They Did Not Grow Old E-Book

Tim Lynch

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 469

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In June 1918, 135 teenagers arrived in France as part of the thousands sent to reinforce the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. The German Spring offensive had failed, but it was far from over. The coming months would see some of the fiercest, bloodiest, yet least remembered fighting of the war as these young men finally broke the trench stalemate and forced the enemy into retreat. During this time, one in four of these teenaged soldiers would be killed and over half of them wounded. Looking beyond the war as portrayed by poets and playwrights, Tim Lynch tells the story of Britain's true Unknown Soldiers – the teenage conscripts who won the war only to be forgotten by history. These were not the naïve recruits of 1914 who believed it would all be over by Christmas, but young men who had grown up in wartime – men who knew about the trenches, the gas and the industrialised slaughter, but who, when their time came, answered their country's call anyway. For the first time, following the experiences of a typical reinforcement draft, this book explores what turned men so often dismissed as 'shirkers' into a motivated, efficient and professional army, but it also reminds us that in the cemeteries of France and Flanders, behind every headstone is a personal story.

Leseprobe

Acknowledgements

In trying to go beyond the stereotypes and find out who my great uncle, Harold Wiseman, and his friends were and why they fought I have had the help and support of too many people to list in full but special thanks need to go to Alison Hine of the Guild of Battlefield Guides and the University of Birmingham’s First World War Studies programme, who was extremely generous in her support and encouragement. Thanks, too, to Dr John Bourne and Professor Peter Simkins of the Birmingham course for reading some of my material and providing a much-needed boost to morale with their kind comments. From the Western Front Association, Malcolm Johnson allowed me to steal freely from his work ‘Saturday Soldiers’ and David Tattersfield’s enthusiastic interest in the Marne along with his position as Development Trustee provided invaluable assistance in tracking down some vital information. Steve Rogers of the War Graves Photographic Project (www.twgpp.org) found photographs and details of the graves of the draft from his extensive archive.

My mother, Violet, was Harold Wiseman’s niece and provided her recollections of how his death affected her mother and the rest of the family. Unfortunately she died just before publication of the book. She and my father, Albert, are among the last of their generation born into a country still mourning its dead when another war came. A family holiday to Belgium in 1970 sparked an interest in the First World War and military history that has grown steadily ever since.

As ever, my greatest thanks go to my wife, Jacqueline and my kids, Bethany and Josh (yes OK Josh, and Monty the dog). Writing a book is hard work and they have always been patient when I’ve drifted off into my own little world, writing the next chapter in my head or sitting in the car as I tramped across a muddy field in northern France instead of standing in a line at Euro-Disney which was what I was supposed to be doing at the time. Thanks guys.

Tim Lynch

2013

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

Preface

1 ‘Filth and squalor reign supreme …’

2 ‘Cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will’

3 ‘Murderous gang of warmongers …’

4 ‘When the English learned to hate …’

5 Comb outs and roundups

6 ‘The war was becoming impersonal’

7 The great adventure

8 Eat apples

9 ‘The witches’ sabbath’

10 ‘A dainty breakfast’

11 Stupefying shell fire

12 ‘It would kill you, or just go …’

13 ‘What was one going to do next?’

14 ‘The heart no greater sorrow knows’

15 ‘Known unto God’

Appendix

Selected Bibliography

Copyright

Preface

Thursday 28 September 1899. At the end of a long, hot and stormy summer, Robina Carr cradled her baby for the first time, blissfully unaware that the war that would one day claim him had just moved another step closer. As Robina, the British-born daughter of a German immigrant, proudly introduced their first-born child to his father, British troops were arriving in the diamond mining town of Kimberley in South Africa, where special correspondent J. Angus Hamilton reported:

There is much solemn speculation upon the date of hostilities. The fact is that no one here can, with any certainty, predict an hour. A shot anywhere will set the borderside aflame. Moreover, the Boers are daily growing more impudent. At Borderside, where the frontiers are barely eighty yards apart, a field cornet and his men, who are patrolling their side of the line, greet the pickets of the Cape Police who are stationed there with exulting menaces and much display of rifles. But if the Dutch be thirsting in this fashion for our blood, people at home can rest confident in the fact that there will be no holding back upon the part of our men once the fun begins.1

There was, he said, an atmosphere of keen excitement in the town, where ‘crowds of interested spectators besieged the railway station and thronged the dusty thoroughfares of the town. The Imperial men detrained very smartly to the sound of the bugle, off-loading the guns and ammunition to the plaudits and delights of an admiring crowd.’2 As war loomed, Britain was riding high on a wave of jingoism fuelled by its success a year earlier when its army had slaughtered 11,000 Sudanese for the loss of just twenty-eight of its own men at the Battle of Omdurman, followed soon afterwards by another victory when a French military force was compelled to withdraw from the strategic Sudanese town of Fashoda after a bitter diplomatic row and the intervention of the Royal Navy that saw Britain and France brought to the brink of war. To the British public, it was unthinkable that the might of the British Empire could be challenged by Boer farmers, and a rush of volunteers came forward as it became ‘every man’s ambition to take his own share in “whopping” Kruger’.3 For tuppence, British children could buy a Kruger doll complete with a tiny coffin to bury him in, whilst those from poorer families made do with a clay doll and a matchbox. It was, after all, only a matter of time before the might of the British Army crushed the upstarts.

Victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had led to the amalgamation of the various Germanic states into a unified Germany that under Bismarck’s leadership began an aggressive policy of colonisation, making it the third largest player in the late nineteenth century’s ‘scramble for Africa’. Now, the Kaiser’s open military support for the Boers would turn his country – long regarded by generations of Britons as sharing a common Saxon ancestry and therefore as a natural ally – into Britain’s chief rival in the struggle for world power. When the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 threatened to draw Britain in to honour its treaty with Japan at the same time as France came under pressure to support its treaty with Russia, it became clear that Britain could no longer follow its policy of ‘splendid isolation’ from European affairs if it were to be able to defend its overseas territories from its European rivals. The signing of the entente cordiale in 1904 would once again make Britain a part of European politics. As a result, ten years later Britain would join its oldest enemy in battle with its closest kin. All that, though, could mean nothing to John and Robina in their Bradford home on the first day of their son’s life. They named him after his father and wondered what life would hold for him.

At that moment, the same scene was being played out in other homes across the West Riding of Yorkshire. High on the Pennine Hills straddling the Lancashire border, railway signalman Fred Pickering and his wife Ada held their third child, Charles Edward. In Halifax John and Mary Jane Ambler welcomed the arrival of their fourth son, Arnold. On the outskirts of Huddersfield, Sarah Whitwam’s first child Harold was making his presence known just as tailor Thomas Gaines and his wife Ruth gazed upon their son Frederick as he lay sleeping beside his mother in their Leeds home. To the north, in the town of Keighley, the Wiseman family – James, Elizabeth and their children James and Christiana – greeted the arrival of another son, also named Harold, with a mixture of joy and trepidation. As the family grew, their income had to be stretched further. Gone was the large home on the edge of town and their servant as the family slid slowly down the social scale.

Six boys among the thousands born on that Thursday. Six boys whose lives would be forever entwined by the events of a single day. On 20 July 1918, Arnold Ambler, John Carr, Frederick Gaines, Charles Pickering, Harold Whitwam and Harold Wiseman would rise up together and walk into a champagne vineyard against a barrage of fire they would hear for the rest of their lives. Six ordinary young men, now forgotten even by their families, among the millions who served. This is the story of those unknown warriors.

Introduction

1. Hamilton, J.A., The Siege of Mafeking (London: Methuen & Co., 1900), pp.43–4.

2. Ibid., p.43.

3. Ibid.

1

‘Filth and squalor reign supreme …’

The world those six boys were born into was a harsh one, as Elizabeth Wiseman knew only too well. In July 1898 her second son, Frederick, had died aged just 13 months in the same month as her third son, John, had been born. John had died in January 1899 at the same time as she became pregnant with Harold. By 1911, three of Mary Jane Ambler’s twelve children were dead, as were two of Ada Pickering’s and two of Ruth Gaines’; the odds were stacked against a newborn surviving its first year in an industrial town. As historian Gordon Corrigan has shown, the First World War is remembered as four years of carnage on an unprecedented scale that cost Britain a generation of its youth, taking the lives of around 8.3 per cent of the men mobilised for the military – approximately one in twelve of those serving.1 Yet in Leeds, birthplace of Frederick Gaines, the death rate for infants in their first year ran at 262 per 1,000 for the quarter July to September 1899 – 26.2 per cent – more than one in four. The average yearly rate for the city was around 170 to 180 deaths per 1,000 births2 or, put another way, over twice the death rate of the trenches as disease, malnutrition, accidents and even infanticide in poverty-stricken households all took their toll. It was, as reformers were later to argue, a situation in which the infantryman on the Western Front in 1914–18 stood a greater chance of survival than a baby born in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

This was not the Yorkshire of wide open moors and clear streams familiar from nostalgic TV dramas but the industrial heartland of empire, drawing thousands of British and European migrants in search of work in the burgeoning textile industry. The vast county had never been a single entity. Instead it was divided into the Old Norse thrydings, meaning ‘thirds’, which evolved into the ‘Ridings’ (North, East and West), and each had a very different character: the East included the Yorkshire coast and the flat, open farmland of the Vale of York whilst the North held large swathes of open moorland and hill farms. By contrast, at the end of the nineteenth century the West Riding became a mix of all that was good and bad in Victorian England. Stretching 93 miles from Sedbergh in the extreme northwest to Bawtry in the southeast and almost 50 miles across at its widest point, it was, as Joseph Morris explained in 1911, ‘a county of almost violent contrasts’.3 The northern part encompassed what is today the Dales National Park, with its open spaces and settled communities of sheep farms, whilst the far south contained the cramped and dirty mining and steel towns that evolved into today’s South Yorkshire. Between these two extremes lay the mill communities of modern West Yorkshire, ideally situated to combine the raw materials of the wool fleeces supplied by the north with the coal from the south to power thousands of looms producing woollen textiles. It was to these mill towns that the mass migrations of the nineteenth century had been drawn. Towns typically grew quickly. Keighley went from a population of just 6,864 to 41,564 in the ninety years between 1811 and 1901, Bradford from 5,000 in 1750 to 103,771 by 1851 and 280,000 by 1901 – a 5,600 per cent increase in just 150 years. In the ten-year period from 1891 to 1901 alone, the population of the industrial West Riding had grown by almost 305,000 people. Such rapid growth in urban areas lacking sanitation and clean water supplies inevitably created squalid slums in the already overburdened towns. ‘Here,’ wrote Morris, ‘misery, filth and squalor reign supreme. In his quest for ancient churches it has been the duty of the writer to explore these unpleasant districts with some diligence – certain it is that he does not desire to ever visit them again.’4

Keighley 1900. Already polluted by industrial waste, rivers and streams acted as open sewers in the densely populated towns and waterborne epidemics were common.

