Singled Out (3 page)

necessary to give their clever son a university education. He was kind and

willing too, and offered to coach May’s younger brother, who was studying

for an exam. Mother provided a good supper in recompense for his help.

As he was leaving one evening, Mother said to me, ‘Get Philip’s hat off the hall stand.’ We stood talking for a few minutes longer and I saw him looking at me with a smile and a twinkle in his eye, and with a great shock I realised I was hugging his hat and stroking it like I did the cat. I felt dreadful and made the excuse that I had forgotten to close the rabbit hutch up for the night, and ran off, and did not go in again until he had left.

The next day May was at work at the milliner’s as usual. The apprentices

were let out at .. That evening there was a glorious sunset, and as she

stepped out of the dark shop into the street its radiant light nearly blinded
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?



her, so that she narrowly missed bumping into Philip standing on the pavement outside: ‘I thought you finished at seven,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting half an hour for you, and I thought I’d missed you. It is such a lovely evening – would you like to walk home Becks Lane way?’ Shyly, May

agreed. Though she’d known him since she was a child, she felt top-heavy

and awkwardly grown-up. He teased her gently. After that, Philip met her

every day and walked her home. May gave up taking her bicycle to work,

and her brother started to wonder why he wasn’t getting so much help

with his homework. Little by little Philip and May became close, and after

his return home he would cycle the twenty miles from Manchester to spend

time with her on her afternoons off.

It was love’s young dream . . . We walked for miles through fields, woods and country lanes. I sometimes wonder what we found to talk about. We both loved and enjoyed nature’s wonderful treasures, from the tiniest flower and insect to mighty trees and hill top views of the vast Cheshire plain . . . Philip introduced me to poetry too . . . He often quoted a few lines of poetry when speaking to me, and sometimes when he kissed me good night would say, ‘I could not love thee dear so much, loved I not honour more.’ I was very young at that time, and wondered what he meant when he said that. In those days I must have been very innocent or very ignorant.

May knew nothing about art either; but Philip loved to talk to her about

his passions. Out of the small amount of money he had, he would buy her

postcard reproductions of famous pictures. The little images delighted her.

One of these above all seemed to sum up the happy prospect that awaited

the young lovers – a landscape entitled ‘June in the Austrian Tyrol’. They

would pore over it together, seeing in the picturesque setting an enchanted

future. ‘I love that picture too,’ whispered Philip. ‘So – when I am through with Cambridge and in a post, we will get married and go there for our honeymoon.’

Philip and May had been courting for nearly five years when the First

World War broke out. As a Quaker Philip believed firmly in the principle,

‘Thou shalt not kill.’ He registered as a pacifist; nevertheless, he was

imprisoned. In prison he studied first aid and care of the wounded, and on

his release, felt impelled to put these skills to use. Promptly, he volunteered for active service in France as a stretcher-bearer.

Philip was notably courageous even in his non-combatant role. During

battle, he was indefatigable in going over the top to pick up the wounded

and carry them to the first aid post. He carried neither gun nor gas-mask.



Singled Out

The Tommies respected his inspirational defiance of danger, and even

the German snipers, it appeared, respected Philip’s impartiality in helping

whoever was suffering or in pain.

May waited anxiously and patiently for his safe return. She treasured the

brief letters he was able to send her – sometimes only a printed card on

which he had ticked the box beside ‘I am well.’ At last came a letter saying he was due for leave. May was walking on air.

When she wrote her little memoir more than sixty years later, Miss

Margaret Jones barely faltered in the telling of what happened next, but she didn’t dwell on the details. Probably the old lady was still too pained by her memories to write more than a few sentences:

Then everything was shattered; a letter came from the War Office to say he had been killed in action. The shock and loss was terrible, I felt I had lost half of myself, or was it my twin soul. I knew then that I should die an old maid.

Miss Jones re-read what she had written, and added the next words in a

light pencil script:

I was only twenty years old.

After Philip’s death the impulse to continue the account of her memories

leaves her. We know no more, for ‘My Love Story’ simply ends there,

with the rest of the page left blank.

*

Fate was cruel to so many women in those forlorn years of war. Their

suffering was none the less for being shared by thousands. The voices of

the less articulate members of society can be hard to hear, so one can only

guess at the effect of sorrow and blighted hope on the subsequent lives of

innumerable May Joneses across the nation. But there were nevertheless

many women who told their stories. Documents of all kinds exist which

illustrate their fate. This book is an attempt to hear and understand what

happened to a generation of young women who were forced, by a tragedy

of historic proportions, to stop depending on men for their income, their

identity and their future happiness.

*

Silent obscurity was not to be Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s fate. In ,

at the age of ninety-five, she too sat down to write her memoirs, able to

Where Have All the Young Men Gone?



look back on a long life of professional achievement and personal fulfilment.

She was an eminent archaeologist, a formidable researcher and intrepid

explorer. Over many decades, Gertrude had travelled and excavated extensively, making her mark on the archaeological world with far-reaching studies of African prehistory. The papers she published on her fieldwork

still stand as authoritative; the academic world had dignified her, and she

was garlanded with honorary fellowships.

But there was nothing in Gertrude’s background or upbringing to indicate what this young Edwardian woman would one day become. Born in , she was just a few years older than May Jones, but the family were a

world away. The Caton-Thompsons were well-connected and well-off,

cultured and sporty. When she was five and her brother nine their lawyer

father died; their mother married a wealthy widowed doctor and they grew

up in the Home Counties with a large family of step-siblings. A jolly girls’

boarding-school in Eastbourne left Gertrude, in her own opinion, semi—

educated and lacking in rigorous training of the mind. Though regularly

laid up with annoying bronchitis, she was nevertheless a ‘hearty’ not an

‘arty’. Those pre-war summers of her teens and early twenties saw her out

with a group of Edwardian lovelies and young men in boaters sculling on

the Thames. Sometimes the family decamped to Scotland for salmon fishing

and partridge shooting. Winter often found the family in St Moritz for her

mother’s health; there she skied all day and danced all night. Above all

Gertrude was smitten by hunting. She owned two hunters and in the

seasons of  and  rode them alternately to hounds five days every

fortnight.

