Tommy (15 page)

Even a little further down the social scale a satisfying and predictable routine could be found. J. B. Priestley left school to become a junior clerk in the wool trade, working for Helm and Co. in Swan Lane, Bradford. His day began at 9.00 and ended at 6.00, 6.30 or even 7.00 pm, though if he stayed that late there was an extra 6d in the pay packet for ‘tea away'. He smoked Cut Black Cavendish in his pipe, 3½d an ounce from Salmon and Gluckstein's, and wrote prose and poetry at home, enjoying the ‘irregular rhythm of effort and relaxation'. Looking back on his youth he could not disguise his affection for the old world. ‘I belong at heart to the pre-1914 North Country …' he wrote; ‘something at the core of me is still in Market Street hearing the Town Hall chimes'.
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But we do not need to look very much harder to see the cracks in the masonry. The labour movement was growing stronger by the year: there were 422 strikes in 1909, 834 in 1912, and 1,459 in 1913: there would have been a General Strike in 1914 had war not intervened. Class divisions within Britain were still accepted by many, though there was growing rancour. On 23 January 1917 Corporal Will Fisher, already feeling the symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him, wrote:

John Simpson Kirkpatrick, one of the heroes of the Australian fight for Gallipoli, was a merchant seaman from Tyneside who jumped ship in Sydney in 1909. In 1912 he told his mother:

And if the Bradford community described by J. B. Priestley was ‘closer to a classless society than anyone born in southern England can ever understand', there was a desperate underclass which even junior clerks seldom saw. John Cusack's mother brought up five children in two ground-floor rooms in a Glasgow tenement. There was no bathroom, and just a cold water tap and grate in the kitchen. His father and mother slept in the bed, and the children on the floor of a room eight feet square. The family went to a public wash house once a week. After his father emigrated to America the family was barely able to survive.

Underwear was uncommon – John Cusack's comrades found their army issue vests and drawers items ‘previously unknown to us'. In working-class households where it did exist it had to last a full week between washes. It is small wonder that wartime rationing significantly improved the diet and health of families such as these.

In July 1901 Arthur Osburn was a medical student at Guy's Hospital, just back from serving as a volunteer private in the Boer War, an experience which helps account for the bitter flavour of his memoirs. It was decades before the founding of the National Health Service, and the very poor depended for their medical treatment on the charity of doctors and senior medical students. Osburn was on duty in a Bermondsey slum. ‘Outside in the shabby court the heated air quivered,' he wrote:

William Woodruff grew up in a Lancashire cotton town about ten years later. His father worked in the mill, and family life was typical of that of many manual workers, a notch up from the tenement underclass but still with precious little room for financial manoeuvre.

Joseph Garvey, born in Halifax in 1888 to an Irish immigrant family, was four years old when he lost his father in a quarry accident. There were no benefits, just a collection from fellow workers and the proceeds of a benefit dance which brought in less than £10, and his mother had to raise six children. ‘It was a hard life for her,' he reflected, ‘all work and no play, no rest. She was a small woman with long dark auburn hair, and a fresh complexion. Good looking, but she was not built on strong lines.' She died in 1902, and Garvey eventually got a job as an assistant machine minder at 24 shillings a week, good money indeed.
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Dover-born George Fortune, one of nine children,

If life was hard in the shadow of dark satanic mills, the countryside was not always green and pleasant for its occupants. Life on the land was changing as machines began to replace men, eventually ‘to sacrifice the community and the connected way of life on the twin altars of speed and greed'.
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H. J. Massingham wrote of ‘the ruin of a closely-knit society with its richly interwoven and traditional culture that had denied every change, every aggression except the one that established the modern world'.
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In
Lark Rise to Candleford
Flora Thompson described her own village, Juniper Hill in North Oxfordshire, unaware that hers was a picture of a world that was changing for ever. Most men in the village lived off the land, with their own hierarchy of farm labourers, ploughmen, carters, shepherds, stockmen and blacksmiths, and nicknames like ‘Bishie', ‘Pumpkin' or ‘Boamer'. Labourers received 10 shillings a week, skilled workers 2 shillings more. They ate one hot meal a day, usually stewed vegetables reinforced with a little bacon, for all households maintained a family pig, killed, bloodily and noisily, during the first two quarters of the moon, for the meat from a pig killed beneath a waning moon was believed to shrink in cooking.

