Glossop in the Great War by Cooper Glynis

Author:Cooper, Glynis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War I
ISBN: 9781473855113
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2015-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

1917

AT NEW YEAR the Glossop churches held Watchnight services. These started late on New Year’s Eve and finished in the early hours of New Year’s Day. During the services, Christians reviewed the year that had just passed and prayed for the year ahead. It was a muted affair as 1916 had been a grim year and, despite hopes for a better year in 1917, many feared it would bring little joy or comfort.

The mayoress received a large batch of letters from Glossop men serving in Europe full of warm thanks to the givers and workers at home for their Christmas parcels. Some wrote of the dreadful weather conditions at the Front and expressed a hope that ‘Christmas 1917 would be the last Christmas of this terrible war’. A bleak poem, called A Night on the Somme, echoed these sentiments. There were the usual lists of war casualties, which made grim reading and, although reports of military action tried to sound optimistic, nobody was fooled. In mid January a book written by Arthur Mee and Dr Stuart Holden was published by Morgan and Scott. The title was simply Defeat! Although fiercely patriotic it was full of unpalatable facts, such as 10 per cent of the manpower for the war had been wasted and that 10 per cent of the war bill had been wasted. Full of phrases like ‘ring and string’, and putting forward arguments for prohibition, it claimed that Britain had ‘not yet deserved to win the War’.

French agriculture had suffered badly and there was scarcely enough food to feed the French let alone for the troops or for export. There was now an appeal to Derbyshire women to work the land, as women were doing in France and Belgium. All classes of women were encouraged to assist for patriotic reasons, and farmers were instructed that they should not object to female workers. There had been heavy snow storms in the Peak District and many of the farmers were, in any case, heavily occupied by digging out their sheep from snowdrifts. At the end of January a mass meeting was held at Woolley Bridge on the outskirts of Glossop about food shortages, food hoarding, profiteering and the fact that many were going without sufficient food. Children’s growth was in danger of being stunted by inadequate nutrition and there were calls for regulation and for a food controller to be appointed. Following this meeting, dairy farmers in the Glossop area offered 100 acres of grazing land to be ploughed for growing food and, in recognition of their gesture, Lord Howard, who owned most of Glossop at the time, said he would pay for re-seeding when the land came to be re-instated as pasture. Seed potatoes were to be purchased for the national food supply, whose rallying cry was ‘Food! Organisation! Victory!’, and Isaac Jackson, who owned Hawkshead Mills in Old Glossop, offered to pay for Glossop’s share of seed potatoes.

Meanwhile there was, quite literally, ‘trouble at mill’. Cotton spinners throughout

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