Arsenal and needed a change. They joined the WPS and ended up at Rotherwas around Spring 1917. They earned £2 per week and had to buy their own uniform, consisting of a dark blue jacket and skirt with smart hat, fashioned at Harrods. Their task was to search the workers, check ID passes and direct visitors and new workers within the site. However, their main function was to control the behaviour of the girls within and outside the factory environment. The girls were from all parts of Britain and there was keen competition between shifts and different ethnic backgrounds.

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Gabrielle was recorded as saying the girls, particularly those working in the Amatol section, were a rough lot. She also recounts incidents at the Barrs Court Station where the WPS’s were required to control the transit of girls through the station and where fights, which had to be broken-up, were common place. In August 1917 for example there was an incident where the English girls accused the Irish girls of being Sinn Feiners – a fight broke out resulting in the English girls being bundled off to Rotherwas and the Irish girls marching up Commercial Street to their lodgings shouting ‘Ireland Forever’.

Another similar incident was described in October 1917 when women picketed the station in support of the Russian Revolution.

Elsie Abel was witnessed raising the Red Flag, but in her defence exclaimed that the banner was not red but rather pinkish – she was sentenced to one month in prison. Gabrielle and Buckie had had enough and transferred to Waltham Abbey, a less lively ammunitions factory.

Nationally the munitions industry caused many deaths and injuries amongst the workers both male and female. There was little reference to health and safety and workers were exposed to dangers, unthinkable in the 21st century. The girls did not wear protective clothing and inhaled harmful chemicals causing damage to the liver which could develop into toxic jaundice. Nationally 430 women died as a result of exposure to these harmful chemicals and two women died in Rotherwas. Ethel and May Phillips were advised to smoke in order to clear their lungs of toxic substances and Annie talks of a free allocation of milk to lessen the harmful damage caused by Amatol. As a result of handling picric acid, hair and skin developed a yellow pigment, the origin of the nickname – Canary Girls.

Winifred Townsend describes an incident in 1917 when 43 were killed following an explosion within the factory. Again in 1917 an accident on site relates to Elsie Morris who fell from the railway platform and lost a leg being later admitted to the General Hospital.

Finally Annie described an incident where a zeppelin appeared above the Rotherwas site. Air raids during the First World War were rare and even though workers were instructed to turn off their machines 19

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and stay by their work stations, panic ensued. As this appears to be the only occasion that the Germans penetrated this far this reaction was predictable, however many people lost fingers and some people were killed. This incident is not officially recorded but we do have another account recorded by Alfred Evans from the Wye Inn who stated that the girls on the night shift ran from the factory and collapsed outside his family’s hostelry – happy coincidence! Alfred also commented on their yellow hair and skin.

The bravery and dedication of these young women demonstrated the need for women a century ago to play an active role in the defence of the country, a conflict where circumstances (because of the lack of man power) demanded that women rectified the shortfall.

Through this experience women enjoyed a new found camaraderie and independence, together with a feeling of pride in not only having supported their menfolk in a time of crisis but in having played a part.

This is demonstrated in an incident on Christmas Day 1917 when two football teams played at the Edgar Street Football Ground. There was nothing particularly unusual about this, except for the fact that they were female teams from the Rotherwas Factory. During the years of the war nationally girls had been encouraged to take up football to keep fit and to occupy their leisure time – Rotherwas was no exception. The girls learned the rules through playing with the boy apprentices and taking advantage of enthusiastic male workers’ coaching skills.

Girls in Action. (The Citizen - November 30 1958 contributed by a family member).

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Social events were staged to raise funds to purchase football strips and two teams developed within the Canteen and Engineers, their aim being to raise funds for the Herefordshire Regiment serving in France. The stage was set and the two teams arrived at the ground ready for action. In front of an enthusiastic crowd the girls were reluctant to enter the pitch, not surprising when you consider that this was the first time they had appeared in public. However, eventually they were encouraged to begin the game, which was reported to be rather slow initially, but livened up as the game progressed. Margaret Lucas of the Canteen scored the winning goal.

All of the proceeds were sent to France to provide a few luxuries for fathers, brothers and sweethearts.

Bibliography and Sources Herefordshire Lore – In the Munitions, Hereford 2003, Edited by Bill Laws, additional research Bobbie Blackwell Edmonds J - The History of Rotherwas Munitions Factory, Hereford 2004 Dinedor Heritage Group - Dinedor and Rotherwas Explored, Hereford 2015 Herefordshire Archives & Record Centre Interviews with relations of munition workers

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After reading Ancient History at Oxford, David Jones made his career in financial journalism. On his retirement to Malvern, he studied for his PhD through the Open University and published a book on Roman finance, ‘The Bankers of Puteoli’. His interest in the Dymock Poets was kindled by a chance visit, several years ago, to the memorial display in the village church.

The Dymock Poets and the War Machine David Jones By contrast with other European countries, pre-Great War Britain did not operate a system of nationwide military conscription. The nation fought its land wars through a small professional army, backed up by a home-based force of exsoldiers and part-time Territorials.

In 1914 Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, was entrusted with the task of creating a new citizen army from volunteers. His recruiting campaign was targeted initially at young working-men aged between 19 and 30. His message was powerful and blunt, ‘You owe it to your country to join the army.’ A similar message, in rather more elevated terms, was conveyed through the Officer Training Corps to better-off young men at public schools, at some grammar schools and at the universities. In six months Kitchener recruited over half a million volunteers.

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However, in the spring of 1915 the first British Expeditionary Force suffered heavy casualties in Flanders. The volunteers of the first months of the war were now partly trained and would soon be despatched to the Front, but Kitchener needed many more recruits and now had to look among older men. The message of his new campaign was more subtle, ‘Your women-folk and your children are at risk. They know, and you know, that it is your duty to defend them, by joining the army.’

And now for the Dymock poets.

There were six of them, who had met each other in pre-war London’s literary world. By 1914 the poets Lascelles Abercrombie and Wilfrid Gibson had set up their family homes in rented cottages in Dymock, on the Herefordshire/ Gloucestershire border. From here they published their poetry journal, New Numbers. The young celebrity Rupert Brooke (who visited them from London) and John Drinkwater (a leading light in the Birmingham Repertory Theatre company) were also contributors.

Two other literary figures came to Dymock in 1914. In the spring the (American) poet Robert Frost moved his family from Beaconsfield to Herefordshire; Frost then persuaded the English travel writer and critic, Edward Thomas, to rent a nearby cottage for a family holiday during August that year.

Robert Frost, aged 40 in 1914, was the oldest member of the group. He could see no place for himself and his family in war-time Britain. Perhaps he could find teaching work back in New England.

Part-financed by loans from English friends, the Frosts sailed from 23

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Liverpool in February 1915, on an American liner. The Frosts took with them Mervyn, Edward Thomas’ oldest child, who was to stay in America for a time with relatives of the Thomas family.

Frost went on to write a considerable body of poetry and he held numerous academic appointments. As America’s most distinguished literary figure, he read a specially composed poem at John Kennedy’s presidential inauguration in 1961. He died in January 1963, aged 88.

At 27, Rupert Brooke was the youngest of the poets and the first to enlist. An Old Rugbeian and a Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge, Brooke was imbued (like many of his class and generation) with the notion that to die for one’s country was the supreme virtue.

Brooke was well-connected; Arthur Asquith, son of the Prime Minister, was a close friend. Not surprisingly, Brooke and other members of his circle were quickly found commissions in the special Royal Naval Division, newly formed by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty.

The Division was earmarked to join an allied assault on the Turkish coast the following spring. They went into training in the south of England, and it was here that Brooke wrote the sequence of what we now call his war sonnets. These poems were published from Dymock, in February 1915, in the fourth and final issue of New Numbers.

The war sonnets exemplify the patriotic spirit that swept through Britain in the first months of the war. On Easter Sunday in 1915 the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral quoted in his sermon Brooke’s poem that begins : If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.

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When the allied invasion fleet was assembling in the Aegean Sea for the planned assault on Gallipoli, Brooke contracted septicaemia possibly due to an infected mosquito bite. He was transferred to a nearby French hospital ship, but the doctors could not save him.

