Accrington's Pals: The Full Story

The 11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment and the 158th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery

Andrew Jackson

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848844698
• eBook ISBN: 9781783468829
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

Andrew Jackson's new history tells the story of the Great War as it was experienced by the men of the 11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment (Accrington Pals), the 158th (Accrington and Burnley) Brigade, Royal Field Artillery (Howitzers) and their families. Using information gathered from years of painstaking research in national and local archives and in private collections, he reconstructs, in vivid detail, the role played by these men on the Western Front. His book, which draws extensively on diaries, memoirs and letters, follows both infantry and artillerymen into the British armys bloodiest battles of the war, giving a graphic close-up view of their experiences. It is a moving record of the wartime service of a select group of local men during a time of unprecedented conflict.

Chapter 1

A Determination to Make Good

On 9 November 1912, the Council Chamber of Accrington’s Town Hall was filled to capacity as councillors and public alike gathered to witness the election of 65-year-old Captain John Harwood as the new mayor. The outgoing mayor, Alderman Arthur Smith Bury, a Liberal by political inclination and a cotton manufacturer by trade, described Harwood as a thoroughly broad-minded man of great tact in proposing him for the post. Seconding the proposal, Alderman Doctor Counsell Dewhurst, a fellow Conservative, remarked on the well-known popularity of Harwood and, while referring to his poor health during recent months, expressed the hope that his mayorship would be the happiest year of his life. Councillor John Barlow, a Liberal and a director of cotton mills, also spoke in support of the proposal, and commented on the grit and perseverance shown by Harwood throughout his career. The proposal was carried by the Council unanimously and Harwood was led to the mayoral chair while ‘the Council rose and applauded heartily’.

While the year that followed may well have been, as Councillor Dewhurst had wished, the happiest of Harwood’s life – it included the visit to Accrington of King George V and Queen Mary on 9 July 1913 – his popularity saw him reelected for a further two years so that the mayorship remained his throughout the first fifteen months of the First World War. Harwood would need to call on all of the qualities ascribed to him by his fellow councillors as he responded to his country’s need to build an army capable of fighting a continental war by founding and raising not just a complete infantry battalion, the Accrington Pals, but also an artillery brigade, the Accrington and Burnley Howitzers.

John Harwood had been born into a working class Lancashire family on 14 December 1847 at a dwelling called the Pantry in Blacksnape, a hamlet belonging to the township of Over Darwen. His first association with Accrington seems to have come about through the death from gastro-enteritis of his father, Henry, a 27-year-old textile warper, on 20 April 1853. Henry was survived by his wife, Mary, and at least three of their children, Jane Alice, Edward and 6-year-old John. Twenty months after Henry’s death, Mary re-married at the age of 30; her new husband was Edmund Walsh, a 24-year-old widower employed as an engine tenter. Some five years later, the family moved to Accrington.

As his mother, Mary, and step-father, Edmund, began a family of their own, John was sent to work at the age of just 7. On moving to Accrington, John started out as a warehouse boy at Fountain Mill in the Scaitcliffe district of the town, and by the age of 13 was a cotton power-loom weaver. At some point in the 1860s, John left to work in Chorley, where on 4 July 1867 he married Sarah Fisher, a 22-year-old local girl, at the Wesleyan Chapel in Park Road.

The decade of industrialization from 1851 to 1860 had seen Accrington transformed from little more than a village into a sizeable town of some importance; the several watercourses that flowed through the town had favoured the establishment of cotton mills along their banks, the opening of railway lines to Blackburn, Burnley and Manchester in 1848 had given a further stimulus to the town’s economy, and the formation of a Local Board in 1853 represented the beginnings of local government. By 1859 the Accrington area offered employment through forty-seven cotton factories, seven calico printing works, ten chemical manufactories, two corn mills, eight machinist and ironfounders’ works, as well as four collieries and many other smaller manufactories and places of business.

