Whose Side Are You On? World War I at Home

The popular image of the start of the World War I...

Thousands of British lads

enthusiastically heeding their country's call to join up.

Soon, they'll be fighting the Boche in Belgium.

Among them, the men and boys from Devon.

By November, 6,000 West Countrymen had joined up

with more than one in ten of them never to return.

It's a story of blood, tears and sacrifice.

And one that we rightly mark every November.

But there's another story that's rarely told.

One of strikes and struggle - of a home front divided.

Because Devon, in 1914 and throughout the war, witnessed

industrial unrest on a scale never seen since.

I think if you were part then of the establishment, seeing that kind of

development in the middle of 1917, you would be getting quite worried.

This is the story of Devon in dissent.

The South Devon market town of Newton Abbot,

today a place of relative social harmony.

And at its centre, a memorial

commemorating 233 men

who never returned from the front.

Obviously, a memorial is our proper response to the

heroism of those who fought and died.

What we're less good at remembering is perhaps that we were not

as united in war as we were after the event, in grief.

A few miles up the road is Trusham Quarry.

100 years ago,

this was the unlikely setting for a bloody industrial conflict.

On the eve of war, management locked out workers

who wouldn't accept a pay cut.

When war started, the quarry was reopened

as a gesture towards the war effort.

But managers refused to back down over wages.

There was trouble.

Some of the workers tried to return,

but they were met by pickets who bombarded them with rocks.

One man was badly injured.

20 strikers ended up in court.

The man described as the strikers' leader was a staunch socialist.

He was also an opponent of the war.

For William Bond and the minority who shared his political opinion,

the war was being fought in the interests of grasping

capitalists with the blood of the lower classes.

Such views had been fermenting for years, a time that's come to

be known as The Great Unrest.

This was a period of increasing industrial disputes,

certainly from 1910 through to 1913.

But more than just days lost,

they were quite high profile disputes as well in the coal mines

and the railways

and the Dublin Transport Strike of 1913.

And all of these could be seen as

part of a growing crisis within Britain.

JEERING AND SHOUTING

In the 1970s, the BBC dramatised one of the key events of 1913,

Cornwall's biggest ever strike.

1,000 newly unionised clay workers downed tools in a dispute over pay.

The BBC also interviewed some of those who were there.

Well, the unions started about...either 1910 or '11.

And then after a few weeks or a few months probably

we had a three pence rise from three bob.

And then at 12 months after, just before the strike, we had another

three penny rise which made it a

guinea but we were out for 25 shillings, you see.

Police from Glamorgan were sent to protect those who still

wanted to work.

We travelled down to Cornwall by train.

When we arrived at St Austell railway station,

there we found several charabancs there waiting for us.

But Inspector John Williams, who was in charge of the contingent,

he said, "Take those charabancs away.

"Take them down the bottom end of the town.

"I'm marching my men down through here."

The dispute escalated.

When police blocked the way of strikers trying to reach the men

still working...

They said, "We will go!"

So, the man in charge said, "Charge!"

When we charged, from our previous experiences,

there's no messing about it.

But we were only about 26, all told,

going into a crowd of over 1,000.

When we got nearer, of course,

we start scattering them, right and left.

Eventually, as the BBC drama recreated, the workers

were forced back to their jobs.

But once the war had started,

the government needed the unions on its side.

Chancellor David Lloyd George

invited workers' leaders to sit on industrial planning committees.

The strikes weren't banned, as such,

in the way that they were in World War II.

Erm, but nonetheless the expectation was that there would be arbitration

and conciliation in disputes

and that wherever possible,

disputes would be resolved without strikes or lockouts.

But this didn't go down well with some at grass roots.

There was a sense very often that leaders were selling out and they

therefore become very antipathetic towards their leaders -

not want to follow them so much.

So, strikes went on throughout the war, often under local leadership.

In Devon, bottom up militancy threatened to derail

the truce between the government and the unions' national leadership.

As well as the dispute at the local quarry,

railway workers here in Newton Abbot came out on strike just before,

just after and even in fact DURING the war...

..against the wishes of their national leaders.

One of the things that fascinates me

as a historian is how the media covers the big

political stories of the day.

So, I've come to the offices of the local paper that reported

those turbulent local events of 100 years ago.

The surprising thing about the reports is their liberal stance.

Just two months before the war,

the paper comes out in support of the Trusham Quarry strikers.

And four days after the start of the war, on the very day that

the Defence of the Realm Act was passed, which made it

possible for the government to censor any anti-war views, the

newspaper published a vehemently anti-war speech by William Bond,

in which he says,

"If the working classes allow themselves to be dragged

"into a war, it would be another means of keeping them down..."

