In all the commemoration of the First World War, and the inevitable political spats, there’s been a great deal of talk from various folks wanting to use it for their own present-day agendas.
So far, so normal. That’s history for you.
At one end of the spectrum are small and big-‘c’ conservatives who claim the war was necessary and just, and that those who fought were honest, stout-hearted patriots and heroes. All of them.
At the other end is a more fragmentary collection of socialists (the war was a great capitalist conspiracy against the working class), anarchists and peace campaigners who claim the war was unnecessary and avoidable.
Personally I’m with neither side. Ideology don’t boil no historical cabbages. FWIW my view is that it was all a ghastly and unnecessary fuck-up which was avoidable, but became unavoidable once the more-or-less mechanical military systems were switched on. AJP Taylor’s War by Timetable.
So if you listen to these arguments from either end, people in 1914 are either all patriots eager to do their duty or they are socialists, trade unionists and pacifists desperate to prevent the tragedy which is about to ensue.
Fine. There are actually plenty of both.
What there also is is large numbers of people with no strong views either way. And plenty of these just don’t want to have anything to do with it.
There hasn’t been a lot of work done on this, but the fact is that large (but unquantifiable) numbers of Britons in 1914 don’t really want the Germans to win, but they don’t really want to fight either.
This only becomes apparent once conscription is introduced in 1916. Again, historians and Guardian-readers alike are fixated on the relatively small numbers of people who appealed against military service on the grounds that they were conscientious objectors. This ignores the far larger numbers who appealed on other grounds – family or work responsibilities, medical unfitness etc.
Many of these were doubtless honest men who believed that they were best serving their families and their country by carrying on as before. But others were simply trying to worm out of being put in uniform, being shouted at by block-headed NCOs and shivering in trenches where Germans were trying – with a high degree of success – to kill or injure them.
You can’t blame them. But at the time if their real motivations were understood and exposed – which they sometimes were – they were called cowards.
In that sense, conscientious objectors, who were also labelled cowards (which they most certainly were not) did the real cowards an immense service. In rural areas, the conchies did farmers a huge favour by deflecting some of the loathing that they attracted for getting some, often all, of their sons out of having to join up.
So anyway, here’s a yarn about lack of martial ardour from Bristol in 1914. I came across it a couple of weeks ago. No idea if it’s true or not, as it could well be the sort of yarn told in any town, but here goes anyway:
So war has just been declared and there’s this very wealthy bloke living in Clifton. He strides down to the recruiting office wanting to do his bit for King & Country, but despite all his protests he is told that he is far too old for the Army.
Disappointed, he goes home pondering how he can help the nation in its hour of need. He then realises that he can make a very great and patriotic sacrifice. He will give up his valet.
He summons his man to the library and tells him what a lucky fellow he is to be single and of military age at this great moment in history. It will be his great good fortune to be able to serve his country.
In view of his marvellous gesture in volunteering, he adds that he will instruct the chauffeur to drive him down to the recruiting office first thing in the morning.
Jeeves, or whatever his name was, says nothing, and is dismissed.
First thing in the morning rolls around, and the master of the house is perplexed to find that his man has not come in to help him dress for one last time.
Because, of course, Jeeves is in no hurry to join the Army and has done a runner.
Plug time: For more on Bristol in WW1, you need ‘Bravo, Bristol!’ by Clive Burlton and me. Available from Amazon and all the usual places.
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Biological warfare in Bristol?
Here’s another one of my favourite Bristol WW1 tales; a favourite because it contains a great big unanswered, and possibly unanswerable question.
Bubonic plague. Scary stuff because that’s, like, what the Black Death was about. The thing that killed maybe as much as half the population of Europe in the 14th century.
It’s always been around, though, and still hasn’t gone away. So in Britain in 1914 the authorities in sea-ports were always on the lookout for it. It did sometimes enter the country carried by seafarers or rats on ships.
So, common enough, but still alarming.