Even within the industrial areas, though, there were differences. The six boys had been born into the wool textile producing towns of the Aire and Calder valleys where woollen mills nestled in steep-sided valleys and where, Morris pointed out, ‘What matter if the [valley] bottom be defiled by ugly mills; if the highways be infested by vile electric tramways; if the waters of the brooks and rivers run fishless and polluted? Always it is possible to escape from this corruption to the solitude and silence of the ridges.’5 But if the mill towns at least offered an escape onto open moorland, further south the landscape changed again. ‘Those who ride out of rural Yorkshire across the border of the coal field may well be pardoned if they experience for the moment a sense of bewilderment’, continued Morris:

Gone in a moment are the wholesome green fields, the pleasant country lanes and the quiet red brick cottages. Instead we have piles of accumulating refuse; dusty roads, with unspeakable surface; footpaths grimy with cinders and coal dust; long gaunt rows of unlovely houses, set down anyhow by the highways and hedges; scraps of walled yard instead of garden; monotonous lines of monstrous ash-bins; dirty children at play in the street; everywhere misery, filth and squalor. It is difficult to believe that this outside unloveliness is not faithfully reflected in the lives of the people.6

Eighteenth-century indentures had made demands that servants should not be expected to eat poor men’s food such as fresh salmon from the rivers more than three times per week. By 1850 those rivers were little more than open sewers. In 1851, near where the Wiseman family now began to raise their son Harold, 44-year-old Rebecca Town brought the town notoriety when it was reported that she had died having lost no fewer than thirty children in their infancy, in an area where average life expectancy had fallen to just 25.8 years.7 A few paternalistic mill owners sought to create decent affordable housing for their workers, but most resorted to ‘back-to-back’ terraced housing where two houses shared a rear wall. Cheap to produce and usually built of low quality materials, these houses often had just two rooms, one on each floor. Because three of the four walls of the house were shared with other buildings and therefore contained no doors or windows, back-to-back houses were notoriously ill-lit, poorly ventilated and sanitation was minimal at best. Even these cramped, dark and airless places, though, were considered an improvement on what had gone before.

Between 1846 and 1847, the Irish potato crops failed and thousands of people fled their homes seeking work so that soon Keighley drew one in twenty of its population from Ireland. They settled in the poorer sections of town where a single privy shared between twenty houses was common, leaving cesspools overflowing and one street described as ‘almost impassable from excrement’. The streets were described in a contemporary report as ‘a filthy open drain from top to bottom’ where ‘foul and offensive liquid matter’ seeped through walls and into cellars.8 Frequently, those cellars were occupied by entire families and, in cases where the cellars abutted churchyards, what seeped through the walls could be more than just unpleasant.

In February 1851, William Ranger was sent to investigate living conditions in the Amblers’ home town of Halifax and compiled his Report to the General Board of Health, on a Preliminary Inquiry as to the Sewage, Drainage and Supply of Water, and the Sanitary Conditions of the Inhabitants of the Town of Halifax in the County of York. In it, he drew on evidence from a Mr Garlick, the medical officer for the township, who spoke of local housing as ‘frequently closely built, badly ventilated and lighted, and abounding in accumulations of offensive matter’.9 Like many of the period, Garlick was keenly interested in the need for fresh air and complained about the ‘most close, confined quarters of town, where the fresh air has the greatest difficulty in penetrating’ and homes ‘surrounded by collections of filth and refuse which contaminate the air’.10 The houses were overall, he said, in ‘bad repair, deficient in the accommodations required by common decency, and still more in those of purification ventilation’. Nor was it only the older dwellings that suffered. Ranger reported that the proper ventilation was also lacking in the newer houses, especially those built as back-to-backs.

Keighley in the 1890s.

Worse, though, was to come. As many other places, Halifax had a considerable number of cellar dwellings. Mr Garlick considered these lodgings, often a single room measuring around 13ft by 12ft in area and 7ft in height,11 to be ‘unfit for human beings to live in … provided with neither air, light, nor ventilation’ and ‘almost always damp, dirty, and unhealthy’.12 For many, though, these rooms were the only shelter they could afford and the only alternative to living on the streets or in the workhouse.

Fifty years later, Arnold Ambler was born to a family living in Woolpack Yard, a cluster of slum houses attached to a pub built in the 1830s. Lacking all but the most basic facilities, Woolpack Yard had been home to one John Ambler back in 1841 and little had changed since then. Disease remained rampant, especially around the polluted river that served as the town’s main sewer and, in the crowded conditions, spread quickly – an outbreak of scarlet fever in the town killed 762 people in the year of Arnold’s birth.

Ten miles away, in Bradford, John and Robina Carr lived more comfortably. Robina’s father was a successful glass manufacturer from an established Bohemian family and John himself ran a printing business. Not rich by any means, the family were at least comfortable and able to afford a home away from the town centre and near a park. In nearby Leeds, tailor Thomas Gaines and his family lived on the edge of the city centre in a recently built back-to-back terrace within an easy walk of nearby parks. In Keighley, the Wiseman family had suffered a loss of status. James, the head of the household, had been born in Liverpool but came from a long established family of lead miners and farmers in the Kettlewell area, about 20 miles to the north of his new home. In the general depression affecting the country in the late nineteenth century, he had made his way to the town and found work in an engineering company. His wife, Elizabeth, was born in Glasgow but moved to Keighley with her family at about the same time, her father setting up a moderately successful confectionery business. Soon after they were married, James and Elizabeth moved into a home together and could afford to employ a domestic servant, but as the family grew, their finances shrank and they relocated from their new home on the outskirts of town into a terrace near the centre, an embarrassing move in class-conscious Edwardian society.