His friends gave him a funeral fit for an ancient hero. They buried him at night in an olive grove on the nearby island of Skyros. The lanternlit procession was led by Brooke’s platoon sergeant, who carried a cross of white wood, bearing the poet’s name in black paint. After the burial three rifle volleys were fired and a bugler sounded the Last Post. ‘It was as though one were involved in the origin of some classic myth’, wrote a friend. The myth was, perhaps, the tale of a gallant soldier poet who had given his life for his country.

John Drinkwater was aged 32 at the outbreak of war.

His work is chiefly remembered today for its portrayal of rural themes. But he did write poems in response to the war, and he expressed resentment against the ‘warriors of the tongue’, whose rhetoric had sent so many young men to their deaths.

Drinkwater’s own career in the war years has for long been a puzzle.

He did not enlist as a volunteer in 1914 or 1915 and he was not called up when conscription was introduced in 1916. (And if he had been a conscientious objector, we would surely have heard about it.)

Two photographs (dated to 1915) may help to solve the puzzle.

They depict men of the Repertory Company (including Drinkwater) putting in a Sunday shift at the Birmingham Aluminium Company, where shells were manufactured. I suggest that the theatre company, composed of men who had been excused military service on medical grounds, was being publicised as a praiseworthy example of patriotic civilians ‘doing their bit’.

John Drinkwater died in 1937, aged 54.

For Lascelles Abercrombie, aged 33 in 1914, the onset of war meant the loss of well-paid freelance work at a difficult time. A third child had just been born, and his wife Catherine was undergoing an expensive series of operations for breast cancer.

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Nevertheless he did try several times to join up, and as an Old Malvernian he might well have been considered for a commission.

But he was rejected on medical grounds. He was eventually accepted as an inspector at a munitions factory in Liverpool and moved the family back to the north of England.

His job in the munitions industry was not entirely out of keeping. He had studied chemistry at school and as a young man he had trained as a quantity surveyor.

After the war Abercrombie pursued an academic career. A lectureship in poetry at the University of Liverpool was followed by posts at Leeds University and Bedford College in London.

In 1935 he was awarded a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford. He died in 1938, aged 57.

Wilfrid Gibson, known before the war as the People’s Poet, was 35 in August 1914. He made several attempts to enlist but initially his poor eyesight precluded selection.

In 1917 his publishers sent him on a reading tour of America, to try and whip up sales. This meant a long, dangerous sea voyage in each direction and led to a poem about American boys from the Mid-West crossing the Atlantic to unknown lands to fight an unknown foe.

On his return Gibson was finally accepted by the army as a private soldier - first in the Army Service Corps Motor Transport, and then as a clerk in the Medical Card Registry. Both postings were in south London.

Before the war Gibson had written about the experiences of working men and women. Now he wrote about the fate of young men who entered the terrible lottery of the military machine. In one poem he describes the stream of naked white bodies that paraded before bored doctors at the army medicals.

Gibson died in 1962, aged 83.

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Finally we come to Edward Thomas, aged 36 in 1914.

In addition to his surviving letters, field notebooks and war diary, two books written long after the war provide us with information on Thomas’s last years. One is his wife Helen’s memoir World Without End, the other is Edward Thomas, The Last Four Years written by his adoring friend, Eleanor Farjeon. I have chosen Eleanor Farjeon as my principal source, partly because her account is studded with letters from Thomas.

(Thomas was aware of Eleanor’s devotion but he was able to keep their relationship at a light-hearted level. Helen Thomas apparently accepted the situation; indeed, when news of her husband’s death reached England in April 1917, it was Eleanor that Helen asked to come and stay with her, to share her grief.)

In August 1914, when he came to Dymock at Frost’s suggestion, Thomas was struggling to support his family by freelance travel writing and book reviewing. During that month Frost and Thomas went for long walks together, and even after the holiday was over Thomas returned to Dymock several times. On their walks Thomas, a keen naturalist, revealed to his American friend the hidden world of the English countryside. And they talked – about family life, about the implications of the war and about poetry.

Energised by his talks and walks with Frost, Thomas plunged into writing poetry. His first poem, Up in the Wind, was written in November 1914. By the end of the year the floodgates were open.

Edward was not a different man, Eleanor commented to a friend, but the same man ‘in a different key’. He had found a means of selffulfilment. He adopted the name Edward Eastaway as a pseudonym, sent his manuscripts to Eleanor for typing and had her post them to publishers from her address in Fellows Road, Hampstead.

Thomas achieved his breakthrough into poetry in spite of - some might say because of - his long drawn-out indecision about whether he should enlist in the army. It was a mental struggle that had begun in the golden August of 1914 at Dymock and ended in war-torn Britain in July 1915.

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On the one hand he was faced by the barrage of propaganda for enlistment (on posters and in the newspapers). Public pressure was accompanied by suggestions from his father that he was a coward.

On the other hand, he thought, perhaps he and the family could follow the Frosts to America where, through lecturing and writing, he could earn a decent living.

I believe that Thomas’s hand was eventually forced by political events.

In July 1915, alarmed at the fall off in army volunteers and the shortage of skilled workers in the munitions industry, the government introduced the National Registration Act. This required men and women between the age of 15 and 65 to have ready for collection at their homes, on Sunday August 15th, a completed registration form. Men already in the armed services did not have to register. The forms, blue for males, white for females, were distributed in advance.

The signatories were required to enter their name, age, address, occupation, and number of depandents. Men were not to enter their wives as dependants. Women at home (other than servants) were to give their occupation as ‘domestic duties’.

The forms were to be collected on Registration Sunday, or soon after, and taken to the Town Hall for processing. Each person registered was later given a certificate – the forerunner of the World War II Identity Card. At the Town Hall clerks would create special pink cards for men between 18 and 41, the current age range of men eligible for military service.

The pink cards of men who were employed in civilian occupations deemed vital for the war effort – typically mining, metal and engineering manufacture, the railways, and agriculture – were to be marked with a star and sent to the Labour Exchange. The remaining pink cards were to be sent to the Recruiting Office. Men listed on these cards, who were popularly known as ‘shirkers and slackers’, would be visited by Recruiting Sergeants.

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If he enlisted before Registration Sunday on August 15th, Thomas could choose which regiment he might join and he would be saved from the shame of being listed among the shirkers and slackers.

So, on Monday 19th July 1915, Thomas signed up to join the 28th Battalion of the Artists Rifles, a London-based officer training regiment. The attestation form that he signed that day has survived.

His first weeks with the Artists Rifles were spent in London, drilling at the Euston Road HQ and engaging in map-reading exercises on Hampstead Heath. He lodged with his parents in Balham.

On 17th September 1915 he was posted to Loughton, on the edge of Epping Forest. A second posting took him to another training camp at Hare Hall near Romford.

Edward Thomas came to believe that he could and should do more for England than teach map reading to officer cadets. Perhaps he should apply for a commission in a regiment that was seeing action in France. And England (he reasoned) could do something for him.

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Although the government had recently made him a one-off grant of £300 he still had difficulty in feeding his wife and family. An officer’s pay could make a good deal of difference. But he knew, as everyone else did, that junior officers had a short life expectancy on the Western Front.

In June 1916 he applied for a commission in the artillery, which made it almost certain that he would be posted to serve in France.

On 29th January, 1917, 2nd Lt P.E. Thomas was on his way to France with 244 Siege Battery. He was one of five subalterns reporting to the battery commander, Captain Lushington.

For years Thomas had kept field notebooks based on his exploration of the English countryside. Now - as well as noting the bird and animal life that survived in the shattered landscape of the Western Front – he recorded in his War Diary the daily round of a junior artillery officer. His principal task was to choose and man observation posts - from which to mark where enemy artillery fire was coming from and to note where Allied friendly fire was landing. He told Eleanor in one of his last letters how much he enjoyed the exercise and the work with map and field-glass. He sounds like a man who was at peace with himself.

At Arras on the morning of Easter Monday 1917, after a prodigious barrage from the British artillery, the infantry launched an attack on the German trenches. They were initially successful. Thomas left his observation post to fill his pipe. A stray German shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart. He fell without a mark on his body. His papers and his War Diary survived, creased but intact. He had just passed his 39th birthday.

