Despatches from Tyneside World War I at Home

For every war fought on foreign soil,

there is a price to pay at home.

This is Tyneside's story.

Soldier or labourer,

the people who lived along the Tyne were vital to the Great War.

It would leave its mark on the local landscape

and its people.

Many made the ultimate sacrifice -

some abroad, some on their own doorstep.

A century on, their individual names remain -

they're there for all of us to read.

Yet there's little to tell you who they really were.

I'm on Tyneside, where one remarkable project

is trying to change that

by documenting the lives of all those who fell.

And the scars of war weren't just etched on the battlefield.

I'll also be revealing stories

of how the Great War shaped life here on the home front.

War was never far away.

In the early hours of December 31st 1916,

an event just off the mouth of the Tyne would scupper any plans

to raise a glass and see in the New Year.

INDISTINCT

What happened within sight of the piers

would rock a tight-knit community.

What is your heading now?

Yet the rest of the British public would not be told of the event

until the war was over.

We will board on the port side.

The fog on the Tyne is no match for today's pilots.

Guiding ships safely into the river has always been hazardous

but, 100 years ago, the pilots really were exposed to the elements

and the enemy.

The Protector was a pilot cutter

that was used 100 years ago by the Tyne pilots.

They stayed on board this larger vessel at sea

and they went out from smaller vessels,

whereas nowadays we just go on board the likes of this launch.

Where are we off to?

We're off to a position three cables on the old leading lights,

outside the pier entrance.

That is where the Protector is, or was, hit by the mine.

All 19 crew perished when the ship was blown clean out of the water.

Some families lost several generations.

My great-grandfather and his grandson Ralph were lost on the Protector

when she was blown up.

In my case, it was Grandfather that was lost on the Protector and,

unfortunately, he shouldn't have

been aboard the cutter that day.

He was standing in for someone else.

The pilot cutter had its lights on all the time

and had to be on station

24 hours a day.

And were the pilots happy about that?

They raised it with the pilots' union,

who complained to the Admiralty and the Government

and said there were no risks attached to

the pilot service being out with its lights on.

Some people say it was torpedoed, some people say it was mined

but, you know,

no submarine commander would waste a torpedo on a vessel of that size.

We'll never really know what happened.

Only a few bits of wreckage were ever recovered.

There'd also be no trace of the incident in newspapers.

Censorship meant their deaths went unreported,

as were the pilots' warnings to the Admiralty

that they feared for their safety.

One member of the Phillips family

had not been on board the Protector that day.

Three months later, he'd make a shocking discovery.

By some common chance of fate, my grandfather found the body of

his father, Robert Phillips, floating in the water off King Edward's Bay.

He survived but he lost his father and lost his son.

-That must have been devastating.

-Yes, indeed.

My grandmother was so upset that the photograph of the Protector

was taken down and it was put behind an organ that they had,

a pedal organ in the lounge, and it was hidden from view.

She used to sit at the living room window

from morning until night,

waiting for Ralph to come home

cos she was convinced,

because there was no body, that he would come home,

that the Germans had taken him prisoner.

Sadly, it was never to be.

The tragedy would be hard enough to bear in one household

but the river pilots' community lived cheek-by-jowl.

Robert Phillips lived in this street, at number 53.

A few doors down, a fellow pilot, Charles Burn, at number 41.

Next door to him, an assistant at number 43.

And another crew member lived at 24.

In the next street, there were another six homes

where the men would not return on New Year's Eve.

The single body that was recovered was given an official

Commonwealth War Grave, as 70-year-old Robert was in service

when he was killed by enemy action.

It's in Tynemouth's main cemetery and is one of many on home soil -

something that got a local resident wondering

and led to a remarkable community project.

For many years, I used to walk my daughter's dog around this cemetery

and I became increasingly aware of the number of Commonwealth War Graves

headstones, so I went to the local library and found -

a shock, really - a list of 1,700 men whose deaths were attributed

to the Great War.

What we're trying to do is to give some life to these people.

They're not just faceless names on headstones.

These were people who had families, who were involved in the local

community in numbers of interesting ways which we've uncovered.

We're not telling the history of the war,

we're telling the story of the men.

Yes, we'll have a look and see what you've got.

The Tynemouth Project is one of the biggest community groups of its kind

and the public have been dropping by to add their own family knowledge.

In many instances, it is the case of the faded photograph

which has been lying in the back of a drawer for 50 or 60 years.

