Rescued from oblivion
First-person testimony of life on the home front has been largely ignored by historians ... There are very few left who still have memories of these events ... the oldest men and women in Britain.
So writes film-maker Steve Humphries in this edited version of the introduction to All Quiet on the Home Front: An oral history of life in Britain during the First World War. He describes in detail what we will lose if we do not listen to these soon-to-be-silenced voices.
Albert's story
He is weeping uncontrollably. This is a story he has never told before.
It has long been buried in his memory, but he has been unable to speak
about it, even to his wife or his children. It happened 85 years ago.
It was November 1917 in the small mining village of Usworth in County Durham. Albert, the frail 94-year-old sitting in front of us, was then nine. He was one of the Walmsleys of 20 Richardson Terrace. Like most other boys in the village, he was the son of a miner. It was a very large family. There were 13 children, but some didn't survive for long. Today Albert can't even remember the names of all his brothers and sisters. 'Let's count them again. There was Jim, Eva, Bill, Bob, Peter, Ellen, Jack, Lizzie and me. How many's that – 11?'
His elder brother Bob had joined the North Staffordshire Regiment, but had been gassed and was now living at home again.
What me mam had to do was get a miner's stocking and fill it full of onion, like toasted onion, boiled onion, fill it full and tie it round his neck. It done him the world of good, too.
But it isn't the sight of his disabled brother that is upsetting Albert. It is the memory that, in the winter of 1917, his family had virtually no food to eat.
We were getting short of bread, short of supplies. Mother, she had a basin and she'd get a slice of bread. She'd tear it up into little pieces and put hot milk on and give it to us.
The image of his mother struggling to feed them all is too much to bear. Albert starts to cry again. Then it emerges that their family were actually better off than some in the village who were on the verge of starvation.
There was some dying from what they called consumption. Oh, it was a terrible thing. It took months before they died. It would bring the tears to anyone's eyes. There were two of my pals, Jimmy Anderson and Jackie Hoff, they lived in Waterloo, just a bit out from Usworth. Their constitution got that low. They had galloping consumption, because they were hungry. There was nothing inside their body to fight. Doctors couldn't help. Their mam gave them sweet water thinking it was medicine. They just more or less lay there and died. You know, it was pitiful. Mind you, there wasn't just one or two. There was quite a lot died during that time.
The children's strike
There was nothing unique about the malnutrition and poverty in Usworth.
In the winter of 1917, there was a food crisis throughout the nation,
a shortage of essential supplies that inevitably hit the poorest families
and communities hardest. There was still no system of rationing in place.
Food prices were spiralling. Those who had to survive on low wages or
war widows' pensions, those with no guarantee of full-time work and those
with big families to feed simply couldn't afford to pay. For them, the
cupboard was bare.
What was very unusual, though, was that, along with the neighbouring village of Washington, the children of Usworth came out on strike. They refused to go to school until they had been fed. They demanded that they be given free school meals. The strike, which began on 18 November, was initiated by the fathers, most of them hardened trade union men who knew that to get anything they had to resort to strike tactics. Even in wartime.
But what is perhaps most extraordinary is that the story of the children's strike has been long forgotten in this part of Durham. With very few children of Durham mining families surviving into their 90s, there is no living memory of the event in the area. When we approached local historians, museum curators and newspaper editors, they were puzzled. They had never heard of it. Some thought it was a fantasy on our part until we showed them the Sunderland Daily Echo for that month. It provides a detailed report of the strike and the near-starvation of local families.
At a meeting held in the Alexandria Theatre, New Washington yesterday and attended by over 1,600 miners employed in the Usworth and Washington district, it was decided to declare a school strike as a protest against the action of the local authorities in not putting into operation the Feeding of the Schoolchildren Act, owing to the poverty existing in the area ... Our representative made careful and thorough inquiries and the facts brought to light lead him to the conclusion that, unfortunately, the miners' statement that many families are practically starving is not exaggerated ... For four-to-six months, there has been very little work in the collieries in and around Usworth and Washington. The result has been that, food prices being so high, many men have been unable to buy sufficient of the necessities of life to feed themselves, their wives and their families.
The last survivor
Albert is probably the last survivor of that strike. Once they were
convinced of the truth of the story, some helpful people in Usworth and
Washington helped us track him down. He had moved from Durham in the 1930s
to work in Corby as a policeman. He was now living in North London with
his daughter.
