Tag Archives: 1914

A Pottering Sort of Day

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I completed my research on Friendly Societies of the 19th Century today and tidied up my piece on the 1882 Preston Guild Medal worn by members of the Independent United Order of Mechanics. They were prone to schisms, sometimes over doctrine, sometimes over money, and a government report of the time says, with the air of a disappointed parent “it is very difficult to distinguish the different orders of Mechanics”. Tell that, I thought, to the members of the Free and Independent United Order of Mechanics, who were mainly based in the Lake District. Is it me, or are the words “Judean People’s Front” drifting in you mind now?

When I say “completed”, I mean completed it enough for the purposes of writing an article about a medallion. The full story of the Friendly Societies will probably never be known.

I’m now researching the 1914  medal issued by the town of Northampton to the children who had fathers serving in the Army or Navy. It’s associated with the Poor Children’s Dinner Fund and I’m having trouble disentangling the two things. They made 3,100 medallions for distribution, but they were lost by the railway company and not given out until mid-January.  There were 2,914 children who qualified, including 80 who, by 1914, had fathers who were either dead or “missing”. Considering that many of the early recruits were unmarried, this is a lot of kids. It would, of course, get considerably worse.

There were 879 Christmas hampers for the Fund to distribute in 1914, about 500 less than in 1913. The boot trade (Northampton’s main trade) had picked up in 1914 due to the need for military boots, so there were fewer poor people needing help. Seventy percent of British Army boots used in 1914-18 were made in Northampton, with one manufacturer doubling in output and many women involved in the wartime trade. they also made boots for the Russian Army.

This is a multi-purpose article, as it will do, with slightly different slants, for several different places. I’ve already used it to fill half a blog post. It will go on the Numismatic Society Facebook Page as an example of a medallion and on the research page of the Peterborough Military History Group. Peterborough was in Northamptonshire in 1914.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lessons from History

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I wanted to see the heron again

It was the monthly meeting of the Peterborough Military History Group this week and the talk was about the Great War in Serbia with particular reference to six female soldiers and a boy who all fought with distinction. It was quite an eye-opener. I knew the basics, but wasn’t aware that the massacre of Serb civilians was commonplace during the occupation. or that there had been so many female soldiers in the Serbian Army. That’s why history is important. Although I knew there were problems between Balkan states, I hadn’t realised that Serbia had lost between 21 and 27% of its population during the war, including the systematic massacre of civilians by the Central Powers. There was also quite a problem with Albania in the Great Retreat. In the retreat King Peter, veteran of three previous wars and a guerilla campaign, led the civilian column, walking every step of the way and refusing to ride a horse as others had to walk. He was 71 years old. You can see why his people venerated him.

I’m practicing to be artistic. 

The “boy” of the talk’s title, Momčilo Gavrić “enlisted” at the age of eight when his parents, grandmother and seven siblings were killed by Croat troops of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was adopted by an artillery unit and provided them with information on the location of the troops that committed the crime. The battery was able to open fire on the troops and they allowed him to fire one of the guns to take his revenge. He had an interesting life, but I’ll let you read the rest of it by following the link.

It was, as I say, an interesting talk, and shows what happens when generations of struggle breaks out into warfare, and why that warfare is more savage than you sometimes expect. However, the real question is, what can we do about breaking the cycle? The evidence I see today is not making me optimistic about peace, or even common sense.

Not tempted one of these into the garden yet . . .

 

Scarborough Attack – 1914

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Scarborough Castle, Yorkshire (with “Dramatic” filter in use.

This is an expanded version of the article that appeared on the Facebook page of the Numismatic Society of Nottinghamshire. I thought it would be quick and easy as away of adding a post without much work, as Julia has me down for various household jobs today. It took longer than I thought. Easy things are seldom as simple as they sound.

Wednesday 16 December 1914. 8 am. Three German warships appear out of the mist and open fire, sending 500 shells into the undefended town of Scarborough. Seventeen people are killed and eighty suffer serious injuries, two of them dying in the next few days. 

The ships then sail off to attack Whitby, killing 3 people and damaging many houses. Three shells hit the abbey, including a direct hit on the West Front. The damage they inflicted on Scarborough Castle and Whitby Abbey can still be seen today. The West Front at Whitby was rebuilt in the 1920s, using pre-war photographs and pictures as a guide. The remains of the barrack block at Scarborough were demolished and removed.

Whitby Abbey

Meanwhile, another group of battleships bombard Hartlepool, which, with three guns in coastal batteries, is better able to fight back. According to research done in 1965, 122 civilians were killed and 443 wounded. Five soldiers and two sailors were also killed and 14 military personnel wounded. German casualties, inflicted by the Hartlepool guns, were 8 killed and 12 wounded.