70 volunteers are gathering the life stories of all those

from Tynemouth who fell, whether abroad or at home,

and, by pinpointing where they lived,

they're building up a unique map

of how the war played out in the borough.

It just shows you the depth

and how much devastation was brought to bear on individual streets

and how much pain and suffering was

there in the community and shared amongst everybody.

This was a war like no other.

It was fought on an industrial scale.

The Army and Navy had an insatiable appetite for weapons.

Workers on both banks of the Tyne

were perfectly geared up to meet that challenge.

We are at Smith's Dock,

right at the heart of what was one of the largest areas of industrial

production in the world during the First World War. About 20,000 men

are working along the Tyne in the shipyards.

Within a couple of years, that's doubled to more than 40,000

and by the end of the war, 1918,

over 60,000 men are engaged purely in shipbuilding on the Tyne.

About a mile back, nothing but plants and factories and docks.

Nothing like this is done anywhere else in the country.

About a third of Royal Naval vessels during the war

were built where we are...

Which is just mind-blowing when you think about it.

..as well as ships for other navies.

Yes, it's extraordinary, and particularly now as we stand in this

deserted area about to be redeveloped, just how busy and

bustling and intense the experience was for those who worked here.

-So this really was part of the war machine.

-It was.

You can think of it almost as a river of war.

It's importance was recognised with a string of royal visits.

What the King would not have seen

was the daily reality of keeping the yards going.

Many of the men left to join up.

Others had to fill their place to keep production on the Tyne going.

The average age of the workforce would change...

..and schoolchildren would be found outside the yard gates,

ready to hand the adults the lunch.

Further upriver,

factories were making vast numbers of guns and munitions.

It was a traditional Tyneside industry

that the military knew it would depend on to secure victory.

They've been making armaments on the banks of the Tyne in Newcastle

ever since the mid 19th century.

They still are to this day.

But when the war broke out,

companies like Armstrong Whitworth,

as it was then known, went into overdrive,

making everything from machine guns like this to aircraft.

What they needed was manpower.

But there weren't enough men to fight on the front

and make the weapons.

The answer - women, who took to the productions lines.

In what would have been astounding images for the time,

men lost their exclusive grip on heavy industrial work.

At Armstrong Whitworth, women had a hand in all areas,

from munitions to heavy guns.

Women were getting dirty, they were getting hot and bothered

and engaged in areas they wouldn't have seen before,

I don't think, and doing these jobs as well as men, and realising

that there were no essential differences between the sexes.

Quite a profound change of attitude, I think.

And that's why the struggle for women's emancipation,

for the right to vote, goes on.

It's a very bloody and unpleasant conflict before the war

but by the war's end, 1918, they have the vote.

With women part the workforce, production soared.

So proud were they, Armstrong's documented their success

in vast photographic catalogues.

Yet some of the work they undertook was kept under wraps.

Could planes be launched from a ship?

This was the trial on the banks of the Tyne.

The plane was just a dummy.

What the Newcastle engineers needed to know was,

could they generate enough speed?

A rather brave test pilot tried it for real.

Back at the Tynemouth Commemoration Project HQ in North Shields,

they've uncovered an unusual story.

A soldier whose war grave gives no hint about his death.

He overstayed his leave by just a few days

but couldn't face the harsh punishment that was meted out.

Chris, there's quite an interesting one here.

It was about a Cullercoats soldier

having a very sad end.

He came home on leave, had a few extra days

and was arrested and he ended up in court at Whitley Bay.

He was given 18 months' hard labour.

-They really threw the book at him.

-They did. They did.

He ended up writing a letter home to his wife, saying that

he was going to end it.

She decided to meet him at the station before he was

transported to York from Whitley Bay

and try and talk him out of it.

But he was found by an officer, hanging by his belt.

You do hear some stories which,

when I'm inputting onto the database,

do bring tears to your eyes.

It is very emotional sometimes.

There could be moments of light relief,

even on the front line,

if the war was going your way.

Northumberland Fusiliers relish the chance

to try on the enemy's helmets for size.

But not everyone who joined up was posted abroad.

Soldiers needed to be ready to defend home soil, too.

The Tyne was a Class A port.

In fact, it was classed the same as Portsmouth

and Southampton as being important enough to defend to a higher level.

There were two six-inch guns and a 9.2-inch gun here in Tynemouth.

