Law for the million

The home front in World War One  has been rather neglected by researchers, but as we saw from last week’s post on cookery in war-time,  the Tower collection contains a wealth of material on the subject.  

This 1917 edition of the News of the World’s Law for the Million, with its special section on the emergency war legislation does give us a flavour of the time. Interestingly, much of the legislation introduced during the war remained in force for many years, and some is still affecting us today.

This is the ninth edition of a title first published in 1905.  In those days the News of the World used to give advice on what to do if libelled in a newspaper! Even then they were using the public interest defence – that there could be no action against “fair and reasonable comment and criticism … on the actions of public men such as politicians and actors”.

The War-time law” section runs to just 30 pages in a 350 page volume, arranged alphabetically from Advertisements to Yachting. The new laws would have affected almost everyone, especially those living in big cities and the major ports.

The best known piece of wartime legislation is the infamous Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), passed in August 1914. It gave the government wide ranging powers to requisition land and buildings, and introduced a range of new offences including kite flying, lighting bonfires, buying binoculars, and keeping carrier pigeons. There were strict controls on the sale of alcoholic drinks – pubs could only open for six hours a day (12.00 to 3.00 and 6.30-9.30). The ridiculous afternoon gap in opening hours remained in force until the 1980s.

Drugs – Early in the war it was possible to send gifts of cocaine and opiates to soldiers and sailors. From 1916 a doctor’s prescription was required, and illegal possession was made an offence punishable by six months imprisonment and/or a fine of £100.

Food control – By 1917 the effects of three years of war can be clearly seen.  There was no official rationing until 1918, but there were strict rules on the production and sale of food.  The Bread Order (1917) was particularly draconian. No sugar could be used in the making of bread, and currant bread, sultana bread and milk bread could not be sold. The sale of light pastry, muffins, crumpets and tea-cakes was entirely prohibited, and the amount of flour used in buns, scones, and biscuits was strictly limited.  Cakes and pastries could not be covered or coated in sugar or chocolate.  Hotels and restaurants had to have meatless days – no meat, poultry or game could be served in London on Tuesdays, or on Wednesdays in other parts of the country. Potatoes could only be served on meatless days and Fridays – so the Government wasn’t brave enough to deprive people of their fish and chips on a Friday!

Although these  laws did not apply to home cooking, the library has many books on vegetarian and meatless cookery from this dating from this period.

Paper money – although banknotes had been issued since the seventeenth century, they were only used for sums of over £5 (about £400 at today’s prices), so ordinary folk didn’t see them very often.  In 1914 the Treasury issued £1 and 10 shilling (50p) notes to replace the gold sovereign and half-sovereign.  The 10s note remained legal tender until 1970, and the £1 note soldiered on until 1988

Air raids – In 1916 new laws were introduced to counter the effects of air raids. Stringent blackout regulations came into force, and there was even a law against the acquisition of air raid souvenirs.  The finder of any item (including bombs) dropped, or lost from a hostile aircraft had to report the find to the police or the military, and “give up the article if required”. 

It would be interesting to learn how rigorously some of these laws were enforced. Was it possible to buy chocolate cake?  How did the British public react to meatless days, and what alternatives did they find to the potato?

A school at war

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School stories, World war 1

 May Wynne’s “The honour of the school” published in 1918, has one of the most curious dustjackets I’ve ever seen. Who wouldn’t want to take this book off the shelf to find out what happens? The story begins traditionally with a new girl arriving at Polgrath school, which is housed in an old manor house on the Cornish coast, providing an exciting setting of wild sea, rugged cliffs,  and smugglers’ caves. The war intrudes mainly during meals: weak tea, no sugar and “war bread” which is unpopular. But the war is only the background to the real adventures: before a fortnight has passed the girls have been trapped in a smugglers’ cave and blown up a woodshed when practising chemical experiments. After a single morning recovering with her Latin grammar the heroine manages to fall down a cliff, and is rescued by a young man in khaki, who has come from Canada “to fight the Germans”, his ship has been torpedoed and he has swum ashore. Beat that.

Still wondering why the hero has been hiding behind the panelling in the picture gallery? I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the surprise ending. Read it and find out!

The holidays, 1917

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First World War

I have to confess that I hadn’t given much thought to holidays during the First World War until I came across this volume The holidays – where to stay and what to see, 1917 – an annual publication,  first published in 1896. 

 

The 1917 edition is about half the size  of the peacetime volumes, but is still pretty substantial. There are well over 300 pages of text and advertisements, and there are hardly any references to the war.  Perhaps at the time it wasn’t necessary to continually mention the fact,  but anyone reading the guide today would find it hard to believe that at the time of publication Britain had been at war for more than two years.

As you might expect, with so many European destinations unavailable, the guide mainly features British seaside resorts and spa towns.  Blackpool, Brighton, Scarborough and Great Yarmouth all feature prominently – with no mention of risk of air raids, or the bombardment of East Coast towns by the German fleet.  Not surprisingly, inland destinations proved popular, though there are some unusual entries –  I hadn’t really considered Luton, Dunstable, Hitchin and Peterborough as prime holiday destinations!

It’s always interesting to find references to places that you know well, so I was pleased to find this advertisement for Thorpeness, a purpose built holiday “village” near Aldeburgh in Suffolk.  I stayed there several times in the 1990s, and the place has hardly changed. In fact there was far more to do there in 1917 than there is today.

Most surprisngly holiday cruises were still being advertised.  The Rotterdam Lloyd company were offering 18 day Mediterranean cruises, departing from Southampton, and calling at Lisbon, Tangier, Gibraltar and Marseille. Fares averaged about £1 per day in 1st Class, and 12s (60p) in 2nd class.  The Finland Line was also offering holidays in Finland, sailing from Hull.  I’m not an expert on the war at sea, but the Mediterranean and the North Sea must have been pretty hazardous in 1917 – certainly not suitable for a pleasure cruise.

“Hell with the lid off”

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First World War, France

As regular readers will be aware, the Tower Project has reached the First World War.  In amongst the usual school textbooks, novels and religious tracts we are now finding a good number of handbooks on soldiers’ duties, military drill and tactics, firing muskets, fighting with bayonets, care of the wounded, prayers for the soldiers and much other war related material.

This week I also came across “Out there,” which is an account of a visit to Belgium and France in 1916, undertaken by Charles Iggleston on behalf of the British government [1916.6.617]. The book is described on the spine as “A visit to the Front under the auspices of the War Office, thrillingly and graphically described.”   Naturally, it has strong patriotic overtones but at the same time it does give a flavour of how life was for the British Army of the day, in one small section of the war.

The author is full of admiration for “Tommy,” the British soldier: “dodging death at every hour of his life, he sticks to his work in grim earnest, with sublime devotion, overcoming all difficulties and obstacles, cheerful throughout, and with a fixed determination to win through in the end.”

The infantryman, he observes, “must needs bear the brunt of the fighting … all day and all night the infantryman is under fire so long as he is on duty, but in the mad rush of battle, the brunt of the fighting falls on him in a conspicuous degree.  He it is who rushes from his trench in the attack across the open, swept by a hurricane of fire from machine guns.  Only those who have seen No Man’s land between the opposing trenches can have any idea what this danger zone is like.”

The greatest everyday danger would appear to have been from the almost constant shelling, but the soldiers’ approach to them seemed almost blasé, perhaps because there was not much one could do to avoid them.  Iggleston describes walking down an open track with a subaltern, who seemed unconcerned at shells flying overhead, save for commenting, “This is a bit dangerous.”  He does then go on to explain the differences between “theirs” and “ours” and to say that one only needed to look out if the “whizz” became lower and lower…

This had its effect on the countryside “as many a blackened wall, many a roofless house, many shattered windows proclaim.”  Probably, we have all seen the photographs of this land where “traces of fierce fighting are everywhere – a bit of shattered trench, the severed trunk of a lonely tree, odd strands of telephone wire, and twisted bundles from destroyed entanglements … a spot that has been fought over and over again till the soil must have become sodden with blood.”

The descriptions of the French people living in their ruined countryside are perhaps even more heart rending than the plight of the soldiers.  Through a glass-less window, Iggleston sees an old peasant woman with a sad wrinkled face, sitting, knitting in the ruins of her cottage; having lost her two sons to the war and her two young grandchildren to a German raid.  “No one hears the white-haired peasant woman talk. She just tends her garden, lives on the few vegetables it provides, and after that – knits, knits, knits.”

Many of the French homesteads had been knocked about by the shells, but their inhabitants continued to farm their ancestral lands, sometimes gathering their harvest within yards of the Germans lines, with shells falling around them.  With all the able-bodied men away fighting, the ploughs are worked by “old men, who in England, would have been relegated to their children’s fireside, as incapable of doing another stroke of work … close by a farm cart was being drawn up a hill by a half-starved horse, an old women trying to help by pushing … while a little hunch-backed boy … added his strength to aid the struggling, panting horse.  Such are the sights one sees while traversing miles and miles of French territory.”

Today is, of course, Armistice Day, marking the anniversary of the end of the Great War.   None of the veterans survive now and increasingly the war is four or five generations removed and means only a few pages in a history book to many.  It is hard to picture the scale of the war and the vast numbers of men who were killed or died of diseases “out there,” but all of us have ancestors who lived through that time.   We should never forget.

Save the pence for home defence

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fund-raising, money, plays for children, World war 1

Do you remember that episode of “Dad’s army” when Private Pike dresses up as a squanderbug to raise money for a Spitfire? “Patriotic pence” (classmark 1917.7.1005) is a play for children, written for similar fundraising activities during the first world war. The play centres around Mrs Smith and her children who are wasting money. The Home Fairy visits (Costume suggestion – silver tinselled gauze. “That’s a smart outfit for a district visitor” says Mrs Smith) and points out that the pennies are being wasted on peppermints and going to the pictures, while they could be used to help soldiers at the front.

“When shells thick in air they are hoverin’,

I want so to help them, don’t you?

But the tip of a shell costs a sovereign,

So what can a poor penny do?”

 Enter Serjeant Shilling, who explains that pennies do matter: “every fourpence saved pays for three cartridges for the boys out in the trenches.”  The play ends in a wild dance featuring the children dressed as pennies, chanting:

“A saving we will go!

A saving we will go!

Put our money in a box and mend our socks,

A saving we will go!”

As you can tell, I enjoyed this play very much, and was excited to see that it was actually performed in at least two junior schools during the first world war (see David Parker’s “Hertfordshire children in war and peace”)

World war 1: inspiration

What words of inspiration or comfort did soldiers take with them to the front?

The books published in late 1914 include many slim paperbound pamphlets of ‘inspirational’ thoughts. Some are cheap and basic, a kind of spiritual first aid book.  ‘So fight I’ is a compilation of quotations from the Bible and Christian writers, only a few pages and only 12 cm tall. Similar is “The happy warrior”, a collection of Biblical texts for each time of day and each day of the year, based on the soldier’s daily routine. So at Reveille on Monday April 19th, the text was “Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ will give thee light.”

There are also packets of postcards with suitably cheerful texts on them, like these ‘cheer cards’ (above) published for Christmas 1914. And finally there are more expensive productions printed on fine paper with silver lettering, like “The happy warrior: in memory of the gallant sons who, by land or sea, have laid down their lives for the Empire.” The happy warrior is the hero of a painting by G. F. Watts, which is reproduced as the frontispiece:

The hero is at the point of death on the battlefield, when a ‘spirit form’ appears and kisses him, while the shaft of light falling on his face seems to come from another world, beyond the clouds. Watts’ painting appeared in 1884, but during the first world war it became a “talismanic image” for some. These pocket-sized pamphlets include pictures, hymns and poetry – whether quotations from Homer’s Iliad or  a printed card with the understated text “Pluck is the ability to face a difficult situation with brave calmness and undiscouraged energy.”