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Further Reading The First Year of the War

A good place to start investigating enlistment in World War One is: The Long, Long Trail, http://www.1914-1918.net/ 1915: The Death of Innocence, Lyn Macdonald, 1997, Penguin Books.

The Poets at Dymock

Dymock Poets and Friends, Journal of the Friends of the Dymock Poets, passim.

The Muse Colony, Dymock 1914, Keith Clark, 1992, Redcliffe Press.

Once They Lived in Gloucestershire, A Dymock Poets Anthology, Linda Hart, 1995, Green Branch Press.

Edward Thomas

Edward Thomas, The Last Four Years, Eleanor Farjeon; forwd.

PJ Kavanagh; intro. and revised edn., Anne Harvey, 2010, Faber and Faber.

Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas, Matthew Hollis, 2011, Faber and Faber.

Illustrations

‘Britons Join Your Country’s Army,’ © Imperial War Museums (art.IWM PST 2734) ‘Women of Britain Say Go!,’ © Imperial War Museums (art.IWM PST 2763) ‘Attestation of Edward Thomas,’ Item from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © Crown copyright’.

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Peter Arscott (b 1954, Lima, Peru) came to school in England at 13, and later went on to Bristol University where he obtained a degree in Hispanic Studies before moving to Barcelona where he worked as a teacher. A self-taught artist, he had a number of solo and group shows until 1984 when he returned to live in London, working as a Blue Badge guide and exhibiting at various galleries. He now lives in Herefordshire and has a studio in Ledbury. He is a founder of the Ledbury Poetry Festival, and is involved in the arts locally.

The Dymock Poets and World War One Tour of Dymock - 31 March 2015 Peter Arscott Just before the outbreak of war in 1914, some of the best poets of their generation lived in or visited a small area of Gloucestershire near the village of Dymock. This rural episode, and the war that broke it all up, inspired their poetry and thus played an important part in the history of English literature, its most seminal facet being the friendship between Edward Thomas and Robert Frost.

Others involved included Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie and a host of other writers such as the children’s author Eleanor Farjeon, the Supertramp, W.H.Davies, and Edward Marsh, patron of the Arts and secretary to Winston Churchill.

The coach tour started off in Ledbury and then meandered through the countryside of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, taking in the scenery; the Malvern Hills, May Hill, where Thomas wrote “Words”, Glyn Iddens, the cottage where the poets’ famous cider supper was held (Eleanor Farjeon boasted from then on that she had drunk all the poets of Gloucestershire under the table), and the Old Nail Shop 32

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where Gibson lived and where all the poets met for the last time in August 1914.

However, the story of the Dymock poets starts at Ryton where by 1913 the poet Lascelles Abercrombie and his family were living at The Gallows. His sister had married and was living in one of the cottages in the estate of the Beauchamp family, and it was she who persuaded Lord Beauchamp to rent this one out to Lascelles. It stood high above a lane surrounded by elms and a cherry orchard.

It was so called because Jock of Dymock - a local character who wore antlers and liked to surprise visitors by jumping out from behind bushes - was hanged there for poaching the King’s deer.

Nowadays there is nothing left of it. Yet in this small space the Frosts and the Abercrombies lived together to cut expenses in 1914 - no hot water, an oil stove, no bath, though Edward Marsh describes the home-made shower of red india rubber with a funnel attached, and was himself attacked by wasps. Many years later, thinking back to that time, Frost wrote “The Thatch”: “..They tell me the cottage where we dwelt, its wind-torn thatch goes now unmended, its life of hundreds of years has ended by the letting the rain I knew outdoors In onto the upper chamber floors.”

It was here in early 1914 that Catherine Abercrombie addressed envelopes for the first issue of New Numbers (bound in grey paper, cover price 2s 6d, a publishing venture guaranteed by the generous Marsh) and it was Gibson who licked all the stamps and became ill.

The envelopes were franked at the Dymock post office by Mr Griffiths.

This first issue contained eleven poems: Abercrombie’s “The Olympians”, Gibson’s “Bloodybush Edge”, Rupert Brooke had four poems and John Drinkwater (poet, playwright and actor) had five.

Abercrombie was the most established of the group, and the main reason Wilfrid Gibson moved to the area. Gibson was a popular poet whose unpretentious work was based on everyday events, and went down especially well in the USA. Now largely unread, Philip Larkin at 33

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Glimpse of Oldfields from Little Iddens.

Mayhill from Little Iddens.

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first said Gibson had never written a good poem but later recanted and stated that he had been “a much underestimated poet” in his Desert Island Disk appearance in 1976.

Gibson died in 1962: “I am one of those unlucky writers whose books have predeceased him.”

Gibson was followed into the area by the then admiring Frost (whose wife Elinor wanted to live “under thatch’), and Rupert Brooke twice visited - he was happy to be asked to participate in New Numbers since at the time he was by far the youngest and saw the venture as gaining him a bigger readership. It was New Numbers issue No 4 that included “The Soldier”, originally “The Recruit” until Gibson persuaded him otherwise.

Brooke’s death in 1915 meant the end of the New Numbers venture.

On his way to fight at Gallipoli, he had been unable to withstand the blood poisoning from the septicaemia after a mosquito bite on his upper lip (he had never been strong) and died and was buried in Skyros. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, telephoned Marsh to tell him. There was great public shock, even a sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral: he was very much the golden boy for a generation.

Frost, an American, was in England with his family - this was his last throw of the dice, a gamble to establish himself as a published poet before returning to the States with a reputation to build on. He was persuaded to move out of Beaconsfield by Gibson and Abercrombie to see real English countryside, and he was attracted too by the idea of living amongst poets. His four children were all home educated and had a rural upbringing, which would stand them in good stead. He eventually found Little Iddens, a thatched cottage which he rented for a year, £50 paid in advance. It had a brick floor, open beams, a stove, an old iron pump outside, a vegetable garden at front, a weeping ash and a bay tree. It turned out to be difficult to heat in winter.

There is a famous Life magazine photo of him in 1957, now a widower and a famous literary figure, standing in the field behind Little Iddens, one hand covering his eyes “in ache of memory” as his granddaughter Leslie Lee Francis described it years later. He was more than likely thinking of his long dead friend Edward Thomas.

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They had both met in London, and in August 1914 Thomas had rented rooms for himself and his family at nearby Oldfields. The poets spent many hours walking and talking, discussing the importance of the “sound” of natural speech - at one point Frost shouted a question to a haymaker whose indistinct response was only understood because of its cadence and context. These walks and talks activated ideas that had been dormant in Thomas: the need for a poetry rooted in an English tradition of Nature Poetry but without the rhetoric and formality, without the posturing or gesturing or writing for an audience. He was, in effect, reacting against the poetry of the day.

So it was that Thomas, a writer of reviews, a fearsome literary critic, a “hack” writer as he called himself, began writing poetry at “36 in the shade”, most of it during active service, until 1917, when he was killed by a shell during the Arras offensive. He wrote one hundred and seventy poems, “Adlestrop” being one of the nation’s favourite poems.

The church of St Mary’s at Dymock has a permanent exhibition dedicated to the poets. The War memorial in the churchyard contains the names of the thirty local men killed, including the headmaster and one of the postmen who handled New Numbers.

It was here that the coach tour halted and WEA participants gathered in the village hall to sit and listen to a revealing talk on The Dymock Poets and the First World War by David Jones. The clarity of this well researched lecture shed light on the personalities of the poets and the difficulties they had to surmount in the years 1914 to 1918.

The last melancholy words should be Lascelles Abercrombie’s:

“I have lived in Gloucestershire, and I have known what it is to have Wilfrid Gibson and Robert Frost as my neighbours; John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Will Davies, Bob Trevelyan, Arthur Ransome, have drunk my cider and talked in my garden. I make no cider now, and I have no garden. But once I lived in Gloucestershire.”

Peter Arscott

Bibliography: Please see page 31 for details.

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Art Historian and anthropologist, Jill Salmons lived in West Africa for seven years and carried out in-depth research into the art of that region. She has since written for numerous publications, attended many conferences and contributed collections for a number of museums. She has lectured for many years in western and nonwestern art and conducted research in South West China, South America and India.

