Songs of Innocence (11 page)

Another major issue, Sylvia reported, was the growing number of illegitimate babies for whom there was little or no support. The army’s separation allowances did not extend fully to
unmarried partners and their children. The navy deducted sixpence from the daily pay of each sailor to send to his wife and children, but ‘in respect of a bastard child, fourpence’. In
many cases, even this paltry sum did not come through. Many of these now-absent young men would have married their sweethearts if they had known they were pregnant or had had the time to do so,
Sylvia said – though there were also reports that men ordered by the courts to support their children were escaping their responsibilities by joining up.

Soon, though, even the most affluent homes were coming to terms with the horrors of war. Hermione Llewellyn, her mother and her brother Owen returned to her grandmother’s large house after
her father’s departure for Egypt, only to find it had been turned into a hospital. Each week ambulances would arrive bringing bandaged soldiers: ‘Owen kept asking who had hurt them and
they always said, “The bloody Boche.”
³⁶

‘Sometimes in our house grown-ups talked French, or stopped talking at all, when Owen and I were around. One day when Cook was having her afternoon rest Owen and I looked at her newspaper
on the kitchen table: we saw dreadful pictures of men without arms or legs, and there were pictures of men all huddled together sleeping. Owen was five and owned a tricycle and explained it all to
me: “There’s been a quarrel between the Kings and Emperors,” he said. “And now all the good men are fighting all the bad men.” He told me the sleeping men in
Cook’s newspaper were dead but they were heroes and would go to heaven.’
³⁷

War work

Harry Watkin was six when the war started, the second of ten children born into a poor family in the slum district of Hulme in Manchester. Even at this tender age, and in the
absence of a father who had joined up, it was his job to run most of his mother’s errands. Later, he would remember thick fogs, broken only by candles carried in jam jars, and queues for
everything.
³⁸
‘The longest and slowest-moving queues in which I waited were those at the Medlock Street gasworks to buy coke. It was
overall a wearisome task. First a wagon had to be borrowed from Jack Booth’s coalyard in Duke Street. I had to beg, looking as humble and as grateful as I could, for the loan of one. They
were very strong and heavy with iron handles and wheels and made a noisy clatter as they bumped along over the flags and setts. These coke errands meant half a day off school and I would take one
of the children with me, riding in the wagon.’

Many children had work to do in wartime. In addition to his regular domestic duties, Harry took part in a national scheme to raise funds for refugees, which involved selling scent cards:
‘They were coloured and strongly perfumed and every boy at school was given about a dozen to take home and sell. Well, I didn’t even consider asking mother to buy one and I
wouldn’t have dreamt of trying to sell any to our neighbours – one never bothered with or spoke to women unless specifically sent by mother. So I just kept the cards until we were told
to return all money and unsold ones. Obviously mine were soiled and creased, for there was no place in our house where they could have lain untouched. In spite of that I was given another batch.
The procedure and result were as before.’
³⁹

Elsewhere, too, children were being pressed into the service of the war effort in all kinds of roles. If the Scout movement was ever to come into its own, now was the time. It was set up to
build the
physiques and the characters of the nation’s youth – particularly the poor – for just such an eventuality as this. By 1918, it would boast 300,000
members, and a quarter of a million current or former Scouts would have served in the forces. Girls, too – in 1909 Baden-Powell had conceived a theory that middle-class girls needed to be
less mollycoddled and more able to manage, if necessary, without the help of servants. ‘You do not want to make tomboys of refined girls, yet you want to attract and thus to raise the slum
girl from the gutter,’ he had written in his
Headquarters Gazette
, adding: ‘Girls must be partners and comrades rather than dolls.’ And so the Girl Guides had come into
being.
⁴⁰

If World War One has a major significance in the history of the English child, it is perhaps connected with this: the very notion of childhood now began, through children’s war roles and
through the growing influence of the Scout and Guide movements, to change. Even as the ‘ideal’ child’s physical presence had begun to grow stronger in the years before the war,
ultimately he had remained a somewhat wraithlike figure. Now a far more robust child began to solidify in the public imagination: a stout, capable child who had been trained in practical skills and
who was willing to step up to the mark in a time of national emergency.