For most of the six families, it was possible for the mother to remain at home to look after the children, but for those like the Amblers it was often necessary not only for the father to hold two or more jobs, but also for anyone else in the family capable of working to start earning as soon as possible. Arnold would later recall being sent out as a young child to comb the slag heaps of a nearby pit for any usable coal that had been dumped there. When railwayman Fred Pickering died in 1901, his wife was forced to find any work she could to support herself and young Charles.

This created serious problems for families like theirs. Following the Boer War, a number of investigations were carried out into the physical wellbeing of the nation and in 1908 the Acland Report commented on the worrying state of pre-school care. There were, it said, a great many mothers who, for whatever reason, could not care for their children during the working day. It concluded:

the Committee find that there are only two courses open to her. She can leave her children unattended, either indoors or out of doors, or she can send them to be taken care of either by a neighbour or by a professional ‘minder’ … Where the mother is away all day and cannot attend to the children’s meals or supervise their play, or where the homes are in ‘slum’ districts, the Committee cannot admit that the children can safely be left unattended all day in the streets or lanes. Apart from the physical dangers due to accidents, cold, wet, and dirt, children are often subjected under such conditions to very serious adverse moral influences. The Committee think that, difficult as it may be to estimate the extent to which these evils prevail, there is no doubt as to their gravity, and they consider that little children should be saved from unnecessary exposure to them.13

Where possible, the committee felt, the care of a suitable neighbour was sufficient but, then as now, not everyone could find affordable childcare and some had to turn to the services of less motivated childminders:

The professional ‘minder’ is almost always unsatisfactory. The Committee are informed that it is a common practice in some districts for ignorant women to earn a living by minding their neighbour’s children. The ‘minders’ make on an average a charge of about 8d a day per child, in return for which they undertake to watch and feed it. But there is at present no inspection or control over such places, which are often dirty and insanitary, and sometimes conducted by women of the grossest ignorance. It is a well-proved fact that it is a common practice in such places for children to be drugged in order to keep them quiet. A witness, who supported his statement with careful reference to dates and facts, informed the Committee that in certain districts it was by no means unusual for children to be dosed night and morning with various sedative medicines generally containing opium. In some places gin and soothing syrup are used, and in others laudanum and opium pills are often administered to children. It may be added that it appears that these drugging practices apply almost entirely to children under three years of age. But they affect the children’s health after three, and they show the nature of the places to which children over three are sometimes sent.14

As late as 1912, Bradford MP Frederick William Jowett told the House of Commons that:

with the exception of one or two instances, the income available for feeding and clothing after rent is paid only amounts to 3 [shillings] per head per week. In 55 per cent of the cases the family, when the rent has been paid, has actually less than 2 [shillings] per head per week. It is absolutely impossible for a family to live on any such amount.15

In other words, for some families, one day’s care from a poor quality minder could cost a third of the entire week’s budget to feed and clothe the child.

The Ranger Report was just one of many investigations into social conditions carried out around the turn of the century. Charles Booth in London and Seerbohm Rowntree in York had both long argued that Britain would ignore the needs of the lower orders at its cost. Rowntree’s study, published in 1901, found that 27.8 per cent of the population of York lived in total poverty. This, he explained, included all those families ‘whose total earnings are insufficient to obtain the minimum necessities for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency’ and families ‘whose total earnings would be sufficient for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency were it not that some portion of it is absorbed by other expenditures, either useful or wasteful’.16 Referring to these categories as ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ poverty, respectively, Rowntree claimed they accounted for just under 10 per cent and 18 per cent of the population of York. In defining ‘primary poverty’, Rowntree left no room for doubt about its severity:

A family living upon the scale allowed for in this estimate must never spend a penny on railway fare or omnibus. They must never go into the country unless they walk. They must never purchase a halfpenny newspaper or spend a penny to buy a ticket for a popular concert. They must write no letters to absent children, for they cannot afford to pay the postage. They must never contribute anything to their church or chapel, or give any help to a neighbour which costs money. They cannot save, nor can they join a sick club or Trade Union, because they cannot pay the necessary subscriptions. The children must have no pocket money for dolls, marbles or sweets. The father must smoke no tobacco, and must drink no beer. The mother must never buy any pretty clothes for herself or for her children, the character of the family wardrobe as for the family diet being governed by the regulation, ‘nothing must be bought but that which is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of physical health, and what is bought must be of the plainest and most economical description.’ Should a child fall ill, it must be attended by the parish doctor; should it die, it must be buried by the parish. Finally, the wage-earner must never be absent from his work for a single day.17

The embarrassing performance of the British Army in the Boer War, where failings in equipment, training and logistical management saw Britain being taught, as Kipling put it, ‘no end of a lesson’, served to highlight the problem. Around 7,500 soldiers died in battle against the Boers whilst over 13,000 died of disease as they tried to survive in extreme weather conditions without the appropriate clothing and often without rations. Worse still, although volunteers came forward to join the army to keep it up to strength, it was found that most failed to meet the physical standards for enlistment, due largely to illnesses linked directly to poverty and malnutrition.

Although the rejection rate was often exaggerated, it drew attention to the failures of Victorian-era laissez-faire politics in which government refused to accept any responsibility for the welfare of the population. Working-class people – from whom the men needed to guard Britain’s empire would be drawn – had been left to fend for themselves in an economy that was geared towards maximising profit for a relatively small and wealthy elite. With wages at subsistence level, few could afford to provide an adequate diet for their families and fewer still the luxury of medical and dental treatment. Poor dental health, for example, would continue to create a problem for the military into the early days of the Great War for the simple reason that men with damaged or missing teeth could not chew the hard tack biscuits that would form a major part of their rations on active service. The rejection of so many potential recruits could not be ignored. The inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration was set up to investigate and report on the state of the nation’s health and quickly established the link between poverty, malnutrition and failing health standards.