Painters of the First World War Jill Salmons Poetry of the First World War is justly famous for its evocative descriptions of personal experiences of men on the Front Line.

Perhaps less well known are the myriad paintings, drawings, sculptures and posters produced by visual artists throughout Europe, both during and after the war. The work of a few such artists will be examined here.

The years immediately preceding 1914 were exciting ones in the art world with numerous new movements, such as Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Suprematism and Vorticism, all shaking old artistic conventions to the core by producing radical new art forms.

There was a general air of expectancy of a better world through the overthrow of the old order, both in politics and art. Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists even suggested that a war could be “the only health giver of the world”.1 Wyndham Lewis, a leading Vorticist, even painted images of war, such as “Plan of War” 1914, before war was declared. The general air of optimism soon gave way to pessimism as the reality of the mass slaughter and futility of the war became obvious.

Amongst the millions of young men who were slaughtered were some of the finest artists of the age, including the creative Italian Futurists, Sant Elia and Boccioni and the Frenchman, Henri Gaudier 37

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Brzeska, who, in one of his last letters home, complained “now it’s the third circle of Dante’s Inferno”.2 It is probable that because Europe was such a hive of artistic activity at this time that art was given a high value, for, as early as 1914, national war art schemes were created in Britain, Canada and Australia to promote visual propaganda, be it postcards to films. By the end of the war, Britain had commissioned one hundred and thirty artists to create over three thousand paintings, drawings and sculptures, which later became the core of the Imperial War Museum’s art collection. There appear to be no similar schemes in Germany and France, though artists were commissioned to produce propaganda posters.

Much of the art, however, was produced by freelance artists on both sides who witnessed the war first hand and felt compelled, often many years later, to attempt to visually portray the realities of the horrific world they had personally experienced.

At the start of the war, official British War Artists did not even cross the Channel but relied on photographs to create their images. The first artist to venture abroad was Muirhead Bone, an architectural draughtsman, who, although spending three months in France, during which time he produced over one hundred and fifty drawings was not allowed to go near the Front. He therefore concentrated on the new military equipment, such as tanks, and the devastation it had caused on the surrounding towns and countryside.

However, as the war ground on, a number of younger artists were commissioned to draw and paint what they saw both behind and on the Front Line. In England an extremely talented group of students had emerged from the Slade School Art. Six of these men, C.R.W. Nevinson, Stanley Spencer, David Bomberg, Paul Nash, Marc Gertler and William Roberts were to produce some of the most memorable paintings of the conflict.

C. R. W. Nevinson joined the ambulance unit in 1914 and was deeply traumatized by his experience of caring for the injured casualties of this, the first mechanized war. On returning to England he exhibited 38

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four paintings in a geometric Futurist style including “Returning to the Trenches” which suggested “the hurried and harassed melancholy” of military service 3. A further painting called “La Mitrailleuse”, depicting a French machine gun team bent over a huge gun, was so popular with the public that he was recruited as an official war artist.

Ironically his work in this official capacity did not live up to his earlier efforts, losing its originality and force as he was constantly restrained by his bosses not to paint images of dead soldiers as it was felt this would have an ill effect on morale at home. Eventually the strain of being at the Front led Nevinson to have a nervous breakdown and to be invalided out.

Paul Nash had always excelled at landscapes so when he was appointed as a war artist he concentrated on depicting the bleak, devastated terrain of the Front Line. Two of his greatest paintings, the ironically named “We are Making a New World” and “The Menin Road” show the catastrophic effects of the brutal machines on the blasted landscape in which the soldiers are depicted as tiny, helpless creatures, devoid of hope or purpose.

Nash was also able to express himself powerfully in his letters, writing at one point “It is unspeakable, godless, helpless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to the men who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls”4 William Roberts was “loaned” to the Canadians as an official war artist. His “The First German Attack at Ypres” drew on traditional Christian images of the Last Judgment. Sue Malvern has stated that this picture “is possibly the most acerbic and cynical produced by any British artist... bitter enough to rival the social realism of the German artists Otto Dix and GeorgeGrosz”.5 David Bomberg, having enlisted and been sent to fight on the Western Front was so traumatized by the experience that in desperation he deliberately shot himself in the foot in order to be repatriated. Fortunately for him he was then commissioned by the Canadians to be a War Artist. However, Bomberg was warned that 39

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“cubist work would be inadmissible” for his painting of Sappers at Work, commemorating a tunnel created at Ypres in 1916, and he was forced to produce a number of versions, becoming more and more representational, before his work was accepted.

Unlike his fellow Slade artists, Mark Gertler chose to be a conscientious objector, and as such did not see action. However, on witnessing wounded soldiers on leave in a London fairground, he produced the chilling “Merry Go Round” in 1916, effectively creating a metaphor for the power of the war machine to eternally entrap mankind in a never ending cycle of uncontrollable futility.

It was after the war that Stanley Spencer produced probably his most original war work when he was commissioned to create a remarkable series of wall paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, based on his experiences in the Medical Corps on the Salonika front. Scenes of everyday army life depicted on either side of the chapel lead to the dramatic altarpiece “Resurrection of the Soldiers” 1928, with its complex cluster of crosses, out of which emerge the triumphant young soldiers.

Other artists, such as Frank Brangwyn, William Orpen, Lady Butler, Eric Kennington, Augustus John and John Singer Sargent were all employed to produce work both during and after the War. Singer Sargent, an American in his sixties, with no first hand experience of the war front was commissioned in 1918 to produce a huge painting for a proposed Hall of Remembrance, which in the end was never built.

He travelled to France with Henry Tonks, and after witnessing soldiers who had suffered a gas attack, produced a huge canvas, “Gassed”, now in the Imperial War Museum, showing an orderly line of blinded soldiers being escorted from a battlefield strewn with dead and dying.

Modernist abstract art that had emerged in Europe in the first years of the twentieth century was quickly recognised as being an inadequate method of portraying reality whereas a form of Expressionism seemed ideal. The optimism that was evident in 40

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the art of the first year of the war soon gave way to angry and pessimistic images as artists struggled to express the horror of witnessing the effects of the machines that could create unlimited human slaughter.

For example, the Russian avant garde artist Natalia Goncharova, responding to the terrible injuries of her soldier partner and the ongoing defeats of the Russian army, abandoned her experimental art forms and reverted to a traditional style to produce a series of lithographs called “Mystical Images of War”. These start on an optimistic note but end with an image of a battlefield full of dead or dying soldiers.

Other artists appear to have used their artistic talents as a form of mental therapy. For example, the German, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner produced “Self Portrait as a Soldier” dressed in army uniform but with an amputated hand, implying that he was incapable of fighting.

He wrote “I feel half dead with mental and physical torment”6 George Grosz, also suffering from a nervous breakdown, produced such honest and grisly depictions of the war front that he gained mass notoriety in Germany.

As the conflict dragged on there was little to celebrate and images became bleaker and bleaker. Some disillusioned artists met in neutral Switzerland and created the Dada movement to vilify the bourgeois society of Europe who they blamed for having brought so much death and destruction to the world. Their `non-art” with its rejection of conservative representation, was the precursor to surrealism and the artist Max Ernst, for example, produced the collage “The Murderous Aeroplane” in 1920 which captures the nightmare quality of a seductive yet deadly flying machine capable of annihilating mankind.

The German artist Kathe Kollwitz produced a series of woodcuts called “War” based on her emotional response to losing her soldier son in 1914. These include depictions of a grief stricken mother desperately hugging her dead child. In 1922 she said “I have repeatedly attempted to give form to the war... (but) I could never grasp it. Now finally I have finished a series of woodcuts, which, in some measure say what I wanted to say.” 7 41

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1. Paul Nash The Menin Road 1919 PG Pg.142/3 2. David Bomberg, Sappers at Work 1918-19PG Pg. 304

3. Mark Gertler Merry-Go-Round 1916 RC Pg. 136

4. Stanley Spencer The Resurrection of the Soldiers 1928 PG Pg. 260

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5. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self Portrait as a Soldier 1915 RC Pg. 109

6. George Grosz K. V. (Fit for active service) 191617 RC Pg.154

7. Max Ernst, The Murderous Aeroplane 1920 RC Pg. 258

8. Otto Dix, War Triptych 1932 RC Pg. 304

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Otto Dix, who joined the German army in 1916, created some of the most powerful, disturbing images of the horrors of war. The sketches that he made throughout the war became the basis for numerous prints and paintings which graphically depict the harrowing experiences and deaths of ordinary soldiers. These men were not seen as heroes, but as dirty, bewildered, exhausted creatures having to cope with the horrors of trench warfare. Dix ably uses both chiaroscuro and bold brush strokes in his paintings to accentuate the tortuous scenes.