World War 1 – books published in late 1914

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1914, Publishing, World war 1

We’ve just started to catalogue books published at the end of 1914. It’s noticeable how fast and how completely the outbreak of the First World War came to dominate the books published. Since about 1907 we’ve noticed several pamphlets on the arms race, and glossy brochures about Britain’s new warships, but by the end of 1914 every shelf in the bookshops must have been filled with books about the war.

Books published in late 1914

 Some of these are so out of date as to be of no practical use: the book entitled ‘Cold steel’ has a chapter on dealing with ‘savages’  which I think would be useless when faced with an enemy armed with guns instead of spears. The author of a book on the treatment of wounds explains that his advice is based on experience of the Boer war.

Poetry is famously important to our understanding of the first world war, but the poetry published in late 1914 was centred on one theme: patriotism. The titles say it all:

With the Season's Greetings

Poems of war and battle

The flag of England: ballads of the brave and poems of patriotism

England, my England, a war anthology.

The Union Jack.

War songs.

 

And finally the card (left) issued for Christmas 1914.

The sinking of the Lusitania

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destruction, engineering, First World War, war

This week of cataloguing I came across a rather sad and strange reminder that our project is gradually approaching the 1^st world war. In my 1907’s shelf of books I found the ‘launch book’ for the Lusitania, the ocean liner which was famously torpedoed on the 7^th May 1915, killing over a thousand civilians travelling from the United States to England. Famous mostly perhaps because the ensuing outrage, stirred up by British propaganda, turned global popular opinion against Germany and led to US intervention in the war.The book is primarily about the construction of the vessel, which is beautiful, and so I wanted to post up some illustrations. Her story is also interesting, so I’ve included a little about her too, apologies to WWI experts, this barely skims the surface.

The Lusitania was built as part of the race for the trans-Atlantic passenger trade and was one of the largest and fastest vessels of the time. Perhaps because of this, she had been quietly part funded by the British Military authorities, with the idea that she would be used as an auxiliary cruiser in times of war. The final passengers to board her were aware of some of the risks …

 “Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany . . . and Great Britain . . . and that travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.”

…read a notice from the German government in forty U.S.newspapers. National Archives (of America) http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/eyewitness/html.php?section=18

Though not all of them … That day, the Lusitania’s loading manifesto failed to mention a significant element of her cargo, with a supplementary manifesto, for the President of the United States only, being filed later after she had left New York. Some munitions were originally listed but what was omitted was the large amount of explosive products such as gun cotton and 52 tons of shrapnel shells. (www.lusitania.net).

It is not clear whether the Germans knew about the hushed up cargo or not, but despite it a wartime journey was always going to be risky. Tactics for evading submarines had not yet been clearly devised, however, Messr John Brown and Co. the designers of Lusitania were confident that their use of Krupp plate steel, with new methods of treatment and technique for application would make their vessel torpedo proof. Sadly this was not the case and chaos reigned as she sank within 18 minutes, killing 1,198 of her 1,959 passengers.

 The war diary of Kapitänleutnant Walter Schwieger Captain of the U-Boat that sank her described the scene:

“Many people must have lost their heads; several boats loaded with people rushed downward, struck the water bow or stern first and filled at once. . . . The ship blew off steam; at the bow the name “Lusitania” in golden letters was visible. The funnels were painted black; stern flag not in place. It was running 20 nautical miles. Since it seemed as if the steamer could only remain above water for a short time, went to 24 m. and ran toward the Sea. Nor could I have fired a second torpedo into this swarm of people who were trying to save themselves.” National Archives (of America) http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/eyewitness/html.php?section=18

The outrage at the event and the loss of so many were it seems a significant driver for America to join the war. Propaganda drove this further as strange items began to appear, such as the medals apparently issued to the torpedo crew for sinking the ship. These depicted the Lusitania sinking on one side and on the other a queue of passengers buying tickets from a skeleton (death). Whether Germany made them first but quickly destroyed them as they saw the action criticised or whether it was a conspiracy dreamed up by the British is unclear.Whatever significance the Lusitania’s sinking played in the war, there is no escaping the tragedy and loss of life. Therefore there is something eerily gloomy about finding a book so full of the excitement and pride of the manufacturers, designers and builders, who had little idea of what was to come.