There were the same guns at Frenchman's Bay in South Shields.

A further two six-inch guns on Spanish Battery below us.

There were also submarine mines in the river mouth,

which could be exploded to destroy a ship coming in.

When the guns were fired on full charge,

the concussion from them had a problem.

It broke all the windows on the seafront at Tynemouth

so they had to be careful that they fired them on half charge

unless, of course, we were attacked.

Beneath the guns, the weapons store,

and, for the soldiers here, this was very dangerous work.

The cartridges are highly explosive,

volatile, so they had to wear special clothes

that didn't create friction, canvas slippers,

and the doors are lined with copper because, when they close,

if there was just one spark the whole place would go up.

The military were in charge and the civilians watched

as the signs of the war scarred their landscape.

Tynemouth was no longer the picture postcard seaside resort.

Things were restricted.

They dug a great many trenches along the coast,

along the seafront at Tynemouth, right through to Whitley Bay.

These trenches had barbed wire around them.

So, again, restrictions would be in place on going down to the beach.

All these things would have given you the great impression

that there was a war on and it was affecting you at home.

It's best seen from above.

This intelligence photo shows just how intricate

the system of trenches were.

You won't find any trace of them today

but a close inspection of the Tynemouth skyline reveals

a discreet reminder of how real the threat of an attack was.

Talk about a room with a view, Nick.

It is amazing, isn't it?

What was this?

Well, it was originally built as an observation and control tower

in the First World War

to look for enemy activity and enemy ships.

-But now it's your home.

-It's my home. I live here.

-Amazing.

-It is an amazing place.

-How did it actually get used, then?

They took two turrets off a battleship,

put one at Marsden, one at Seaton Sluice, and this is the centre point.

They had a number of towers

because, at the time, if you couldn't see your target

because you had no radar, so it was all visual, and they worked it

out by trigonometry in the towers, the distance to the target.

Of course, the best views are right here at the very top.

It's ironic. Although they

started building in 1916 for the First World War,

it wasn't finished until 1921 so it was never used during the war.

-Really?

-That's amazing.

Despite those construction delays,

the Germans were wary of approaching the Tyne directly.

Zeppelins sneaked in further north.

One attack, which killed 17 men at the Palmer's shipyard,

was celebrated in enemy propaganda.

But the real fear was an invasion force.

Blyth, just up the Northumberland coast, was a real weak spot.

I've got here a classified document that was prepared less than a year

before the outbreak of war.

It warns that the Germans could invade here

and march on the armaments factory on the Tyne,

all within a day.

Tyneside's Achilles heel would have to be covered.

A lot of people that come down here think it's a water tank.

-Right, but it's not.

-No. Anything but.

-Goodness.

This is a little gem, isn't it?

Yes, this is the battery observation post.

I can see this used to rotate.

Yes, the whole top of this would have rotated.

In the sides here would have been smaller gear wheels

and a winding mechanism to rotate the whole top.

And from that door and that door

was a Barr and Stroud split-image rangefinder.

A prism in each end, you turn a dial in the middle

and you could calculate the range out to the ship.

So a fancy pair of binoculars.

A big pair of binoculars with a rangefinder in.

The only surviving example of this type of rangefinder tower

in the whole of the world.

The Blyth Battery wasn't complete until 1916 -

well after the first Zeppelin attack.

Yet it seems military engineers didn't have the vision

to see them as a threat.

So, Chris, this is the searchlight we have.

It's typical of the type that would have been in here.

-And that would have pointed out to sea.

-Right.

The windows that we have

have all been blocked in from its use as a beach chalet.

I think I've spotted a design flaw.

It was shining this way, wasn't it?

Yes, it could only shine out to sea.

It had no capability of shining up in the air.

The home defences were so stretched, anyone in uniform would do.

Whitley Bay's Boy Scouts brigades were commandeered as makeshift

coastguards, keeping watch for enemy ships or spies.

Paranoia was rife.

In Newcastle, Otto Nichol, a German-born butcher who'd

spent most of his life here, was jailed for six months.

A neighbour reported seeing homing pigeons flying out his back yard.

Were they really carrying messages to the Fatherland?

Hearsay was enough when at war.

Answering the call to fight the Hun was, for many, a patriotic duty.

As the new recruits marched off to join the front line, there was

a lot of bravado from the men when the cameras were rolling.

But wives or mothers would fear the worst as they walked alongside.

