Food queues 3,000 long and thousands of new jobs for women... How World War I changed our capital for ever
Zeppelin Nights: London In The First World War
Jerry White ★★★★★
As Britain declared war on Germany at 11pm on August 2, 1914, great cheers arose from the vast crowds assembled all over London.
The most unlikely people became tub-thumpers: the rector of a church in Brixton had his prayer books all re-covered in khaki, and converted the crypt into a firing-range.
The patriotism soured when the crowds sniffed an enemy closer to home.
Hundreds of thousands of women of all classes were entrusted for the first time with vital work. Once the war was over, there was not turning back
Before the war, the 40,000 Germans and Austrians living in London had been the most integrated of all the immigrant communities, but they were soon to find themselves targets for violence and abuse.
In the Old Kent Road, a 5,000-strong crowd demonstrated outside a German butcher, shouting: ‘Down with Germany.’
People with German surnames were driven to switch them for something more English. A pub called The King of Prussia became The King of Belgium.
In Sainsbury’s, German sausage was rebranded Luncheon sausage.
But for most, there was no hiding place: as the war went on, houses and shops owned by Germans were looted and destroyed.
The First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher, even seriously proposed that a large number of hostages be taken from the German population of London, one of them to be executed for each British civilian killed by a German bomb.
With the great theatre of war on the other side of the Channel, London became a sort of backstage area, the corridor through which virtually every British soldier entered, and, if lucky, exited.
And it was like being backstage in other ways, too: famously, the noise from the French battlefields could often be heard in London, as, in the words of one resident, ‘a kind of pulsation in regular beats’.
Jerry White, the historian of an acclaimed series of books about London in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, has now turned his attention to the much briefer period of London from 1914-1918.
Zeppelin Raider, 1915/16 from a work by H G Wells
For various reasons – not least the impact of the Blitz – London is generally more associated with World War II, but within a few pages White proves his claim that World War I ‘utterly dominated the city’s life’ and that, even a century on, ‘Londoners still live with many of the consequences of the First World War’.
A fair number of these consequences, it should be said, have proved positive.
Hundreds of thousands of women of all classes were entrusted for the first time with vital work: 25,000 women worked at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, and they proved themselves in various jobs – railway ticket collectors, tram conductors – previously reserved for men. Once the war was over, there was no turning back.
And by the end of the war, the divide between rich and poor had been weakened.
Full employment, increased wages and substantial overtime might not have meant that, as one observer had it, ‘the rich have become poor, the poor have become rich’, but they certainly narrowed the gap.
Jerry White is masterful at mixing hard facts and statistics with telling anecdotes.
To illustrate the pre-war class divide, he tells the story of a lady who dined regularly at the Cafe Royal and would always order chicken in browned butter sauce for her Pekinese, which was provided with an expensive cushion and chair.
When someone suggested that the remains of the chicken might be given to the poor people who used to come to the back door of the restaurant, she ‘turned round, and with a look as cold as marble said, “I hate poor people, they depress me” ’.
Contempt such as this would not disappear, but, after the war, it would never again be so open.
At the same time, wages for every type of profession, but particularly servants, radically improved.
White is particularly good at showing the peculiar push-me/pull-you relationship between power and people, the rulers and the ruled.
Many public figures tried to seize on the outbreak of war as the perfect opportunity to purge the nation of what they saw as the moral squalor of the Edwardian age.
‘We are fighting Germany, Austria and Drink,’ announced Lloyd George.
‘And as far as I can see, the greatest of these deadly foes is Drink.’
'Women on the London streets are the real cause of the downfall of their men'
Accordingly, pub opening hours were cut from 19½ hours a day to just five-and-a-half, and the super-strong beer that was normal before 1914 disappeared from our shelves for ever.
And the crackdown worked: the number of arrests for drunk and disorderly behaviour in Greater London in 1914 – 68,000 – has not been matched since.
On the other hand, there were some areas in which the finger-waggers made no difference whatsoever.
As long ago as 1915, the National Council of Public Morals was linking the rise in juvenile delinquency to violence in films, and demanding tougher censorship.
It’s strange to think that at the same time as they were calling for an end to screen violence, they were prepared to tolerate the deaths of 20,000 British soldiers every week in the trenches.
The effect of the war on London life was also evident in much more visible ways. Anti-aircraft guns appeared on top of buildings.
Lakes in parks were drained to stop the moonlight glitter providing enemy bombers with landmarks. Long queues appeared everywhere, particularly after 1917, when food shortages increased.
In December of that year, potatoes were nowhere to be found, and sugar, tea and meat were all so thin on the ground that queues 3,000 people long were not unusual.
Needless to say, most people made do, however unsatisfactorily: Robert Graves recalled that his wedding cake was adorned with what looked like fancy icing but turned out to be a plaster cast. When it was lifted off, ‘a sigh of disappointment rose from the guests’.
White is wonderfully skilful at interweaving the tangible and the intangible, the conscious and the unconscious.
Rumours abounded: the Germans had started invading on the East Coast, or they were dropping poisoned sweets from their Zeppelins.
The prostitutes around the railway stations – Waterloo was popularly known as Whoreterloo – were rumoured to be drugging soldiers, then robbing them.
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Whether or not the number of prostitutes actually increased during the war is hard to say, but it was certainly thought that they did, so much so that the Prime Minister of Canada vowed that in future neither he nor any successor would allow troops into Britain.
The real danger, he said, lay not in the trenches but from ‘women on the London streets who are the real cause of the downfall of their men’.
In other ways, the great London railway stations were transformed into settings for the most vivid and heartfelt drama, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers leaving, never to return, or finally returning, but as invalids.
‘We hear an incessant muffled roar of trains all night; it is like the roaring of the sea,’ wrote someone living near Euston.
'A vicar’s wife who went to Victoria to bid farewell to her son noted that ‘what struck me most was the cheerful bravery of the women who sent their men off almost invariably with smiles’.
After the worst few months of the war –196,000 men were killed or wounded in July 1916 alone – one Londoner observed that ‘I cannot pass the gates of Charing Cross station at any hour of the day without a choking sensation in the throat.
‘There, day by day, during these big “push” operations, you see a deep double line of people, mostly women, standing mutely and hourly from the doors of the station to the Strand entrance and even beyond, watching the outpouring motors and ambulances filled with the wounded...
‘There is no cheering. Just a little waving of handkerchiefs from women with tear-stained faces, and as each motor goes down the line the women gently fling roses’.
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