Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes

1901 Arthur Osburn was a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, just back from serving as a volunteer private in the Boer War, an experience which helps account for the bitter flavour of his memoirs. It was decades before the founding of the National Health Service, and the very poor depended for their medical treatment on the charity of doctors and senior medical students. Osburn was on duty in a Bermondsey slum. ‘Outside in the shabby court the heated air quivered,’ he wrote:

      Odours of hops, tanneries, horse dung and wood pavement inextricably blended. The mean tumbledown dwelling I was in buzzed with flies, while the frowsy smell of unclean bedding was everywhere; here and there the familiar chain of brown vermin crawled from the loose and half-rotten skirting boards upwards onto the greasy walls. A thin wailing sound was coming down the steep rickety staircase from a room above – one of the spate of unwanted infants which plague the slums and which I had helped bring into the world, wondering at the time whether the snuffling, puling bundle of misery would not have done better to have got itself born in an African jungle.

      ‘That makes fifteen, and I’ve buried nine, sir,’ the mother had said. The midwife, nodding confidentially at me, had suggested a bootlace or lying the unwanted one down on a blanket. Full of youthful rigidity and righteousness I had sternly threatened her with the coroner if the child was not alive the next day.⁵¹

      William Woodruff grew up in a Lancashire cotton town about ten years later. His father worked in the mill, and family life was typical of that of many manual workers, a notch up from the tenement underclass but still with precious little room for financial manoeuvre.

      My brother Dan and I shared a bedroom with our parents. There were two metal beds with straw mattresses resting on thin metal slats … Dan and I slept in the same bed. We slept so close to our parents that we could touch them. The nearness of our bodies made us feel safe. I accepted my parents’ love-making long before I understood it. It was as natural as somebody using the pisspot … It didn’t disturb me, or confuse me, or revolt me. Like my father’s deep snoring, I ignored it. Living in such a confined space meant everybody shared in everybody else’s joys and sorrows.⁵²

      Joseph Garvey, born in Halifax in 1888 to an Irish immigrant family, was four years old when he lost his father in a quarry accident. There were no benefits, just a collection from fellow workers and the proceeds of a benefit dance which brought in less than £10, and his mother had to raise six children. ‘It was a hard life for her,’ he reflected, ‘all work and no play, no rest. She was a small woman with long dark auburn hair, and a fresh complexion. Good looking, but she was not built on strong lines.’ She died in 1902, and Garvey eventually got a job as an assistant machine minder at 24 shillings a week, good money indeed.⁵³ Dover-born George Fortune, one of nine children,

      left school at fourteen and got a job as a lather boy. It was a first class shop, they used to charge 4d for a haircut … My wages were 3/6d a week – 8 am to 8pm, Saturday 8 am till midnight. I cleaned all the windows, scrubbed out the shops, cleaned two copper urns, one for morning, one for afternoon. I never had metal polish to clean them with – paraffin oil and whitening …

      I used to do this kind of work in the cellar. It was very dark there – he would not let me have a light during the day. He liked me to sweep up after customers and brush them down; take his little boy to school and bring him home; tease out dirty old combings that old ladies used to bring to have them made up into wigs; set the razors.⁵⁴

      If life was hard in the shadow of dark satanic mills, the countryside was not always green and pleasant for its occupants. Life on the land was changing as machines began to replace men, eventually ‘to sacrifice the community and the connected way of life on the twin altars of speed and greed’.⁵⁵ H. J. Massingham wrote of ‘the ruin of a closely-knit society with its richly interwoven and traditional culture that had denied every change, every aggression except the one that established the modern world’.⁵⁶ In Lark Rise to Candleford Flora Thompson described her own village, Juniper Hill in North Oxfordshire, unaware that hers was a picture of a world that was changing for ever. Most men in the village lived off the land, with their own hierarchy of farm labourers, ploughmen, carters, shepherds, stockmen and blacksmiths, and nicknames like ‘Bishie’, ‘Pumpkin’ or ‘Boamer’. Labourers received 10 shillings a week, skilled workers 2 shillings more. They ate one hot meal a day, usually stewed vegetables reinforced with a little bacon, for all households maintained a family pig, killed, bloodily and noisily, during the first two quarters of the moon, for the meat from a pig killed beneath a waning moon was believed to shrink in cooking.

      Many farming youngsters were ‘thickset, red-faced men of good medium height and enormous strength …’. Their older workmates ‘stooped, had gnarled and swollen hands and walked badly, for they felt the effects of a life spent out of doors in all weathers …’. Endurance was their favourite virtue: ‘Not to flinch from pain or hardship was their ideal.’ Their womenfolk were as tough, and ‘a young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement, “I didn’t flinch, did I? Oh, I hope I didn’t flinch.”’ They did not begrudge their employer his beef and port: he was ‘Not a bad ‘ole sort … an’ does his bit by the land.’ Their rancour was reserved for his bailiff, ‘“Muster Morris” to his face but “Old Monday” or “you ole devil” behind his back.’ Boys sometimes did a stretch in the army before returning, or going off to seek work in a town. In 1914 Juniper Hill, like so many other villages, did not flinch, and sent its young men, Flora’s brother among them, to the war. ‘Eleven out of that little community never came back again,’ lamented Flora.

      A brass plate on the wall of the church immediately over the old end house seat is engraved with their names. A double column, five names long, then, last and alone, the name of Edwin.⁵⁷

      Illegitimate births were unknown in ‘Lark Rise’ in the 1880s, but became frequent soon afterwards. They generally passed without much comment, but when young Emily blamed the son of the house where she had been in service for her condition there was widespread support for her. The youth was able to prove that he had been away from home at the relevant time, and Emily went on to raise a large family without benefit of husband. In Glasgow there was an overall illegitimacy rate of 7 percent in 1913, and in the very poor Blackfriars district this rose to 15.6 percent of all births. The city’s Medical Officer of Health reported that year that he feared that about 8 percent of poor children were infected with syphilis.⁵⁸ About 200 per 1,000 infants failed to survive the first year of life in many of Britain’s large industrial towns, and many that did grew up with hollow chests and rickety limbs. Overall, 60 percent of volunteers for the Boer War had been rejected as physically unfit, and even in 1918, when military medical standards were at rock bottom, over a million men were graded unfit for front-line service.⁵⁹ There was a close correlation between social class and physical fitness. A pre-war survey of Cambridge undergraduates found 70 percent in the fittest group, Class I; 20 percent in Grade II, 7.5 percent in Grade III and just 2.5 percent in Grade IV. But in Britain as a whole in 1917 only 34 percent of recruits examined were actually Grade I, and those from urban areas with high infant mortality rates fared even worse.⁶⁰

      Thomas Atkins was no stranger to death. His siblings died in infancy from illnesses which would now be prevented by vaccination or cured by antibiotics. His workmates perished from a variety of accidents and diseases, and the prevalence of infection meant that even a simple cut could prove fatal. Most people then died at home, and in many households bodies were laid out in open coffins before burial. Funerals were rituals of enormous significance, for they said much about the status of the bereaved family and, by extension, of the neighbourhood.

      The cut of the mourning clothes and of the funeral baked