Over 1,400 people in Britain were killed in air raids during the First World War, and more than 3,400 were wounded. Ada Kyle had an early memory of the damage caused to Folkestone by Gothas in May 1917.
My mother put us to bed and there was a lot of banging away and I called out to my mother, ‘Mum! What’s all that noise?’ She said, ‘Oh, don’t be silly,’ she said, ‘it’s only the boys, they’ve got some ladders at the back.’ So of course, I believed her. So she said, ‘Go on, get off to sleep; you’ve got to go to school in the morning.’ Well this noise kept going on and I kept calling out, ‘Mum, mum!’ But there was no answer from mum. So of course, marches myself downstairs – there was no mum. I thought, ‘Oh I know where she is; she’s along gran’s.’ And I toddles off, and my grandma wasn’t in. So as I came out, I started to grizzle. And a lady said to me, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘I can’t find my mum and I can’t find my gran.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘they’re along in the alley, dear. But don’t go along there.’ Well, that was the worst thing she could have said. ‘Course, I goes along there. As I gets to the alley, there’s my mother. She had a white apron, taking it off and ripping it up and binding a man that had his leg blown off. And I can see that now.
Allied aircraft also bombed German cities, which caused much the same panic amongst the population as in Britain. Herbe Haase lived in Frankfurt.
The air raids came with the war, it was inevitable, and everybody was frightened. We had to go to the cellar and we had no electric lights in our flat. All clothes had to be put on a chair, so that one could dress in no time, as quickly as possible, and rush down to the cellar where the whole house met then. Air raids occurred on cloudless nights, mainly, and we heard the planes coming. We heard the anti-aircraft guns and everybody got more and more frightened. The air raids caused one death which I very well remember. At the junction of several streets, in plain daylight, a man was hit by a bomb or bomb splinter, something of the kind. The whole town talks about it and the whole town’s very upset about it.
The pressures of wartime led to increasing state control over civilians’ lives. In Britain, the Defence of the Realm Act restricted many aspects of life on the home front. One regulation was a reduction in pub opening hours, in an attempt reduce drunkenness – such as that witnessed by J Greatorex in Derby.
In those days, the beer was very, very strong and I think most of the men there – unfortunately father included – used to do quite a bit of drinking. And the beer was very, very strong in those days. If you was out at night, you wouldn’t have to wander through many streets before you found somebody drunk and rolling all over the pavement. Because in those days there were two or three pubs in practically every main street, a lot more public houses than what there is now. And it was around about a penny a pint as far as I remember!
Entertainment and socialising offered some reprieve from wartime life – but, as London schoolboy Dennis Barker discovered, the conflict was never far away.
We could go to the pictures for a penny, and Charlie Chaplin kept our morale up because he came out in ’14. He made a picture called ‘Tillie’s Punctured Romance’, with Marie Dressler. It was a six-part comedy; that was in 1914. And down the Old Kent Road, near the Bricklayer’s Arms – there used to be a railway there, where all the stalls used to be – there used to be a little cinema. And there was a south London place here, the Old Variety Theatre. There was the Elephant, where they used to do straight plays. There was the Holborn Empire; New Cross Empire; Lewisham Empire; Woolwich Empire. And they all did a roaring business. They still carried on with the acts. You could get about 12 acts for a penny; a tuppence up in the gods; and about sixpence downstairs for the best seat. They kept it on all the time, Zeppelin raids or no Zeppelin raids – they didn’t worry about them much.
Wartime governments knew it was important for civilians to support the war. Propaganda stoked up patriotic fervour – and hatred of the enemy. But many, like schoolboy Leslie Friswell, didn’t place much trust in what they heard.
There was a whole lot of these atrocity stories floating about. But I don’t think that they made much effect. I mean, it was a propaganda move, of course, but as far as I recall it was pretty fruitless. You know, it was all taken very much with a grain of salt, that. Unlike World War Two, when they really had the concentration camps. But, no, the stories that were told I think were, you know, one has to discount those as propaganda.
Munitions worker Thomas Peck was motivated to join the army by the propaganda he heard.
