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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… The
Allies regrouped after the mixed fortunes of spring, especially the failed
Nivelle Offensive which threw the French Army into disarray characterised by a
wave of mutinies. In part, aiming to ease German pressure on the French while
their new C-in-C Général Pétain took
control, Field Marshall Haig launched a well-planned attack which became the
Battle Of Messines (June 7-14).
Co-ordinated
explosions of massive mines under the German lines followed by infantry advance
under cover of a creeping artillery barrage saw British and Anzac forces
advance on a nine-mile front, breaking out of the Ypres Salient, to take high
ground from Ploegsteert to Mount Sorrel on the northwest frontier of Flanders.
Unprepared, the Germans did summon reinforcements from further south, around
Arras and the Aisne. The only drawback to the success of the first few days was
a series of friendly-fire artillery foul-ups causing heavy casualties to both
Anzac and British infantry near Blauwepoortbeek.
Around
the Channel, relatively low-key exchanges continued with a daylight German
bomber raid on Sheerness and Naval facilities around the Medway (June 5; 13
killed, six planes brought down) and a British bombardment of occupied Ostend
on the same day.
Otherwise,
among the Allies it was the Italians who had the toughest week. The 10th Battle
Of The Isonzo ended (May 10-June 8) ended with five days of powerful
counterattack by the Austro-Hungarian Army which took back almost all the gains
the Italians had made with a steady and costly advance towards Trieste
(casualties: 39,000 Italian, 33,000 Austro-Hungarian). Nonetheless, the Italian
Army immediately began another attack – the Battle Of Mount Ortigara, on the
Asiago Plateau in southern Trentino (June 10-25) – gathering 300,000 troops on
a very narrow front. On the first day they took the mountain summit. Further,
in northwest Greece, they took the town of Ioannina – from the Greeks, as part
of their annexation of Albania.
[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers
volunteer and Gallipoli veteran [Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016] had fought on the Somme Front
with his second outfit the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until
officialdom spotted his age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the
battlefield – and told him he could take a break from the fighting until he was
19. He did so, though with an enduring sense of guilt. By December, 1916, he
ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again, this time to the
Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion, along with a bunch of other under-age Tommies training/marking
time – and in Sam’s case dicing with meningitis and other battle-fatigue
enhanced ailments – until such time as they severally became eligible for the trenches
once more… But for now the blog continues with themed
childhood and teens material from the Memoir under the title The Making Of
FootSoldierSam – because my father didn’t write enough about his year “off” in
England to cover 1917 in weekly chunks (I can hardly blame him; writing in the
1970 he wasn’t really thinking about blog requirements)]
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, The Making Of Foot Solider Sam,
1902-1905 Uprooted 3, chose excerpts from the Memoir which showed how one
consolation for living in poverty for Sam, aged four to seven, was that 1900s
London was thronged with animals – draft horses everywhere pulling trams, cabs
and tradesmen’s vehicles, sheep and cattle being herded to local butchers’
slaughterhouses. Sam was entranced… and got a little basic biological education
without knowing it.
Now, with similar relish, he recalls and enjoys all the hustle
and energy of the big city bursting outwards into the countryside which
surround his district, Edmonton, then on the northern edge of urban development, the spirit of commercial adventure
untrammelled – and not always succeeding as the lad realised (NB: my father
wrote the early chapters in the third person, calling himself “the boy” and
then “Tommy”):
‘Despite their lack of money, the children found much to
excite them in the neighbourhood, especially the terrific activity on the
nearby main road out of London**. Stacks of wooden blocks and pipes and tall,
iron standards appeared, laying by the roadside. Work lasting several years
began. Hordes of navvies with pick and shovel dug trenches and laid tramlines
in a new road surface made with wooden blocks (replacing the granite chips
which had previously done the job).
Following the
roadworks led the children to explore further. Much open space lay beyond the
new street they lived in; fields and market gardens, a farmhouse with a large
barn and pigsty. Tommy liked all the natural smells. Temporarily, they lived at
the very edge of the city.
They found
brickfields… They watched as workers dug up clay and mixed it with water to
form a thick mud they called “pug”, which they then moulded and baked. The
manufacture all took place in the open air.
Then, among the
tall grass of the fields around their school, they found kerbs and manhole
covers laid at intervals along what had obviously been intended as a road. They
learned that, during an earlier boom period encouraged by the extension of the
suburban railway line, speculators put up street after street of cheap terrace
houses. But the bubble burst and they abandoned the work at whatever point it
had reached when the money ran out. You could still walk around streets they
had completed, though “To Let” notices stood outside many of the houses.