Children gather to mark the coronation of King Edward in August 1902. Most of the boys in this picture would see action by 1918.

‘Half-timers’ gather outside a woolen mill waiting for their shift to start. Few could aspire to more than the most basic education and became family breadwinners before they finished school.

At the same time, the political landscape was changing. In 1900, the Labour Representation Committee was formed to champion the interests of the working classes and of the growing trade union movement and, in the ‘khaki election’ of that year, secured two seats in Parliament. Aided by the Liberal Party in an attempt to break the Conservatives’ grip on power, the Labour Party brought a new impetus to the campaign to improve the lot of the urban poor. The findings of the Committee on Physical Deterioration supported much of what the Liberal and Labour parties were demanding by showing that if the government wanted to maintain an army strong enough to retain the empire, it needed to ensure that the next generation of soldiers would be fit enough to serve. Noting the extent of Britain’s urban squalor, former Prime Minister Lord Rosebery said that ‘in the great cities, in the rookeries and slums … an imperial race cannot be reared … The survival of the fittest is an absolute truth’.18

Inside a typical working-class home. A ‘two up, two down’ house would often accommodate large families.

Alongside that, Britain’s place as a world leader in industry was under threat. Foreign manufacturing, particularly in Germany and the US, had not only caught up with Britain, but was edging ahead. A poorly educated workforce struggled to keep up with advances in technology and it was becoming increasingly clear that despite the signs posted outside factories and mills, the workforce could no longer be expected to be just ‘hands’. As German production outstripped British, observers pointed to the social welfare system established in Germany as a crucial motivating factor. Whilst the British worker felt alienated from the country, the German worker felt he had an investment in the state and all it stood for. If the British Government intended to keep its position as a world leader, it needed popular support to do it. It needed to make its people believe in it. In 1904, across the West Riding, the boys started school.

Notes

1. Corrigan, Gordon, Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the First World War (London: Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2004), p.354.

2. Newman, Sir George, Infant Mortality: A Social Problem (New York: E.P. Button and Company, 1907), Appendix IX.

3. Morris, Joseph E., The West Riding of Yorkshire (London: Methuen & Co., 1911), p.6.

4. Ibid., p.10.

5. Ibid., p.8.

6. Ibid., p.9.

7. Dewhirst, I., A History of Keighley (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), p.57.

8. Ibid.

9. Mr Garlick’s Statement in Ranger, W., Report to the General Board of Health, on a Preliminary Inquiry as to the Sewage, Drainage and Supply of Water, and the Sanitary Conditions of the Inhabitants of the Town of Halifax in the County of York

10. Ibid., p.35.

11. Ibid., Appendix C, pp.115–20.

12. Ibid., p.18.

13.Consultative Committee Report Upon the School Attendance of Children Below the Age of Five (The Acland Report) (London: HM Stationery Office, 1908), p.18.

14. Ibid., p.19.

15. Hansard, 13 March 1912, 35 H.C. Deb., col. 111.

16. Rowntree, B.S., Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London: Macmillan, 1901), pp.86–7.

17. Ibid., pp.133–4.

18. Hammal, R., ‘How Long Before the Sunset? British Attitudes to War, 1871–1914’, History Review (2010). Available at http://www.historytoday.com/rowena-hammal/how-long-sunset-british-attitudes-war-1871–1914.

2

‘Cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will’

Believing that an efficient modern state could not afford for its people to be illiterate, Frederick William I of Prussia instituted compulsory state-run primary education in 1717, establishing a model that would eventually be copied around the world. Declaring that ‘an educated people can be easily governed’, his son, Frederick the Great, strengthened the system so that by 1763, the Prussian Government was enforcing compliance with the threat of fines or even the removal of children from families who failed to maintain attendance requirements. The near disastrous war against Napoleon further encouraged reforms at all levels within the military and government and, although it stopped short of abolishing serfdom, Prussia instigated new approaches allowing greater opportunities for the lower classes, encouraged immigration and granted equality for Jewish immigrants already settled in the country, lessened the power of the guilds and weakened that of the Church, all of which stimulated industry and the economy. But if some saw universal education as part of the effort to modernise the country, others saw things somewhat differently.

Johann Fichte, a philosopher whose work was influential in the development of the German school system, had written that schools ‘must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will’.1 In Britain, philosophers like John Stuart Mill agreed with Fichte and argued that state-run schools for the general population served to curtail civil liberties. In that light, the German policy of educating the masses was seen in Britain as a sinister attempt to create a purely militaristic society: ‘The first lesson instilled into the mind of the German boy is that he has come into the world in order to take his part in the defence of the Fatherland. Army organisation and education are therefore parts of one coherent whole.’ Dr M.E. Sadler wrote:

Side by side with the influences of German education are to be traced the influences of German military service. The two sets of influence interact on one another and intermingle. German education impregnates the German army with science. The German army predisposes German education to ideas of organization and discipline. Military and educational discipline go hand in hand.2

Despite these concerns, the introduction of state-funded education was part of a package of measures that by the end of the nineteenth century had seen Prussia elevated from a European backwater to a strong, independent state that in 1871 could bring together the various Germanic principalities into a single unified nation capable of challenging its European neighbours for political and economic supremacy. In marked contrast, when Arnold, Harold and the other boys started school in 1904, free compulsory elementary education for all was still a new phenomenon in Britain and the elementary school system was struggling, as Alan Penn put it, to ‘serve the twin criteria of social utility and cheapness of operation’3 in order to instil the basic skills necessary for pupils to take their place in the workforce at the lowest possible cost.

Although a wide variety of local institutions ranging from Sunday schools to Industrial, Reformatory, Poor Law and the so-called Ragged Schools were already in existence, educational provision in urban areas was patchy and it was not until the Liberal MP for Bradford, William Edward Forster, pushed through the Elementary Education Act of 1870 that state funding was made available to ensure a school place for every child in the country. The establishment of local school boards and their funding was intended to provide places for those children previously unable to obtain any sort of education but the act was, at best, a compromise. Board schools would fit into the gaps left by other forms of education, but were permitted to continue to charge tuition fees that made education a luxury beyond the means of large, low income families. Boards were elected to ensure the building of schools in areas identified as needing them and they were given the power to create by-laws regarding attendance, but although these allowed them to fine parents who did not send their children to school there were often exemptions for children living a mile or more from the school or where the child was deemed – by widely varying criteria – to have met the minimum standard of education. The so-called ‘Dunce’s Certificate’, for example, allowed children to leave education solely on the basis of the completion of 250 school attendances regardless of whether they had been taught anything. As a result, the parents of the boys’ generation often had little or no education themselves and had developed little respect for it. It was, to a great many, simply a luxury they could not afford until a further act of 1891 made elementary education free for all pupils for the first time.

Even then, though, there were problems. In the 1880s, the Bradford School Board was dealing with around 10,000 ‘half timers’ – children attending school for part of the day before going out to exhausting but poorly paid work and who, as the Committee on Physical Deterioration had found, were in very poor physical condition. In 1887, the headmaster of Bradford’s Wapping Road School began using his own money to buy bread, jam and tea after several pupils fainted from hunger during school assembly and an 1889 report indicated that over 50,000 pupils in London alone were attending school ‘in want of food’. By 1902 the Bradford Education Committee had begun providing meals for poor children but the practice was difficult to support since it was illegal to use public funds for that purpose. Two members of the board, Margaret McMillan and future Bradford MP Fred Jowett, lobbied Parliament and in 1906 Bradford became the first area allowed to provide free school meals at state expense for children deemed to be in poverty. The following year, the Bradford school medical officer, Dr Ralph Crowley, was given a grant of £50 to study the effects of the programme. By measuring the weight of a test group, Crowley found that during the Whit holiday when schools were closed for a week, his test group lost the weight they had previously gained from their school meals and took two weeks to recover full fitness.

Teaching was not just about the three Rs but also about becoming British. When, in 1915, the threat of German air raids increased, these children were taught how to react.

Perhaps not surprisingly, against this backdrop of poverty and hunger in which education took lower priority than physical survival, the board schools became, as W.A.L. Blyth put it, ‘a whole educational process in themselves and one which is by definition limited and by implication inferior; a low plateau, rather than the foothills of a complete education’.4 The overall aim, Blyth argued, was not to educate the masses beyond what was necessary to maintain an efficient workforce and offered little or no prospect of further education. Teachers were of varying quality, some genuinely dedicated and innovative but often with minimal training and knowledge. The 1900 guidelines, for example, suggested that school trips to local museums and art galleries were to be actively encouraged but inspectors soon found that teachers ‘seem afraid to undertake visits to Museums … some tell me that they would not like to explain objects to their classes because there would generally be experts near at hand who would easily detect any mistakes that they might make while others say that they are not sure of the kind of reception that they would meet with on the part of the Curators …’5

From the outset, as the Acland Report was later to comment, the children attending board schools were often those who had experienced poor or virtually non-existent childcare from an early age and in many cases they had been left to fend for themselves as ‘feral’ children. Schools were segregated into boys and girls with separate entrances for each. Around fifty to sixty pupils per class was commonplace and up to seventy not unusual, with discipline a significant issue, especially in the boys’ classes. Older pupils were frequently relied on as ‘monitors’ to act as teaching assistants and there was a genuine need to establish acceptance of the teacher’s authority, the importance of punctuality, obedience and conformity simply as a practical measure to ensure that any sort of teaching could take place. As a response, the teaching of drill movements became standard in all elementary schools to instil obedience.

It started young. Writing in 1905, Katherine Bathurst, one of the few female school inspectors for the Board of Education, described one class of ‘babies’ being drilled by their teacher in an infant class:

Fold arms – Sit up – eyes on ceiling (all the heads are raised) – Eyes on floor (all the heads are bent) – Eyes to the right – Eyes to the left – Eyes on blackboard – Eyes on me (all the sixty baby heads are wagged in unison).

This, she said, might be followed by twenty minutes in which all the children were required to do was thread needles. ‘The discipline,’ she said, ‘is military rather than maternal, and can only be maintained at the expense of much healthy, valuable, and, as far as the children are concerned, necessary freedom.’6 Often, schools in built-up areas lacked space for playgrounds, but enterprising teachers found ways to get their children to perform drill movements – in some cases climbing onto flat roofs, in others getting children to stand on benches in the classrooms or in the aisles between desks to perform synchronised arm and leg movements under the general heading of ‘Swedish Drill’. Elsewhere, if space permitted, military-style marching was the preferred form of exercise. It was cheap, required no equipment and fulfilled the need to discipline the children. Teachers turned to Parts 1 and 2 of the army’s 1870 ‘Field Exercise Book’ and schools were encouraged to purchase (at just tuppence each) copies of a short Manual of Elementary Military Exercise and Drill developed for army-run schools for serving military families.