In the summer of 1916, responding to lurid rumours of an outbreak in the city, the local Medical Officer of Health, Dr D.S. Davies, issued a statement that there was no epidemic, but that three patients – two men and a boy – had presented with a “mild form” of the disease. They had been isolated at Ham Green hospital and all, he said, were making a good recovery.
Inquiries traced the infection to rats at Avonmouth, but Dr Davies later told a meeting of the council’s Health Committee that he did not believe the rats had come into the port on a ship. He suggested that plague-infested rats may have been deliberately introduced to Bristol over land.
Dr Davies oversaw a team of over 30 men disposing of potentially infected material at the warehouse, principally 200 tons of rags (presumably destined for paper manufacture). The dock workers involved in this task were each paid £5 – over a fortnight’s wages – each day and had to go to Ham Green for a disinfectant bath at the end of each shift. By September, after several hundred rats had been caught and tested at a special laboratory set up in Avonmouth, Dr Davies declared Bristol plague-free.
Whether we’ll ever know if enemy agents tried to give Bristol a serious dose of Black Death in 1916 is another matter.
All this and more in ‘Bravo, Bristol! The City at War 1914-18’ by Byrne and Burlton, in local shops and on tinternet soon.
Come to the launch do if you fancy it; it’s free, but you need to book: http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/2014/events/bravo-bristol/
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The B-word
Just got back from collecting copies of the latest book what I wrote. They look smashing.
‘Bravo, Bristol! The City at War 1914-18’ is co-authored by Clive Burlton and me. Even if I say so myself, it’s rather splendid.
It’s actually much easier to brag about things you’ve co-written because of course you’re not claiming all the credit. As a researcher and as expert on the military side, Clive reached parts I couldn’t have hoped to reach. We will be nagging you to buy it more in due course.
‘Course the problem with old-school booky books is that once they’ve gone to the printers you can’t change ’em. And in the case of Bristol’s part in WW1 we’ve been finding out loads of great new stories ever since. So I’ll regale you with a few of them in the coming weeks. Be a pity to lose them.
Here’s the first one:
This concerns a man named John Flynn, who kept a newspaper shop on the Horsefair.
In October 1914, with the war getting under way and people starting to get killed, he was selling leaflets with a short eight-verse poem on them titled ‘A Call to Arms’.
Someone complained that it was obscene and the police paid him a visit. Flynn readily admitted selling the leaflets and handed over his stock of around 1,000 copies.
Police returned some time later with a search warrant, but found no more copies, and no other objectionable material. Nonetheless, the decision was made to charge him with selling indecent materials and he was up before the beaks a few weeks later.
The case turned on whether or not the verse was, in fact, indecent, and this came down to the use, several times in the poem, of a certain word.
Appearing for his defence was the solicitor Edward Watson, a person so amazing we’re going to have to save him for some other time. “E.J.” Watson conceded that the poem was rather coarse and vulgar but, he said, it could not possibly be said to have any corrupting effect. On the contrary, yer honour; it could only arouse patriotic feelings in the reader.
He then quoted various literary passages, including bits of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, which had used the offending word.
The magistrates dismissed the case, provided Mr Flynn destroy all copies of the leaflet. So we don’t know how the poem went.
But we do know what the rude word was:
“Bloody.”
A whole different world, I tell ya. So different you really ought to remember to buy a book about it when it gets into the shops. That story’s not in it, but there’s plenty of others…
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Me talking to BBC History magazine about it here (2nd half of podcast).
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(* He wouldn’t have used the expression “Tiger Mom” or “Tiger Dad” as it wasn’t in vogue at the time. Also, he was French, and since the emblematic French animal is the Gallic cock, we’re not going there.)
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They come over here …
This is Henri Coandă. Handsome devil, ain’t he? He was damn clever, too.
He was born in 1886 and invented a recoilless gun, prefabricated houses and a solar-powered system of desalination, among many other things.