Someone told Tommy the rents ranged from about 6/6 to 8/6*** per week, low even
for those times.
… Although their
row of houses where the children lived had been completed and the drains and
gas pipes laid, the builder still had to suspend operations from time to time –
due to lack of money it seemed – and the road itself still hadn’t been made up.
No footpath, no pavement, no lampposts, no surfaced road, just the rough
ground. But the builder was a very nice man, Tommy thought. He’d supervise his
men working on the houses at one end of the street, while at the other he
collected the rents for the occupied houses.’
**Hertford Road, which
started at Bishopsgate; later the A1010.
*** For
post-decimalisation readers, 6/6 = 32.5p, 8/6 = 42.5p. To offer an inflation
perspective, the Bank Of England calculator says £1 in 1904 would = £111.58 in
2016.
Now I’m moving on to
“Tommy”/Sam’s tour of the neighbourhood, a magnificent passage I think bringing
out both the expansionist dynamism of the area and its enduring connection with
the Dickensian era of the 19th century. The characters, the knees-up fun, the
drunken violence (even death), the poverty and opulence, the sights, the
sounds, the stinks – all human life is here, recalled and described in fine and
florid detail by a man writing in his 70s, remembering from when he was aged
maybe six to eight or nine:
‘One afternoon, after quickly eating his lunch at home,
Tommy set off for school, taking the route he could rely on to provide
something of interest every day. He walked to the end of his street – itself
almost made up now – to the main road where the navvies swung their picks,
shovelled great lumps of earth aside, and manhandled tram rails and wooden
blocks into place. To make their way towards the town square, pedestrians had
to jump over various trenches which, for Tommy, only added to the excitement of
what was going on.
A little way along,
a row of small cottages had been converted into shops. You could buy all your
requirements in one or other of them: a laundry, a fish shop, a confectioner, a
barber, a cycle maker, general stores. Then you passed a large church, very big
for that area, and a row of houses obviously occupied by middle-class families
– who, only a few decades earlier, would have lived on the other side of the
road, in The Crescent, a terrace of houses built early in the 19th century and
adorned with ornamental stonework. Each house has its basement, two floors, and
attics above. The servants of earlier days did their work in the basement and
slept in the attics. Now families of comparatively poor people occupied The
Crescent, but a shared garden laid out as part of this estate remained in front
of the bowed terrace. It still bore some appearance of dignity.
After the
middle-class houses, Tommy passed a blacksmith’s forge, horses coming in and
out constantly. Children spent many happy hours watching the procedures there.
The horse would be led in, the blacksmith would examine its hooves, and then
start removing the shoe. He heated pieces of roughly shaped, thick metal.
Holding the glowing, new shoe with tongs, he would try it out on the horse,
then adjust it by reheating and hammering away. Sometimes the horn of the hoof
had to be pared away a little. When the blacksmith had achieved a perfect fit,
he heated the shoe again and nailed it to the hoof amid a cloud of tangy smoke.
Tommy’s greatest thrill came from watching the blacksmith work the bellows
until the fire roared while the black coals turned red, then bright orange and
even white.
Re-crossing the
road, another blacksmith’s place, more bellows, and then the piercing shriek of
the circular saw in the wood mill next door assailed his ears as it cut trees
into planks and planks into squares. He could only stand just so much of that
noise.
A little further on
he came to a huge pub. He always wondered at the size of this place. Why had it
been built there? Behind it were fields and then Tommy’s school. A large square
building, the pub had four floors, tall windows and ornamental stonework at the
front. It must have been intended as a hotel, but in a small town with little
wealth on the edge of London, who would use it? Probably another product of the
short-lived speculation boom which left those abandoned and overgrown roads out
in the fields. It must have shocked the people who built the hotel when they
realised their customers were the rough-and-ready working classes.
Tommy often looked
in and saw men sitting on the benches in there, smoking clay pipes and spitting
on the floor. He’d inhaled the foul smell of stale tobacco, stale beer, and
smelly humanity and it didn’t attract him in any way. But the pubs never seemed
to shut – at least, when there was work around – serving from 4 or 6 in the
morning until midnight. It was quite common to see men staggering drunk along
the street at all hours****.
Once, as Tommy
walked to school, he encountered a large crowd gathered outside the pub. Tommy
squeezed his way in among them and saw a policeman down on the ground; a big
man knelt over him, punching at him and then clamping his teeth onto the
policeman’s ear – a feature of brawls in those days. Soon some bobbies who’d
heard what was going on came running up, grabbed the big man, and arrested him,
while a couple of them took their colleague off to hospital. Tommy heard later
that the policeman died of the wound he sustained, no doubt from an infection.
