Domestic Soldiers (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

THE LAST WAR

Helen Mitchell looked at the newborn baby boy cradled in her arms and sighed. Lonely and worn-out from the birth, the only thought she could muster was ‘future cannon fodder’. It was 5 November 1917, Guy Fawkes’ Day, but few celebrations were planned that autumn. More than three desperately sad years into the Great War, the nation, and indeed the entire Continent, languished in a deep state of weariness. That day,
The
Times
published a short article assuring the reading public that there was ‘cheerfulness at the front’, yet even this sentiment was shot through with a far from comforting reality.

The ‘cheerfulness’ of which the article spoke was of those who lay wounded and dying on the Western Front, not knowing when death would free them from their pain, but supremely confident in the ‘ultimate result’: British victory. The soldiers’ heroism was all the more poignant in the conditions they endured, the author explained, as Tommies fought in: ‘a country sodden with water where they frequently sank, not only up to the knees or the waist, but quite often up to the neck or beyond it’.
1
Though literally devoured
by the mud of Flanders, they could not be thwarted in their duty.

If Helen had opened
The
Times
, which she read often, on that day, she may have seen this article, and perhaps flipped through the pages until her eyes rested upon the paper’s daily requiem for the dead, the ‘Roll of Honour’. Day after day throughout the war, the paper published a list of casualties, highlighting the officers lost and naming the privates who had fallen; the vast blackand-white monotony of those lists still has the power to strike one with an intense feeling of loss. Living in Newcastle at the time, Helen may have anxiously searched the names of the Northumberland Fusiliers for anyone she or her husband knew. That day,
The
Times
reported twenty-six Northumberland privates who had died in recent action, a small paragraph in a sea of losses comprising over three tightly printed columns of dead.

She may have been relieved that only one officer had been lost from the Gloucester Regiment, the county where she had grown up. Or she may have wept bitterly if she recognized the name. Though she could not have known it then, the battle that had produced such devastating carnage over the past three months was to end the day after her son was born, when British and Canadian forces finally took the village of Passchendaele. The Third Baffle of Ypres, more commonly known as Passchendaele, sacrificed more than 310,000 British soldiers to the gods of a war many believed futile – and interminable.

When Helen Mitchell looked at her newborn son, all she saw were the lists and lists of dead and wounded. Between 1914 and 1918, hundreds of thousands of young men lost their lives, and many more were mutilated or psychologically scarred from the action
they had witnessed in the trenches during the Great War. The scale of everyday death and destruction in the trenches is unimaginable: on average, nearly 7,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded on any given day; the officers called it ‘wastage’.
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In the end, over 600,000 British soldiers were killed, and more than two million were wounded or missing.

It is little wonder, suffocating under the weight of a never-ending war, as soldiers were drowned and churned into the mud of the Western Front, that in her son Helen could only fathom ‘future cannon fodder’. Indeed, Mitchell’s vision in 1917 seemed eerily prophetic in 1940, when her son William, now twenty-three, was conscripted into the army. When war on the Continent emerged once again in 1939 for the next generation, those who had personally endured and remembered the random, senseless death of the trenches and the grief of the Rolls of Honour could only imagine the horror that waited.

Those who lived through the First World War continued to carry the scars of the conflict well beyond 1918. Though different in age during the war – some were married, and others young teenagers – every woman in this story felt the war deeply, and each was shaped by its long-term effects. For Helen, the trauma of the Great War was inbred in her infant, ultimately poisoning the bond between mother and son. But the scars were as varied as they were deep. Returning veterans came home to an uncertain economy and often found that their patriotic service had ruined them for the post-war world.

Edie Rutherford was a young teenager living in South Africa during the war, but her future husband, Sid, was
old enough to fight. He was injured on Vimy Ridge in 1917 and suffered shell shock. Afterwards, he was sent on military duty to Burma, where he endured bouts of malaria and dysentery that adversely affected his health for the rest of his life: his military service left him suffering severe shortness of breath, heart problems and psychological trauma.

Sid and Edie met in South Africa and were married soon afterwards in Australia, where they lived until moving to Sheffield in 1934. Australia did not experience the depth of economic troubles that Britain did during the 1920s, but Sid’s war disabilities nonetheless made it difficult for him to keep a job for any significant length of time. Reasoning that he could never reliably provide for a family, and feeling it unwise to bring up children they could not afford, Edie and Sid decided to forgo having children. Furthermore, Rutherford explained to M-O, her husband’s shell shock made it difficult to cope with the inevitable racket raised by children. As it was, Edie’s diary had to be suspended when he was home because she used a typewriter, and the noise was too much for him.

Like Sid and Edie, Irene Grant’s young family struggled to survive the severe economic downturns in 1921–2 and the more famous global depression of the early 1930s. The mounting casualties of the Great War that so depressed Helen Mitchell instead motivated Irene to create life. She couldn’t bear to send her husband to the Western Front without having his child, so Irene and Tom conceived a baby girl just before he left for France in 1918.

After Tom returned from France, they had another child. ‘But that’, Irene confessed, ‘was a mistake.’
Marjorie was born in 1921, right as the post-war boom collapsed. Irene would have liked four children, but the economic reality of the 1920s made that hope impossible. By 1922, unemployment had soared to a national average of 15 per cent, causing the government to extend both the length of assistance and the monetary benefit of the dole for the unemployed. In July 1922, the rates given to out-of-work men, women and juveniles were raised by 3 shillings a week and the number of weeks of benefit extended from fifteen to twenty-six. The increase was welcome, but it was hardly enough.