He is best-known, however, as one of the leading early pioneers of aviation. He designed several experimental aircraft including (though the claim is highly contentious) what is said to be the world’s first jet aircraft. The Coandă effect, the tendency of fluid jets to be attracted towards the nearest surface, is named after him.
The fact that he designed a disc-shaped experimental plane in the 1930s and that he was forced to collaborate with the Germans while living in France during the War is what underpins tales of Nazi flying saucers so beloved of so many conspiracy theorists.
Earlier in his career, though, Henri Coandă worked in Bristol. He joined the British & Colonial Aircraft Company in 1912, just two years after its foundation, as its Technical Director, and worked there for three years.
To cut a long story short, he made several key contributions to the company in its early years, not only helping ensure its commercial survival, but playing his part in building a firm which by 1914 was capable of turning out well-designed aircraft which played a critical role in winning the First World War.
Coandă had been born in Bucharest, and died there in 1972 after returning to Romania in his old age. Bucharest’s international airport is named after him.
This is one of the places where British news reporters have been hanging out lately, desperately looking for Romanians planning to come over here, steal our jobs and our benefits and randomly stab themselves in order to get free treatment on the NHS.
The next time (and it’ll be soon) you see or hear any of this spiteful, pig-ignorant drivel pumped out by rags owned by people who’d prefer you to hate hard-working foreigners rather than bankers or their own tax-dodging proprietors, remember that without one particular Romanian immigrant, Bristol might not have its aerospace industry.
And that we’d all be speaking German.
(Actually, that last bit is a slightly massive exaggeration, but you get the idea.)
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From John Latimer: The Annals of Bristol in the 17th Century (William George’s Sons, Bristol, 1900)
A highly interesting donation to the city was offered to the Council on December 7th. Mr. Robert Redwood, a wealthy Bristolian living in St. Leonard’s parish, proffered his “lodge near the Marsh” for conversion into a library for the benefit of the citizens; and the gift was thankfully accepted.
With one exception — at Norwich — this was the first public library established in England. The donor had probably been in correspondence with Dr. Tobias Matthew, Archbishop of York, born over the shop of his father on Bristol Bridge, and may have been induced by his grace to take the step just recorded. At all events, the Archbishop hastened to forward a number of books drawn from his extensive library, which he desired should be preserved “for the free use of the merchants and shopkeepers of the city.”
In January, 1616, the Council resolved that “40s yearly should be allowed to him that now keepeth the new erected Library.” In a few years the institution became so popular as to require extended accommodation, and in April, 1634, the Corporation determined on its enlargement, “for which, purpose,” says the minute, ” Mr. Richard Vickris hath freely given a parcel of ground adjoining the said Library.”
A vote of not exceeding £30 was then granted “as well for new building the addition to be made as for repairing the old house,” the money being handed over to a gentleman charged with superintending the work, whose tragic fate was then undreamt of — “Mr. George Butcher” (or Boucher).*
In 1640, when the extension had been completed, an ironmonger was paid £3 17s 6d. “for 15 dozen and a half of book chains for the Library, “a mode of protection against thieves that, having regard to the portliness of most of the volumes, seems somewhat superfluous.
So then, Bristol’s library service, 400 years old today. Two days after the mayor decided that the two lower floors of the Central Library, built for the benefit of Bristol and all Bristolians, should be handed over to a selective “free school” that has lobbied behind the scenes – and in front of them with the help of a public relations firm which, by the way, you’re paying for – in what is one of the most shameless and brazen local land-grabs in Bristol’s recent history.
I could go on.
(* The undreamt of tragic fate was that Boucher was later hanged for plotting to hand Bristol over to the Royalists during the Civil War.)
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Norton ye Alchymyst
I mention this in honour of this weekend’s forthcoming Bristol Con, which I can’t make. I know how much they all like weird Bristol yarns.