I think that’s what made you more eager to go, you know. When you’d hear, I mean, where they used to take the baby from the woman and kill the baby and then rape the woman and kill her and all that, you know. You got all those stories, which were mostly propaganda, I think, you know. Well of course, some of our chaps were just as bad out there, you know. We weren’t all saints. I mean, you’d do things which you shouldn’t do. But I think the Germans were a bit callous. More or less you accepted it, you know. And I suppose you took notice of it to a degree, you know.
Atrocity stories resulted in widespread anti-German feeling in Britain. Henry Dotchin, from Middlesbrough, admitted his hatred of Britain’s enemy.
I hated them. There you are. I’m not going to say that I didn’t. And as now, I don’t like them. When you come to realise all the things that they did to people; to human beings. Everyone heard about what they were doing, the Germans, to people. If they found a man that was injured, they didn’t used to try and get him put right. They used to shoot him, to put him out of his misery, they used to say. They hardly ever took any prisoners the Germans, oh no.
‘Spy fever’ was common across Europe and there was intermittent violence against anyone seen as being one of the ‘enemy’. Percy Attwood recalled an example of this where he lived, in Hackney.
I well remember the anti-German riots. Well they weren’t called riots; they were demonstrations, in them days. We had a baker in Chatsworth Road called Heinrich Lunkenheimer, and he called himself Henry Lunken. Well, obviously he’d left Germany to escape the terror and I often think what a wicked thing it was to do. People used to go out and throw stones at his house, his windows. Poor old Henry Lunken. Lord knows what happened to him, after that.
Civilians were keen to follow the events of the war. Peggy Larken found she could rely on her mother to keep her up to date.
My mother had a great sense of drama, I suppose. She used to regale us with the news, as time went on. I remember that the terrible defeat of the British fleet at Jutland. And then of course it was discovered it hadn’t been so bad as at first thought; it was neither a victory nor a defeat. I remember her coming in – I can remember that I was bearing a dead bird – when she suddenly said that Kitchener was dead, having been torpedoed off Shetland, I think.
London factory worker Helen Poulter’s sister saw some war news that had a more personal impact.
My sister, she had a boyfriend, he was in the Navy. And he was on the HMSGoliath.And we were leaving Garston’s, going home walking down Colindale Avenue. And on the placards – there was a little paper shop, confectioners and that – there it was: ‘HMSGoliathsunk. All lost.’ All lost, you know. Yes, I think everybody lost somebody, everybody.
Macclesfield journalist Philip Murray visited the homes of the bereaved to collect information for his newspaper. He well remembered the effects of the high casualty numbers at the fighting fronts.
Those who had sons or husbands in the Army, they were terribly worried. I remember sometimes when I would call in at homes – and I was a boy – a woman would gasp, frightened, thinking I might have been the telegraph boy with some bad news. So they were very, very worried and sad and upset. We ran every week a Roll of Honour, pictures of someone who’d been killed or wounded and a little biographical sketch. You know; the school they attended, their place of employment, sporting and social activities etc. I was reporting these chiefly as a 14 and 15 year old. I felt sad. I remember going to one home, a bereaved home, and I saw a young mother bathing two little kiddies, that touched me.
George Park lived in Hull. He was one of the many British people who suffered the loss of a loved one.
My brother went. He was only 17, and they’d give a false age to get in. We lost him when we lost the Hull lads – he was in Colonel Shaw’s mob – on May 3 1917. That’s when they lost most of the Hull men. They used to have a memorial service in Holy Trinity every May 3rd, and mother took me to the last one, you know, they slowly got worse and worse. We went to the last one held in the little chapel at Holy Trinity Church. He was posted missing, then wounded and missing. And we never found out exactly how he did die or where he died or what happened to him. Like lots of others…
Wartime deprivations and restrictions did eventually come to an end for those on the home front. But the loss of life had an effect that never went away, as Cathleen Nesbitt explained.
It was a horrible feeling. I remember that before I went to America, it seemed to me that every young man I knew was on the casualty lists. It was appalling. Every day one looked in the paper and there was someone one knew. It was a feeling not so much of a daily depression, but you… A kind of a feeling of; ‘What on earth is the future going to be like?’ Everybody’s going to be dead, one felt. All one’s contemporaries seemed to be. The first year of the war, the casualty lists were so fantastic. It seemed all so useless and pointless…
Voices of the First World Waris a podcast series that reveals the impact the war had on everyone who lived through it through the stories of the men and women who were there.