The period 1862 – 3 saw great hardship in the Lancashire cotton towns, and it is reasonable to suppose that John left Accrington at about that time to look for work; the determination to ‘make good’ that would characterize his entire life was already in evidence. By 1860, Britain relied on America to supply 80 per cent of the 620,000 tons of cotton that she needed to feed her textiles industry; a further 15 per cent was sourced from India, but the Lancashire spinners had been loath to use it owing to its inferior length and quality. The efforts of Manchester organizations in preceding years to encourage the cultivation of a better quality of cotton in India had largely come to nothing, and it was the continued dependence on America that would lead to the distress of the Lancashire cotton famine in 1862 – 3. On the election of Abraham Lincoln as 16th President of the United States in November 1860, seven cotton-growing states – rebelling against Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery – broke away from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. When Civil War broke out in April 1861, the southern states’ conviction that Britain’s dependence on their cotton would force her into the war on the side of the Confederacy led them to try to force the issue by imposing a ban on exports even before the Union began to attempt a blockade of the southern ports. Shipping of the 1861 crop would normally have begun in September but, despite the looseness of the Union blockade, most of the crop, little short of a million tons, remained on land. In the spring of 1862, half of the land in the southern states that would normally have been used for cotton was turned over to food production. Across the Atlantic, manufacturers in Lancashire were confronted not only with soaring prices for cotton, but also with the threat that a sudden end to the war in America could release vast quantities of cheap cotton onto the market, thereby inflicting potentially ruinous losses on those who were sitting on large stocks of goods made from expensive cotton. The threat was enough to lead manufacturers to introduce short-term working, or even shut down their mills. In May 1862 there were 11,000 operatives out of work in Preston alone, and 8,429 in Blackburn; the distress increased as the year wore on, to the extent that during the winter of 1862 – 3 36,000 in Blackburn were on charitable relief; the suffering in Accrington could have been no less. Despite the damage being inflicted on Britain’s cotton industry – not to mention the terrible hardship being imposed on its workforce – the British government took the decision that Britain’s interests in the longer term were better served by keeping out of the war. The distress in Lancashire saw some relief through a dramatic increase in imports of Indian cotton – a change that ironically would eventually have dire consequences for the Lancashire industry – but continued into 1865 when the war finally came to end with the surrender of the Confederate army.

By 1871, John and Sarah had returned to Accrington, where they were living in a terraced house in Maudsley Street with their 2-year-old son, Thomas Edward. John, employed as a cotton mill labourer, would have struggled to support his young family adequately; Lancashire mill owners had cut wages by 10 per cent in 1869 and, given John’s undoubted strength of character, it is not surprising that he joined thousands of other Lancashire spinners and weavers who had been encouraged by their unions to emigrate to the United States.

Economic migration from Lancashire to the textile manufacturing centres of New England was hardly a new phenomenon by the 1870s; as early as the 1850s it was said of the Massachusetts towns of New Bedford and Fall River that Lancashire immigrants ‘abounded as nowhere else’. By the mid-1870s, English immigrants made up 34 per cent of the workforce in Fall River, where the cotton textile workforce had quadrupled in the ten years following the end of the war to satisfy a massive increase in demand for inexpensive cotton clothing.

John and Sarah’s second child, Henry (Harry), was born in April 1872, and it seems that later that year John set out alone for America in order to establish himself before sending for his family to join him; Sarah, Thomas and Harry followed early in the next year, reaching New York on the SS Egypt on 11 February 1873. The Harwoods’ time in America brought advancement for John as he rose to become foreman of the winding, warping and slashing department of a Fall River mill. It also brought joy in the birth of the couple’s only daughter, Lily, in December 1874; yet tragedy too had already touched the family with the death of Harry in November 1873. Despite the opportunities afforded by life in America at a time of great industrial expansion, John remained there for no more than four years. At this distance, we can only guess at John’s decision to transplant his family for a second time. While it is certainly true that a fresh opportunity presented itself elsewhere, John may well have lost his motivation to further his career in Fall River because of the business practices prevalent there at the time. The business model of the Fall River mill owners in the 1870s was to dominate the market by producing high volumes of cotton fabrics at the lowest possible cost, a strategy that depended for its success on the mill owners’ ability to crush what they regarded as the ‘chronic insubordination’ of their English workers; in turn, the workers held their masters in contempt for producing textiles that relied on the cloth printing process to disguise their poor quality. Matters came to a head in 1875; although the Fall River mill owners were forced to back down from their first attempt to cut wages, they eventually prevailed when a strike of nearly 15,000 workers in 34 mills crumbled. It was about this time that the Harwoods left America in order for John to take up an offer of work at a Bombay cotton mill. John left his wife, son and daughter in the care of his mother and her family in Accrington while he went on to India. Although Sarah would join him a short time later, Thomas and Lily remained in England for their education.

Imports into Britain of Indian cotton had fallen away again as the cotton-growing states of the American south resumed exports when the civil war ended in 1865. At a time when Manchester’s lobbying for a better quality of Indian cotton was finally being acted upon, the sudden surplus of home-grown cotton acted as a stimulus for the development of India’s own textile industry. For the industry to grow at a rapid rate, however, it would need experienced technicians of the likes of John Harwood.

