Portsmouth's World War One Heroes by James Daly

Author:James Daly
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750951999
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

12

A ‘Sink of Iniquity’? Landport:

A Portsmouth Community at War

Although middle-class Southsea boasted by far the most officers among Portsmouth’s war casualties, most of the town’s working-class neighbourhoods lost many hundreds of men serving in the ranks. Although the fate of the middle-class elite has been much more prominent in history, the deaths of thousands of working-class men from Portsmouth perhaps more accurately reflect the town’s lost generation of the First World War. A total of 446 young men from Landport alone were killed, and the experiences of these men provide a useful cross section of Portsmouth society in general. It can be seen, from even a small handful of stories, that their backgrounds were remarkably diverse, and their experiences even more so.

The first dwellings in Landport – originally called ‘halfway houses’ – were built in the early nineteenth century as an overspill from the town of Portsmouth resulting from the influx of people during the wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Its name derives from the gate on the land side of the old town fortifications, the ‘land port’. Straddling the road from Portsmouth to London, among the first houses built in the area was that in Old Commercial Road in which Charles Dickens was born in 1812. The nineteenth century saw rapid change in Portsmouth, and by 1914, Landport was completely unrecognisable from the neighbourhood of Dickens’s time. With the coming of the railway, Landport assumed a new importance. Due to the fortifications around Old Portsmouth, Portsmouth’s main railway station had to be built some way to the north, next to the road to London. A number of hotels sprang up around the station, as well as the town post office. Commercial Road, slightly to the north, grew into the town’s major commercial district, with the road occupied by department stores and public houses. Crowning the development of the area, the new neo-classical town hall was completed in 1890.1

Yet, despite these impressive developments, Landport was still predominantly a slum area. The medieval town of Portsmouth had expanded onto the east and north of Portsea Island, and Landport was by now bordered by new areas such as Fratton, Kingston and Buckland.2 Whereas in the early nineteenth century any part of Portsea Island outside of the town walls could be referred to as ‘Landport’, by 1914 developments in neighbouring areas led to Landport becoming smaller and more defined, broadly covering an area east of Anglesey Road, slightly south of the railway line, west of Fratton Road and roughly south of where Portsmouth’s commercial port now stands. Nevertheless, old habits died hard and many people who lived in other areas of Portsea Island still gave their address as ‘Landport’.

For a relatively small geographical area, Landport had a large population. In 1911, St Mary’s electoral ward, which roughly reflected the boundaries of Landport, was home to 11,376 people in 2,570 separate households. There was a much higher proportion of men than women, due to the presence of so many young sailors.3 Landport also had its notorious aspects.

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