GWB Coventry by Peter Walters

Author:Peter Walters [Walters, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750969079
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2016-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Coventry soldiers from the 1/7 Warwickshires in a relaxed mood.

COURTESY OF MARK RADFORD

Time to enlist, young man.

COURTESY OF MARK RADFORD

In December 1915, the workforce at the Swift Motor Company downed tools because there were still young single men working there who had shown little interest in joining up.

Compulsory Service

It was a pattern not confined to Coventry. The attritional battles of 1915 had blown away the British Army’s seasoned professionals and Kitchener’s eager volunteers and there were simply not enough recruits coming forward to replace them. Some way of forcefully ‘encouraging’ enlistment would have to be found, in spite of the bluster of blowhards like Horatio Bottomley, editor of the John Bull newspaper, who in a speech at Coventry Hippodrome earlier in the year had assured his audience that compulsory service would never be needed in Britain. This was a country, he bellowed, in which two million free soldiers were the equivalent of twenty million anywhere else in the world.

The government’s first move, in the late autumn of 1915, was to introduce the Derby Scheme, named after Kitchener’s new Director General of Recruiting, Edward Stanley, 17th Earl of Derby. This required every eligible single man between the ages of 18 and 41 not in an essential occupation, to make a public declaration that he was willing to fight and would attend a recruiting office within forty-eight hours.

It produced more than 300,000 medically fit new recruits, but there was evidence that almost two-fifths of potential servicemen were still refusing to enlist. And so in February 1916 a Bill was rushed through Parliament to introduce conscription, at first for single men in that 18 to 41 age bracket, and then in May for married men.

In Coventry, the prospect of conscription being extended to married men prompted an angry protest meeting at the Empire Theatre, during which an audience of more than 2,000 husbands demanded a pledge from the government that every eligible single man would be conscripted before they were.

The strength of feeling was understandable. Steadily mounting casualties revealed a heart-breaking story of anguish among many families in the city. For at least a year, the wives and mothers of men missing on the battlefields had been placing appeals in local newspapers for news of their loved ones, who’d often been missing for months.

Private William Arthur Jeffs of the Gordon Highlanders had not been heard of for seven months when in July 1915 his mother appealed for news of him in the Coventry Graphic. Young Jeffs, aged just 16 and from North Street in the Stoke area of Coventry, was never seen again. It turned out he’d been killed in action in December 1914 and his body had never been found.

In another agonising twist to the grim tale of casualties, each week throughout the spring of 1916 local newspapers carried photographs of sweethearts that had been picked up from the bodies of the fallen on battlefields. Each was accompanied by an appeal for the young woman in the picture to come forward and claim the photograph.

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