Whereas the Indian textile industry had its beginnings in and around the port city of Bombay (present-day Mumbai), associations were soon created to build mills in cotton-growing centres deep inside the Indian subcontinent. Located 700 miles to the north-east of Bombay, the city of Cawnpore (Kanpur) is naturally favoured by its central location in the fertile Gangeatic plain, and to the extensive area of black cotton soil to its south. Its growth however was established only in the early nineteenth century after the East India Company recognized the strategic importance of its location on the banks of the Ganges River and developed it into a military base. The completion of a direct rail connection to Allahabad in 1859 aided the development of Cawnpore, and by the 1860s the city had become an important industrial and commercial centre; one author writes that ‘carts laden with cotton crowded into [Cawnpore] until roads became blocked and bales were stacked higher than the roofs of the houses’. It was not long before the Cawnpore Cotton Committee saw an opportunity to produce cotton goods close to the source of the raw material, instead of shipping its cotton elsewhere to be converted; on 8 December 1864, the foundation stone was laid for the first mill building of the Elgin Cotton Spinning and Weaving Company on the banks of the Ganges.

It was to take up the position of weaving master at the Elgin Mills – and thereby to take a further step forward in his career – that induced John Harwood to leave Bombay for Cawnpore in 1880. This was the move that would take John’s ambitions to ‘make good’ to an altogether higher level. After spending only two years at Elgin, John somehow arranged sufficient funds to enable him to leave his employment there in 1882 in order to found the Cawnpore Cotton Mills; on 4 July 1885, the Harwoods’ eighteenth wedding anniversary, Sarah started up the first engine of the new mill.

John was later to recall how he had started with a floor shed containing 100 looms, and as he became successful added another storey above, and started another 100 looms. When his competitors attempted to stifle his business by refusing to sell him yarn, he travelled to Allahabad to buy yarn at a 12 per cent premium in order to keep going. From then on, he was able to raise more capital, building a further three spinning mills, each with a greater capacity than the last. John sourced all the carding machinery and ring-spinning for three of the four mills from the Globe Works of Howard and Bullough in Accrington, and only a lack of capacity forced the company to turn down the contract for the fourth mill. By the end of the nineteenth century, the spinning capacity of the four mills was surpassed by only two rivals in the whole of India.

At the time of John’s arrival in Cawnpore, less than a quarter of a century had passed since the city had witnessed the most notorious of the atrocities perpetrated during the Indian Mutiny of 1857: the massacre of some 200 British women and children in a building called the Bibighur and the subsequent British reprisals. It is no surprise that John threw himself enthusiastically into the activities of the Cawnpore Volunteer Rifle Corps, a body of British and Anglo-Indian men which had been formed after the Mutiny to provide support to the official forces in the event of another emergency. Indeed, John is credited with having founded the Volunteers’ Club: comprising reading and smoking rooms, a music room, a ballroom and a bar, the club quickly established itself as the social centre for the expatriate community of Cawnpore. The club regularly held shooting competitions, and John even organized an annual competition against Accrington riflemen, the competitors’ scores being transmitted by post!

Sarah gave birth to three more children during the couple’s time in India – Mary, born in 1881, John in 1883 and Jack in 1887 – but none seems to have survived beyond infancy. By 1890, their eldest child, 21-year-old Thomas Edward, had joined them and was employed at the Cawnpore Cotton Mills as an assistant manager; the mills had also found employment for John’s elder brother, Edward (mill master), and their nephew, Richard (spinning master). Another nephew, Henry, had also come out to India as an engineer and, on 21 October 1890, a double wedding took place at Bowen Methodist Episcopal Church in Bombay as Thomas and Henry married two Lancashire girls, Margaret Ingham and Mary Hannah Mills.

By 1895, John was not only managing director of the Cawnpore Cotton Mills – which proudly advertised itself as ‘sole manufacturers in India for Stromeyer’s patent porous waterproof cloths’ – but vice-chairman of Cawnpore Municipality, and a captain in the Volunteer Rifle Corps. His son, Thomas Edward, had reached the rank of lieutenant in the Rifle Corps, and was employed as mill manager for the Aryodaya Spinning and Weaving Company Limited in Ahmedabad.

The 1890s saw the appearance of a new generation of the Harwood family. Thomas Edward and Margaret had two children born at Cawnpore, Thomas Yates, on 25 November 1891, and John Richard, in 1895. Henry and Mary Hannah had three children, Katherine Evelyn (Katie), born at Cawnpore, Edmund Mills, born at Accrington on 22 September 1894, and Frank, born at Delhi on 14 August 1896.

John continued to run the Cawnpore Cotton Mills until his retirement at the early age of 50 in 1898, at which point he and Sarah returned to Accrington to live at Jesmond House on Hartmann Street. On leaving the Volunteer Rifle Corps, he was given permission to retain the rank of captain, and to wear the uniform of the Corps. Only a short time passed before John was ready to travel once more, and the winter of 1899 – 1900 saw him embark on a round-the-world trip via India, China and the United States in the company of his close friend, Major Richard Sharples. During their time in India, they spent a whole month in Cawnpore, staying at Thomas Edward’s bungalow. Shortly after their departure from India, John wrote with his characteristic dry humour:

We left Cawnpore on Sunday, the 14th January [1900] at 10am, and a whole crowd of friends came to the station to see us off, and I believe were sorry to part with us, though one Accrington lad did say, when shaking hands with Captain [sic] Sharples, that ‘he was glad to have the pleasure of seeing us off’, which was to say the least of it equivocal.

