The People of Devon in the First World War

David Parker

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780750953054
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Thematically divided, this fascinating study explores the experiences of many of Devon's people during the First World War: soldiers; aliens and spies (real and imagined); refugees; conscientious objectors; nurses and doctors; churchmen; the changing roles of women and children; and finally the controversies surrounding farming and agriculture. It provides a moving tribute to the price paid by Devon and its people during the War to End all Wars.

CHAPTER ONE

DEVON IN THE SUMMER OF 1914

Ancient landscapes, traditional hierarchies, recent initiatives

As spring turned into early summer in the year 1914 there were many issues for the people of Devon to worry about, but imminent war with Germany and Austria-Hungary was not one of them. There had been intermittent sabre rattling over the past couple of decades, largely centred upon rival commercial ambitions in far-flung parts of the world, but flurries of diplomatic activity had always settled things down. Germany’s belated attempts in the last decades of the nineteenth century to create a few colonies in Africa had led to irritating moments in its relationship with Britain, but realistically Kaiser Wilhelm II seemed unlikely to seriously challenge the world-wide dominions and colonies of King George V. There appeared no chance of Germany’s growing number of battleships attaining superiority over the Royal Navy, and as a military precaution Britain had recently signed a defensive Triple Entente with Russia to the east of Germany and France to its west. And besides, most European royal families were inter-related and visited each other amid splendid ceremonies apparently full of bonhomie. As a backup, though, the new International Tribunal at The Hague was ready to resolve disputes before they led to war. A few pessimists perceived ominous signs that mounting jealousies would inevitably tip over quite soon into armed conflict, but nothing much regarding international alarms presaging war appeared in the newspapers. The arrest and conviction of a German spy in Devon in 1911 no doubt thrilled readers, but local newspapers could not have done more to mock the amateurism of Ober-Leutnant Max Shultz, who had posed as a journalist and attempted to elicit information about Devonport Dockyard from some workers he invited onto his houseboat.

DOMESTIC WORRIES

There was far more to worry about at home, as local as well as national newspapers revealed. The bitter strikes in Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Manchester among the dockyard and transport workers, and the drafting of troops into the capital, were headline news in 1911, and on 2 September the Exeter Flying Post was sure that Socialist agitators were to blame. ‘An epidemic of malignity reduced society to chaos’, a leader thundered, and locking onto a favourite target added, ‘of what use is it to boast of our universal education when underlying masses of sheer savagery suddenly burst forth amongst us’. The class war was ever present.

In 1912 the widespread coal strike quickly caused local difficulties. The Great Western Railway’s goods yards and most branch lines were at a standstill, and Meldon, Teign Valley and Beer quarries, Silverton Paper Mills, and Messrs Willey’s iron foundry in Exeter had to close. Exeter opened a soup kitchen, the Mayor’s Poor Box was drawn upon, Lord Poltimore gave £50 to help relieve the city’s poor, and the Earl of Devon allowed villagers to forage in his woods. Rumbles of industrial unrest and threats of national strikes continued well into 1914. In July that year a lengthy and sometimes violent strike brought production to a halt at Trusham quarries in the Teign valley; and at the end of that month the grievances of building workers in Exeter erupted into another strike.

The suffragettes were equally alarming, and certainly newsworthy. In 1912 and again in 1913 and 1914 the Exeter Flying Post was horrified at their actions – breaking the windows of key political opponents across London, smashing Kew Gardens’ orchid house, putting tar in pillar boxes, cutting telegraph wires and, most shocking of all, interrupting a service in St Paul’s Cathedral. More comfortingly, it noted that the Exeter meetings of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage were supported by both male and female members of the influential Fortescue, Buller, Acland and Kennaway families. To applause, at one of the meetings in 1913, the chairman asserted, ‘The destinies of the country, of great imperial and commercial importance, must be managed by men’, and a Mrs Greatbatch did women little service when she ‘spoke from experience of life in an industrial district, and she knew that the women there did not want the vote and would not know what to do with it’. Another female speaker exclaimed that equal pay was nonsense as equal work was impossible.

In December 1913 Exeter was astir as news spread that the suffragette leader, Mrs Pankhurst, had been arrested on the liner Majestic just off Plymouth and taken to Exeter Prison. As she grew weaker on hunger strike, and endured forced feeding, suffragettes flocked to the prison gates and so did a crowd of local men who charged the female pickets. ‘Much rough horseplay ensued’, said Trewman’s Flying Post, and one suffragette was barely saved from being thrown off the parapet of the nearby railway bridge. The agitation continued up to the outbreak of war. In January 1914 the wealthy Miss Rosalie Chichester hosted a non-militant pro-suffrage rally at Arlington Court in north Devon. In May similar meetings were held in Exeter and Newton Abbot, both of which were supported by the local press and a scattering of councillors and businessmen. Speakers steadfastly proclaimed the enrichment of women’s lives through the extension of the franchise and their participation in political affairs.

