Hello. Welcome to the March edition. We have an article from Keith on a local nurse, a piece on a one-handed pianist, and a couple of book reviews.
Trevor
The Programme for 2015
Mar 7th: Michael O’Brien – Double Eagles: American Pilots in RFC
Apr 11th: Barry Kitchener – Railway Men in the Great War
May 9th: TBC
June 6th: TBC
July 4th: Chris John – German Tanks at Villers Brettoneux
Aug 1st: Harbinder Singh – Sikhs in the Great War
Sept 5th: Michael Steadman – Manchester Pals
Oct 3rd: Andrew Tonge – 1914 Race to the Sea
Nov 7th: Marietta Crichton-Stuart – Alice in Wonderland and her Lost Boys
Dec 5th: Branch Social
Last month’s speaker
John Bessette came all the way from the USA to talk to us about “Over there with O’Ryans’ Roughnecks” – the two US National Guard divisions which were under British command in the Northern sector of the Western Front. John is a retired US Air Force Lt Col and is that rarest of creatures – an American historian of WWI. His primary focus is on the 27th Divn which came from the state of New York and in which his father served. The other division was the 30th Divn which was from Tennessee (and in which my grandfather’s cousin served and died). John explained that the National Guard was, and is, under the control of individual states, not of the federal government, or at least until such time as that unit became part of the US expeditionary force to Europe. He also had various reminiscences of the American and British veterans about the collision of cultures in having troops of both nations under the same command. Altogether, it was a very interesting and entertaining talk.
Nurse Mary Hughes ARRC, SRN
Keith Walker
When I was researching the soldiers of WWI on the Memorial Gates at Pentre Broughton, I came across this interesting story of a WWI nurse who had lived in the area.
Nurse Mary Hughes was born in 1880 at Mount Hill, Brymbo and after attending local schools began nursing training at the Royal Salop Infirmary, Shrewsbury in 1905. Here the nurses worked for 2/6d a week (12.5p to the younger generation) and most of that amount went on breakages, for example thermometers which had to be replaced. All their private clothes were taken from them and the people of Shrewsbury called them ‘The Black Crows from Salop’ because they wore black cloaks with white cuffs and collars. In the nurses home, there were about ten cubicles to house them, with a small gas jet in the centre of the ceiling. At mealtimes, butter was rationed to one pat about the size of a walnut and if you were late for a meal it was gone. But there was always dripping!
Salop Infirmary 1914 Salop Infirmary today – now “The Parade Shopping Centre”
With only one day off a month and severe discipline, the nurses of Mary’s day thought themselves fortunate to train for a profession where their matron said a nurse should be able to turn her hand to anything. Their duty began at 7:15am and continued until 8:15pm. They were wakened at 6am and on Sundays it was compulsory to attend Holy Communion at 6:15am. Mary was proud of her training at Shrewsbury at the hospital which was founded in 1745 being known as the Salop Infirmary, providing accommodation for 52 in-patients. Nurse
Mary Hughes qualified as an SRN – “State Registered Nurse”.
At some time, Nurse Mary Hughes joined the Territorial Force Nursing Service. The Territorial Force Nursing Service was set up in March 1908 under the Lord Haldane’s “Reserve Forces Act 1907”. Provision was made for twenty three territorial forces hospitals to be established in towns and cities though out the country. The Territorial Hospitals would give the Army 12,000 extra beds in time of war.
In 1913, the Territorial Force Nursing Service was given permission for its members to volunteer for overseas service if not required for duty at home. At the outbreak of war there were 2,117 members of the service ready for mobilisation, and of the 23 Territorial hospitals, 19 were open and receiving casualties by the last day of August 1914, and the other 4 followed by the end of September 1914.
By the end of the war in 1918, there were 80,140 women serving in the Territorial Force Nursing Service of whom 2,280 served abroad.
At the end of 1919, most of the women had returned to civilian life. In 1921 with reorganisation the service expanded and became the Territorial Army Nursing Service.
In August 1914, Nurse Mary Hughes was posted together with 66 nurses and 22 sisters to the 5th Southern General Hospital at Portsmouth. The matron was Miss K.A Smith and the Surgeon in Charge Colonel Kyffin RAMC.
