War declared – Germans in England "disappear"

Out Now! Nobody Of Any Importance: A Foot Soldier's Memoir Of WW1

Dear all

So we had our "lights-out" night last Monday, millions switching off all over Great Britain to reflect the words of 1905-16 Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey – "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time" – and to solemnly commemorate the centenary of this country declaring war on Germany and our national commitment to… who knew what, back then?

But even with the British Army Expeditionary Force's first major battle still a couple of weeks away (Mons, August 23), my father, Sam Sutcliffe – a 16-year-old junior office boy living with his parents, two sisters and two brothers, in Edmonton, north London – saw drastic changes at home take hold at once, some of them rarely reported or recalled.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
In Nobody Of Any Importance, I should explain for new readers of this blog, my father started out writing in the third person as an "objective" narrator reporting on the life of a boy called "Tommy Norcliffe" – that is, himself. He shifted to first-person "I" during Part Two (of nine). However, his 18-year-old brother, referred to in the following passage, really was nicknamed Ted:

"… the war declaration did bring about immediate and visible changes which touched the lives of many. In the City, at Ted’s paper firm, a German mill owner’s young son, who’d been working for the firm and perfecting his English, failed to appear on the morning of the 5th of August – the day after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany – and was never seen in that office again.

Similarly, many German families lived in working-class areas of London and, from that day or soon afterwards, they just vanished… English children began to miss their German pals…

Meanwhile, the newspapers talked bogeyman stories — suspicious characters, spies and so on. The propaganda had its effect; Tommy saw with regret one day that someone had completely smashed the windows of Mr Schultz’s butcher’s shop. No more luscious faggots and pease pudden, thought the lad. Mr Schultz left for Wales, Tommy heard, as did another branch of his family who lived in the neighbourhood.

A schoolmate called Charlie Schmidt whom Tommy talked with occasionally also disappeared. A round, ruddy face he had, but serious, with an incomplete smile — it never quite made it. His family left with no farewells, no fuss and no destination that anybody local knew of.

Another three or four German men often provided street music, playing merry Viennese waltzes on cornets, euphoniums and basses. But they all went, never to reappear. Spies, said folks. Didn’t you notice how they use to play beside the gates of the gasworks and listen to what the workers were saying?

A local family of house decorators, including several young men in their teens and early twenties also departed without a word — they’d offered low prices for their low-paid customers, useful members of the community and much liked. Napper their name was. Surely not Germans. Or were they?

Minor riots arose in some areas, starting with attacks on German nationals and their places of business."

While the German paper mill owner's son may well have left England of his own volition – or his father's – perhaps to become an officer in the German Forces, the shopkeeping/working-class Schultzes, Schmidts and others clearly didn't. They may have resettled successfully away from the war fervour of London.

But back in the '70s, when my father was writing his memoir, I asked him if he had any further information or guesses about their fate and he said the Government may have interned them less than five miles from Edmonton at Alexandra Palace – an entertainment centre turned Internment Camp for the duration (my father called it a "prison"). Modest research for a footnote revealed that it accommodated 3,000 "enemy aliens" in three large halls and that those in charge allowed inmates to organise football teams, gardening plots, concerts and a theatrical society.

A National Archives file notes that the Defence Of The Realm Act, passed with remarkable speed on August 8, 1914, "increased the state’s power to control and act against ‘unpatriotic’ forces, categorising Germans and Austrians as ‘enemy aliens’“. It resulted in 23,500 deportations and 32,000 internments. About 80 per cent of these internees returned to Germany after the war, although many of them had lived in Britain for years beforehand and clearly had thought of it as home.

War declared: talking Armageddon on the morning train

Out Now! Nobody Of Any Importance: A Foot Soldier's Memoir Of WW1

Dear all

It happened 100 years ago on Monday. My father, FootSoldierSam, was 16, working as a junior office boy for a mining company's head office in the City of London, living at home in Edmonton, north London, with his parents, older sister Ciss, baby sister Edie, younger brother Alf and, his hero, older brother Ted (a nickname; his real name was Philip, and my father gave him the alias of "George"during the first part of this memoir, while trying out the third-person approach he shortly abandoned in favour of straight autobiography).