The intractable problem of Home Rule for Ireland was equally high profile, as Irish Nationalists and Protestants geared themselves for violent civil war whatever political solution was forthcoming in Westminster. Tension was heightened by sensational news reports that caches of rifles and ammunition were being smuggled into the country. In December 1913 a train taking Sir Edward Carson, the fervent Protestant Unionist, to Plymouth stopped at Exeter St David’s station and an appreciative crowd gathered to hear his brief impromptu talk. Exeter’s Unionist MP, H.E. Duke (later Lord Merrivale), together with sympathetic editors, ensured that the Protestant and Unionist opposition to Home Rule was to the fore in numerous local meetings and extensive follow-up reports.

PROTECTING THE NATION

The times were indeed turbulent, with future social stability an uncertain prospect. Nevertheless, despite all this domestic turmoil, some key local figures tried to ensure that Devon was prepared for war, although of course not envisaging a global conflict. In the middle of May 1914 it was probably with mixed feelings of surprise, excitement and apprehension that families in several market towns and seaside resorts across east Devon witnessed a full-scale military exercise undertaken by the Royal Army Medical Corps, Red Cross and VAD nurses, orderlies, stretcher-bearers and drivers. It was based on the assumption that enemy forces had landed at nearby Bridport in Dorset and were being counterattacked by troops of the Wessex Territorial Division. Replicating assumed wartime conditions as much as possible, with boys from Exeter School acting as extra patients and numerous companies of Boy Scouts employed as assistant orderlies, 1,300 casualties were created, of whom 1,160 were deemed hospital cases. Huge quantities of bedding and stores were brought out, and temporary war hospitals were set up in Honiton, Ottery St Mary, Budleigh Salterton, Exmouth, Topsham and Exeter. Rest and receiving points were created at the railway stations in Honiton, Ottery St Mary and Exeter’s Queen Street, a fully fitted ambulance train was used for severe cases, and an array of motor- and horse-drawn transport was used to take the wounded to and from the railway stations. War Office officials observed the massive event, and the newspapers rather blandly concluded that it was a great logistical success, much like the colourful annual manoeuvres of the Devon militia.

For centuries Devon had seen its ports and shores as likely landing points for continental invaders, and VADs for both men and women had been raised across Devon soon after the appointment in late 1909 of the first county director, Mr J.S.C. Davis, immediately after the government had inaugurated the scheme. Their primary aim was to supplement the medical services of the nation’s Territorial Forces in case of war. The influential Buller family, whose recently deceased and locally revered doyen had been General Sir Redvers Buller VC from Downes, near Crediton, had ensured that the initiative maintained a high profile, with the active support of Earl Fortescue, Devon’s Lord Lieutenant and a key figure in the Territorial Force. Not surprisingly, Countess Fortescue was president of the county branch of the British Red Cross Society, and her committee represented a roll-call of notable county families, including Sir Ian and Lady Amory of Knightshayes Court near Tiverton, the Dowager Lady Churston of Churston Court near Brixham, Mrs Rennell Coleridge of Salston Manor near Ottery St Mary, Sir John Kennaway and Miss Kennaway from Escot near Ottery St Mary, Mrs Mildmay of Flete near Ivybridge, Lady Seaton of Buckland Abbey near Yelverton, and the Honourable Mrs Lionel Walrond of Bradfield House near Uffculme.

Earl and Countess Fortescue and Castle Hill. (Devon Record Office)

The Devonshire Regiment had a peacetime strength of three regular army battalions, and still retained close links with the county from which it customarily recruited most of its men. Formed in 1685 to help crush the Duke of Monmouth’s western counties rebellion against his uncle King James II, the regiment won its fearsome nickname ‘The Bloody Eleventh’ in 1812 after its desperate struggle against the French at Salamanca in northern Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. By 1914 several additional Territorial battalions had been created, based in various towns across the county. A sign of their popularity was the Military Tournament and Tattoo held at the County Ground on the outskirts of Exeter in June 1914. The infantry undertook a skirmish, the artillery unlimbered and prepared guns for firing, the engineers erected an observation tower and sent telegraph messages to the command post, the signallers laid cables ‘at a gallop’ and established contacts with various outposts, and the cavalry ‘showed they were quite at home in the saddle’. More serious training by regular army units was undertaken from 1893 until 1914 at the Okehampton Field Artillery Practice Camp on Dartmoor, a vast expanse prohibited to the public which was fully equipped with barracks, stabling and gun stores.

