August 1914 by Mark Rowe

Author:Mark Rowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: First World War, World War I, WWI, The Great War, Winston Churchill, suffragettes, Kitchener, declaration of war, volunteers, soldiers
ISBN: 9781909183377
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

When trade, jobs and food looked uncertain, and charity between classes was not nimble enough, or at all enough, to meet needs, society’s principle of individual responsibility looked like something less moral: every man for himself. All this clashed with those public ideals of duty, and honour - which on the battlefield led to another abstraction: sacrifice.

II

Businesses could hardly carry on ‘business as usual’, if what had been their markets, or source of materials, were now enemy territory. Even in Sudan, Frank Balfour soon noticed that almost half the country’s peacetime exports were gum, ‘mostly taken by Germany’. As crippling, though more subtle, was the shaken confidence of businessmen; irrational, maybe, yet all the harder to put right. In mid-August the Hull architect George Thorp visited relations: “Auntie not well,” he wrote. “Uncle pessimistic”:

... was thinking an army of million men would be very useful in England to keep out the Germans, apparently thinks our fleet insufficient for the purpose, has discharged one of his assistants and cancelled his order for bulbs from Holland and yet had to confess that trade was normal and that they had to work very hard to keep up with the demand. To cheer him up told him a little story - a true one - the story had reference to the trenches being dug at Sutton - a resident there had one dug right across his lawn and flower beds; when he returned in the evening, his wife said to him, ‘oh! Those poor men have been working so hard today, they looked so tired and dirty, so I had them in and made them a good tea!’

The trenches Thorp spoke of were between Hull and the sea, between the villages of Paull and Sutton. These precautions (also haystacks moved, and farm buildings pulled down, if they were in the way of these hurried defences) only fed the fear of invasion - last felt, as Thorp noted, in 1805, when the feared invader was Napoleon. Thorp’s uncle, and many others, could not handle the unfamiliar sights, losses and unknowns of war: the commandeering of horses as mounts for officers and cavalrymen, and to pull wagons; and the ‘streets full of soldiers’, leaving as mysteriously as they marched in. Without confidence, businesses put up their prices not only because they could, but to hoard what they could, in case of even worse times, like any squirrel at the first sniff of autumn.

Given the trade troubles - holiday towns with cancelled bookings, hotels having to lay off staff and disappoint suppliers, who then could not pay their bills; and so on - you could understand the likes of Sophia Langmail, of Cardiff, who in a letter to the Bristol Times on September 2 asked: ‘holiday or no holiday?’ She reckoned that duty (that word again) for her and others like her lay ‘in going forth fearlessly to the seaside or country apartments and in circulating our money as freely as possible in every legitimate way’. Even

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