But it’s also in honour of the forthcoming half-millennium anniversary of the death of a very important Bristolian, or an utterly insignificant one (delete according to taste).
This is Thomas Norton, a real, genuine, honest-to-goodness, actual alchemist. Bristol’s own alchemist. A man of whom we know not very much, and much of what we do know may be nonsense. All kinds of tales get told about alchemists and, to make matters worse, he was involved in a number of legal disputes in which it suited both him and his enemies to tell a lot of fibs.
In 1466, his father Walter Norton left most of his lands in Worcestershire and Bristol to a son named Thomas, possibly the product of a later marriage. This meant that our Thomas was very cross, and had to seek a career, hence the alchemy. He spent the 1470s on the fringe of the court of King Edward IV, who was interested in alchemy, but Norton probably wasn’t as important as he liked to pretend he was. He ended up in a ferocious dispute with Bristol’s council over some land he claimed that the king had given him. He was also sheriff of Gloucestershire for a year and was employed by the crown to seize the property of one John Stacy, who was accused to practising witchcraft against the king.
In 1479 he charged the mayor of Bristol with treason. The mayor and council fought back, claiming Norton had swindled his younger brother Thomas out of his estates, and had imprisoned him, driving him from country and causing him to drown on the sea voyage as a result. Historians have indeed found records stating that Norton later owned the lands which had originally been left to his brother.
Norton was also said to be a drunkard who never went to church. The dispute reached such a pitch that the King personally intervened – on the council’s side, telling Norton to shut up or else.
Norton’s footnote in wider history is as author of a book called ‘The Ordinal of Alchemy’, a handbook for alchemists written in verse, and full of deliberately obscure references and allusions. This was either a) because he didn’t know jack about turning base metal into gold or b) because – as he put it – alchemy wasn’t for any old pleb; you had to be morally perfect and divinely approved to access the “subtile science of holi Alchymye”. The book was still in use over a century later, and like many alchemists, Norton takes a small amount of credit for inventing chemistry by saying that you should experiment, and observe your results. As he put it: “With due proofe and with discreet assaye, wise men may learn new things every day.”
And so to the Norton yarn… He is supposed to have claimed to have discovered the elixir of life (of course) but that it was stolen from him by a woman. The great Victorian Bristol storyteller Joseph Leech, either riffing on some now-forgotten local legend, or maybe just making it all up, fleshed the tale out. The thief, said Leech, was no less than the wife of William Canynges, the fabulously wealthy merchant. Canynges, good medieval gentleman that he was, took his obligations to church and society seriously, and gave away huge amounts of money to St Mary Redcliffe church.
Mrs Canynges, now that she had the elixir of life, was not at all pleased about this. If she was going to live for ever, she would need all her husband’s money to keep her in suitable style.
Anyway, she and Canynges had a screaming, shouting, crockery-throwing row about this, and she got so worked up that she had a seizure.
Don’t panic, she thinks, just go and get the vial of elixir nabbed from Master Norton …
Only when she gets there, the vial is empty. The elixir has been completely dried up by no less than the Virgin Mary herself, who doesn’t want this greedy baggage taking the money that is meant for the church dedicated to her.
And so perished the wretched Mistress Canynges.
Thomas Norton died on November 30 1513, and in honour of this occasion I think we should do something to commemorate him. Probably too late to organise a major Festival of Alchemy now, but perhaps people could meet up on the site of his house – it was in what’s now castle park, next to the water by the ruined St Peter’s Church – and maybe try and turn some base metal into gold, or perhaps concoct some elixirs.
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The Bells, The Bells…
Cah. Start out with the best of intentions and then you get sidetracked. Not looked at or done anything with the blog since the summer.
So you come back and see that 19 comments are pending and waiting approval. And they all say how marvellous this blog is and how much they love what “you guys are doing.” Which is nice, even if it is all spam.
I’ve been very busy with a lot of things, Bristol in World War One included. So here’s a story.