Finally getting my father's book out now and running this blog more or less in synch with WW1, as I intend, I'm aware of not giving readers here much background, so here are a few snippets. The family had "come down in the world". In Manchester, where Dad was born in 1898, my grandfather, Charles, and his brothers had owned a tile factory. But they proved to be the generation who ruined it, partly because Charles was too gentle and, maybe, weak to arrest the profligacy of his siblings. Plunged from considerable wealth to penury they moved to London and, in Edmonton, struggled to survive.

My father's most vivid memory of childhood hunger went like this (my father writing of himself third-person as "Tommy" still): "[Tommy] saw a lad younger than himself sitting on the ground tearing up paper and eating bits of it, he asked him, 'Why are you eating paper?' 'Because I’m hungry,' said the boy. Our lad thought, 'Perhaps it would help if I could do the same'. He tore up some paper and chewed it, but, oh, it tasted horrible."

That's why the Boy Scouts and the choir were such a relief to him – fellowship, a certain material uniformity, free food quite often! Well, that's a glimpse of his life back in the early years of the 20th century. However, by 1914 father Charles, Ted and Sam/Tommy all had jobs, and a little security and modest comfort came into their lives – except that with every passing month war talk grew more pervasive until the Archduke's assassination provoked the domino-tumble of declarations*.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
This is how it felt in those final weeks and days, a hundred years ago:

"Battalions of marching soldiers became a common sight in the City – largely civilian volunteers given time off from their places of employment to undergo extra training in case they should be mobilised to replace regular soldiers who might be sent overseas. Most of them had already received considerable training at their Territorial establishments and in camps where regular-Army instructors supervised their activities.

The frequent conflicts in that region, then described as the Balkans, had been of merely passing interest to the British people, but this war, now looming, affected all, rich and poor. Fears and anticipations coloured all their thinking.

In particular, hope burgeoned among many small businessmen. War creates shortages and speculation can yield enormous profits. But among employed people too flourished a fine flush of patriotic fervour. For instance, a common boast — notably among older men quite sure they would not be called up — claimed that one trained British soldier was worth any five foreigners.

Without thinking too deeply, one could become part of this emotion and go about one’s daily activities lightened and illumined by a self-righteous glow. Probably the nation had smarted under the German threat hanging over their heads for some years. Tommy and his like caught the infection. To the enthusiastic, people who behaved and talked rationally or, at least, just as they had always done, seemed selfish, perhaps even scared.

This national surge flowed through the millions of men who were more emotional than thoughtful. They pulsated, they were invigorated, and sustained. For many, this overexcitement would later be replaced by grim determination, perhaps directed towards helping one’s country while trying to preserve one’s life – or towards making money out of it and having a good time wherever possible. But Tommy’s generation was experiencing the last of the great patriotic upsurges in this country. Wonderful while it lasted.

Normally, Len and Harold took later trains to their work in the City, but that summer they decided to rise earlier and travel in with Tommy and Ted. “Ted”, by the way, was a nickname. As a baby, someone had called him “Tiddle” and later, for dignity’s sake presumably, that changed to “Tid” and then Ted.

Now, on the train, father would join his contemporaries to discuss the threatened Armageddon — the word applied by a journalist and taken up everywhere. Imaginings of war with Germany centred on the imposing figure of Kaiser Wilhelm, as portrayed in photographs and cartoons — that waxed moustache the ends of which were screwed into points and pointed upwards, a spiked helmet on his head, mounted on his horse, a fierce warrior. But people began to call up images of the huge German Army too; the infantry, they thought, would comprise rather big men wearing long, blue-grey overcoats, who travelled at great speeds too with their mechanical transport. The new thing was the lorry; one looked in vain on the roads of this country for great convoys transporting large numbers of soldiers, a sight quite commonplace in the Kaiser’s country, we gathered.

Soon, historic events overtook speculation. On August 4, 1914, Germany attacked Belgium, at which an old treaty commitment impelled the British Prime Minister to declare war on Germany."

* Via a concatenation of treaties and other considerations, between June 28 and August 25, nations declared war on one another like this (not claiming this list is comprehensive): Austria-Hungary on Serbia, Russia on Austria-Hungary, Germany on Russia and Serbia, France on “The Central Powers” (Germany and the Ottoman Empire), Germany on France, Germany on Belgium, Great Britain on Germany (August 4 – because the Treaty Of London, 1839, between Great Britain and Prussia, later confirmed by the German Empire, guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality), Austria-Hungary on Russia, Japan on Germany, Japan on Austria-Hungary.