Dear
all
A
hundred years ago… following the terrible first British defeat at Mons, in
Belgium, near the French border, the BEF continued its retreat. It fought
rearguard actions at Le Cateau August 26 (13,000 wounded and dead, British and
German) and Etreux August 27 (three companies of the 2nd Royal Munsters,
outnumbered 6-1, delayed the German advance for 14 hours). But the 28th saw the
first British victory – in the first naval battle, at Heligoland Bight (six
German vessels sunk, 712 dead, and 35 on the British ships).
Meanwhile, war swiftly circled the world
in ways I never heard of till I edited and researched around my father’s
Memoir: on the 27th, Japanese and British fleets attacked the German-held port
of Tsingtao, China; today, the 30th, is the centenary of New Zealand successfully
invading German Samoa.
And, back home, in the small world of a
individual London working lad, Sam Sutcliffe, 16, hoped he might continue to be
just a boy for a little longer – learning about life, playing practical jokes…
FOOTSOLDIERSAM
SPEAKS
As an office boy at a
mining company’s City HQ, Sam’s immediate boss was known as “Sergeant”, because
he’d served in the Army from boyhood. Memory photographic as usual, Sam
describes him:
“Back straight as a
ramrod, legs slightly bowed, clipped moustache iron-grey and hair about two
inches long, oiled, parted in the middle, his eyes dark, sharp, penetrating –
almost black – with bushy, grey eyebrows above them, and complexion sallow,
parchment-like from service in India; he could cause trepidation with a look.
He wore a black uniform of quality cloth with some gold-braid trimming and
three gold stripes on each arm, lacquered buttons, and several medal ribbons on
the left breast. His shoes shone.” (The uniform came from the Corps Of
Commissionaires, not the Army.)
Sam notes how, often to
his shame, he felt in thrall to this imposing, yet somewhat unsavoury man – not
only a groper of the poor girls who came by selling carbon paper, but a bitter
behind-the-hand gossip about his “superiors” in the company. Yet Sam, too,
frequently remarked on how that society in 1914 delineated social difference
and ensured that people like him – from a poor family in Edmonton, left school at
14 – knew where they stood and stayed there. Here’s a scene from the end of the
working day (bearing in mind that Sam wrote the first section of his memoir in the
third person and called himself “Tommy”):
“The old boy’s train home
went from Liverpool Street too so Tommy… was permitted to walk with him… Tommy
strode out to keep step. Comical he must have looked in his skintight trousers
and short, bum-freezer jacket, topped off with the square, bowler hard hat.
The gentry favoured a different bowler with the brim curled up at
the sides and a half-spherical crown. Thus one could easily distinguish the
officers from the other ranks – though a closer look would further reveal
jackets of fine-quality cloth, more fully cut too, and trousers more fully
shaped from the top to the narrow bottom (permanent turn-ups had not been heard
of; a man turned up the bottoms of his working trousers only if they were too
long for him).”
Tommy/Sam noticed all
this, but didn’t torment himself about it. On the other hand, he saw the
apparently staunch Sergeant twisting himself into knots over his lifetime of
diverse servitude:
“Men like him knew and
maintained an expected code of conduct – although, curiously, they had, and
they showed, contempt for anyone of their own class who attempted to improve
their status by study and hard work. Yet these old and trusted servants also
felt they were themselves aping the gentry and becoming traitors to their kind
thereby — if one can follow that line of thought.
Many a tirade on these matters assaulted Tommy’s ears. Sergeant
in his lunchtime strode the office floor: a bite of his sandwich, a champing of
the jaw muscles, a long swig from a tankard of beer, and out flowed the bitter
words. [Company Secretary] FCB, and Sampson, head of accounts, and Otley, the
top draftsman, all came in for it, the last classed as a ‘homo’ as well as an
upstart.
But the upper classes, equally, could bring on a rant. The very
men with whom Sergeant shared a number of confidences on a servant-and-master
basis, who trusted him – rightly so – were, apart from business considerations,
enemies of his class. Wont to growl, ‘God bless the Squire and his
relations/Long may they keep us in our stations’ – probably the only couplet of
verse he knew – he repeated it endlessly in the course of his lunchtimes
orations. The boy listened, but kept his own council.”
Still, Tommy/Sam remained
eager to please – to which end he would deploy his own ribald sense of humour.
Especially in August, 1914, when his every other waking minute turned to
wonderings about the war and what he should do and when…
“On one occasion, Tommy
tried to introduce a little fun into the now gloomy life at the office. On the
street outside the company building a newspaper deliverer stopped him – they
dashed about the City on bikes with high handlebars and low saddles.
The chap said, ‘Like to buy one of these for a penny?’ He held
out what appeared to be a small booklet. Tommy opened it to find it comprised
just two pages. The first thing he saw was a piece of sandpaper glued to the
inside of the back cover. Then he noticed a rhyme printed on the inside of the
front cover. Somebody had cudgeled his brains to work this thing out and come
up with the following: ‘As times are hard/Please buy this card/Dame Fortune I
can’t make her/But let that pass/Just wipe your XXXX/Upon this piece of paper.’
The painful consequences… poor humour, coarse humour. Tommy
laughed heartily. But he had to tell the man, ‘I’ve got no money, I can’t buy
it’.
However, at home that evening, he found a piece of sandpaper and
a piece of card, pinned them together, wrote this elegant rhyme inside, and
took it to the office next morning.
He showed it to Sergeant who roared and, in his usual way, passed
it round the various parts of the office. Under cover. Later though,
crestfallen, Sergeant reported scarcely a grin, scarcely a chuckle, everyone
apparently so borne down by the weight of the war they didn’t have a laugh left
in them.”
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