Colonel Kyffin was a popular medical practitioner from Gosport. Miss K.A Smith was the Matron of the West Kent General Hospital, Maidstone, Kent. The Principal Matron, Miss Alcock, was from the Royal Hospital, Portsmouth.
The 5th Southern General Hospital was situated in three areas, the Royal Hospital Commercial Road, Portsmouth, Milton Infirmary, Milton Street, and a large secondary school which was on Fawcett Road, Portsmouth. There is an article in the British Journal of Nursing dated December 5th 1914 which states that the hospital had a number of patients, not only British but Belgian and German wounded. The Matron, Miss K.A Smith, stated “that a number of cases are very serious, some of the spinal cases arrive with bad bedsores which are extremely difficult to cure”. She also explained how the school had been modified. “The great central hall of the school has been arranged as a large ward with four rows of beds, two arranged along the walls as in an ordinary hospital ward, and two up the middle back to back with an intervening space. The width of the ward is so great that there is ample room for this arrangement. The German patients are in a separate ward under guard, their officers being amongst the patients allocated to the Portsmouth Royal Hospital”.
The Royal Hospital after a bombing raid 1941. The Royal Hospital, Portsmouth – 1914
As a matter of interest, the Royal Hospital was bombed in 1941, rebuilt but closed on the 1st October 1978. It was demolished, and the site is now a supermarket.
The Milton Infirmary became part of St Marys Hospital, the infirmary closed in 1930.
The Milton Infirmary, Portsmouth
The school on Fawcett Road is still there, and is now an academy – “Priory School”.
German Soldier arriving at The Priory School in 1914 The Priory School today
Nurse Mary Hughes served for the duration of the war. She was decorated with the ARRC “Associate Royal Red Cross”, one of 6,419 awarded in the Great War.
Nursing under the Matron, Miss K.A Smith, Nurse Mary Hughes would have experienced first-hand the horrors of the wounded of WWI. After the war, Nurse Mary Hughes returned to civilian nursing in the Wrexham area. She was the District Nurse in Southsea, Broughton. She lived in “Tagfan” Clayton Road, Pentre Broughton with her sister Eliza who was a school teacher in Black Lane School and her younger brother Ted who worked for the local water board. Nurse Mary Hughes is remembered locally as a very upright and straight lady. She was a regular worshipper at St Pauls Church, Pentre Broughton. A devoted supporter of the British Red Cross until the time of her death, she was awarded the British Red Cross Society Honorary Life Member’s badge in recognition of her devoted service beyond the call of duty.
After her life of so many experiences, Nurse Mary Hughes enjoyed a quiet retirement in Broughton, dying at the age of 78 and was buried in St Paul’s Churchyard with her brother and sister.
Some mementoes of Nurse Mary Hughes
Associate Royal Red Cross T.F.N.S Badge
Red Cross Badge Royal Salop Badge
References and acknowledgements
2. The British Journal of Nursing December 5th 1914
3. Ms Shirley Randles
Music and the Great War – more than a Long Way to Tipperary?
Caroline Adams
We all know about the war poets, but WW1 impacted on all aspects of the arts and this weekend I came across some instances of its influence on music.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was 41 years old in 1914. He enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served with them in France and Salonica. In December 1917, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery and in 1918, he was appointed Director of Music, First Army.
After the war, he wrote A Pastoral Symphony, first performed in 1922. It is a musical representation of the “pastures” of the Western Front where he served as a stretcher bearer and includes a cadenza for trumpet which was inspired by a bugler he heard practising there.
Paul Wittgenstein was the son of an eminent, wealthy Viennese family. Before WW1, he had ambitions to be a virtuoso pianist, but lost his right arm due to a bullet wound when serving on the Russian Front. The field hospital was captured and patients and staff transported to Omsk prisoner of war hospital, in southwest Siberia. Determined to continue his musical career, Wittgenstein drew a key board on a wooden crate and practised finger movements for hours each day. He was later transferred to an internment camp where he was given access to a piano. Eventually repatriated to Vienna, he became a concert pianist. Some of Chopin’s etudes had already been arranged for the left hand alone and he arranged others himself, but family money also allowed him to commission work from the best composers of the 20th century including Korngold, Hindemith, Richard Strauss, Ravel, Prokofiev and Britten.