One of the things which unarguably put Britain on the side of the Good Guys in WW1 was that it started out trying not to conscript people into the army. It was also the only major combatant to permit conscientious objection to war service, difficult though this process was.
By 1918, though, we had full-blown conscription, and any man of military age who wasn’t in uniform because he was performing some other vital work needed an exemption certificate.
In March 1918 a man was called before the Bristol military service tribunal. He was the male half of a husband-and-wide acrobatic act called The Bells, who were then performing at the Hippodrome.
The man’s solicitor, Mr F.E. Metcalfe, explained that the act had previously been two men, but when one of them was called up to the army, the man had trained his wife to take the man’s place in less than eight weeks.
Naturally, the tribunal wanted to know why on earth a man who was performing as a music hall acrobat wasn’t in the army.
Mr Metcalfe said that his client had made four attempts to join the forces but had been rejected as Grade III – unfit. In desperation, the man, who spoke fluent French and German from his time as a travelling performer, had offered to join the Army as a physical training instructor. This offer, too, had been turned down.
Mr Metcalfe explained that although his client was an accomplished stage gymnast, the Army did not want him because: “He has a fractured skull, due to falling 75 feet whilst performing, a fractured ankle, a loose cartilage, flat feet, and is blind in one eye.
“His father was a gymnast, his grandfather was a gymnast and his brother, who was one of the few cases of a man continuing alive with a broken neck, was also a gymnast.”
The tribunal granted six months’ temporary exemption.
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2014 & All That
Next year sees the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War.
The chatter over how this should be marked has already started. There’s no point putting any links in here. You can Google the debate easily enuff, with government ministers, historians and assorted pundits all offering various views. These basically split into
a) It was horrible and futile,
b) It was horrible but necessary, or,
c) This fence is hurting my bum.
The problem with the horrible and futile school is that it’s a bit old hat, and that the ‘Oh What a Lovely War!’ or ‘Blackadder Goes Fourth’ viewpoint oversimplifies things. The generals weren’t all idiots, and by 1918 Britain had produced a thoroughly professional sort-of-citizen army which comprehensively defeated the Germans in the field.
The other issue with horrible and futile is that the knee-jerk leftist take on it is that the vile upper classes squandered the lives of the working classes. Not really; the most dangerous thing to be in the trenches was a public school educated junior officer.
The horrible but necessary school has been winning ground recently by pointing out that Germany was run by militaristic semi-autocratic regime which was the aggressor. It therefore had to be stopped by more decent and democratic powers.
Uh-huh. This begs the question of how much better Britain was (let’s leave France and America and Tsarist or Communist Russia out of it for now). Britain at this time was a highly stratified society run by a Conservative/Liberal oligarchy which in 1914 was in dread fear of socialism and trade unions, and which, by the way, didn’t think much to the idea of giving women the vote either. As for German aggression, well they thought (with good reason) that they were threatened by France and Russia and needed to strike first.
It all very well to take the view that we were better than the Germans, but if you actually read up on the rhetoric used by politicians and soldiers at the time, it is couched in terms of King and Empire, two things that very few Britons would be prepared to die for – and more significantly, kill for – nowadays.
So on the whole, me personally, while I can’t imagine a German victory being all that wonderful (though you can create counterfactuals in which it’s not that bad, and perhaps even prevents WW2), I’m mostly with the horrible and futile school. The more so since the war resolved nothing and was re-fought all over again in 1939-45, which really was horrible but necessary.
Mostly horrible and futile, I said … The one thing you can say is that the Great War brought about massive social change in Britain, and all of it for the better.
I’m currently working on a book about Bristol’s home front in WW1, which may not sound all that interesting but which actually turns out to be fascinating. Part of the problem we have with the Great War is that popular memory is almost exclusively bound up in mud, trenches, war poets and the tragedy of a generation of young men dying.