This was perhaps why Albert was so emotional when he told the story. He had lost touch with the community where he had grown up. Since he had left, he had never had the chance to talk about how tough it had been there during the First World War and the terrible hardships they all had to endure. In any case, it was not the done thing then to dredge up and discuss painful memories from the past. After the victory celebrations of 1918, this – along with countless other upsetting incidents from the First World War – had been forgotten. Forgetting was generally thought the best way of coming to terms with the suffering that the war had brought.
But now it was all flooding back. Albert recalled how the miners themselves couldn't strike. Any reduction of the meagre weekly wage earned by the Usworth and Washington miners would have spelt disaster for their families. Their only bargaining power lay in the children. They decided on a collision course with the local authorities.
The children were getting that hungry they used to cry. Well, it was no good going to school to cry. That's the reason the parents had to take charge. The miners used to have these meetings where one of them would go around with a big rattle like they used to have at football matches. He went round all the streets and told the miners there was a meeting at seven o'clock about the children being starved.
The place was packed. We started digging our heels in, and they said, 'The children are not going to school. If you're not going to give us any aid, that's it.' Well, it was up to the council to decide what they were going to do.
So we all came out on strike. The school was empty. There was no point in the school board man doing anything about that. Our parents were behind us. And after a few days, they gave in. Every dinner time from then on, we had a free dinner bun and soup with good stuff like carrots and turnips and leek in it – oh, it was fine soup. We weren't so hungry then, so that was a real victory.
The flow of the war
This wartime school strike captures the essence of what All Quiet
on the Home Front: An oral history of life in Britain during the First
World War is all about. In it, we have tried to chronicle little-known
events, experiences and emotions from life on the home front during the
First World War. It is a collection of deeply personal testimony, most
of it previously unrecorded or unpublished, woven together in the broader
narrative of the nation at war. Wherever possible, we have used living
memory from the last survivors from those four years of patriotism, struggle,
hardship, terror, loss and – finally – bittersweet victory.
Our aim was to rescue their stories from oblivion and reinstate them as
part of our history.
Our main narrative follows the chronological flow of the war and how it shaped the lives of those on the home front. There were few who were not touched by it. We begin with the surge of patriotism that greeted the declaration of war in August 1914. The nation was in a buoyant mood. While the men volunteered to take up arms, the women enthusiastically volunteered to take their places in the factories. There was full employment, rising wages and every confidence that the war would be over by Christmas.
This optimism was short lived. Christmas 1914, in fact, brought a surprise attack by the Kaiser's navy on east coast towns. There were fears of an imminent invasion. As the nation desperately geared up for war production, there were new problems and dangers. Among them was the first-ever air attack on Britain. An air defence system was hastily put in place. There was patriotic outrage that innocent children and women should be victims of war, and a strengthened resolve to resist the 'evil Hun'.
Much more testing were the mounting casualties at the battle front. By 1916, following the Battle of the Somme, there were already half a million injured or dead. The maiming of fathers and sons, neighbours and friends was starting to undermine morale.
The year 1917 was even worse. A German submarine blockade prevented shipping from bringing essential food and materials into Britain, which, by late 1917, had led to serious food shortages. These, in turn, aggravated labour problems, and there was a spate of strikes involving workers in such key war industries as mining and engineering. They wanted more money to pay for food, the price of which was soaring. In London and the south-east, matters were made worse by more air raids from new Gotha bombers.
Some in the government feared that morale was so low that the country was close to collapse. A few believed there might be a revolution similar to that which had ousted the monarchy and the old regime in Russia.
In 1918, the casualties at the front mounted even more. War fatigue was becoming a serious problem in the factories. It was only in the spring that food rationing was finally introduced. But Germany was weakening, too, and soon it was all over. The victory celebrations in November 1918 masked just how desperate it had been. Some had been close to breaking point. However, this was a subject so taboo that it was never discussed again.
Voices of the veterans
The germ of our book lay in the fact that there has been no wide-ranging
or comprehensive oral history of Britain during the First World War. In
the last 10 or 15 years, we have become accustomed to hearing the voices
of Great War veterans. The terrifying world of the trenches that they
survived – the mud, the blood, the barbed wire and the sound of slaughter
– are now all unforgettably imprinted in our minds, and rightly so.
For a long time, however, they had not spoken about their experiences. The war was so catastrophic and traumatic in its waste of human life, it was a taboo subject. Around a million servicemen from Britain and her Commonwealth and Empire died. Two million more were injured or maimed. This was the first truly modern, industrial war.