He was, however, very critical of the works which were composed for him, often refusing to play them himself and some were not performed till after his death. Some of the contemporary music critics considered his playing to be mediocre, both before and after the loss of his right hand. Despite that, however, and his difficult relationship with his composers, he has left a significant legacy of commissioned work which continues to inspire single handed pianists.
Book reviews
AT WAR WITH THE 16TH IRISH DIVISION 1914-1918
The Staniforth Letters
JHM Staniforth,
edited by Richard S Grayson
Pen & Sword Military, Barnsley, with the Imperial War Museum
2012, £25, xv, 251pp, ills, photos
ISBN 978-1-84884-634-0
This book is much wider than its title suggests and is well worth reading from various angles. John “Max” Staniforth was a highly educated man whose writing style is both lucid and amusing. The book consists of his edited letters which he sent, on at least a weekly basis, to his parents during his service in WWI from 1914 to 1918. He rediscovered them during a house removal in the 1970s, later typed them up and tried to have them published. Unfortunately, interest in WWI was at a low ebb, and he could not find a publisher for them. He died in 1985, and so never lived to see them in print, which is clearly a great shame.
Some of the letters succumbed to the effects of 50 years of mould and mice but most did in fact survive. Professor Richard Grayson has edited them, adding footnotes and much other material to help explain the context to the reader. In particular, he explains where on the Western Front, or elsewhere, each letter was written, as Staniforth was unable to do so at the time they were originally written, for obvious reasons. Indeed, I gather from the WFA’s own expert on the 16th Irish, Denis McCarthy, that the original letters are difficult to decipher, so Richard Grayson’s input on many fronts should not go unnoticed.
Staniforth was, in truth, a very English chap. His father was a GP in Yorkshire and Staniforth junior was at school at Charterhouse before going up to Christ Church, Oxford where he was when war broke out in August 1914. He enlisted in October in the Connaught Rangers as a private. His mother was originally from County Cavan and his maternal great grandfather had served in the forerunner of the Connaughts. Enlisting in Whitby and opting for the Connaughts caused some considerable confusion in the local recruiting office!
The account of the rough and ready recruits, and the training at the depot in Fermoy is certainly illuminating. This includes a brawl involving drunk prisoners breaking out of the guardhouse and the ensuing fracas, resulting in two of them dying of their injuries. He describes the daily routine and the various activities of the training camp, which were rather more subdued and constructive.
He was made a corporal by the end of October, not long after he had reached the Fermoy depot. A few weeks later, he was encouraged to apply for a commission by a young Dublin lieutenant who had joined the Dublin Fusiliers as a ranker “to see what the life was like” and had then applied for a commission. Staniforth did likewise, having been assured by the Dublin lieutenant that he could live on a subaltern’s pay. Before signing his application, his colonel gave Staniforth the task of drilling the company in “practicing skirmishing and extended order” on the local race course. Clearly it all met with the colonel’s approval. He was commissioned into the 7th Leinsters where he remained, more or less, for much of his service, though he was in the 2nd Leinsters toward the end of the war.
Staniforth’s first “job” was as a signals officer and he was sent off for signals training in April 1915. It would be a further 8 months before the division was sent to France, as high command felt that it needed much further training to make it effective. During his time as a signals officer, he describes scavenging cable on the battlefield and on one occasion, having rolled up a 2000 yard length of it, discovering that he had just disconnected a French artillery unit from its HQ. So, profound apologies all round and he had to re-lay the cable, but he said that the French were very nice about it.
Later in the war, he acted at various times as an adjutant, quartermaster, and officer in charge of a troop train, amongst other tasks such as “just” being an officer of the regiment. He describes his varied roles in some detail and in an amusing turn of phrase. In particular, the sheer level of organisation and effort involved in supplying a front line unit with its various requirements for a 24 hour period makes for educational reading. It also helped me realise what an adjutant actually did in WWI.
He describes his journey back to the UK as a gas casualty in 1918 which gives a lucid insight into the fate of the wounded. He had periods of sick leave when he suffered from scabies (a nasty skin infection) and from severe dental problems.
In another letter, he comments on censoring the men’s letters. In particular, he mentions a Private Galvin whom Staniforth says is “an honest soul who invariably concludes his laborious epistles to the wife of his bosom with the parting words ‘God protect you from your lovin husbin [sic]’”.