Almost hidden from view,

she grabs his hand what may be the last time.

Yet some men would go to extraordinary lengths to join up.

Joseph Foster was my grandfather.

He shouldn't have been in the First World War. He was too old.

He was 42 years of age and the cut-off age, apparently, was 39.

Martha, his eldest child, she...

He said to her, "Martha, there's my birth certificate.

"Make me look ten years younger."

Which she did. She altered it for him.

He went to France in 1915

and he was killed in 1916.

And my aunt never forgave herself for having done it.

You know, she said, "I signed my father's death warrant

"by altering that birth certificate."

No, she never forgive herself.

And this was taken, what, a couple of years, then, before she...?

Just before she actually forged the birth certificate.

-And that's your mum.

-That's my mother.

And my grandmother was left with six children

between the ages of 3 and 13.

So, Martha, not only would she have the guilt,

-she'd see the consequences.

-Yes, yes.

She was old enough to understand, I think, at that age.

This is something which is very precious to me.

A small piece of French silk which has been hand-painted.

"Ne m'oubliez pas."

"Don't forget me."

How did they ever imagine they would be forgotten while they were away?

In fact, many people would remember Joseph.

As a younger man, he was a very keen amateur footballer.

He played for Newcastle United A.

And look at this. They were cup winners.

-He was a bit of a celebrity.

-Yes. Yes, he must have been.

I suppose when you know you had

a famous Magpie footballer in the family,

but you actually know the fact that he broke all the rules to serve,

I don't suppose you know which you're supposed to be more proud of.

Well, that's difficult, yes.

People were quick to accuse anyone who didn't volunteer of cowardice.

20-year-old river pilot Ralph Phillips

was instructed to remain on Tyneside.

There's a tragic irony that

if he hadn't been forced to stay on board the Protector

he may yet have survived the war as a serving soldier.

He wanted to serve.

I think just going backwards and forwards to the pilot cutter

didn't seem much to do

with the war effort and maybe he felt

no glory attached.

He wrote to the pilotage committee

and asked if he could join the Army and

they sent this letter, which says that they

applauded his patriotic fervour but he was doing a vital job.

He was, in his way, serving his king and country by being a pilot.

So he was issued with one of these,

which is a certificate of exemption.

-Ah, right, so this is your kind of get-out-of-war card.

-Yes.

When young ladies would come up to you and give you a white feather,

you could show them that to say that you weren't a shirker.

-So this basically said, "I'm not a coward and this proves it."

-It does.

-"This is why I'm not serving abroad."

-Mm-hm.

But didn't that happen to your dad?

Yes, my father was home recuperating

and a woman gave him a white feather when he was on a bus

and my grandmother opened up his shirt

and showed the bandages and told her that he had been severely wounded.

That shows the pressure that men were under to be seen to be

doing their bit, doesn't it?

It was all jingoism.

"Your country needs you. Enlist now."

All these different slogans going about.

Tyneside played a part in whipping up patriotism.

Right at the heart of it,

what is now just another fashionable address in Newcastle's Grey Street -

Andrew Reid & Company.

The print works produced many posters for the War Office,

many aimed at bolstering recruitment and raising much-needed funds

to provide more tanks and weapons.

Marching bands rallied crowds to the cause on flag days,

where lapel badges were sold in support of local regiments.

But civic pride back home was little comfort to anyone

not cut out for fighting.

Now, what's your name?

William Hunter.

Future Private William Hunter.

I've got your number.

The Hunters had a terrible war.

In North Shields, William's brother had gone AWOL

and their mother was charged with harbouring him.

She escaped a six-months' prison sentence, but William wouldn't be

shown any leniency when he went missing from the front line.

He's kind of entered into my consciousness, William Hunter,

and I got much more emotional when writing this play.

Is it inevitable when he gets over there, into France,

he's going to go AWOL?

He doesn't seem to have much respect for authority.

He goes off with a French girl,

he's captured, he deserts again,

he's captured again, he's sentenced, he's shot.

Oi, you, lad.

Aye, you.

-You look like you might be first-class material.

-Me?

You look like a big, strong Shields lad.

This is the only professional play being

commissioned in the region about the First World War.

We are also using various young actors who are about the same age

as he was when he was shot.

I think this'll bring home to people, you know,

these are just youngsters and they're lined up and they're shot.

The play Death At Dawn came out of the Tynemouth Project case files,

which reveal William Hunter kept his court martial

secret from his own mother.