His assailant served a long term of imprisonment.
When the uproar
faded, Tommy turned into a road made of railway sleepers which ran along one
side of the pub and something else caught his eye. A dirty, unshaven man sat on
the ground with his back against the rear wall of the pub yard, filling an old,
clay pipe. Tommy paused to watch and realised he was packing it with horse
dung. When the man looked at him, he ran off away past the brickfield and
reached the school gates in safety.
Sometimes, on his
way home from school in the late afternoon, when he came to the main road and
the huge pub he would turn the other way, towards the general market area. He’d
smell it long before he saw it; strong odours of meat, fruit, stale beer, piss…
every dark corner had its deposit of human excreta, no public lavatories at
that time. If it happened to be a Thursday afternoon, you could see the sheep
coming up the busy road in the care of just one man and his dog, driving them
to meet their fate in the butcher’s yard. Butchers in those days killed their
own animals and the meat was really fresh and good. However, this particular
butcher would buy his beef “on the horn”, as it was called, at Greenwich –
slaughtered there. He ferried the carcasses back to his shop on a horse-drawn
wagon.
This market area
was triangular: on the left side, from Tommy’s direction, a row of shops
selling foodstuffs and every household requirement – fishmongers, bakers,
grocers, greengrocers, a pawnbroker. Facing them, across a wide paved footpath,
a group of stalls also selling food, mainly cabbages and other greens from the
market gardens nearby.
At the base of the
triangle ran a single-track railway with level-crossing gates. This railway
bisected many living areas, an heirloom of early bad planning. Oddly, a short
stretch of track in the market place had been built on tiles and underneath
them flowed a wide stream. Obviously, before they built the railway, this place
had been a ford. The engineers had driven in piles to set the railway and a
small station***** above the water — not always very sweet water either. Some
people seemed to regard any stream near a town as the natural dumping ground
for dead cats and other items for which they had no further use.
On the remaining
side of the triangle (should you be getting lost: to Tommy’s right, that is,
but in the far corner near the railway) stood an old coaching inn, untouched
over several hundred years, with a cobbled yard at the side and, in the rear,
an extensive stable. The innkeeper himself kept several horses, a few local
people had one or two, and visiting circuses also made frequent use of the
premises. In fact, the proprietor almost always wore riding breeches, red
waistcoat, hacking coat and a bowler and did all his journeying around the
neighbourhood on horseback. A very popular man.
A couple of doors
along, father, sons and daughters ran an old-time family pharmacy – the shelves
arrayed with bright blue and orange decanter-shaped containers. The premises
served also as a large post office. Two of the sons had trained in dispensing
medicines and their father oversaw everything, a venerable figure with his
long, lean face, pointed beard and, invariably, a smoking cap (a sort of fez
with a tassel on top).
While the pharmacy
portrayed the respectable face of medicine, every market worthy of the name
would have its resident quack, generally known as Doctor Brown. That name might
cover a multitude of sins. Our Dr Brown was a fine figure of a man clad in a cutaway
black coat, striped trousers, patent leather shoes and a tall silk hat on his
head – proper morning dress – his fair moustache waxed to two long points. He
looked clean, every inch a doctor, and the tale he told about the pills he
sold, that was part of the weekend entertainment and a huge crowd would gather
around him. According to their number, so the length of his story grew and,
proportionately, the sales at the end of it. He gave value for money in pills,
potions, and perorations and did very well indeed.
In the middle of
the triangle was the old village green, as it had been before this small town
became a botched urban district. Marked out by a low iron railing, it comprised
a pond, a patch of grass, and a couple of may trees. On warm summer days the
out-of-work and assorted idlers would sun themselves there, six or a dozen of
them lying on their backs while, around them, the activity of the market went
on.
This was a market
of long standing and not just weekly, like many in the country. Most of the
stallholders worked every day of the week except Sunday (a few on the
coaching-inn side operated on Saturdays only). Although they held regular
pitches, they had no licenses, no permits. Rather, they occupied their places
by right of conquest. If you went along there at 4 in the morning you would see
that a board or a trestle had been thrown on the ground at the site and a man
or men guarded it. Later in life Tommy became quite deeply concerned with these
people, but more of that later******.
As darkness fell,
the shops around the marketplace lit up incandescent gas lamps, reasonably
bright, none of the brilliance of electric lighting. The stallholders used
paraffin flares — a can with a metal tube hanging from it and a burner at the
bottom producing a flame about 18 inches high. It would have been very
dangerous in an enclosed space. According to his wealth, each stallholder had
one, two or three of these flares burning. This always attracted crowds on dark
nights — the greatest numbers guaranteed on Friday nights when, as Tommy
sometimes observed, the market’s character changed to a degree.