Private Theophilus Jones of the Durham Light Infantry, killed at Hartlepool, becomes the first British soldier to be killed in Britain for 200 years.

Medallion commemorating the dastardly attack on Scarborough, 1914

In military terms little was accomplished. The Germans had multiple aims – to ambush and sink defending Royal Navy ships, to depress civilian morale, to tie up British troops to defend the coast, and to inflict losses on munitions production. They seem to have failed in every one. Equally, the Royal Navy failed to engage the retreating German ships in decisive action and were unable to demonstrate their control of the North Sea to either the Germans or the British public. Politically, “Remember Scarborough!” became a powerful recruiting slogan, and American attitudes began to harden against Germany.

Government propagandists chose to concentrate on Scarborough as it was the best known of the three towns, being a popular holiday resort, and had no defences or military production facilities. It did have radio stations working with the Royal Navy, but that was ignored at the time.

Scarborough would be attacked again, though there is no medallion for the second attack. On September 4 1917, a U-Boat surfaced and engaged anchored trawlers in South Bay. They were being employed by the Royal Navy as minesweepers and, being armed, were able to defend themselves. Shots were exchanged – one British sailor was killed and stray German shells killed two civilians on shore. After four years of war, showing how the nation had become accustomed to death, the reporting showed no more outrage at this news than it did to the rest of the local news.

The reverse of the medallion.

North Bay, Scarborough. Looking North.

 

Bombardment, Bones and Captain Cook

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We decided to give Whitby another look on the way back from Sandsend. There’s a lot to see in Whitby and we decided to have a look at the Captain Cook statue and the whalebone arch on the West Cliff.

The first thing we saw was the Bombardment Garden, which commemorates the East Coast bombardment of 16th December 1914. On that day two groups of German warships sailed down along the coast and attacked the towns of Scarborough, Whitby and Hartlepool. One group attacked Scarborough, killing 18 people, before steaming up the coast and killing three more in Whitby. The other group attacked Hartlepool, killing over 100 people.

To be fair to the Germans they were attacking military targets -they shelled a naval radio station at Scarborough and the railway at Whitby. At Hartlepool they engaged shore batteries and the Royal Navy.

The garden represents a house destroyed by a shell.  The shell in the middle of the living room floor is a proper WW1 shell that was given to the town for fund-raising during the war and donated to the project by the town council.

Bombardment Garden, Whitby
Bombardment Garden, Whitby

 

Just along the cliff is the statue of Captain Cook. He was born at Marton, which is now part of Middlesbrough, lived at Great Ayton, was apprenticed to a haberdasher on the coast in Staithes and finally ended up in the Merchant Navy at Whitby. He first came to official notice for his service in the Royal Navy when his charts of the St Lawrence River helped General Wolfe to take Quebec. This led to him being selected to make his famous voyages of discovery, with a certain William Bligh acting as his sailing master on the third and final voyage.

Despite his great achievements he is little more than a cycle rack and seagull perch these days.

Captain Cook – cycle rack
Captain Cook – perch
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The third thing of note on the cliff top is the whale bone arch. Whitby was a major whaling port and between 1753 and 1837 the Whitby fleet accounted for 2,761 whales, 25,000 seals and 55 polar bears.

The inventor of the Crow’s Nest (William Scoresby) came from Whitby and used to be commemorated by a modern sculpture (now replaced by a war memorial). His son, also William Scoresby, was, like his father, a whaler and arctic explorer, but also a scientist and priest, who was quoted by Ishmael in Moby Dick.

The original arch was set up in 1853 to signify the importance of whaling in Whitby’s history. That set lasted around a century and were replaced by a set from a Fin whale donated by Norwegian whalers. They only lasted until the 1990s, when their replacement caused a certain amount of ethical concern. One suggestion was that there might be some bones preserved in the cold of the Falklands. In the end Whitby’s twin town of Barrow in Alaska came to the rescue with a set of jawbones from a Bowhead whale killed in a legal hunt by Alaskan Inuit.

Whitby Abbey
Whalebone Arch – Whitby
Whalebone Arch – Whitby

I don’t know what I’d do if I was in charge of the whalebone arch. Fibreglass and plastic have been considered but dismissed, which I think is fair enough, but I’m not easy with the idea of using real bones, even if they are legally taken. I think I’d opt for a nice stainless steel sculpture.

Or a plaque saying that there used to be whale bones there but we have moved on.