And, as he puts it,

"..retarding the work for the better conditions of the people."

The interesting thing is that the speech is reported without

any comment, almost as if the newspaper

agrees with its sentiments -

a remarkable thing for that point in time.

And perhaps an indication of the extent of local

support for such radical views,

views which were championed by the Independent Labour Party, the ILP.

It was a forerunner of the present Labour Party,

but much further to the left.

William Bond was a member.

The party was against the war

because it believed workers of all countries should stand

united against what it saw as the "capitalist masters".

Evidence showed it had quite a following here in Newton Abbot.

Photographs show the ILP could muster quite a crowd

for their outings and that they even had their own Sunday School.

This level of dissent in a South Devon market town

is surprising, but even more so is the opposition to recruitment

that came from those you might imagine being at the opposite end

of the political spectrum to the ILP.

Before 1916, service was voluntary...

..but casualties were mounting.

Troops needed to be reinforced and replaced.

The war office sought a solution and attention turned to Devon.

Here, near Newton Abbot, the country's first purpose-built

agricultural college, Seale-Hayne, had just been completed.

This place was at the forefront of

the drive to find those replacements.

But it produced the most extraordinary

opposition from the very people it had been intended to help.

During the war, Seale-Hayne trained women to work on farms - land girls,

as they were known.

The plan was to free up farming men for service.

There were over 2,500 women

within Devon in 1915 and 1916 who

had actually registered to work in agriculture.

Many of these trained at places like this, Seale-Hayne.

It was a hard month's training. Up at 5.30am and to bed about 10pm,

with lots of milking and lots of mangold and lots of turnips and lots

of all the other things that the girls managed to do quite well.

But things didn't quite go to plan.

There is every evidence that the women were good,

though they never, ever managed to convince the farmers.

There's also, of course, the fact that the farmers' wives themselves

didn't much like strange women working on the farms.

Some farmers simply didn't want to let their men and their sons go

to war, just as the government was trying to crank up the war machine.

There was great resistance amongst the farmers for their own sons

to join the forces.

And unfortunately for the recruitment drive,

the agricultural labourers too quite quickly realised that

if their bosses' sons weren't going, nor am I.

And that was a bone of contention that lasted right through until

conscription, in 1916.

The reluctance of some Devon farmers to support the war effort was

a real factor in the county having one of the lowest

numbers of army volunteers.

Figures from the National Archives show a marked

difference between recruitment rates in the South West and elsewhere.

If you look at the percentage of men of military age who had enlisted

by the 12th of November, 1914, the national picture for England, Wales

and Scotland was 10.2%. So, 10.2% of men of military age

had enlisted by the 12th of November, 1914.

The picture for Devon is somewhat different, it's about 50% less.

It's 4.7% of men of military age had enlisted by the 12th of November.

It's not the worst rural county's performance.

Cornwall actually does a lot worse than that and it's about 2.7%,

for Cornwall.

For those living in Devon,

events across the North Sea must have seemed very distant.

Two thirds of the population lived in very rural areas.

It was the largest agricultural county in the South West, in 1914.

And there is a historic connection between rural workers being

less likely to enlist compared to urban workers.

But it would be wrong to assume that because Devon farmers weren't

keen for their sons to enlist

that they were opposed to the war effort.

It's a late harvest in 1914, so a number of men feel that they

should stay at home to bring in the harvest.

That their patriotic duty is best expressed

by keeping the family farm going.

That duty and patriotism can be fulfilled by feeding the nation,

literally. And this becomes ever more important, particularly in 1915

when German submarine warfare really begins to kick in.

Some may have resisted the call to swap Devon's green

acres for Flanders' fields. But as more men did enlist,

cracks began to open up in Devon's manufacturing heartlands.

It wasn't only farmers who were affected by the loss

of men to the war effort.

It also disrupted factory work

and led to a huge increase in industrial tension.

The remains of the paper mill at Stoke Canon, near Exeter.

By 1915, several skilled men had gone away to fight

and production was down.

The owners wanted to pay those who remained by results.

The workers said no

and asked instead for an increase in their basic pay.

The Tremletts, the owners of the

mills said that would cost them

far too much. In fact, they offered to open their books up to the public

and said it would cost an extra £500 a year and the workers said,

"No, we're serving you with a notice to strike."

The paper mill owner was Frederick Tremlett.

This was his house.

He also owned the homes of many of his workers.

By the middle of August, the Tremletts had clearly had enough

and decided to seek a court case, an injunction to have all the workers

evicted from the cottages behind me.