Both Dix and George Grosz also chose to produce highly disturbing images of the postscript of war - desperate war cripples being treated with contempt by a decadent German society. When Dix produced “War Triptych” in 1932 he was dismissed from his professorship at Dresden as it was claimed his work threatened to sap the will of the German people to defend themselves. Dix’s response was that he had painted it because people were already beginning to forget what horrible suffering the war had brought them...”.I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people’s power of resistance”.8 How sad that the vivid images of Dix and all the other First World War painters failed to prevent, so soon, yet another dreadful war.

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Bibliography Laura Brandon, Art and War. Tauris & Co. 2012

Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War. Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1994 Paul Gough, A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War. Sansom & Company, 2010

David Boyd Haycock & Frances Spalding, Nash, Nevinson, Spencer, Gertler, Carringtony Bomberg: A Crisis of Brilliance 1908-22. Scala, 2013

Illustrations The illustrations featured are all taken from:

Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (indicated by RC) or Paul Gough, A Terrible Beauty (indicated by PG)

Notes 1

Marinetti, Initial Manifesto of Futurism, 20 February, 1909

2

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to Edward Wadsworth, 16 December, 1914, quoted by Barbara Wadsworth, Edward Wadsworth. A Painter’s Life (Salisbury,1989) pp.58-9

3

Wyndham Lewis, “The London Group, 1915 (March) Blast No.2 p.77

4

Paul Nash,1918, at Passchendaele. His letters were compiled by his wife, Margaret Nash into Outline soon after his death in 1946

5

Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War, pp122-132

6

7

8

Ernst Ludwig Kirschner to Karl Ernst Osthaus, quoted byWeiland Schmied, “Points of Departure and Transformations in German Art, 1905-1985, p.26.

Kathe Kollwitz to Romain Rolland, 23 October,1922, Briefe der Freundschaft Und Begegnungen (MUNICH, 19661) P.56

Otto Dix, interview in Neus Deutschland, December, 1964, Quoted in Dieter Schmidt, Otto Dix im Selbstbildnis

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After a varied career and having two children, Dr Pinches completed a degree in Historical Studies at the University of Warwick. She then studied at the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, gaining an M.A. and a Ph.D., with a thesis on Warwickshire charities. While studying at Leicester she worked part-time at Warwick Castle as a guide, adding to her life-long interest in castles.

She was Curator of 78 Derngate, Northampton from 2002-2005 before working for the Victoria County History Trust in Herefordshire, writing a history of the market town of Ledbury. She is now a freelance researcher, writer and lecturer.

An Agricultural Settlement for Ex-Servicemen in Bosbury Dr Sylvia Pinches

At this time when so much attention is being directed to the experiences of the First World War (both those of the men who served abroad and those of the population at home) it seems appropriate to consider some of the arrangements that were made for the returning soldiers. This is particularly apt, as one of the first agricultural settlements for ex-servicemen was set up in Bosbury, Herefordshire.

The idea of smallholdings (variously called settlements or colonies) for ex-soldiers had a variety of antecedents. The Romans, of course, settled ex-soldiers on the land, in colonia, from which we derive our ‘colonies’. In more recent times, the British government encouraged time-served soldiers to settle in both Canada and New Zealand, as one of the strategies for developing and controlling the newlyappropriated lands. Also through the 19th century there was a twofold movement toward creating smallholdings. One, closely akin to the allotment movement and allied with political radicalism and calls for land reform, sought to provide working men with a stake in

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the land. The short-lived Chartist Land Company (1845-51) bought, amongst other sites, a small estate at Lowbands, Gloucestershire and land at Dodford, Worcestershire. One of the cottages on the latter is now a National Trust Property (https://www.nationaltrust. org.uk/rosedene/). Between 1847 and 1849 the Company was negotiating buying property at Mathon (then in Worcestershire), although nothing came of this in the end.

The other ‘back to the land’ movement was a rather more romantic affair, flourishing particularly in the 1880s and 90s. A number of cottage farm settlements were established around the country by middle-class socialist and anarchist intellectuals. These schemes were not designed to give agricultural labourers and other working men help onto the first step of the farming ladder, but were seen as an end in themselves, where the participants could live the good life and commune with nature. Like the Chartist Land Company, most of these were short-lived.

At the same time, in the late 1880s and 90s, more practical attempts at establishing smallholdings came into being, crystalised by the Smallholdings Act, 1892. This permitted, though did not oblige, County Councils to purchase land for smallholdings. In the first instance, the smallholdings so created were to be sold to the tenants on a hire-purchase basis. By 1902 only eight county councils had created smallholdings. Further Acts in 1907 and 1908 redefined allotments as holdings up to five acres and required every county council to set up a Smallholdings and Allotments Committee. They were given powers of compulsory purchase. Land could be let rather than sold to tenants, and co-operatives were encouraged.

The government was keen for ‘colonies’ of smallholdings to be set up so that tenants could work as a community. Land could then be let to co-operative associations. The Board of Agriculture published leaflets on cooperation. Between 1908 and 1914 205,103 acres were bought in England and 14,045 smallholders settled on the land.

It is against this background that one must see the ideas growing in the middle years of the war, to provide smallholdings for exservicemen. Australia and New Zealand were the first to formalize 47

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this idea, with the Returned Soldiers Settlement Act, 1915 and the Discharged Soldiers Settlement Act, 1915, respectively. It was 1916 before there were enabling acts in Britain. In the autumn of that year the Small Holdings Colonies Act was passed, which permitted the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, during the continuation of the war and for twelve months afterwards, to acquire land ‘for the purpose of providing experimental small holding colonies’. By June 1919 the Board of Agriculture had acquired over 16,000 acres in 11 settlements. These were let to ex-servicemen.

In December 1916 the Sailors and Soldiers (Gifts for Land Settlement) Act was also passed, and it is that which concerns us here. It was enacted to allow the gift of land by Robert Buchanan of Bosbury to the government for the purpose of providing smallholdings for returned servicemen, in the hope of encouraging similar gifts from other landowners. Robert Buchanan (1852-1920) was born in Glasgow. As a young man, he travelled in Canada and the United States, where he became familiar with modern methods of corn milling, using steel rollers. He returned to Glasgow and then, with his brother William, bought the Molyneux Mill in Kirkdale, near Liverpool, in 1887. His business prospered although eventually his health declined. In 1912 he bought the 1,000-acre Bosbury House Estate, in the name of his elder son Alan. (He had three daughters and two sons). At the outbreak of war both sons enlisted in the 8th (Scottish) Volunteer Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment. Sadly, Alan was killed at the battle of Looge, near Ypres, on 16 June 1915.

It was the following September that Robert Buchanan approached the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture to propose giving land for ex-soldiers as a memorial to Alan. His idea was to ‘assist those who may require it and to help to get the land in [the] neighbourhood into better cultivation. This should be kept clearly in view. You should notice that there is a fair amount of coppice etc on Beacon Hill. If this is allowed indiscriminate use by tenants then there will only be a lot of poachers and others who will cut up the timber and destroy the place. It is necessary therefore that I have some say as to how the land is utilized ere passing it over.’ The Board felt that there would be some legal difficulties in accepting a gift of land, hence the need for 48

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‘One of the farmhouses and adjacent buildings on the Bosbury Farm Settlement. Note the construction of the farm building of concrete, timber and slate. Photograph: Sylvia Pinches.’

the enabling act. As it turned out, Buchanan’s was the only such gift and the Act was finally repealed in 2008.