That was the night
the workers drew their wages and a little more money than usual flowed into the
tills of shopkeepers and stallholders who shouted their wares ever more
vigorously to make themselves heard above the hubbub. Everybody with a few
pennies to spend felt the pleasure and excitement of it. The publicans did well
too, of course. Diagonally opposite the coaching inn, stood the market
triangle’s second, less grand pub and on Fridays a throng would gather on the
pavement outside both establishments, holding pint pots and talking until late
into the evening.
This played a part
in generating another of the market’s thriving businesses, operated by
gentlemen offering funds to those who, during a hectic weekend, got through
their wages, perhaps leaving no money to buy even food for the family until the
next week’s pay arrived. On the Monday morning the procession from the
sidestreets would begin, a ragged band making for the pawnbroker’s shop
(adjacent to that second pub). Father’s best Sunday suit, mother’s best Sunday
costume, even the children’s boots and shoes would go over the counter. The
pawnbroker advanced a shilling or two on them. The hope was — and, generally,
it did happen — that these goods would be redeemed the following Friday night,
ready to be worn at the weekend.
Some women carried
huge bundles to the pawnbroker’s shop, undoubtedly including sheets and
blankets, which would be missing from the family’s beds for the week – if ill
fortune befell them in the meanwhile, how were the children to be kept warm?
How were the old people to be kept warm? Short of clothing, short of bedding,
short of food during the worst part of the week until the man’s wages, to some
extent, redeemed them…
Even so, many did
survive on the tiniest of incomes, like Tommy’s family, keeping at least an
outward appearance of what was called respectability. They frequently suffered
deprivations in their home. But even in those circumstances they could still
find energy and time to do a little to help others, as with church work. But
the toll on nerves, the irritation, the bitterness, the feeling of instability
and fear of even worse overtaking them often blighted the lives of people who
were doing their best to keep things going under difficult circumstances. And
of course the children often suffered the lash of the tongue or the slap of the
hand, not always deserved.’
**** An online search suggests World War I brought about the
restriction of licensing hours to 9am-11pm, then 10pm – although one source says
the 1914 Defence Of The Realm Act tightened the permitted hours even further.
The current much looser laws came in during the 1980s with further amendments
in 2005.
*****
My father
doesn’t name it, but this must have been Lower Edmonton station, on Edmonton
Green, opened 1872; the market grew up in the late 19th century alongside the
working-class influx from London’s “inner suburbs”.
****** In fact, my father’s Memoir
barely touched on his life after World War I, because he stopped in July, 1919,
with the Peace parade celebrating the Treaty Of Versailles – not to mention 600
pages and 250,000 words under his belt. What he’s referring to is that he spent
much of his working life post-WW1 as an Edmonton market trader (a draper) – a
barrowboy – in partnership with younger brother Alf, until they moved on to a
small shop.
Yet all sorts of things
could make Sam feel a little less poor, a little less strait-jacketed by
circumstances. Here, improbably, it’s new developments in street lighting:
‘Some months passed. On the main
road the navvies had finished their work: tramlines put down and rather high
standards erected with light fittings on the top of them. Arc lamps*******.
The night they were switched on was the first time street lighting by
electricity in that area had been attempted.
These
lamps rely on two sticks of carbon fitted with a slight gap between them so
that when a current passes through them it leaps the gap – the arc – and
creates a bright light. Sometimes they work well and sometimes not at all.
Sometimes they give a steady light and sometimes a flickering light. But the
effect excited many people to take an evening stroll just for the sheer joy of
seeing the lights and their road illuminated at night.
Tommy
too felt something romantic, quite thrilling, about it all as he made his way
to the marketplace and up the street to Mr Frusher’s******** house or the church. Very old,
dingy buildings became interesting in this mauvish, pinkish light. So did
people on the street. Their clothes could not be seen in detail, their faces
took on an unusual colour, and they looked different – not the rough-and-ready
folks he was used to seeing about.’
******* Arc lamps had been
gradually introduced to London streets from 1878 onwards.
******** Mr Frusher, the
vicar/choirmaster/Scoutmaster, music teacher – a mentor to the boys of the
community, he figures extensively in two Making Of blogs later in June.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: The Making Of
Foot Soldier Sam, 1904-1912 – the diverse influence of school and teachers:
from batty old Dizziba to the dynamic, heroic AE Page…
* In his 70s, Sam
Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance,
a Memoir of his life from childhood
through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919
Peace parade.
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