Baden-Powell’s role in this transformation would be hard to over-estimate. Even before war broke out, he had offered the services of the Scouts as lookouts who could watch trunk lines and
telegraphs between London and the coast to prevent sabotage by German infiltrators. Soon, Scout troops were also watching reservoirs, acting as messengers in public offices, hospitals and Red Cross
centres, and helping the coastguards. By 1915, the Scouts were also serving refreshments to the troops in France from specially constructed ‘huts’. Within months of the outbreak of war,
thousands of Scouts were away from home on extended tours of coast-watching duty which lasted for many weeks at a time.

‘We had the order to mobilise from the superintendent of police on August 6th at 11 a.m. and at 2 p.m. we started,’ reported J. Barcham Green, Scoutmaster of
the 11th CK Troop from Kent in November 1914, after a three-week tour watching the Deal to Dover road:
⁴¹
‘We went on duty at 6 a.m.,
watching the telegraph line and following suspected persons, of which there were a host. Our duty ended at 8 p.m. when the police took it over till 6 a.m. During our stay of three weeks we handed
many suspected persons over to the police and military, had two aliens registered, tracked and shadowed many innocent persons whose movements were suspicious, mended various punctures and broken
down bicycles and made many good friends. The Scoutmaster was arrested one fine afternoon while watching for a spy who was said to be disguised as a Scoutmaster, and he (our Scoutmaster) had a busy
time explaining his identity.’

By December 1914, it was estimated that 100,000 Scouts had been employed in war work. And in that month, too, the first deaths of Scouts were recorded. The lists, which were printed each month
in the
Headquarters Gazette
, would total 10,000 by the end of the war, some in air raids at home and some in action with the forces abroad. Baden-Powell has since been accused of helping to
brainwash a generation of young men to go willingly to their own slaughter.
⁴²
It is an accusation which is easy to make, for the Scout
movement’s founder certainly threw himself with gusto into the preparation of his charges for war.

‘At present, only men of 19 and over, and of rather big size, are being enlisted for the service,’ he wrote in the
Headquarters Gazette
in November 1914. ‘The time may
shortly come when the standard may be lowered, and younger men of smaller size admitted. I want all Scouts to Be Prepared for this and to have our Scouts Defence Corps ready, so that the moment the
door is opened we can step in, trained and ready for service. The candidates should perfect themselves in the following duties: Rifle shooting, judging distance,
signalling,
pioneering, entrenching, drilling in accordance with the Army “infantry training”, Scouting, first-aid, camp cooking.’

The Girl Guides were doing their bit, too, with Baden-Powell’s sister Agnes at their head. But there were strict limits. Too much physical activity could fatally damage a girl’s
‘interior economy’, Agnes explained.
⁴³
‘Do you know that there are more girls nowadays with hairy lips than formerly, and I
believe it is due to the violent exercise they take?’ Guides were urged not to use vulgar slang such as ‘topping’ or ‘ripping’ or ‘what ho!’ and were put
to work during the war training as volunteer nurses. The
Handbook for Girl Guides
suggested that ‘really well-educated women’ could also take up translating, dispensing to a
doctor, stockbroking, house decorating, accountancy or even architecture as careers.
⁴⁴

The Girl Guides did have one notable victory over the Boy Scouts – early in the war, the nascent intelligence service had recruited a few of the boys as messengers, but had found them
prone to getting into mischief during the long hours of forced inactivity. They turned instead to the Guides, who continued to supply them with girls aged between fourteen and sixteen throughout
the war.
⁴⁵

On the land, too, children were everywhere pressed into service. This had been common practice before the war, with some areas fitting school holidays around harvest times, and children in many
rural areas simply missing school when they were needed to pick fruit or work on the family farm. Now, a huge effort was made, in particular through the Scout movement, to recruit boys to work on
the land. By June 1918, forty-six Scout troops from the East End were supplying about 300 boys to help farmers in Peterborough with their crops, for instance. But this was not universally regarded
as a good thing, for many commentators tended to feel children were too easily exploited as cheap labour.

