August 1914: young Sam the joker finds "they didn't have a laugh left in them"

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.”

Next week: Sam joins up.

1914: lunching in London, the boss and the soldier boy to be

Dear all

A hundred years ago yesterday… August 23, 1914, three weeks after Britain declared war on Germany, the British Expeditionary Force – the nation’s established professional Army – fought its first great action in defence of “little Belgium”: the Battle Of Mons. They fought valiantly, they deployed their brilliant 15-aimed-shots-a-minute marksmanship so skillfully they often fooled their opponents into thinking they had adequate numbers of machine guns. But they lost and a two-week retreat began.

       Back home, boys like my father, Sam Sutcliffe, 16 – living with his family in Edmonton, north London, working as a junior office boy in mining company Lake & Currie’s City HQ – heard little of this bad news for some while. However, he writes, they “all felt the same – that life as they had known it was finished, big things looming”.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

So, during this interval of worrying and wondering, a look at the life my father saw around him as he traveled daily from a poor family home into the wealthy heart of London.

       Not surprisingly, given he’d grown up hungry, in his Memoir he constantly wrote about food. On the one hand, he recorded his own quest for whatever came cheap – and his almost loving appreciation of the places that provided it (again, for new readers, I need to clarify that my father wrote the first part of his story in the third person, calling himself “Tommy”):

“… a chain called Lockharts (bless the promoter of them), where just buying a mug of tea entitled you to sit there and eat the sandwich lunch mother had prepared for you. Rest and refreshment for a penny…

       Another place [his friend] Reg introduced Tommy to was known as the Alexandra Trust [near Old Street bus and tram depot], where hundreds of people went for cheap food. And it was cheap – apart from the tea, a large, toasted teacake cost a penny too.”

But Tommy/Sam’s unenvying eye also observed a rather different level of lunching. One of his office-boy duties entailed delivering the food orders for “small, intimate groups” of his bosses’ business associates:

“A day or so beforehand, Tommy had to visit the supplier to hand over the order – often at a famous restaurant and bar over in Cheapside called Sweetings [Queen Victoria Street] where he observed really prosperous City businessmen, bosses all, who wouldn’t even spare the time to sit down to have their lunch. These toffs, as Cockneys called them, clad in fine morning suits, lined the long counter, munching, and drinking their ale or whatever they favoured. The smell of all these delicious foods pleased Tommy; he loved to stand there and look and breathe it in. White-hatted waiters dressed up as chefs carved succulent slices of beef or ham.

       When the customers finished eating, they would just throw down some silver on the counter and walk out – no question of bills or talking about the cost…

    In addition to the special drinks and foods the restaurant supplied, Tommy had to buy certain cheeses and a special type of coffee. This task took him to a shop of the old style where soft cream cheeses hung from the ceiling in muslin bags… Fortunately, in due course, Tommy would get the chance to do more than look at all this enticing provender.

    When one of these feasts had concluded, the bosses would take their guests to a club… Often, when they left Mr Lake’s office – the temporary dining room – Tommy went in to clear up before the caterers came to collect any utensils and crockery they had provided. But he’d pause to inhale the fumes of cigars and cigarettes, the aroma of all this good food, and of an appetising cocktail they regularly took called gin cup which they drank from small, silver tankards, a sprig of a small, mauve flower with a yellow centre floating in each one.

    And, until the men from Sweetings arrived, Tommy could eat and drink anything left over —often quite a lot. Quickly as he could, he’d run through the menu. The lovely cream cheese, the crisp little rolls, some meat, ham or tongue or beef, a little salad, and then, of course, the gin cups had not always been emptied so he sampled them as well. It was very good. And one further pleasure he would save for later; some of the senior partner’s Turkish cigarettes – made for him by a chap in Burlington Arcade – would be left lying on the table and Tommy, who sometimes collected parcels of them from the tobacconist, felt free to take some of them if he wished. For a brief while, the boy would think of himself as a man. And fare like a lord.”

Imagine him remembering all those gorgeous smells and tastes 50 to 60 years later, when he wrote his Memoir… However, he also recalled the more frequent occasions when he and his older brother Ted enjoyed less opulent dining:

“If they had no money spare, the brothers would go down to their favourite wharf on the River Thames and sit on the wall with their legs dangling while they ate their sandwiches and watched the seagulls. From time to time they’d throw these birds lumps of rather hardcore cake – their mother’s speciality, nourishing one assumes, but not too appetising… Threw the cake at them more than to them, in truth. They never registered a hit as far as they could see, but they felt sure that, if they had done, the effect would have been pretty deadly.”

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.