In a report on Church of England schools in 1871, the Reverend H.W. Bellars claimed:

The drill in our schools is generally bad; I should like to see a regular system of military drill introduced, with marching tunes and, where practicable, with drum and fife bands. Arrangements with the adjutants of the militia and volunteers for providing the necessary teaching might easily be made, and the expense of it by employing drill sergeants would not be great.7

By 1875, like many others around the country, the board schools of the West Riding had embraced the need for boys to be disciplined through drill lessons. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools recommended around two hours per week ‘for not more than twenty weeks in the year’ in school time and even that Saturday morning sessions could be held – each of which would count towards the infamous ‘Dunce’s Certificate’. The Bradford Board had employed Sergeant J. Ryan as its Drill Instructor; an 1892 report by the Chief Inspector of Schools in nearby Leeds shows that they, too, had taken on a full-time Drill Instructor who visited each school once a fortnight and the authority held annual field days in which schools competed for banners awarded for the best drill displays.

But whilst many argued the need to create discipline in order to manage schools, others grew concerned about the increasingly militaristic tone of the training. Parliament debated the possibility of providing formal military training as part of the school curriculum with Sir Lauder Brunton, later a founder member of the Boy Scout movement’s national committee, suggesting that weapons training using wooden rifles should begin at the age of four and progress throughout the school years.8 In some areas, school boards had gone as far as obtaining weapons, equipment and uniforms and even provided shooting practice and tactical training for pupils. Trade unions and religious groups expressed their concerns, but in the wake of the Boer War, calls increased for the introduction of compulsory military training, with schools being identified as the ideal starting point. During a debate in the House of Lords in 1905 Lord Meath, founder of the Lads’ Drill Association and a proponent of conscription, even went as far as proposing that the War Office and Board of Education set up a committee to consider the use of War Office funding to provide weapons training for all boys. After lengthy discussion it was agreed that it would be impractical to provide the proposed two to three years of training in the northern schools because of the impact this would have on the already restricted education of the half-timer children.

Outside schools, the phrase ‘muscular Christianity’ was being widely used to describe the prevailing attitude across religious denominations. Drawn from the New Testament teachings of St Paul and others who used athletic metaphors to help describe the challenges of the Christian life, the term was first adopted in the 1850s to describe the characteristics of the novels of writers like Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, both of whom were keen sportsmen and advocates of active lifestyles as an antidote to what they saw as the ‘effeminacy’ of ‘education and bookishness’.9 Hughes used the term in his 1861 novel Tom Brown at Oxford, saying that it was ‘a good thing to have strong and well-exercised bodies’, and that even ‘the least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men’. The premise of Victorian muscular Christianity – that participation in sport could contribute to the development of Christian morality, physical fitness and a ‘manly’ character – fitted perfectly with ideals of helping the poor, weaker members of society, and from the 1880s onwards, church and civic leaders began enthusiastically promoting healthy, active and above all morally uplifting pastimes for the nation’s youth.

Starting in Glasgow in 1883, W.A. Smith’s Boy’s Brigade used military structure, ranks and discipline and was founded on ideals of Christian manliness expressed through gymnastics, summer camps, religious services and classes as well as rifle drill and other forms of paramilitary training. Enormously popular, by 1910 there were some 2,200 companies connected with different churches throughout the United Kingdom, the British Empire and the United States, with 10,000 officers and 100,000 boys.10 It was followed in 1891 by the founding of the Church Lads’ Brigade with its sister organisation, the Church Nursing and Ambulance Brigade for Young Women and Girls, which became the Church Girls’ Brigade in 1901. Other groups, such as the Jewish Lads’ Brigade and the Catholic Boys’ Brigade, followed suit and, in 1907, Lord Robert Baden-Powell held an experimental camp on Brownsea Island near Poole in Dorset to try out ideas he had developed during reconnaissance operations in South Africa and at the 1899–1900 siege of Mafeking. On his return to the UK, Baden-Powell had written about the importance of training troops in fieldcraft and tracking both to increase their military skills and to improve their ability to use their own initiative. The book proved enormously popular, not only with the military, but also among teachers and youth organisations looking for ways to inspire the boys in their classes.

Although Baden-Powell had some concerns about the military organisation of the Boys’ Brigade and promoted the ideal of an international movement emphasising peace and co-operation, he believed his ideas could offer interesting and useful activities for such groups to take part in and set about writing a new version of his military manual with youth groups in mind. Scouting for Boys was published in 1908 in six fortnightly parts at 4d a copy. Sales of the book were enormous and what had been intended as a training aid for existing organisations became the handbook of new, spontaneously created Scout Patrols formed by groups of boys on their own initiative. In September 1908, Baden-Powell set up an office to deal with enquiries pouring in about what he began to refer to as ‘the Movement’ and it quickly became established in its own right. No fan of Liberal politics, in 1911 Baden-Powell complained that ‘Free feeding and old age pensions, strike pay, cheap beer and indiscriminate charity do not make for the hardening of the nation or the building up of a self-reliant, energetic manhood’.11

Although based on a pacifist ideal of co-operation, the Boy Scout Movement owed much to its military origins. Here scouts tackle a military assault course.

Despite their popularity, concerns were voiced about the quasi-military nature of such groups (the Boys’ Brigade, for example, would continue to practise rifle drill until the 1920s) but even among Quakers there was support for uniformed groups:

While concerns about militarism were never far away, Friends emphasised the benefits of uniformed youth organisations for the training of young people’s character. For example, Martha Baker of Willesden argued that the Boys’ Life Brigade – not the Boys’ Brigade – could ‘supply the elements needed, both as to out-door exercise, physical drill, discipline, brotherliness, self-sacrifice, and patriotism’.12

By the time the Scouts were established, the Earl of Meath’s own youth groups, the Lads’ Drill Association and the Duty and Discipline Movement had been incorporated into the National Service League. Founded to provide ‘systematic physical and military training of all British lads and their instruction in the art of the rifle’, Meath’s campaign left little doubt that he regarded preparation for war (almost certainly against Germany) as vital to future British interests. Stressing its tenets of ‘discipline, duty, mutual service and patriotism’, the movement attracted many senior establishment figures – including Winston Churchill – as supporters. By 1907 it was actively campaigning for compulsory military training at school as part of the National Service League’s agenda to bring in peacetime conscription in order to create a reserve army in case of war and claimed over 91,000 members by 1911 but, as Ian Beckett records, its support came largely from the Church of England, with a number of Anglican bishops among its more prominent backers. As such, in the West Riding, where Non-Conformist religions held sway, there was little interest.