The Mill Cottages and the Burnham Cottages which they owned,

as workers' cottages for the mill.

The case was heard by magistrates sitting at Exeter Castle.

The local newspaper reported a Mrs Radford as saying she'd gone

to work at the mill to keep her home going after her husband had

been paralysed following an accident there.

But eviction orders were still granted

against her and 13 other strikers.

She warned that she'd end up living in a tent.

And that's exactly what she did, along with 50 men, women and

children, three dogs and a cat,

in tents provided by the Papermakers' Union.

A play park now stands on the spot.

Some of the strikers eventually went

back to work, but others were replaced.

It must have been tough living in tents for seven weeks

and being forced to move elsewhere to seek work.

The strikers here, unlike those at Trusham,

got very little sympathy from their local newspaper.

An editorial, typical for the time, said,

"The whole attitude of Trade Unionism, as controlled

"by the socialist element, is one of the most disheartening

"aspects of the situation in which the nation finds itself."

Such an editorial is not surprising.

The war was more than a year old,

the full horror of what servicemen were facing

was by now well-known.

But the conflict was also affecting

the working conditions of people in every corner of Britain...

..and tensions over pay led to unrest here in North Devon

that lasted the whole war.

This was once home to furniture makers Shapland & Petter.

During the war, the company won a contract to produce shell cases.

But it's better known

for this sought after arts and crafts furniture.

The men who made these pieces wanted a rise of four shillings

and sixpence, bringing their wages into line with Northern workers.

The owners said that they'd lost 100 skilled men to the army

and business had suffered as a result.

They could only afford to pay two shillings a week.

The workers came out on strike.

After four weeks they returned, accepting a compromise offer,

but they continued to agitate throughout the war.

Their actions were damned by the local newspaper, which said,

they were "Causing the greatest possible anxiety at a time

"when the interests of the nation should be served to the

"fullest possible extent."

Strikers and socialist opponents of the war were given a rough ride

by much of the press for the first two years, but at least

they didn't have to fight if they didn't want to.

That changed the following year,

with the introduction of conscription.

Now joining the army was compulsory

for all eligible men.

Voluntary recruitment literally could not keep up with

the mounting casualty rates.

And there was a sense of having exhausted that pool of voluntary

participation and the system had reached its sell-by date.

Something else needed to be tried.

Every unmarried man between the ages of 18 and 41 had to sign up.

There were exemptions,

including for those termed "conscientious objectors".

But nonetheless, conscription caused further conflict between the

establishment and the far left.

The Independent Labour Party fought

to keep local people from being conscripted,

making representations

at local tribunals which decided who would stay and who would go.

The ILP archives are held here at the London School of Economics.

And they include the papers and

letters of Newton Abbot's William Bond.

They produce a fascinating insight into the thinking

of the left in that town then and

here is a letter from William Bond to the party chiefs.

"Dear Comrade, Six of our members appeared before the local tribunal

"on Tuesday and put up a good fight,

"carrying the audience with them and

"giving the tribunal an object lesson.

"Enclosed is a short report cut out from the Daily Mercury, which gives

"the ILP a look-in."

So Newton Abbot's radical enclave was stubbornly standing firm,

but prevailing opinion was against its anti-war stance.

Anger was vented, in particular, against conscientious objectors.

This rare footage shows an attack on a London meeting.

One Devon paper said the "conchies", as they were known,

were doing more than anybody else in Britain to help the other side.

Conscription caused further disruption in the workplace.

It put extra pressure on employers - and not just

farmers - to get women into work, a move resisted by

many male colleagues.

At Heathcoat's textile works in the mid-Devon

town of Tiverton, the government had to intervene to force the company

to take on female employees.

Pam Sampson's grandma was one of them.

I think it was just men being men,

they didn't want women stepping on their toes.

That maybe they'd do the job better than they would, you know.

They just didn't like it, did they?!

Then they had to change the age of girls going in to 12, so the boys

could go off to the land and the men could go off to war.

Had no choice, in the end.

But Devon's biggest wartime dispute occurred in a place more

usually associated with military than industrial conflict.

The Royal naval port and garrison city of Plymouth,

an important base for escort vessels and repairs.

It centred on pay and triggered a new escalation in tensions

between the strikers and those that knew the slaughter at first-hand.

Trouble flared towards the end of 1916 when workers

from the country's second biggest co-operative society went on strike.

It was big and getting bigger all the time.

It had grown spectacularly

since its foundation in 1860.

And then in the 1890s, they built one of the biggest structures

west of Bristol, just behind us here.