However, beginning with the celebrated BBC Great War series in the mid-1960s, the stories of the survivors – courageous, harrowing, sometimes humorous, but always dignified – slowly became part of the fabric of radio and television programmes and books about the war. We have made our own modest contribution to the oral history of life in the trenches with – among others – our co-authored book Veterans: The last survivors of the Great War and Richard Van Emden's The Trench.
A dwindling community
This made us increasingly aware that first-person testimony of life
on the home front in World War I has been largely ignored by historians.
Very soon it will be beyond living memory. Just as there are now only
a handful of survivors from the front line, so too the survivors from
the home front are a rapidly dwindling community.
Most of them – now in their 90s or early 100s – were children or teenagers at the time. Those who were young mothers or young men who had avoided conscription or soldiers forced to return home disabled are very few and far between. There are even fewer left who still have memories of these events. They are now in their mid- to late-100s and are the oldest men and women in Britain.
We reckoned that virtually none of these great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers would be leaving diaries, memoirs or poems. With money so tight during the war, it was unlikely that they would even have photographs of themselves and their families. All they had was their memories.
In the ageing process, the long-term memory is one of the last things to go. We have often been amazed at the detail of recall stretching back over almost 100 years. The detail is at its sharpest in memories of childhood and youth, when everything was surprising and new. This was precisely the historical moment we were searching for.
Questions
There were so many questions we wanted to ask these last survivors
who had kept the home fires burning. In particular, we wanted to ask about
some of the sacrifices the war had entailed for them and their families.
The war had started with patriotic fervour in the heady days of 1914 and early 1915, when 2.5 million men volunteered to serve king and country. But all this was to change when it ground on much longer than expected.
This was the first total war, and many citizens found themselves in the front line – for instance, as victims of the first bombing of Britain from the air. In this new kind of warfare, civilians had a vital role to play in providing the weapons with which it was fought. There would be hard, relentless work in the munitions factories. There would be food shortages to bear, made worse by the sinking of British merchant ships.
Most difficult and upsetting of all, there would be the mass slaughter of so many young men. Nobody expected that the sons, fathers, uncles, neighbours and workmates who marched off so proudly in the early years of the war would never come home again. Or that they would come home shell-shocked, blind or otherwise badly disabled.
We wanted to find out how the loved ones left at home coped. We wanted to find out how far morale held up during the war. We wanted to see if there were any real low points, moments when it was difficult to go on working in the factories and putting on a brave face to family and friends.
Fundamentally, we wanted to find out how Britain as a nation kept going through four long years of work, worry, privation and loss. How much of the detail and drama of the memories remained fresh? Were the emotions that must have been experienced so deeply still there to be recovered?
Campaign to find and record
The challenge was to find the last survivors from the home front.
We first began work tracking them down in about 1996. It was easier then
to find men and women born in the 1890s who had a clear memory of the
war in Britain, and we recorded or filmed interviews with a number of
them.
One remarkable character we discovered was Florence Billington from Coventry. Born in 1898, she was one of the most vivacious and youthful women you could hope to meet, laughing, singing and with perfect recall of every twist and turn that fate had dealt her during the war. She had suffered more than most. She had lost her sweetheart Ted Feltham in 1915 in the 2nd Battle of Ypres. Shortly afterwards she had married Syd, who worked on a hospital ship, and had struggled to bring up their young child in the latter years of the war.
If you'd seen me then, you wouldn't believe it. I've got a picture of me then in early 1918. I was like a skeleton. I lost so much weight. I must have gone down to five or six stone. It was the worry of it all. I'd lost Ted. Now I thought I was going to lose Syd on his ship. I looked like someone from Belsen.
Those were the most difficult years of what would be a full and happy life. Sadly, Florence died suddenly in August 1998, just before reaching the 100th birthday she had been so looking forward to.
When very old men and women are talking about their childhood and youth, they can seem so young that it is easy to forget how close to death they are. It was with this thought in our minds that, in the summer of 2001, we renewed our efforts and began a much more thorough campaign to find and record home front stories.
Scattergun approach
However, the people whom we had hoped would tell these stories proved
very elusive. Surprisingly, they were even more difficult to find than
the last war veterans we had tracked down a few years earlier. The most
active veterans were relatively easy to find through organisations such
as the ever-helpful Western Front Association and the World War I Veterans
Association. Then, a few years ago, there was the list of British soldiers
belatedly awarded the Légion d'honneur by the French government.