Things came to a head in 1910 when youth groups came under pressure to become part of the newly formed national cadet force scheme linked directly to the Territorial Force and funded by the War Office with the threat of penalties against those who failed to sign up. Despite its strong military leanings, the Boys’ Brigade resisted and, with its huge membership, was able to survive the threats to its existence, as did the Scout Movement. The creation of the cadet force, though, brought another layer to the mix. Public schools had long had cadet forces which were seen as officer training schools for future military leaders. Now, another cadet force would be open to ordinary youths as a stepping stone to service in the Territorial Force, cutting down on the need for basic military training by drawing in those who already knew how to march and drill and who had the basic fieldcraft skills for camp.

In his study of Youth Movements in the early twentieth century, historian Paul Wilkinson used a survey by the Mass Observation Archive to show that between 1901 and 1920, 34 per cent of British males were, at one time or another, members of the Boy Scouts. A further 14 per cent said they had been part of the Boys’ Brigade. Even allowing for some dual membership, he says, a conservative estimate would have around 40 per cent of young male Britons having been part of one or other organisation.13 To this figure we can add a wide variety of other youth groups, sports teams and clubs to suggest that a substantial majority of the generation growing up in the first decade of the twentieth century were members of some sort of organised social group. Among the reinforcement draft to which the six boys would eventually be posted, membership of the Scouts, the Temperance Band of Hope and Church missions was commonplace. The problem was that there is evidence to suggest these groups tended to attract more upwardly minded youths from upper working-class families than the disadvantaged urban poor they were aimed at.

By 1901, muscular Christianity was influential enough in England that Cotton Minchin, in his account of the influence of public schools on English history, could praise ‘the Englishman going through the world with rifle in one hand and Bible in the other’ and add, ‘If asked what our muscular Christianity has done, we point to the British Empire’.14 Inevitably, such thinking heavily influenced both the school boards and the School Inspectorate when they set about attempting to impose some sort of standardisation on the various types of school in operation. In 1900 the government issued guidelines requiring all schools to provide ‘suitable instruction in the elementary things’ and ‘simple lessons on common things’. For ‘older scholars’ aged 7 years and upwards, a course of instruction ‘to be taken as a rule in all schools’ involved ‘Lessons, including object lessons, on geography, history, and common things’.15 The inclusion of history and geography into the recommended syllabus owed much to Disraeli’s ‘one nation’ belief that as societies develop, members within them have increasing levels of duty towards each other, and in particular an emphasis on the obligation of the upper classes to care for those classes below them. As the threat of revolution spread across Europe, it was clear that the two-tier class system could not be maintained forever and that there was a need to harness the political support of the wider population for a common political goal. The teaching of geography would give children a sense of the role their country played in a world in which they, as Britons, owed a duty of care to the people of the less developed regions of the empire. At the same time, history could be used to create a sense of nationhood by teaching children about the role models provided by a variety of real and fictional British (or more often English) heroes.

Specific lessons in history were initially few and far between, but the statutory inclusion of history in the curriculum in 1902 saw a massive rise in the teaching of the subject and between 1890 and 1903 the number of elementary schools offering separate lessons in history rose from just over 400 to around 23,000. Writing in 1901, educationalist H.L. Withers noted:

It has no doubt been the case in many schools, in which History has not been presented as a class subject, that nevertheless, lessons in history have been given. And in every school without exception the rule had held good that out of the three reading books in every class above the Second Standard one has been a ‘History reader’.16

‘Readers’ became big business for publishers since they could serve a dual purpose, thus keeping costs down. In a 1906 teaching manual, James Welton claimed:

If the term ‘reading book’ be confined to those books which are used mainly for oral reading, then we see that the contents should be of value as literature rather than as information. The attempt to combine the two, like most endeavours to kill two birds with one stone, usually hinders the attainment of the result which should be sought from each. The chief exception is the history reader, which, if well chosen, is at once literature and the medium of conveying definite information.17

The phrase ‘if well chosen’ was the key. History ‘readers’ were being produced from a variety of sources, some more reliable than others. In his 1904 teaching manual, A.H. Garlick argued that historical learning in elementary school should not encourage jingoistic sentiments, but instead should ‘help to break away national prejudice by giving us some knowledge of other countries’ (Garlick’s emphasis). He continued: ‘Bias against, and hatred and contempt for other nations, are often the results of ignorance.’18 James Welton’s manual followed suit, arguing that in addition to being in poor taste, the history produced in textbooks was considered largely unhistorical:

A good textbook should be one written by an author who is competent at once as a scholar and a teacher. Too many of those in common use are mere pieces of hackwork, the study of which engenders prejudice and false notions even when it does not lead to disgust with the whole subject. [Welton’s emphasis]19

Despite the warnings, school texts continued to be produced on the basis of profit over accuracy. Charles Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling’s 1911 A School History of England, for example, was heavily criticised by the Educational Times for being too bloodthirsty and militaristic but sold well. A glance at some of its content helps to illustrate the degree to which such readers could be used as political propaganda. The authors make clear their own social Darwinian beliefs in noting ‘improvements in medicine and surgery have saved and prolonged countless useful, as well as many useless, lives’.20