Between the slow proceedings of the Board of Agriculture, and negotiations over the fact that Buchanan wanted to retain his sporting rights over the land and also to let current tenancies expire, it was not until 24 September 1918 that the deed was signed, transferring 312 acres of the Bosbury estate to the Board. Another deed of 1 July 1919 conveyed another circa 600 acres. By 15th July the secretary of the Board noted that ‘the Labour division informs me that it will be necessary to provide four army huts at the Bosbury Farm Settlement as soon as possible, in order to accommodate exofficers now waiting to be received at the settlement but for whom no accommodation at present exists … huts are now procurable at auction sales under the Disposal Board for about £80 per hut.’ By November 1919 eight officers had been settled and ‘It is proposed to divide the whole estate into small holdings as the remainder of the land comes in hand. Ultimately there will be 16 small holdings, all of which, it is expected, will be let to ex-officers’.

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There were two existing farmsteads on the estate and some cottages, but the idea was to divide the land into smaller units and build a commensurate number of farmsteads and houses.

Accommodation roads and water supplies had to be installed, both of which took some time to complete. A government report on smallholdings in 1913 had been full of advice on what was needed: three bedroomed houses with living room and scullery; separate dairy and washroom. On a mixed holding of 20-30a. there needed to be: fodder and chaff house, stable for two horses, cattle shed, cart shed, yard with boarded fence. Loose boxes were thought to be preferable to pigsties. Dairy farms needed a cow house, mixing room, and so on. Many of the county council smallholdings did not reach that standard, but the properties built at Bosbury were wellplanned and built, although the execution was slow. There was much toing and froing between the architects and the Board as to what was suitable – the Board though that chimneys were not necessary in bedrooms, for example. Then there was the problem of sourcing material and labour. It was not until 12 May 1921 that the Board was able to report that ‘The new cottages, farm buildings, hutments and adaptations are finished and all that remains to be done is the work in sinking three wells and deepening and cleaning out two existing borings’.

It has not, as yet, been possible to find out a great deal about the origins or military service of the first tenants. Among them were (in December 1919): No. 2: Mr Walsh – needs dairying buildings No 3: Mr Tottenham, needs ordinary buildings Mr Muer and Mr Goldsmith working in partnership, need to give them a semi-detached cottage Nos. 4&5 farming in partnership, specialising in pigs As on many of the other settlements for ex-servicemen, the Board had difficulty from the outset in finding suitable tenants. The men needed to have served overseas but also to have some farming background. This problem became more acute as time passed.

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As early as 1926 the Trustees of the Buchanan Trust were already in correspondence with the Charity Commission about widening the terms of benefit. This was finally agreed in 1932, allowing the appointment of men who had been in any of the services, whether they had served overseas or not. This criterion has caused some difficulties down the years.

The Board of Agriculture experienced many problems in administering the Buchanan Trust estate, and its other settlements under the Smallholding Colonies Act. In the 1930s they were reporting considerable losses on all the properties. Most of the Colonies were sold during the 1920s and 30s. The remainder were eventually passed to the appropriate county council, in 1972 in the case of the Bosbury (Buchanan Trust) land. From that date until the present the Trust estate has been managed along with the other council smallholdings, though with the involvement of the Buchanan Trust in the selection of suitably qualified ex-servicemen. In early 2015 a new Board of Trustees has been appointed and some changes in administration are imminent.

Dr Sylvia Pinches

With thanks to: Barry Sharples of the Bosbury Chroniclers for the research into the Buchanan family.

See www.bosburyhistoryresource.org.uk The Buchanan Trust: www.Buchanan-trust.co.uk The National Archives (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk) where many of the records are kept in the files of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF), the Department of Works (WORK).

For background, see: Quentin Bone, ‘Legislation to revive small farming in England, 1887-1914’, Agricultural History 49 (1975), pp. 658-9.

H. Laxton, I. Hodge, and G. Davidson, Smallholdings under pressure (1987) L. Leneman, ‘Land Settlement in Scotland after World War One’, Agricultural History Review 37 (1989), pp. 52-64 Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral impulse in Victorian England, 1880-1914 (2010) C.W. Rowell, ‘County Council smallholdings, 1908-58’, Agriculture (1959).

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Chris Twiggs is a retired secondary school teacher. In the last few years he has taught courses on the Great War for the WEA. He regularly visits the First World War battlefields of France and Belgium either cycling with friends or leading parties of adults or school pupils on tours. He is a member of the Wolverhampton branch of the Western Front Association and is currently involved in a number of Great War related projects.

The Conscientious Objector in WW1 Chris Twiggs

A contemporary view of the conscientious objector IWM Q103334 52

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The Great War witnessed a significant change in the method by which Britain obtained man power for its armed forces. The heavy casualties suffered by the British Army, especially on the Western Front, meant that Kitchener volunteers were not sufficient to supplement the Regulars and Territorials. The introduction of the Military Service Act in 1916 ended Britain’s tradition of staffing its army with men who were volunteers. The Act when introduced applied to unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 41. By the end of the war it applied to men up to the age of 51. Men were “deemed to have enlisted for general service.”

The Act allowed for the granting of a certificate of exemption from military service on the following grounds: 1. on the grounds that it is expedient in the national interest that he should, instead of being employed in military service, be engaged in other work in which he is habitually engaged or in which he wishes to be engaged or, if he is being educated or trained for any work, that he should continue to be so educated or trained; or 2. on the ground that serious hardship would ensue if the man was called up for Army Service, owing to his exceptional financial or business obligations or domestic position; or 3. on the ground of ill-health or infirmity; or 4. on the ground of a conscientious objection to the undertaking of combatant service.

A conscientious objector was someone who refused to undertake military service, or be involved in preparations for war, because they were deeply opposed to war and killing.

The basis of their objection could be religious, political and moral or some combination of these factors.

Before the introduction of conscription a conscientious objector’s main concern lay in the reaction of family, friends, neighbours and work colleagues to their beliefs. This in itself posed major problems and considerations. It meant that the decision to declare oneself to be a conscientious objector was not one to be taken lightly. Families were often divided over the decision and in some cases individuals 53

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severed all contact with each other. It also has to be remembered that the prevailing attitude in society was that it was one’s duty to be prepared to support King and Country in any conflict. To adopt a contrary position was to invite ridicule and accusations of lack of patriotism and cowardice. The introduction of conscription meant that the conscientious objector also had to confront the full force of the law and face the prospect of imprisonment or possibly worse.

During the Great War there were some 16,100 men who claimed a conscientious objection. 3,300 served in the Non-Combatant Corps.

They wore uniforms, were subject to military discipline but were not expected to carry weapons or engage in any form of combat. They were sometimes referred to as the “No courage corps” which was rather unfair as their work could put them in danger of being killed.

2,400 worked in Ambulance Units or as stretcher bearers, another role in which they found themselves in serious danger but were not expected to carry arms or kill. About 4,000 accepted some alternative form of directed work at home. This meant employment in work deemed important by the Government. These individuals could be defined as Alternativists. However, 6,261 men served at least one prison sentence as a result of their conscientious objection to the war. 1,350 men were Absolutists who resolutely refused to make any form of compromise with the authorities and consequently spent a lot of time in prison. Their position was clear in that not only were they unwilling to fight but they were not prepared to contribute to the war effort in any way. Accepting an alternative role was unacceptable because it was still deemed to be assisting the war effort and it might simply serve to release another individual to serve in the armed forces.

A conscientious objector’s story might go as follows. At some stage following the introduction of the Military Service Act a man would receive his call up papers. A conscientious objector could choose to simply ignore these and await a visit from the police or apply to the Local Appeals Tribunal for exemption from military service. The Local Appeals Tribunals were established in towns and cities across the country to adjudicate on a wide range of appeals. Most of these were on grounds of personal hardship, health or because of work related concerns e.g. employers anxious not to lose valuable employees 54

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and their skills. A small minority of cases involved a conscientious objection. The local tribunals were composed of local worthies such as bank managers, shopkeepers, landowners etc. In addition each tribunal had to have a military representative. The system was geared towards making the granting of exemptions difficult and in the case of conscientious objectors just about impossible.