There is no such list of those who served on the home front. There are a few organisations such as the Women's Land Army, but they told us that the last woman known to have answered the call to follow the plough between 1914 and 1918 had died two years before.
We resorted to a scattergun approach. We put letters in almost every local newspaper in Britain. We contacted many old people's homes. We made appeals on local radio. We spoke to libraries and museums. We contacted the Oral History Society, which has collected and recorded memories for the last 30 years. We persuaded others working in the field to give us names and addresses. In all, we discovered about 500 new people to talk to.
Not all of them were interviewed. We selectively interviewed about 100 men and women on the basis of the vividness of their memories and the range of stories they had to tell. Our interviewees were drawn from all social classes, though we made a special effort to document the stories of those who came from a poor working-class background.
Between 1914 and 1918, Britain was a deeply unequal, class-ridden society, rooted in manufacturing industry, in which the majority of the population was working class. These were the people who usually had to endure the toughest conditions – hunger, a poor diet, bad housing, disease and early death. Children from this kind of background were the least likely to live into their 90s and beyond. They were also the least likely to leave any written record of their lives.
A race against time
Our interviewees were all in their 90s and 100s. Over half of them
were still living independently or with someone in their family. Practically
all seemed remarkably youthful for their age and led active lives. The
oldest was a 108-year-old from the Scottish lowlands, who during the war
was the wife of an agricultural labourer. The youngest was 92: Gwen Herford
from South Wales, the daughter of a coal miner who went on strike in 1917.
As soon as we discovered somebody who seemed interesting, we interviewed
him or her as soon as possible.
It really was a race against time. In the spring of 2002, we discovered Madge Rutherford, a sprightly 97-year-old from Sittingbourne in Kent. Her son rang us after seeing our letter asking for memories of bombings in the south-east. She had a photographic recall of a serious air raid on central London in 1917. As a 12-year-old girl, she had been naturally terrified. Yet, curiously, at the time she never spoke to anyone about her fears – or even about the bombing. She told us over the phone:
There were five bombs dropped. Two of them dropped either side of the passageway. They caught Mr Gower [who had effectively brought her up] and Mr Walker [a neighbour]. It killed them both. Mr Walker was cut to pieces. He was cut in three pieces, which was dreadful to think of. Mr Gower just got up, staggered to the flat and called his wife's name. Then he fell down and was dead.
My brother grabbed my hand and pulled me, and we were running full strength into the station, Vauxhall station. It was like slow motion. It was the most horrifying thing. People were crying and screaming and praying. Some people had lost each other and were trying to shout for each other. I thought it was silly to keep on like that. What was the good of crying and praying? I'd never done things like that. I was a quiet child. I kept it all to myself. I did do at the time and kept it to myself afterwards.
But now Madge really did want to talk about it. There would be no sparing of gory details. We filmed her shortly afterwards when she gave us an even more graphic description of what happened during the raid. The first time we had spoken to her, she had said, 'You'd better be quick. I won't be here for long.' After unburdening herself of this story, which she had held on to all her life, she died a few weeks later. Possibly there was a link between the two. We will never know.
Small sacrifice
There is a sense in which the suffering endured on the home front
has never been talked about openly. The oldest generation was not brought
up to discuss emotional things. Their way was the stiff upper lip, the
stoic silence. At the time, there was little reason to stir up these emotions.
They were uncomfortable, painful, ambivalent and difficult to deal with.
In a typically British way, they lay dormant for many years, untouched
and unspoken. It was hoped that, in time, they would just go away.
What made it even more difficult to talk was the greater suffering at the battle front. With so much courage and so many dying, it seemed self-indulgent to make a fuss about the hardships at home. This attitude has remained deeply embedded up to the present day. The recent attention given to Western Front veterans has reinforced it even more. The soldiers, or so it seems, are the heroes, the men who went to hell and back, yet still managed to rebuild their lives afterwards – and live to a ripe old age.
This was one of the reasons why it was so difficult to find people who would talk. They felt they had nothing to tell. They were the lucky ones. The ones who had been spared the bullets and the bombs in the trenches. Why should they seek attention, when theirs had been a very modest role, a small sacrifice?
Collective silence
This collective silence became clearer when we began approaching some
of them – they didn't want to make a fuss. After we made a 200-mile
journey to visit a 95-year-old lady who had suffered extreme poverty in
London and had been lucky to escape death in a Zeppelin raid, she changed
her mind.
She said that she didn't want to talk about it: 'That's what you had to do in those days. It was different. Nobody complained then, and I don't want to now.' She wanted us to know that she was not in any way damaged or traumatised or embittered.
