Stuart Hylton - Reporting the Great War

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First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Stuart Hylton 2014

ISBN 978 1 78346 357 2
eISBN 9781473838765

The right of Stuart Hylton to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Printed and bound in England by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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Contents

PREFACE

When I wrote the Second World War counterpart to this book ( Reporting the Blitz ) I felt it necessary to give a word or two of explanation, as to why a further book was needed to complement the wealth of excellent written material on that part of our history. The same no doubt applies to this book.

Both books use local newspaper reports of the period as a major source. Whatever the shortcomings of provincial journalism (and there are plenty of those), the reports do help to capture a flavour of what it was like to live in that community through the war. A historian, applying their forensic analysis and the wisdom of hindsight, may give a more accurate account of events, but they do not necessarily capture a sense of how it felt to be there. Even the shortcomings such as the omissions or distortions required by censorship or propaganda, or their inability to predict the future are valuable in enabling us to share the immediate experience of the war to which the civilian population was exposed. We see, for example:

• how the authorities used patriotic fervour and hatred of the enemy as an aid to getting the whole of the population engaged in the war effort. Not for nothing was this thought of as the first total war;
• how the submarine blockade and the terror of bombing from the air brought the civilian population into the front line as never before;
• how other forms of new technology impinged on the war from the internal combustion engine to the new horrors of warfare, like poison gas;
• how the business community tried to maintain business as usual, or better still to seek out the new opportunities for commerce that the war offered;
• how the authorities sought to control and use the new media mass newspapers, cinema, wireless telegraphy to ensure that it was their version of the war that got relayed to a better educated and more enfranchised public. This was also the first real propaganda war;
• how State control extended further and further into everybodys lives, with conscription, the blackout and rationing, along with the direction of labour, all anticipating the conditions of life more usually associated with the Second World War;
• how the war impacted on the role of women in society and, in particular, the labour market;
• how the idea of conscientious objection emerged alongside that of conscription, as a factor to be taken account of in recruitment;
• how the people tried to retain a sense of normality in what were extraordinary times, and life went on, in all its eccentric variety, despite everything.

As with the last book, I must disavow any claim for it being comprehensive or authoritatively accurate. What we are looking at is the first draft of history and, like all first drafts, it is prone to error. I have already referred to the dark hands of censorship and propaganda that coloured reports, and things that seem important to us now may have seemed much less so then (and vice versa). But each of these shortcomings is, in its own way, illuminating and I hope that this book will complement the wealth of other material now available about the home front in 191418. Think of it not so much as a history of the home front as an anthology of how it felt to be there.

I have to thank the many local history librarians and archivists up and down the country, who have without exception been most helpful to me in assembling the book. The photographs in it come either from the Imperial War Museum (prefixed IWM) or Reading Borough Councils Library Service, and the other illustrative material is taken from contemporary newspapers.

Chapter 1

A Quarrel in a Far-away Country

Few of us will forget the last week in the month (of July 1914), a week of calm and comfort when, under skies of Syrian blue, cloudless and serene, the hours passed dreamily away, and all things seemed to conspire to sooth us with the sense of security. It was true that some fears had arisen in the preceding weeks since a great tragedy had taken place at Serajevo; it was true that apprehensions had been aroused, but they had been lulled again; it was true that political seers had discerned ominous signs on the eastern horizon, but few could believe they were real portents of evil. Peace had so long prevailed, friendship had been so assiduously cultivated; goodwill to mankind had become so pure an aspiration, that the horror of a universal war seemed incredible and impossible .

Manchester City News
31 July 1915

On the 28 June 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by a 19-year-old Bosnian nationalist called Gavrilo Princip. Initially, the assassination passed virtually unnoticed in Britain. It seemed, as Neville Chamberlain was later to put it in a different context, like a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing. To judge from the report of the event in one local paper, it should be seen primarily as a family tragedy for some distant set of foreign Royalty:

The murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, adds yet another to the family afflictions and sorrows that have befallen the Royal House of Austria. No monarch has suffered so many tragic bereavements as the aged Emperor Franz Joseph.

Franz Joseph had had his brother executed in Mexico, his wife assassinated and his only son was either murdered or committed suicide. Even more clear was that no one could foresee the enormous consequences of this deed. In their estimation, it should not lead even to a local war:

although Magyars, Czechs, Germans, Poles, Slavs and Russians may each have their grievances, they have none of them anything to gain from disruption, and if Hungary separated from Austria she would straitway [ sic ] be at the mercy of Russia.

When Prime Minister Asquith addressed the House of Commons about the assassination, he called it one of those incredible crimes that almost make us despair of the progress of mankind and, according to one newspaper report, the tribute paid to the aged Francis Joseph was one of the noblest that has ever been delivered in Westminster and was worthy of the Prime Minister of a great and friendly nation. Asquith praised the Emperor as the imperturbably sagacious and heroic head of a mighty state and described the Austro-Hungarian Empire as rich in splendid traditions and associated in some of the most moving and treasured chapters of our common history. Within weeks we would be at war with that Emperor, and that Empire.

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