The tension in the hardest-hit areas such as Sheffield and Tyneside rose steadily despite this intervention. On 8 December 1922, during a debate about the rising social unrest, Tom Smith, MP, made it clear that the benefit was not enough to feed a family even in the workhouse – the most despised form of welfare available for the poor. When respectable working men lost their jobs, the MP pointed out, they lost everything. ‘I have seen men come in for food or relief who went to school with me,’ he related:

These hard realities, the MP argued, led previously hard-working, stable, men to become radicalized and to take action against the government. It was a dangerous situation that ultimately culminated in the General Strike of 1926, a national strike in sympathy of coal miners whose wages were cut. Over 1.5 million workers
downed tools for nine days – the longest general strike in British history.

The Grants’ troubles began in earnest when Irene was forced to leave her job. Her husband Tom, one of the ‘respectable’ working men radicalized by his experiences, was in and out of work throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and the family could have used Irene’s income as a teacher to keep afloat, but in 1922 married female teachers across the country were forced to resign. The institution of the marriage bar by many local education authorities, requiring all women to leave a career once they married, was meant to help returning veterans find work. Ironically, it nearly devastated the Grants. Throughout the inter-war period, Irene and Tom’s young family barely managed to scrape by on savings left over from Irene’s teaching days and whatever could be laid by when Tom was in steady work. Although she never wrote about receiving unemployment insurance, it seems likely that the Grants were probably forced to turn to the dole during lean times.

Nella Last also remembered the inter-war period as a time of scarcity in which the domestic skills that her grandmother taught her as a child were indispensable, especially the ‘dodges’ that made the most of the ingredients she could afford. Times were not as difficult for the Lasts as they were for the Grants, however. After the Great War, Nella’s husband Will had taken over his father’s joinery workshop and worked steadily throughout the inter-war period. Those who had work during the depressions of the 1920s and 1930s were generally better-off than they might have been in more prosperous times, because they could take advantage of the lower cost of living that accompanied
the downturns. In fact, while the Grants and the Rutherfords struggled to keep food on the table and to pay the rent, the Lasts bought a new house with the help of inheritance money from Nella’s father. Will was never an ambitious businessman, but with Nella’s wise household management they were able to raise their two growing boys.

Nella and Will were married three years before the First World War, and when he enlisted in the navy, they moved to Southampton, where they spent most of the war. While Will worked in the shipyards, Nella took care of their young son Arthur and volunteered at the local hospital. Nella fondly remembered helping the injured soldiers write letters home and entertaining them. She enjoyed bringing a smile to their faces or a glint of light to their eyes with her jokes and light-hearted ‘monologues’. Nella and Will’s second son, Cliff, was born during Will’s service on the south coast. The birth left Nella desperately ill, but a kindly doctor took care of her and secured a month’s leave for Will to help her recover. Though her health was touch and go for a few weeks, looking back on it, Nella figured she was happier in Southampton than at any other time in her life.

Alice Bridges recalled the First World War and the 1920s as a particularly difficult time. Born in 1901, she was only thirteen when war broke out. Her father was out of work for most of the war and did not serve in the military. Instead, he insisted that he was the ‘chosen one of God’ and left work for days and weeks at a time to pray at home. This left her mother to fend for the family, and Alice soon became her mother’s main support. Although her mother worked hard to feed and
clothe six children on her own, there was never enough and Alice remembered ‘many hungry days’ during the war and afterwards. She believed that these lean years, and the endless hours she helped her mother, ‘ruined’ her health.

Even in the 1940s, when she wrote for M-O, Alice’s health was always delicate, but for eight years in the 1920s, between the ages of twenty-two and thirty, she suffered severe illnesses. When she married in 1928, her doctor warned her against having a child, as it might put Alice in grave danger. Les and Alice waited almost five years until her health improved before they had Jacqueline. Although she wanted two children, Alice stopped at one. It was not her health that barred her this time, but rather Les’ behaviour that convinced her not to have more. After the birth of their daughter, he became jealous that Alice’s attention was focused elsewhere, and left her to do all the work. Once she realized Les would not lift a finger to help with Jacq, she decided one child was enough.

Natalie Tanner made the same decision after giving birth to her son in 1933. She considered having three children, but with her husband busy building a thriving engineering firm, and because she felt the first two years of the baby’s life were too ‘trying’ without the help of a nanny, James would be her only child. Although they remembered the large-scale destruction and grief of the war, both Natalie and Hugh were too young to participate directly in the First World War.

Instead, Natalie came of age during the economic crises of the 1920s, when she threw her support behind the Labour Party. She spent most of her early twenties campaigning for Labour candidates, and even carried
out a term as Poor Law Guardian herself. For a stint of two years her radical leanings led her into membership of the International Labour Party (ILP), known especially for its staunch pacifism amid the jingoism of the Great War.

After getting married in 1926, Hugh and Natalie moved to Spain for five years; they left in 1931, the year in which the Spanish Second Republic was established. The republic soon, however, became overwhelmed by the infighting that would eventually blow up into the Spanish Civil War. When war did break out there in 1936, Natalie became involved in organizing relief efforts for the Republicans who fought against General Francisco Franco’s Fascists. It was this work that brought Natalie into contact with communists, for whom she gained great respect. Although she accused them of ‘tactical stupidity’ and usually voted Labour, she was nonetheless a staunch supporter of the idea of communism and the Soviet Union from this time onwards. In fact, at a theatre production in 1941, she was appalled by the fact that everyone stood up for ‘God Save the King’, but sat down when the ‘Internationale’ was played. Natalie remained standing, and angrily instructed the rest of the audience to pay respect to the national anthem of their new ally, the Soviet Union.