We tend to think very little about what happened at home, beyond perhaps some vague ideas that lots of women went to work in factories. The real story is far richer than that; this is a time of suffering and privation at home, but it is also a time of huge social change and of real advances in the conditions of working people in general and of women, too. On a day to day basis, though, there are also some fascinating stories, some of them awful, some of them rather funny. The middle class moral panics over the behaviour of the lower orders, for instance.
Moral panics because people are being paid better wages (and spending them on pianos, my dear!), because women have slightly more freedom, and with it other career options than just becoming servants. Returning servicemen knowing with utter certainty that newspapers tell lies. And coming back, in quite a lot of cases, actually, to eventually get decent housing. “Homes fit for heroes” was an empty promise for some, but it was fulfilled for many.
The War helped achieve real advances in most people’s lives, though again folk memory deceives us into believing that the 1920s and 30s were times of unalloyed deprivation for the working classes. They were in many places, and the 1926 General Strike was a genuinely revolutionary situation, but most people’s lives in most places most of the time were far better than they had been in a time of greater deference to one’s social betters.
(I’d also love to be able to stand up my completely unproven hypothesis that the cenotaph in Bristol’s city centre was sited there and not on College Green because the old establishment feared it would be a rallying point for trade unionists and socialists who had served in the war… War memorials don’t have to be conservative/establishment icons, you know,)
The Great War is part of the folklore of every family. Many of us still have diaries, letters, photos and medals from relatives who served. Some of us still have a bronze plaque awarded to the families of those who had lost their lives. Popularly known as the “dead man’s penny”. That’s the one for my great uncle, C/SM Patrick Byrne in the pic.
It’s more of a part of our lives than many of us realise. Perhaps 2014 will see it taking its proper place in popular memory, alongside WW2, of which we take rather more positive view.
Horrible and futile it was, but that should not diminish or demean those who lived and died in it. We should honour their memory, and make a decent account of what they went through, and of what they achieved.
In Bristol, much of the 2014 commemorations are being co-ordinated by Bristol 2014. You might want to look at their Facebook Group, which has lots of links to the debate, and loads of interesting little local stories.
M Shed are also looking for family mementoes for their big 2014 exhibition. See http://mshed.org/about-us/news/what-did-your-relatives-do-during-the-first-world-war/
Plenty more of this in the months to come. BTW, I just this morning put up a wee pic of the YMCA “Dug Out” for servicemen in Bristol in 1917 on the FB group. If anyone out there has any idea of the relationship between this place and the famous local nightclub of later decades, I’d love to know. Cheers.
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I officially become editor of the Post’s Bristol Times this week, following the retirement of Gerry Brooke. He’ll be a hard act to follow as he really does know everything about Bristol’s history.
BT is the Bristol Post’s local history/nostalgia section and it’s in the middle of the paper every Tuesday.
This week’s includes articles by me on the day Prince Albert (not the male jewellery) came to launch the ss Great Britain, the new edition of the Dictionary of Bristle and the rise and fall of Inmos, a local firm set up by the government (a company set up by the British government!) in the 1970s, and which played a small but influential part in what people used to call the microchip revolution.
I’m chuffed to bits to be taking this on for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, it’s a great excuse to continue putting off the novel I’ve been successfully putting off for ten years now.
It also means I get my grubby paws on the archives of one of the country’s leading regional newspapers; it’s probably too much to hope that we’ll find a photo of the Lord Mayor greeting the deputation from the Hitler Youth that visited in the 1930s with a Nazi salute, but there’s all sorts of other cool stuff down there. Whatever does turn up will be in the Post every Tuesday, so I’d place a regular order with your newsagent now if I were you.
And then there are the readers. BT gets loads of feedback from Bristolians of all ages; memories, stories, yarns and family legends. Not to mention the expert input from individuals with the most encyclopaedic knowledge of recondite subjects (especially anything with engines).
So that’s me. In local history spod heaven. If you have any ideas, requests, suggestions, information etc. you know where I am.
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Eugene Byrne 