Many farming youngsters were ‘thickset, red-faced men of good medium height and enormous strength …'. Their older workmates ‘stooped, had gnarled and swollen hands and walked badly, for they felt the effects of a life spent out of doors in all weathers …'. Endurance was their favourite virtue: ‘Not to flinch from pain or hardship was their ideal.' Their womenfolk were as tough, and ‘a young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement, “I didn't flinch, did I? Oh, I hope I didn't flinch.”' They did not begrudge their employer his beef and port: he was ‘Not a bad ‘ole sort … an' does his bit by the land.' Their rancour was reserved for his bailiff, ‘“Muster Morris” to his face but “Old Monday” or “you ole devil” behind his back.' Boys sometimes did a stretch in the army before returning, or going off to seek work in a town. In 1914 Juniper Hill, like so many other villages, did not flinch, and sent its young men, Flora's brother among them, to the war. ‘Eleven out of that little community never came back again,' lamented Flora.

Illegitimate births were unknown in ‘Lark Rise' in the 1880s, but became frequent soon afterwards. They generally passed without much comment, but when young Emily blamed the son of the house where she had been in service for her condition there was widespread support for her. The youth was able to prove that he had been away from home at the relevant time, and Emily went on to raise a large family without benefit of husband. In Glasgow there was an overall illegitimacy rate of 7 percent in 1913, and in the very poor Blackfriars district this rose to 15.6 percent of all births. The city's Medical Officer of Health reported that year that he feared that about 8 percent of poor children were infected with syphilis.
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About 200 per 1,000 infants failed to survive the first year of life in many of Britain's large industrial towns, and many that did grew up with hollow chests and rickety limbs. Overall, 60 percent of volunteers for the Boer War had been rejected as physically unfit, and even in 1918, when military medical standards were at rock bottom, over a million men were graded unfit for front-line service.
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There was a close correlation between social class and physical fitness. A pre-war survey of Cambridge undergraduates found 70 percent in the fittest group, Class I; 20 percent in Grade II, 7.5 percent in Grade III and just 2.5 percent in Grade IV. But in Britain as a whole in 1917 only 34 percent of recruits examined were actually Grade I, and those from urban areas with high infant mortality rates fared even worse.
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Thomas Atkins was no stranger to death. His siblings died in infancy from illnesses which would now be prevented by vaccination or cured by antibiotics. His workmates perished from a variety of accidents and diseases, and the prevalence of infection meant that even a simple cut could prove fatal. Most people then died at home, and in many households bodies were laid out in open coffins before burial. Funerals were rituals of enormous significance, for they said much about the status of the bereaved family and, by extension, of the neighbourhood.

Most working-class families paid into burial and sick clubs, the latter to ensure a basic income if the breadwinner fell ill, and the former to avert the crowning insult of a pauper's funeral.

Although most working-class communities generated a powerful sense of identity and shared values, they were by no means as crime-free as they appear in rosy retrospect. Drunkenness and its frequent concomitant wife-beating were common, and there was frequent violence, often on a small scale but sometimes, especially in Glagsow, where Catholic versus Protestant riots occurred, on a much larger scale. Even the small Hampshire brewery town of Alton (where I spent my middle years) was once so violent that policemen patrolled in pairs. The police were widely unpopular, and at least one of the reasons for widespread suspicion of the Military Police amongst First World War soldiers was an attitude forged in civilian life.

There were urgent political issues too. Lloyd George's radical ‘Peoples' Budget' of 1906, which raised taxes to pay for social reforms, including old age pensions, had been passed at the cost of confrontation with the Lords, whose powers were reduced by the 1911 Parliament Act. Suffragettes campaigning for votes for women risked death for their beliefs. The apparent imminence of Home Rule for Ireland encouraged thousands of Ulstermen to arm and drill, and the so-called Curragh Mutiny of March 1914 originated in the possibility that the army might be used to coerce the North when Home Rule was granted. In June 1914 David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer (and as unreliable a prophet of the future as he was to prove a commentator on the past), assured London's business leaders that the international skies had never been bluer. The government was far more concerned about domestic issues, and there seemed little doubt that it was right.

The Old Army mirrored this divided world. It had never been the mass army that French or German conscripts would have recognised, with middle-class men serving in rank and file alongside industrial workers or farm labourers. French infantryman Henri Barbusse tells us how: