Peter Walters - GWB Coventry: Remembering 1914-18

In memory of my grandfathers

C.J. Walters (11th Hussars)

J.L. Sheldon (Essex Regiment)

Soldiers of the Great War

I am hugely indebted to the following people, without whose knowledge, support and enthusiasm the story of Coventry in the First World War would have remained a closed book to me: Jim Brown, Carolyn Ewing, David Fry, Chris Holland, Huw Jones, Damien Kimberley, Mark Radford, Keith Railton, Terry Reeves, Martin Roberts and Brian Stote.

Church folk on the march while in Sarajevo an assassins bullet triggers the First World War.

COURTESY OF DAVID FRY

On a summer Sunday morning, bathed in brilliant sunshine, the parishioners and clergy of St John the Baptist, one of Coventrys oldest churches, marched through the streets in joyful procession to mark their annual saints day.

More than a thousand miles away, at the other end of Europe, an assassins bullet was ending the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg empire. The date was 28 June 1914. Within six weeks Europe was at war, with millions of men mobilised and marching towards a conflagration the scale of which the world had never before seen.

Yet that summer in Coventry thoughts were far from fatal alliances and the collapse of empires. It was a city of the young, with more people under the age of 20 than over it, and they were intent on having a good time.

High wages in a city that had pioneered both the bicycle and the automobile industries had fuelled a boom in shops and places of entertainment. Earnings, wrote one disapproving Coventry clergyman, were being too largely expended on crude and trivial satisfaction.

In this heady boom town, local concerns focused on congestion too many motor cars for the narrow medieval thoroughfares of the old city and not enough homes for a population that had exploded since the turn of the century, mostly with young, able-bodied immigrants drawn from bigger cities like London and Birmingham in search of that good life.

Radford Garden Suburb, Coventrys first serious response to crippling housing shortages, had been officially launched in June 1914, with plans for 200 homes on a 14-acre site. In late July councillors nodded through a 300,000 road-building project for two new city centre streets, Corporation Street and Trinity Street, that would ease traffic congestion and sweep away clusters of medieval buildings described by one prominent member of the council as germ breeding houses.

If there was a niggling worry amongst those who were thinking beyond their next payday it concerned Ireland, where on 23 July thousands of hard-line Protestants had flocked to take up arms in defiance of the governments proposals for Home Rule.

The fashionable girl about town in Coventry.

COURTESY OF MARK RADFORD

The Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, delivered on the same day, caused barely a ripple, even to a British Government still confident that it could stay out of any conflicts on the Continent. As late as 2 August, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was assuring the German ambassador in London that Britain would not intervene, as long as his country didnt invade Belgium.

By that Sunday night more than 25,000 of Coventrys residents, revelling in the new-found excitement of proper industrial holidays, had already left by train for what promised to be a dazzling Bank Holiday weekend at their favourite seaside resorts in North Wales and Lancashire.

The city they would return to days later, a little punch-drunk at the speed of events, was destined to become one of the powerhouses of Britains war effort, a munitions centre labelled the busiest town in Britain and compared by The Times newspaper in 1916 to the US industrial dynamo that was Detroit.

Not for the first, nor the last time in its history, Coventry was on the brink of seismic change.

Peter Walters, 2016

To more feverish imaginations it might have seemed like a destructive omen of the conflict to come.

As Coventry journalist Henry Wilkins and his wife knelt in prayer during the Sunday service at Holy Trinity, the peace of the fourteenth-century church was shattered by two loud crashes as heavy stonework detached itself from the south face of the tower and fell on to the roof of the organ loft.

Nobody was hurt and in his Journal of the European War , Wilkins recorded the incident, on the morning of 2 August 1914, without comment. Yet by then other prominent Coventry citizens already knew that the die for war had been cast.

The day before, Siegfried Bettmann, the citys German-born Mayor and the founder of the Triumph Company, had called an urgent meeting of Coventrys biggest manufacturers at the request of representatives from the War Office.

As they discussed motorcycle production, Bettmann asked a senior official where all the machines they required were to be used. He was told Belgium and at that moment, he wrote later, he knew that the fate of Europe was sealed.

The first wild rumour of the war swept through Coventry during the night of 4 August, as Britains ultimatum to Germany ran out. The German Army, it reported, had landed at Flamborough Head in Yorkshire and was marching south towards the Midlands. Distant rumbles and flashes of light in the sky were evidence that a major defensive battle was taking place somewhere to the north-east.

It turned out to be simply a distant thunderstorm but the sinister interpretation placed upon it was evidence of the jumpiness infecting many now that conflict was a reality.

Within four days, Ministers had rushed through the Aliens Restriction Act, which required people of German extraction to register with the police. In Coventry that initially meant around seventy individuals, mostly shopkeepers and hotel staff.

In theory at least, this new regulation also applied to Coventrys Mayor and the Triumph Company founder, the Nuremberg-born Siegfried Bettmann. He had become a naturalised Briton in the 1890s, taken an English wife and was, in his own words, proud to be an Englishman, not only by law, but by marriage and sentiment.

This most patriotic and loyal of Coventrians was suddenly a target for smear and innuendo. A group of loyal citizens had petitioned the Home Office for his instant removal as Mayor, a request that was turned down, but the Foreign Office did decree that he should not serve a second year as Mayor, as custom dictated, when his first term ended in November.

Nationally, anti-German sentiment, stoked up by rabble-rousers like the swindler Horatio Bottomley and his John Bull weekly magazine, quickly caught Bettmann in its snare.