There was some truth in this. But there was also another truth. The hurt and the pain and the repressed emotion of a nation that had lost three quarters of a million of its young men hadn't gone away. It was still there, waiting to be put into words. And when we asked the questions, many very elderly men and women found those words. Their stories flowed, often with eloquence and poetry. Secret memories emerged, some having been stored for as long as 90 years.
No emotional vocabulary
Some of the most vivid and unforgettable stories came from those who
had been young children at the time. Several times we heard how fathers
dealt with the death of their sons. Or, rather, how they could not deal
with it at all. With no emotional vocabulary to cope with such a family
catastrophe, they tried to repress all feeling.
In 1915, eight-year-old Len Whitehead was at home with his mother when they heard the news that his older brother George, who had recently joined the 9th Battalion of the Essex Regiment, had been killed in action. Len had the unenviable task of breaking the news to his father, a farm worker.
My father had been ploughing in a field near to the farmhouse. I waited for him to finish a bout with his plough and two horses. 'George has been killed,' I told him. He didn't answer but left his two horses all steaming in the late October weather and we walked back in silence to the house.
Mother was unwell in bed. When we got to the house, he went to the bottom of the stairs and called up, 'That's all right, ain't it?' He made no attempt to go up and comfort my mother. He went straight into the kitchen, sat in his wooden chair, put his arms on the table and his head on his arms for a while. Wept, I think. Then he went back to his ploughing.
It is clear that many children had not been able to talk at the time about events and experiences that had a profound effect on them. Perhaps this is not surprising in a society where children's emotions were quashed and adult authority was fiercely enforced in many homes. Nevertheless it does seem remarkable that some children and teenagers who had narrowly escaped death in bombing raids and had seen the horrific aftermath didn't look for some reassurance or support from their parents or teachers.
In this, Frieda Sawden, now 104, was fairly typical. One morning in 1915, on her way to school in Hull, she walked down a street strewn with dead bodies and even a severed head. There had been a Zeppelin raid the night before. Yet she never spoke to anyone about the dreadful sights she had seen.
I wasn't able to tell my teacher or anything. I just did my school work. And when I got home, I didn't say, 'Oh, mother, it was awful, it was terrible.' It might have relieved me if I did. I couldn't get a word out. It was not until some time later that I even mentioned it. People in shock are not able to talk at the time.
Self-revelations
Now, 85 years on, once they started talking, some of our interviewees
could not stop. Details of events and experiences came back. Even names,
times and dates, which had been thought forgotten long ago, were sometimes
recalled. For a few, there were moments of insight and self-revelation.
When the tape had stopped rolling, Madge Rutherford commented that the traumas of her childhood, all deeply repressed, had shaped her life: 'It probably stopped me from allowing myself feelings, from letting myself go. It was all too frightening.' Others commented on what a relief it had been finally to have spoken of memories that had haunted them for so long. Unable to express grief at the time, they held on to it for a lifetime.
We hope that, for some, there was a therapeutic value in our interviews. Many of those we spoke to shared with us very private and intimate experiences. There was always a slightly uneasy feeling leaving them so soon afterwards, to move on to the next interview in the next town, worrying that you may have done more damage than good. What is in no doubt is that they wanted to tell their stories. They wanted to put the record straight and to reflect honestly the experience of their generation.
Authentic voices
Their testimony provides a new perspective on some of the historical
orthodoxies contained in many previous works. One such orthodoxy is that
the First World War had unleashed a silent social revolution, promoting
greater state intervention that ultimately benefited both the working
class and women.
Much has been written about how the war helped women escape from the servitude of domesticity to take jobs as factory workers, tram drivers, nurses, forestry workers, bank clerks, bus conductors and so on. There is much truth in this. But what is often missed out – and which also comes through very clearly in our interviews – is the cost to women in terms of danger, physical exhaustion, illness, family tensions and grief.
We have tried to document the authentic voices of those who experienced life on the home front. It has been fascinating to meet and talk to so many of the nation's oldest citizens. They spoke with real emotional power and refreshing honesty. Their testimony shows the same candour and courage we have become accustomed to hearing from veterans of the Western Front.
We believe that their stories provide new insights into what it felt like to live through the war, a war that destroyed so many families on a hitherto unimaginable scale. They told us their most intimate secrets, their deepest fears, their hopes and dreams, how they tried to make sense of a conflict that shook the fabric of British society. We hope that we have done justice to their memories.