Knightshayes, near Tiverton, seat of the Heathcoat-Amory family. (Devon & Exeter Institution)

The Territorial volunteers took part in annual training and manoeuvres, usually in tented camps on scrubland. In May 1914, 450 members of the Royal North Devon Hussars and their horses went for a fortnight to Ashwick, north of Dulverton in Somerset. That August, just a few days before war broke out, large crowds watched 3,371 officers and men of three Territorial battalions of the Devonshire Regiment, and two Territorial battalions of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, detrain at Exmouth and march the 4 miles to Woodbury Common accompanied by military bands and wagons drawing tons of equipment for two weeks of summer manoeuvres. Also active in the county under the umbrella of the Devonshire Territorial Force Association was the Royal Devon Yeomanry, first raised locally in 1794 by Sir Stafford Northcote of Pynes, Exeter, primarily to suppress civil disorder within the county – which it did on several occasions. By 1914 it had four squadrons spread across the southern half of the county with its overall headquarters in Exeter, and that May large crowds gathered as 430 men from the yeomanry and an accompanying transport column encamped at Lower Haytor Downs outside Bovey Tracey. Linked to all these forces were Territorial Transport and Supply Columns, Garrison Artillery, and Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) Ambulance and Hospital Units. Recruitment was good, the battalions were largely up to strength, and, of course, their officers were drawn from the ranks of the nobility and gentry. Earl Fortescue was colonel, and also president and chairman of the Devonshire Territorial Force Association, and his deputy was Lord Clifford of Chudleigh.

Holidaymakers and residents of Devon’s seaside resorts such as Ilfracombe and Westward Ho! in the north and Seaton, Sidmouth, Exmouth, Dawlish, Teignmouth, Torquay and Paignton in the south were often treated to the impressive sight of British battleships gliding slowly past or moored off shore. Such appearances were good public relations events for the Royal Navy and summer tourist attractions for the towns. In June 1914 the elderly HMS Commonwealth visited Ilfracombe, and crowds flocked to Capstone Hill, the Pier and the Parade to see it. Local people and the crew put on a sports day in the public park and a concert in Alexandra Hall, and parties of schoolchildren had the awesome experience of visiting the ship and viewing its four 12in guns at close quarters. A month later the warm welcome and mutual visits were repeated, and the sights were even better, when two modern sister ships, HMS Conqueror and Thunderer, moored off the resort, each massively armed with ten 13.5in guns. During three months of summer 1914 Ilfracombe Pier recorded 33,179 paying entries; ‘the battleships were responsible’ remarked a council member – ‘but don’t forget the bands’ added another.

HMS Conqueror, moored off Ilfracombe, July 1914. (Ilfracombe Museum)

Capstone Parade, Ilfracombe. (Author’s collection)

On the southern coast Devonport was a major naval port, employing thousands of local people not only servicing, repairing and rebuilding warships of all types, but also building new ones. Launches were occasions for local celebration, especially if the ships were large, such as the battleships HMS King Edward VII, Queen and Royal Oak, and the cruisers HMS Arrogant, Aurora, Cleopatra, Furious and Minotaur, launched and completed there between 1898 and 1915. After stiff competition from other ports, and interminable delays, the small Devon town of Dartmouth was chosen as the site for a new naval college to replace the Dart’s ancient floating hulk Britannia. Eventually completed in 1905, the imposing new Royal Naval College high above the deep water estuary dominated the town, and the annual passing-out parades, royal connections, annual regattas and visiting warships helped ensure naval affairs maintained a high local profile.

Torquay harbour, with warships anchored off shore. (Author’s collection)

THE HEIGHT OF THE AGE OF STEAM

Just as the Territorial battalions on their way to Woodbury Common had travelled across Devon to Exmouth by train, and the pre-war VAD exercise had relied upon the railways, so the naval dockyards and numerous commercial ports were coming to rely on the speedy communications provided by increasingly powerful steam locomotives. In addition, the growing prosperity of many Devon farms and seaside resorts would have been impossible without the steadily expanding network.

Amid great public excitement, the first Great Western Railway (GWR) train arrived in Exeter from Paddington via Bristol, Taunton and Tiverton Junction on 1 May 1844. In due course branch lines fanned out from Tiverton Junction east to the rural communities around Hemyock and west to Tiverton itself. The substantial market town of Tiverton was also halfway along a later GWR line that wound its way from just outside Exeter through the countryside to Bampton, a few miles later joining the equally winding GWR line from Taunton through South Molton to Barnstaple. From Exeter the main GWR line reached Plymouth via the southern coastal and market towns of Dawlish, Teignmouth, Newton Abbot, Totnes and Ivybridge in May 1848, before winding on to Penzance by 1859. Substantial branches were later built from Newton Abbot north to Bovey Tracey and Moretonhamstead,...