The bulk of the work undertaken by tribunals was fairly routine and in many cases involved the granting of temporary certificates of exemption for example where an employer might need a period of several months to find and train a replacement for an existing employee. Some claims were guaranteed to try the patience of tribunal members such as the case in Leeds of a man who claimed exemption because he had to bring his wife a cup of tea in bed and had just started a course of hair tonic which required three months to show results! Those claiming a conscientious objection on the basis of their political beliefs were likely to be unsuccessful. An objection based on religious grounds was much more likely to be given serious consideration but was far from guaranteed to be accepted.

Many conscientious objectors made meticulous preparations for their appearance before a local tribunal expecting to be given time to carefully outline their position and engage in meaningful debate. They were often disappointed to find that their case would be dismissed within minutes. Those afforded anytime were ultimately confronted with the question “What would you do if the Germans invaded this country and threaten to kill or molest your wife, daughter or sister?�

The expectation on the part of the tribunal was that any good citizen would reply that they would take action to protect their relatives and at that point their case would be destroyed. The conscientious objector had to be resolute in their stance by refusing to give such a reply and by doing so the average tribunal member simply saw them as a liar and coward trying to squirm out of military service. If their appeal was dismissed, or possibly they were directed to some form of acceptable employment, inevitably clearly seen as directly supporting the war effort, their next response could be to ignore the ruling and await arrest by the police for failing to report to the Army.

This would lead to a court appearance, a fine and being handed over to the military. The strategy followed inevitably involved refusing to 55

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put on uniform or follow any order. A court martial usually imposed a sentence of 2 years with hard labour. This was often commuted to 6 months in prison. The sentence was served in a civilian prison. On completion the conscientious objector was released into the hands of the military authorities. Once again the objector only had to refuse an order and the whole cycle of events would start again this time resulting in a longer prison sentence.

Life in prison for the objectors was very unpleasant as they were often regarded as less worthy than the usual inmates. Discipline was harsh. Men were subjected to several weeks of solitary confinement at the start of their sentence and they were allowed 40 minutes exercise per day. Food was poor, they had to sleep on a wooden board without a mattress and the work could be boring and repetitive. Picking oakum or sewing mail bags were typical jobs.

It was clear that the physical and mental health of the objectors suffered very badly as a result of their stay in prison. Many relatives were horrified at the appearance of their husbands, brothers or sons on their release from prison.

In June 1916 a Home Office Scheme allowed objectors in prison to have their cases reviewed by the Central Tribunal. If their objection was considered genuine they were offered the opportunity of being released if they agreed to “undertake work of national importance under civil control.� This meant they had to work at Home Office Work Centres. These were set up at some prisons such as the Princetown Work Centre at Dartmoor Prison. The first centre was established at Dyce near Aberdeen. The men enjoyed a greater degree of freedom and locks were removed from the cell doors at prisons used as work centres but the work was often very hard. Discipline remained harsh and men could be returned to prison for fairly minor offences.

Support for objectors was limited to that coming from family, friends and sympathisers. The No-Conscription Fellowship offered considerable support to those incarcerated and to their families on the outside. This was a vital role which helped many to get through the whole experience. Some leading members of the Fellowship such as Clifford Allen and Fenner Brockway were imprisoned themselves for their stance.

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The war ended on November 11th 1918 but many conscientious objectors remained in prison until the early months of 1919. Their tribulations did not end there as they were further punished by being disenfranchised until August 1926. Many also found it difficult to find employment especially when their status as conscientious objectors became known to prospective employers.

Some 73 objectors died during the war with about half of this figure dying in prison or at the Work Centres. The rest died following release from prison as a result of the physical and mental strain. 37 went insane as a result of their experiences.

Although they were regularly portrayed as cowards and shirkers this was a false image of the men who became conscientious objectors.

They were prepared to go against the common grain and stand up for their principles knowing the consequences of their actions could change their lives forever. The introduction of conscription posed challenges for which the authorities were not really prepared as can be seen by the actions of the local tribunals. Most of their members could not understand the political, religious and moral objections of the men that came before them. It could be argued that every society needs to have members who ask difficult questions of the type posed by the conscientious objectors of the Great War. In April 1939 conscription was reintroduced. The composition of the Tribunals was widened to include working class people and there were no military representatives. Conscientious objectors were to receive a fair hearing. Just fewer than 60,000 people registered as conscientious objectors during the Second World War.

References: We will not fight: The Untold Story of WW1’s Conscientious Objectors

by Will Ellsworth-Jones Pub: Autumn Press Conscientious Objectors of the First World War: A Determined Resistance by Ann Kramer Pub: Pen & Sword Comrades in Conscience by Cyril Pearce, Pub: Francis Boutle Publishers The courage of Cowards by Karyn Burnham Pub: Pen & Sword The Peace Pledge Union website www.ppu.org.uk

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Jennifer Harrison, freelance researcher in Herefordshire, concentrates on local involvement in the First World War to seek out the personalities of the names on war memorials. Using both original sources and knowledge gained from many years walking the battlefields of France and Flanders and from visiting numerous war cemeteries and memorials Jennifer puts flesh and bones on the names on the stones.

We Will Remember Them This workshop covered remembrance of the First World War worldwide as well as locally in Herefordshire. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) maintains 23, 000 graves in 150 countries. Each cemetery has a Sword of Sacrifice and the larger ones a Stone of Remembrance. The graves are marked by gravestones all of the same pattern. On each is recorded the name, rank, regiment and date of death or “A soldier/sailor/airman Known unto God”. They may contain a religious symbol or a message chosen by relatives. Many messages are biblical references, but there are some memorable ones “One never knows does one?” and “I’m all right mother, cheerio”. A bronze box is at the entrance to each cemetery with a register and a visitor’s book which always contains messages from visitors about how beautiful that cemetery is. This is because they are planted with flowers like an English garden and beautifully kept by a team of gardeners who are often descendants of the original gardeners trained at Kew in the 1920s. The earliest cemeteries were established directly after the war, but the most recent one at Pheasant Wood, Fromelles was dedicated by the Queen in 2010.

This cemetery at Fromelles was established to rebury the bodies of 250 Australian and British soldiers, whose remains were recovered in 2009 from a number of mass graves located behind nearby Pheasant Wood, where they had been buried by the Germans following the 58

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disastrous battle of Fromelles in July 1916. In Pheasant Wood Military Cemetery there are 219 Australians of whom 75 are unidentified, 2 unidentified British soldiers and 29 entirely unidentified soldiers. The identities of the 144 Australians were established by DNA samples from descendants.

There are larger Memorials to the Missing in France and Flanders at Thiepval, Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate and on these are commemorated those whose bodies were not identified. All these contain seemingly endless lists of those missing who died during the Battle of the Somme or near Ypres. There are 72,754 names on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Battle of the Somme, 54,395 names on the Menin Gate in Ypres and 34,946 on the nearby Tyne Cot Memorial.

Local war memorials gave impetus to in depth research into the names engraved in stone here. We all reply “We will remember them�, but who are we remembering? Starting with the names and initials on the war memorials in the locality of Ledbury and using the CWGC website meant some individual names were identified easily, but it certainly was not all straightforward and many other resources were needed. Errors in spelling or reversal of initials caused problems, but using the census records for 1891, 1901 and 1911 helped with establishing who these men were. Reading through each edition of one local newspaper on microfilm in Ledbury Library and travelling to the British Newspaper Library in London to read copies of the other local newspaper published at the time helped both with identification and to form a fuller picture of each of the fallen. The resulting Books of Remembrance are available for view in a number of the churches in the Ledbury area. Moving further afield into the whole county these methods of research were used to establish the identities of all the 3,198 names on the 325 war memorials in the Herefordshire and 236 war graves in 101 Herefordshire churchyards and cemeteries. They now form a database which can be accessed on the Herefordshire Council website To illustrate the difficulties in establishing identities an example is Gunner J Dixon, the only one on Ledbury Town War Memorial with just an initial. Hundreds of Medal Record cards were studied and also 59

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the Official Lists published after the War. There were pages and pages of Dixons who were killed in WW1. Trawling through the List for anyone who had the rank Gunner, and then looking at the CWGC site, I looked at all 191 Gunner J Dixons and came on this one; Gunner 3569 J Dixon whose mother’s address was Aylton, local, but not Ledbury. However his mother wasn’t living there in 1911, so why was he on the Ledbury war memorial? The Jack Dixon mystery was only revealed when I went to the British Library. In the Ledbury Reporter & Farmers’ Gazette dated Friday December 16th 1916. Gunner J Dixon, 3569 Royal Field Artillery, is officially reported killed. Gunner Dixon was formerly employed as a baker with Mr J Pedlingham, late of Southend. Persistence in research pays off.