Staniforth’s letters are a very interesting read. They are of course from a son at the front to his parents, so are possibly made cheery so as not to worry them at the time, and certainly glossing over some of the things that he saw. As regards his soldiers, certainly, he was fond of the men of the Leinsters (and Connaughts) and they were clearly fond of him.
After the war, Max Staniforth worked on railways in Argentina, drawing on his WWI experiences with train transport, then as a radio announcer in France and finally as a Church of England clergyman. I do wish I had met him.
Trevor Adams
A QUESTION OF DUTY
The Curragh Incident 1914
PAUL O’BRIEN
New Island, Dublin, 2014, £9.99,
photos, 164pp.
ISBN: 978-1-84840-314-7
This is an interesting book which I would buy with my own money and it would not break the bank. It deals with events of March 1914 in the midst of the Home Rule crisis in Ireland and can easily be read in an afternoon. The subject matter is British army officers stationed at the Curragh camp who refused to obey potential orders to march against Unionists who were primarily, but not exclusively, in Ulster. It was to all intents and purposes an army mutiny, though it is now often described rather effetely as an “incident”. Surely the British army refusing to obey orders a mere five months before Mons is a bit more than a mere “incident”!
The author explains the context, and how the whole issue arose from a bungling War Office and the crass behaviour of Generals Paget and Fergusson, who were in charge of the army in Ireland. More intelligent man management of their subordinates, and better communication and understanding all round would have headed off the whole problem. Churchill’s “solution” was to deploy the Royal Navy to the Scottish coast and to offer to have “Belfast in flames in 24 hours”. Thankfully, Prime Minister Asquith overruled him when he heard about it.
The author raises the interesting issue of whether the Curragh mutiny, and the distrust arising between the army and the politicians from it, damaged the performance of the army in WWI. He does not seem to provide a definitive answer, so in the absence of evidence to the contrary the answer must presumably be “no”, but it is a fascinating matter to raise.
The attempts to solve the mutiny were as bizarre as the incident itself. These included Seely, the secretary of state for the War Office, even altering the compromise document without referring it back to the cabinet, which resulted in him being forced to resign at the end of March 1914. A similar fate befell Sir John French because of his involvement with that document, though of course he made a comeback, as it were, to lead the BEF in August.
This whole incident should be viewed in the light of British policy in Ireland of the era, which managed to go from inept to appalling, by the end of the decade. The book reminds us that the Germans supplied weapons to both the Unionists and the Nationalists, not least to create a diversion for the British from their problems in continental Europe both before WWI and during it. The author does deal effectively with the German connection, as it was in 1914 (and which later reached its peak with their practical support for the Easter rising in 1916).
The chapters at the start and end of the book deal with some background on the politics of Ireland, and also the aftermath of the incident. These are the less successful aspects of the book. To my mind, they should either not be there at all, or be more comprehensive and more balanced. Without wishing to walk on anyone’s toes, these chapters are somewhat slanted toward an Irish Nationalist viewpoint, and so lack the balance achieved by the writings on Irish political history of authors such as ATQ Stewart or Keith Jeffrey. By way of example, yes, there were atrocities against northern Catholics in the early 20s, but there were also murders of Protestants especially in county Cork, resulting in an appeal from the protestant church leaders in southern Ireland to the then president, Arthur Griffith. Why mention one but not the other? Anyway, what relevance do events of the 20s have to the Curragh incident? And why is there a chapter on the murder of Sir Henry Wilson in London in 1922 at all? At least in dealing with period of the Curragh mutiny the book is thankfully clear that Wilson was a southern Irish protestant, a fact which seems to elude English writers on WWI, dare I say it, who forever refer to him as an Ulster Unionist. There were also southern Irish unionists and he was one of them!
It is an interesting book.
WWI blog
The Leicester Arts and Museums Service, in conjunction with the Royal Leicestershire Regiment, has set up a blog where they are publishing a series of letter from a local, Captain JD Hills, who served through most of WWI. The letters are being published sequentially, on the centenary of the date on which the original letter was written. The blog can be found at https://ww1lettersfromthefront.wordpress.com/
Trevor Adams trevormcmadams@gmail.com