What else did this energetic young woman have time for? As might be

expected from a girl of her social class, her accomplishments included a

little watercolour sketching and a fair ability on the violin. Concert outings were recorded with care; Gertrude’s tastes ranged from Wagner to Rimsky— Korsakov, Gounod to Beethoven. The family were regular, and unquestioning, churchgoers. There were foreign holidays too, mostly with her mother, in Italy, France, Israel, Crete, Sicily, Egypt. The ruins and remains were noted appreciatively; Gertrude was interested in archaeology, and had attended some lectures at the British Museum on the subject of the early

Greeks. But she was happy to get home and resume the enjoyable social whirl: golf, tennis, bridge, ten-mile walks, hockey, badminton, point-to-points, and above all an endless round of calls, race parties and dances.

Thus far, Gertrude’s upbringing would be indistinguishable from that of

any other upper-middle-class young woman of the Edwardian era. But she

and her older brother did share one peculiarity: their intense interest in



Singled Out

military matters. The nursery had its usual complement of lead soldiers, but to Gertrude and Arthur the toys lived and breathed. Together the children devoured tomes of military history and Army Lists. They committed to

memory the battle honours of the various regiments, and knew by heart

the histories of Waterloo, the Peninsular War and the Crimean War. They

avidly followed the progress of the Boer War.

So it was not surprising that Gertrude found she had much in common

with a family from their immediate Berkshire circle, the Mason-MacFarlanes.

David MacFarlane, a soldier
manque´
, was the family doctor, and had endeared himself to the ten-year-old Gertrude when she was in bed with bronchitis by attending her in full Territorial uniform and talking ‘army’.

At the earliest opportunity he retired from medicine and settled down to

devote himself to the training of the th Territorial regiment of the Seaforth Battalion in Ross-shire. His two boys, Noe¨l and Carlyon, were destined for military careers. Dr MacFarlane sent them off to be cadets at Woolwich

and Sandhurst respectively. Off-duty, the boys were the constant companions of Gertrude and her family in all that they did, from hunt balls to river parties.

Carlyon Mason-MacFarlane was a couple of years younger than Gertrude,

but the bond they formed was a strong one. Military matters were for both

these young people of consuming interest. The British army, its history, its exploits, its hierarchy and its achievements, was of central importance in both their lives. And why should it not be? Today such an interest may seem like a ‘special subject’, a blind alley. In the early years of the twentieth century, nothing could seem more relevant to the society that these people and their families lived in. In  England was at peace, the Empire was at its zenith, but a major war in Europe was envisaged by anyone with an eye on the activities of the great powers. Military might was seen by the majority as

the key to social stability. Soldiers fought so that debutantes could dance.

But Carlyon was no naı¨ve jingoist. This young man was thoughtful

beyond his years, incisive and bold in his judgements. Not everyone realised that his irrepressible high spirits and easy gregariousness masked a wide— ranging intellect. Leaving Sandhurst in  loaded with all the honours

that the institution could offer, Carlyon opted for a Cavalry commission,

shrewdly exploiting the War Office’s blindness to the growing obsolescence

of mounted troops, and thus speeding up his promotion to a staff appointment. In  he sailed for India to take up his commission with the th Hussars. He spent his last evening with Gertrude and her mother in their

London flat.

Gertrude’s life continued in the same somewhat purposeless vein after

Where Have All the Young Men Gone?



Carlyon’s departure. There were dress fittings at Bradley’s and lots more

hunting. There was a bout of measles, but there was also the Russian ballet.

A more committed side showed when she helped to organise a meeting in

the Albert Hall to raise money for the Suffragettes. In the winter there was skiing in Mu¨rren, and in the summer there was the Chelsea Flower Show.

In  Gertrude read with shock of the sinking of the
Titanic
, with a loss of nearly , lives. She had a proposal of marriage too, from Montagu Luck, brother-in-law of General Sir George Pretyman, but turned him

down. ‘My heart was with Carlyon, though in a totally unpossessive way.’

In May  Carlyon unexpectedly returned from India on sick leave;

he was convalescing from rheumatic fever. By now war seemed inevitable,

and Gertrude found herself mediating between him and a German friend

in a heated debate on the imminence of conflict between their two nations.

But a few days later the atmosphere was light-hearted as the same group

motored to Epsom with an Army and Navy Stores picnic in the back of their

hired vehicle for that great British carnival, Derby Day. Among her guests

Gertrude had eyes only for the good-looking young officer as he perched

precariously on the car roof munching game pie, ‘his grey topper pushed

back, as carefree as the beautiful day’. It was an image she never forgot.

With Carlyon’s family in the Highlands of Scotland, Gertrude made her

regular visit to the MacFarlanes at Craigdarroch in late July. In Europe the tension was building, but by Strathpeffer the river Conan teemed with salmon. Gertrude and Carlyon set up their rods on its banks and together

kept the household in fish. They both knew that his hour was coming.

Serbia and Austria were first to declare; Austria and Russia followed.

Colonel MacFarlane and his house party motored down to see the North

Sea Fleet lying at anchor in the Cromarty Firth awaiting orders. To the

MacFarlanes and their guests, the orderly lines of battleships, cruisers, gun-boats and smaller vessels, all stripped and ready for action, were a majestic and heartening sight. That evening rain set in, but Gertrude and Carlyon found it impossible to stay indoors. The suspense had become intolerable,