The last strand of the afternoon concentrated on one individual whose name appears on both the Ledbury and Colwall war memorials. Using all the previously mentioned resources and also letters and artefacts supplied by Charles Selley’s niece, just one of the names was brought to life again. A full description is included to help and encourage those who wish to indulge in in-depth research themselves!

On the Ledbury War Memorial in the centre of the town the name G W KELLEY has been added at the end of the list originally carved in 1920; in Ledbury Parish Church the name G W SELLEY has been added recently. The name had been added (incorrectly in both cases as will be revealed) and in fact was there because his niece complained a dozen years ago that “Uncle Will” wasn’t on Ledbury’s memorial. Uncle Will turned out to be Charles William Selley whose family had moved away from Ledbury in 1912 to Colwall, a nearby village; his name is engraved there (with the correct initials!)

Charles William Selley

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However Charles William Selley is the example of how the use of census materials, a service record, letters and artefacts can build a picture of a name in stone and understand a father’s difficult search for news when a son was reported missing.

Charles William Selley (known to his family as Will) was born in Ledbury in 1897. Will’s father Charles’s occupation in 1901 was Domestic Gardener and the family lived in Parkway. Will aged 3 was in the Cottage Hospital in Ledbury. By 1911 the family had moved to Ledbury, and Will’s father’s occupation was now listed as a Cowman.

When Will enlisted in Hereford in April 1915 he stated that he was a Temporary Postman with an address in Colwall. When he attested Will was attached to the South Wales Mounted Brigade Field Ambulance.

He was not embodied until the end of the month and was given an On Active Service Badge to wear.

No letters survive from his earliest days in the army, but after his initial training he was posted to a further training camp in the Weymouth area to complete advanced weapon training. A photograph of Will at the time shows him with an RAMC badge and a medical orderly badge indicating medical work which would have included ambulance driving. He was then 1883 Driver W. Selley South Wales Mounted Brigade Field Ambulance Royal Army Medical Corps. After his training at Dorchester he was posted to Suffolk.

On March 1916 Will was still in Suffolk because he told his mother about the German Navy shelling Lowestoft and that men from other units had had to man the trenches at Southwold on the coast all day.

Will however was still heavily involved with horse transport.

Easter 1916 was late April and he had been hoping to get home for leave, but it was cancelled until after Easter. However by summer 1916 they had lost their horses,(Field Ambulances were by this time being motorised), and anyway by this time Will had had enough of horses and he “wasn’t sorry to see the back of them” he always seems to have had at least two to look after, and looking after horses meant looking after the harness and wagons and a quick washing, polishing and grooming wouldn’t have been enough, horses were very important, there were plenty of men, but good healthy horses were in short supply, 61

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they didn’t last very long pulling guns through the mud of Flanders, and so a good supply of horses was required all through the war.

Will then started to tell his mother that he would probably be transferred to the Army Service Corps, then it is maybe he thinks he will, then it is “I doubt it”, and then his hopes are dashed “it’s not going to happen”. Since losing the horses he has been made a ‘batman’ (he explained to his mother “that’s an Officers Servant in other words”) and he appeared to like his officer. On a postcard dated 2nd July 1916 he said all the officers have been put on 48 hour standby for France but they couldn’t take their batmen with them, he gives the impression he would like to have stayed with that officer and gone with him, maybe “better the devil you know than the one you don’t”. On the same postcard he also tells his mother he will be coming home on leave for a fortnight that Friday.

After that leave he moved to a Royal Army Medical Corps depot, while here he wrote to his mother about underage soldiers getting into bother because their families were trying to stop them being sent to France, and they are obviously young men his mother knows. By this time in the war everyone was aware of what was happening in France, it was no longer an adventure as it had been portrayed earlier.

He was still in Suffolk in late summer of 1916 because he suggested his mother contacts one or two of the local farmers to see if they will claim him for “harvest leave”, some categories of soldiers were released for the harvest period to do farm work, quite a few in his unit did get it, but he wasn’t included, at least nothing else was mentioned in letters about it.

At some time later in 1916 he went to an Army Service Corps horse transport depot as 1883 Driver C.W. Selley, but not for long as he then got posted to ‘B’ Company 4th Welsh Regiment and it was on this move that he had his first Service Number change occurred and he became; 202566 Pte C.W. Selley stationed in Pembrokeshire.

It is from here he moved to Southampton to embark for France on Thursday 17 August 1917, he is by now definitely in the South Wales Borderers (Monmouth Regiment) and his number has been changed again to: 260150 Pte C.W.Selley.

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When he got to Southampton he sent his mother a letter postcard Dear Mother Just a card to say we have arrived at Southampton and are stopping here for the night. I can’t say for sure yet but as far as I can say we are sailing for France tomorrow evening.

The next day his card says he is sailing tonight. He moved into the trenches the first time on Friday 29 August 1917, “I’m going up the line tonight”. On the 18th September he was in rest billets just behind the front line until about the 4th Oct, he returned to the trenches about this time and was still in the line on the 19 Oct. The last correspondence Will Selley sent home was an “on active service” card which was sent on the 15th November 1917. The Battle of Cambrai started on 20th November and Will took part in at least one attack on the German trenches.

The next the family hear is when Officer in Charge of Records wrote to Will’s mother and father on 25th December 1917 to say 260150 Pte Charles SELBY of the Monmouth Regiment was posted as missing in action, the reference for that letter is South Wales Borderers/ Casualties.

It was late January when this notification appeared in the Ledbury Guardian Ledbury Guardian & Herefordshire Advertiser Saturday 19 January 1918 Private C W Selley 260150 South Wales Borderers has been reported missing.

Will’s service record then details his father’s correspondence with the Record Office in Shrewsbury; he sent a photograph which was returned. He is advised to write to the British Red Cross. By late February Charles Selley then wrote to the International Red Cross in Geneva who told him that they have not found the name on the German lists.

The International Red Cross in Geneva kept cards of the missing and prisoners of war. The numerous card files are still there, rows and rows of filing cabinets which you can inspect when you visit their museum in Geneva. You can see these and even view General de Gaulle’s card as a WW1 Prisoner of War!

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Herefordshire and World War One

Then in April the letter they did not want to receive came; next day a second one one from London. The Germans buried the British dead as we did theirs. They carefully cut off the identity disc and sent it via the German Red Cross to Geneva. This is the reason why, when bodies are found in communal graves, the bodies are not immediately identified.

It wasn’t surprising that the search was difficult as Will Selley became Selby and his medals record he was in the Welsh Regiment, but his identity disc in the South Wales Borderers! The final artefacts in Will Selley’s story are his medals, Memorial Plaque and Scroll and the receipt signed by his father that he had received the medals.

The wording of the scroll sent to next of kin was debated by a committee, the final words coming from the provost of King’s College Cambridge. In December 1917 a competition for a memorial plaque to be presented to the next of kin of all British and Imperial servicemen and women who died in, or as a result of, the First World War, was won by Edward Carter Preston, a medallist and sculptor from Liverpool. His design shows Britannia and a lion, with the inscription “He (or She) Died for Freedom and Honour”, and a cartouche for the name. In all, 1,355,000 plaques were cast, including 600 for women, requiring 450 tonnes of bronze from old shell cases.

They were popularly named Dead Man’s Pennies, or Widows’ Pennies.

The research on just one of the names shows the vastness of the task undertaken during the First World War in maintaining the Service and Medal records; the amount of detail and the persistence of the search for next of kin to send out the memorial scrolls. A large amount of that material is now available to researchers.

By the end of this workshop flesh and bones had been put on the names on the stones.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

Jennifer Harrison

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