They had well over 100 different outlets, they had groceries,

butchers, milk places, a drapery they'd started.

They'd just opened a massive new warehouse at Sutton Harbour

and because they were fairer than any other retailer, people flocked

towards them, especially when rationing meant that

prices were going up and up and up in the normal retail world.

The co-op even had its own quay where its coal ship would

unload supplies crucial for keeping Plymouth's home fires burning.

It was the men that worked here that ignited the strike.

The Dockers' and the General Workers' Union had put in a

request to have their wages raised by three shillings a week.

And some of the workers hadn't had a pay rise for about 15 years,

so it was due.

Soon workers from other sections of the co-op joined them.

They met at the city's Guildhall.

It wasn't just co-op management they had to contend with.

According to local newspapers,

one meeting was cancelled after

police intervened to protect strikers

from angry servicemen who accused them of cowardice and treachery.

"You ought to be in the trenches" they said.

But the Co-op workers stuck to their guns

and achieved a modest increase after staying out for ten weeks.

The numbers of casualties inflicted on Plymouth were devastating.

It's easy to understand how the strikers would have struggled

to gain sympathy.

But, by this point, after Britain had endured two years

of gruelling warfare, there was still enough left wing agitation

going on for the establishment to fear a mass uprising.

In October 1917, revolution swept across Russia

and there were real fears that the same could happen here.

The ILP and other socialists met in Leeds to discuss how

they could follow Russia's example.

Once you start getting people on the left getting very enthusiastic

about revolution, you get the Leeds

Convention of June 1917

when lots of people, people who are

actually in many ways...we would tend

to see now as quite moderate people,

but people like Ernest Bevin, for example.

You know, the former Devon farm boy, one of the leading lights

in transport trade unionism, go to the Leeds Convention

and talking about setting up British Soviets.

Then I think people on the

establishment side do start to get worried.

World War I was nearing its end.

In 1918, the Germans launched their Spring Offensive, which would

ultimately fail and grant victory to the Allied Powers.

But there was no let up on the industrial front at home.

In August, three months before the end of the war,

council workers and dockers came out on strike, in Teignmouth.

And the following month, railway workers walked out here,

in nearby Newton Abbot.

There was a growing sense of concern

about what the post-war world is going to be like.

Workers are looking to defend their position, to defend things that they

won during the war.

To get things back that they'd lost during the war.

Prices are rising, and that obviously

leads to people needing to take

industrial action in order to maintain their standard of living.

One of Devon's most memorable wartime strikes took place

just before the armistice.

It had all the ingredients of earlier strikes.

It wanted better pay,

it had the aggressive hostility of the establishment, but it

also looked back to a pre-WWI militancy of the suffragettes

and symbolised the hopes and

aspirations of women for after the Great War.

The all-female workforce at Exeter's City Collar Works

went on strike complaining that the five pence an hour

they got for making uniforms wasn't enough.

They'd been refused a penny increase.

The women marched 13 miles from

Exeter to here in Ottery to persuade

their fellow female workers to join them in the strike.

And they were met on the bridge by soldiers,

who threatened to throw them into the river.

But the women were undaunted and they went on into Ottery and they

did persuade the women workers there to join them in the strike.

Their boss refused to budge and closed down the City Collar Works.

If it reopened, it went unreported.

Other events took over as the nation celebrated its victory over

Germany. The troops came home to an economy whose major

industries were booming, as were the demands of workers and unions.

There's huge amounts of investment going into a lot of these industries.

Very low levels of unemployment, I mean, very, VERY low levels

of unemployment.

And that, as always, increases the power of working class movements

quite significantly because people can go out on strike and employers

will give them better conditions or

better wages in order to get them back

because they can still sell their products.

But the boom was short lived.

Unemployment soared,

and in 1926, nearly two million workers downed tools

in support of striking miners.

The Daily Mail called it "A revolutionary move".

But by now the Labour Party we know today had come into being.

Labour was led by Social Democrats, by moderates, democratic socialists,

if you like.

They weren't interested in revolution.

The early years of the twentieth century were the nearest

Britain ever came to revolution.

As for Devon, its years of

industrial militancy were numbered.

And today, Devon's wartime dissenters are largely forgotten.

How should we view those who went against the grain, attracting

public vilification, risking their homes and their livelihoods?

Unpatriotic troublemakers?

Or defenders in their own way of the rights and freedoms that

so many fought and died for?

It's easier to overlook what was going on in people's

everyday lives back home.

When we look at them,

we often find unexpected and even uncomfortable truths.

But those are as much a part of who we are and our history

as the undeniable sacrifice of those who fell.