On his return to Accrington, John found himself unable to enjoy life in retirement. Not only did he successfully seek election to Accrington Town Council as a Conservative in November 1900, but he also acquired fresh business interests by becoming chairman of directors at Lang Bridge Limited of Accrington and a director of Henry Livesey Limited of Blackburn. Local sport commanded his attention too: John took on the presidency of Accrington Stanley Football Club which joined the Lancashire Combination for the 1900 – 1 season. Each year, John awarded a set of medals to the non-reserve side which finished highest in the league, an honour that the Stanley players were to receive on several occasions. The highlight of his presidency came in the 1902 – 3 season when Stanley became the first non-reserve side to win the league championship; considering that the Lancashire Combination contained the reserve teams of leading First Division clubs, it was an outstanding achievement.

Chapter 2

On the Verge of War

The divergent fortunes of Turkey and Germany in the late nineteenth century led to a situation in which war, if not inevitable, became considerably easier for the European powers to justify.

The decline of the Ottoman Empire, hastened by an upsurge in Balkan nationalism and Russian aggression, led through the 1878 Treaty of Berlin to the creation of the independent states of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro; Bulgaria gained autonomy while Bosnia and Herzogovina were occupied by Austria-Hungary. In 1908, the Russian Foreign Minister, Alexander Izvolsky, and his Austrian counterpart, Count Alois von Aehrenthal, discussed mutually beneficial amendments to the treaty, including Russian tolerance of an Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzogovina in return for Austrian acceptance of the opening of the Bosphorus Strait to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. In the event, Austria succeeded in its aims to annex Bosnia – bringing neighbouring Serbia to the brink of war in the process – while failing to back Russia whose subsequent and lasting sense of betrayal would contribute to the acceleration into war six years later. Serbia, with her own dreams of territorial expansion, posed a constant threat to Austria. It was a threat to which the Chief of the Austrian General Staff, Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, saw preventive war as the only solution; allegedly he demanded war with Serbia twenty-five times in 1913 alone but was restrained by Aehrenthal and the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Franz Ferdinand.

Germany, in contrast, was a power on the rise: unification of the German states under Kaiser Wilhelm I after Prussia’s victory over France in the war of 1870 – 1 had been followed by consolidation through a Triple Alliance forged in the years 1879 – 82 with Austria-Hungary and Italy. Entering the twentieth century, Germany’s ambition was at a much higher level: to rival Great Britain as a world power. It was an ambition – most blatantly displayed in the massive expansion from 1888 of Germany’s Imperial Navy driven by Kaiser Wilhelm II – that led Britain ultimately to form alliances with Japan (1902), France (1904) and Russia (1907). To successive Chiefs of the German General Staff, however, the threat to Germany’s ambitions lay in the new armaments programmes of both France and Russia. In the spring of 1914, the German Foreign Minister, Gottlieb von Jagow, was reportedly told by the Chief of the General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, that within two or three years the

military superiority of our enemies would . . . be so great that he did not know how he could overcome them. Today we would still be a match for them. In his opinion there was no alternative to making preventive war in order to defeat the enemy while there was still a chance of victory. The Chief of the General Staff therefore proposed that I should conduct a policy with the aim of provoking a war in the near future.

In short, the summer of 1914 found the European powers trapped in a web of mutual loathing and fear. All that was needed was an excuse to go to war, and on 28 June ‘the most famous wrong-turning in history’ provided it.

In between articles looking forward to the next season for Haslingden Football Club and ‘Personal Gossip’, the Accrington Observer and Times of 30 June 1914 reported the assassination two days previously of Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo: ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Terminology
• Chapter 1 - A Determination to Make Good
• Chapter 2 - On the Verge of War
• Chapter 3 - Why Not Accrington?
• Chapter 4 - Very Badly Shaken
• Chapter 5 - We Want to be There
• Chapter 6 - Not Enough Men Born
• Chapter 7 - Men of the Mechanic Class
• Chapter 8 - A Most Colourful Personality
• Chapter 9 - ‘Some’ Colonel
• Chapter 10 - Away From All Civilization
• Chapter 11 - No Time for Anything
• Chapter 12 - They Fought Like Heroes
• Chapter 13 - A Devilish Hot Time
• Chapter 14 - The Old Spirit Still There
• Chapter 15 - Ceased to Hope for Anything Better
• Chapter 16 - The Hottest Show
• Chapter 17 - This Gallant Officer
• Chapter 18 - With Our Backs to the Wall
• Chapter 19 - Peaceful Penetration
• Chapter 20 - With Great Enthusiasm
• Chapter 21 - Remembrance
• Chapter 22 - Epilogue
• Notes
• Index