"We haven't heard from you for over three weeks.

"Why haven't you written?"

She's very worried about this.

"I'm collecting Woodbines for you to send out a parcel.

"A neighbour has given you a khaki scarf."

So everything seemed normal. We don't think they knew.

They got the famous telegram at home,

saying that Private Hunter had died of wounds.

What they didn't say was that those wounds

were inflicted by the British,

not by the Germans.

As the war dragged on, casualties mounted.

The military needed beds for the wounded

and, on Tyneside, any large building was requisitioned.

Students would have to find somewhere new to attend lectures.

Professors, blackboards and desks

would be replaced by patients, matrons and beds.

The college we now know as Newcastle University was

turned into the first Northern General Hospital.

The tightly pulled sheets of pristine beds couldn't hide

the reality of war and how many soldiers had lost their limbs.

Lessons were still being learnt here.

New surgical techniques to treat war wounds

would ultimately benefit the whole population.

It wasn't just students who were put out.

Even the destitute at the workhouse on Newcastle's West Road

were displaced and sent to other Northern towns.

For those in the know,

the Army's growing demands for medical facilities

were raising eyebrows.

Here, they asked for 500 extra beds

to treat an unspoken consequence of active service -

venereal disease.

Growing losses on the Continent would cast a terrible shadow

over the streets back home in Tynemouth.

The community project has pulled together addresses and dates

to reveal the impact of one of the war's bloodiest campaigns.

When things really got bad was the first day of the Battle of the Somme

and the period thereafter.

Here, you show the impact on our small town here.

-And it's impossible to ignore that there's been fatalities.

-Goodness.

I don't know how you begin to deal with this.

Maybe some collective mourning helps

or assists in some way.

Clearly, there's a lot of pain here.

To me, this is the first time I've really seen

the impact of the war, actually...

so strongly displayed. It's amazing.

There's an impact of one man dying abroad

but this is showing the story of the wife and the six kids,

the wife and the three children, you know, the mums, the dads,

the brothers or sisters, all having to carry this burden.

On the first day of the Somme,

Major James Knott wrote a letter to his parents on Tyneside.

His brother had already been killed in action, and he wrote,

"Momentous events are looming up

"and I have a premonition I may not return to you."

His dead brother, Basil, had appeared to him in a dream,

which he took to be a warning.

And he was right.

He was killed in action that very same day.

In his letter, James instructs his parents to destroy his medals.

In fact, he tells them to get rid of anything

that would remind them of their boys,

which is what makes one of the windows here

all the more remarkable.

This is the church of St James and St Basil,

in Fenham, in the middle of Newcastle.

It's named after two sons who died in the First World War

but it's not just the window.

The whole building is based around these two huge aisles

and each of them are of equal size and we have two altars.

Everything we have, we have two of, because of the two sons.

Sir James Knott was a Northeast

businessman, industrialist, ship-owner

and he'd built the business up with his sons

and on the death of his sons

he was totally distraught.

He went against the wishes expressed in the son's letter

and went on to sell the business and give all the money away.

His sons are immortalised in the Knotts Flats in North Shields -

a pioneering monument of social housing.

HE SINGS

And 100 years on, youngsters enjoy music at a youth centre

because of grants the trust is still handing out to this day.

THEY CHEER

When the armistice was declared, any celebrations would soon be

tempered as the number of war dead kept on rising.

They were dying of their wounds,

they were dying of complications associated with gas.

We can't find one safe place to live on this map.

I think people look at any one of those streets there and think,

"What would happen if that was my street?

"You know, that would be three of my pals, my next-door neighbour."

They went to school together, played football together, grew up together.

They all knew each other. They could see their faces.

The principal object of our exercise was to give life to these men,

a biography of people who passed away now 100 years ago.

We're telling a story which,

if it isn't told now, could be lost in 20 or 30 years' time.

Many of the relatives coming to us are very elderly themselves

and if it's not recorded now it'll probably never be recorded.

Those who lived and worked along the River Tyne

played a huge part in the Great War.

The conflict left its mark overseas,

but emotional and physical scars

were also etched into the landscape back home.

The First World War could claim a life in foreign fields,

out at sea, or on your own doorstep.

And each death equally deeply felt on the home front.

Echoes of that past can be found in all our family trees.

You only have to look back a generation or two.

And when mere names become stories,

a century-old Great War doesn't seem that long ago.