The First World War was a challenge to a generation of Britons. Unexpected, not of their own making: at first a dark, threatening shadow over remote areas such as the seas off Chile, then closing into every street and family in the nation.
There is a compelling image of the war: soldiers in the mud on the Western Front across Belgium and France. But this is only one part of the story. Even for the British Army on the Western Front, by 1918 only 450,000 of the 1.4 million troops serving there were infantry, and even these infantry were no longer in fixed trench lines. Many more were in artillery, supplies and the Royal Air Force (RAF) in a new kind of machine war. Further back from the trenches the war created a war zone that took in most of the UK. This was the wider Western Front. Every town and every street was linked to the front line through service and through contribution to the war of the guns. The war mobilised not just soldiers but women workers, teenagers and even school children, who contributed their pennies to the war loans, picked fruit in summer and pushed sacks of coal in winter. Unlike the Second World War, which was fought a long way from home, the front line of the First World War was very close to home, a shadow on every coast and in the skies over the UK.
In this book we trace the main sites for this wider war effort - which can be found mostly in the UK - but to these we should add the hubs of Queenstown (Cobh) in Ireland and Calais in France. For a generation it was an unavoidable challenge that turned into a 'test to destruction'. Along with sorrow there must surely be pride at how the people of Britain faced up to it. During the First World War Centenary, we remember not just the leaders and the millions who served, but also the courage of small, disparate groups facing a powerful enemy: the signs of their effort - and often of their sacrifice - are there in your town. Also described are the main sites and how to get to them, which I hope will help you to set out on your personal quest to find this generation and to honour them.
The fifty-two months of war created a changed future as well as a threatening present, forcing an acceleration of personal, social and economic change with results for years to come. Here we trace the presence of the war in the British Isles - the key sites where this change took place.
The changes followed from the extraordinary effort of popular mobilisation. The cost in lives and disability was enormous. Familiar now - but not then - are the pictures of large cemeteries, but there is another side to the story: pride in success. The War Memorial outside St George's Hall in Liverpool recorded 'Out of the North Country came a mighty host .' This generation met the challenge of a front line 60 miles from the Kent Coast (reduced to 40 miles by the German offensive in April 1918). From 1916 onwards gunfire could often be heard inland. This generation experienced the first air attacks, where Zeppelins roamed for hours over much of England. In the war at sea there were changes in the axis of threat, with a shift from mines and cruisers in the North Sea to submarines in the Atlantic approaches.
Many books were published recording the town and city experience. One of the best was Leeds in the Great War:
What was it like to be alive then? Let us see with your eyes and feel with your heart and brain the bursting of the news on a generation that hardly believed in the possibility of war, the continuous departure of the troops until all the young manhood of Leeds had gone, the return of the wounded, the arrival of the lists of those who would never return, the darkened streets, the shortened food supply, the searchlights sweeping the clouds at night, the alarm of a Zeppelin attack, the hope and the despair, and all the pathos and the riot, all the spontaneous outburst of feelings that defy analysis, when the Armistice came, and at last there was an end.1
The book went on to pay tribute to the 'unparalleled endurance of pain and suffering shown by both sides and all classes and the wonderful power of organisation and initiative to meet unforeseen difficulties shown by our own country'.
On 27 October 1917, Prime Minister David Lloyd George (the first 'ranker' to reach the office) moved a vote of thanks in the House of Commons to the officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the British armies in the field. 'Our expeditionary force numbered at the beginning of the war 160,000 men. Our expeditionary force today numbers over 3,000,000, probably the greatest feat of military organisation in the history of the world.'2
The spirit of service: relatives of Paul Stamper (English Heritage lead on the First World War) in Leicestershire, names unknown.
One year later, on 29 October 1918, the British Army was able to mount a victory parade through Lille, where fit and well-equipped troops marched through the city for two and a half hours to the delirious joy of the local citizens after four long years of harsh occupation, cut off from all contact with their partners or families in France and living under threat of starvation, execution and deportation.3 A few days later there were similar scenes in Belgian towns that had been occupied by the German Army.
This was a war of small crews and sections: pilots in single-seater aircraft and workers by the machine in the munitions factory; the trawler crew sweeping mines in rough winter seas; the infantry section in a shell hole on the Western Front; the woman workers in the eleventh hour of a shift filling shells; the Royal Flying Corps pilot freezing at 8,000ft without oxygen. The war depended on their courage and initiative. Battle destroyed hierarchy. The command-and-control gap once battle had started has been well recognised for the Western Front, where troops might be cut off for hours, but there was a similar gap in many other situations in an age before instant communication. Members of small teams were on their own, with the higher command hours away. This was as true at sea and in the air as on the Western Front.
The war led to seven key changes:
1. A new industrial world managed by 'men of push and go'. Between the 'lions' and the 'donkeys' came the managers. By 1916:
The whole of the North Country and the whole of the Midlands have in fact become a vast arsenal. Standing on an eminence in the North, one may by day watch ascending the smoke of from 400 to 500 munitions works, and by night at many a point in the Midland counties one may survey an encircling zone of flames as they belch forth from the chimneys of the engineering works of war.4
British industry had to take to mass production and giant factories of a kind rarely seen before the war. The largest was Gretna Green, some 9 miles long:
One remembers coming past Gretna for the last time during the war in the gathering gloom of an autumn evening and strangely impressive it was in the half light. The place set on a turf bog with nitric and sulphuric acid plant and great leaden basins in which the dangerous materials were handled had a sinister aloof air well suited to its grim business.5
Munitions works were sited in open country with low hills behind them (Chilwell, Banbury and Gretna), in order to contain explosions. The Arsenal at Woolwich extended to 700 acres and at its peak in 1918 employed some 70,000 people. For the first time the UK came to know mass production and the American innovation of assembly lines. Most of the pre-war production had come from workshops and mills; the First World War demanded the introduction of the modern factory, with the government paying for extensions at every pre-war industrial site. Every valley wore a rim of fire.
2. Millions were on the move, the new soldiers to camps and civilians to the cities. London, Birmingham and Glasgow expanded. The main newcomers to the big cities were women and young adults. In Birmingham, in the 1911 census, males over 18 numbered 246,881 and females 283,366. By the spring of 1918 the respective totals were 200,251 and 323,911.6
The Munitions Works - a rim of fire in every valley.
Millions were on the move. This 1915 postcard is from Auntie Eliza living in Pocklington, Yorkshire, to her nephew Jack.
Much of the coast became a restricted area from Southampton round to Hull, with training grounds, airfields (142 landing strips in Kent alone) and naval bases in the Dover Straits and Harwich. There were seaplane and dirigible bases at Yarmouth and Folkestone and further north the repair base at Invergordon and the main base of the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. Smaller towns like Todmorden and Hove lost residents, as the men went into the army and the women to the munitions works. The countryside also changed, with 2 million more acres under the plough and the first use of 4,000 American Ford tractors (government-owned). The word 'allotment' was more widely used and thousands dug plots, some on railway embankments. By 31 December 1917 there were 185,147 allotments reported.7
3. New groups with political and economic influence. According to suffragist and early feminist Dame Millicent Fawcett, women began the war as serfs and ended it as independent citizens. Women at the Wimbledon train depot in early 1915 were the first to wear trousers - inspiration for the later trouser suit.8 (Munitions workers in France and Germany continued to wear long skirts.) The role of women was vital, not just in munitions but in the transport system and in farming. The expansion of UK farming output in 1917 was one more vital contribution, but women...