In one of his last parliamentary speeches before his death in September 1915, the Labour Party founder Keir Hardie – a vehement
opponent of the war – spoke out
against the practice. Education authorities all over the country were quietly allowing boys of eleven or twelve to leave school early so they could do agricultural and even manufacturing work, he
said. He feared that if this were allowed, it might continue after the war and erode a century of progress in protecting children’s rights: ‘Once the principle is laid down it may
become permanent,’ he said, accusing the education authorities of ‘robbing the child of the education which the law has provided for it’.

Yet with an estimated 60,000 agricultural workers now away at the war, and hundreds of thousands of jobs in other trades now vacant, Hardie and his supporters were left shouting into the wind.
Children were legally allowed to leave school at thirteen with permission, and many did so much sooner, especially during the war. The President of the Board of Education, Joseph Pease, declared
himself unable to do much about it. After all, he pointed out, many thousands of children were out of lessons because their schools had been comandeered by the forces.

Dora Dewar, a young teacher who worked near London’s docks at Custom House during the war, recalled later that her pupils began to disappear as soon as spring was in the air: ‘After
Whitsun the great exodus began across the Woolwich ferry into Kent, first for pea-picking, then for the cherry picking and other soft fruit, then for the apples and pears and last of all the hops.
They camped in tents and huts and had a glorious holiday and came back in early October like a horde of brown, shiny, smelly gipsies.’
⁴⁶

For other teenagers, there was no such happy ending to a spell of war work. Sylvia Pankhurst’s young friend Rose Pengelly, by now aged sixteen, found a job in one of the factories which
were crying out for women and girls to fill the places of the absent men. One Thursday just before Christmas 1915, she came to Sylvia’s welfare centre to dance for the younger children.
‘On Saturday she should
have danced again – but the knife of the machine she was working descended on her pretty right hand, rending and mangling the thumb and a
couple of fingers. Her new employer making no offer to pay a cab fare, she walked to the station, took the train to the London Hospital and there sat in the out-patients department till late in the
evening, when her crushed thumb and two fingers were amputated.’
⁴⁷

Boy combatants and civilian casualties

Legally, the minimum age for enlistment in the army was eighteen, and soldiers were meant to be nineteen before they could serve overseas. Naval cadets could join at fifteen,
but most did not see active service until they were older. But in truth many teenage boys were swept up in the jingoistic atmosphere of the time and managed to persuade the recruitment officers to
turn a blind eye to their real age. The youngest fatality is reputed to have been John Condon, who was killed in May 1915 and who was said to be just fourteen years old – though there has
been some dispute about this.
⁴⁸

Most boys joined for the glory and the excitement, yet the food was also an incentive. When Albert Farley, aged fifteen, sent his first letter to his family in London from a shore base near
Chatham in Kent, much of his letter was taken up by a full description of the clothing and the meals he had been given: ‘I am getting on all right with the bananas, salmon, sardines, bully
beef, peas, pickle onions, shrimps for tea, cocoa for supper,’ he wrote. ‘Perhaps fried fish and salmon 2nd course dinner, bananas, apple, custard and plums on Sunday.’ Albert
reported, with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a pupil writing home from boarding school, that he also had four new ‘duck suits’, three hats, a toothbrush and two sets of singlets and
drawers: ‘Everything A1.’ Albert died four months later along with about 400 other sailors when HMS
Natal
, the ship on which he had
become a stoker, caught
fire while at anchor in the Cromarty Firth and was ripped apart by a series of explosions.
⁴⁹

But the most celebrated of these boy combatants was Jack Cornwell, who, like Albert Farley, was fifteen when he joined up and sixteen when he died. Unlike Albert, Jack became a national hero and
was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. He died standing alone at his exposed post on the deck of HMS
Chester
, awaiting orders while under fire during the Battle of Jutland in May 1916.
In different times the reaction might well have been that Jack Cornwell was too young to fight and that he should never even have been there. Yet the navy did not even attempt to play down the
significance of Jack’s extreme youth. Far from it: the boy’s tender age was used to highlight his act of heroism. The
Daily Sketch
splashed his photograph across its front page.
The
London Gazette
, recording the awarding of the Victoria Cross in September 1916, reported: ‘Mortally wounded early in the action, Boy, First Class, John Travers Cornwell, remained
standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders, until the end of the action, with the gun’s crew dead and wounded around him. His age was under sixteen and a half
years.’