Dedication

To my grandson, Freddie Hayton of Shotley, in the hope that his generation is never sent to war.

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
PEN & SWORD MILITARY
an imprint of
Pen and Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright © Rachel Field, 2016

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1Ipswich before the Great War

2‘England to mobilise today’

3Daily life

4The enemy within?

5Business as usual?

6Public services

7Marching off to war

8War at sea and in the air

9Caring for the sick and wounded

10News about the war

11Doing our utmost

12Keeping our spirits up

13After the war was over

Afterword

Appendices

Timeline

Suffolk Regiment battalions

Bibliography

Ipswich, 1920 (SRO, Ipswich)

Ipswich town centre, 1920 (SRO, Ipswich)

Acknowledgements

With many thanks to: Paul Field for his practical suggestions, moral support and writing skills; Keith Woodman for hours of painstaking newspaper research; John Rixon for his expert editing of images and map-drawing; and Sarah Rixon and Linda Appleby for their enthusiastic and accurate proof reading. My thanks are also due to Kelvin Dakin, David Empson and Derek Pheasant of the Suffolk Branch of the Western Front Association, the staff at Suffolk Record Office (Ipswich) and to the team at Pen and Sword. Finally, many thanks to Sheila Hardy for putting this opportunity my way and to Cathy Hunt for her expertise as a professional historian and for her friendship.

Although I have concentrated on Ipswich itself, I have also included some of the villages and locations surrounding the town – in particular, Shotley Gate and Martlesham Heath, where there were military bases of national importance. Unless otherwise indicated, all locations are in Ipswich.

I do not believe that I have breached copyright in any material I have used but if I have, please contact me via my publishers.

CHAPTER 1

Ipswich Before the War

Before the war, Ipswich was a busy county town with a population of around 74,000, a little over half the size it is today. It was Suffolk’s largest industrial town and trading port, essentially a working class place and, for the most part, home to people born and bred in Suffolk. It had expanded rapidly over the nineteenth century with people mainly from Suffolk villages moving in to the town to work in its growing industries. If not Suffolk-born, Ipswich residents came from elsewhere in East Anglia, with only a small minority hailing from other parts of the British Isles and a tiny number from mainland Europe.

Ipswich town centre would have been typical of many across England, its streets lined with dozens of independent local retailers amongst a few big-name chains, such as Marks & Spencer, Boots and Sainsbury’s which are still familiar to us today.

Among the town’s most densely populated districts were St Clements and the town centre itself, particularly the streets around ‘The Mount’ (now the Civic Drive area) and the roads between Tower Ramparts and Fonnereau Road (now the site of Crown Pools). These areas housed some of Ipswich’s poorest people. St Clements, for example, was full of cramped, insanitary courts, ‘blind back’ terraces and once-grand merchants’ houses from centuries past, by then being let out for multiple occupation. These districts have since been demolished in slum clearances.

Tavern Street
Tavern Street then, as now, was one of the main shopping streets in the town centre. The Working Men’s College is on the left, marked by a large lamp. The Maypole Dairy is a few doors down on the same side. Fish & Sons, outfitters, is on the right at the junction with St Lawrence Street. In the far distance is the turret of the East Anglian Daily Times’ offices. (Ipswich Society)

Other centres of high population were Stoke, home to many railway workers, and the town end of Bramford Road.

To the east, more salubrious suburbs had been developed in the previous century. This land, roughly between Cauldwell Hall Road and Britannia Road, had once been owned by the Ipswich Freehold Land Society and had been allocated to its members for building houses.

Affluent households tended to be clustered in the streets around Christchurch Park north of the town centre and along Belstead Road to the south-west. Chantry and Gainsborough housing estates and much of north Ipswich were yet to be built.

In 1914, Ransomes, Sims & Jeffries was the largest local firm, employing around 3,000 men and boys. They made world-renowned ploughs, lawnmowers, threshing machines and other agricultural implements, and operated from Waterworks Street and the Orwell Works, a huge dockside site in St Clement’s parish. Across the river, at the Waterside Works, Ransomes & Rapier manufactured heavy engineering products such as cranes, railway plant and lock gates. Other heavy engineering companies at the time included E.R. & F. Turner and Reavell & Co.

As the largest town in a rural county, Ipswich had a significant agricultural processing industry. Cranfield Bros., at the docks, were flour millers; R. & W. Paul were maltsters and animal feed manufacturers; W.A. & A.C. Churchman processed tobacco products and Edward Packard & Co. made fertilizers. Beer was brewed in the town by Tollemache’s Ipswich Brewery and by Cobbold & Co., still at this time separate companies.

St Helen’s Street
Crowded electric trams brought workers and shoppers into the town centre. Horse-drawn buses carried people in from Shotley. Others from out of town travelled to and fro by train, or by cart, carriage, bicycle or on foot. There were very few private cars until after the war. (Author’s collection)

Cattle market
The busy cattle market at the Portman Marshes end of Princes Street. (David Kindred)

Ipswich was a busy seaport with international arrivals as well as longshore shipping. Bustling fleets of Thames barges with their blackened hulls and distinctive tan sails were an everyday sight on river wharves and in the Wet Dock. Pauls and Cranfields operated their own fleets – flat-bottomed ‘beasts of burden’ that could navigate the shallow creeks alongside farm wharves on the rivers Orwell, Deben and Stour. Farmers like the Wrinches of Shotley would send barge-loads of straw, hay and mangolds to feed London’s working horses, their boats returning piled high with horse manure to fertilise the land.

In these pre-war years, some women would, of course, have been working outside the home. A number had jobs at Pretty’s corset factory, for instance, or were maids-of-all-work in private households. Middle-class women might be employed as nurses, teachers or shopkeepers.

Ipswich was a county borough and, as such, Ipswich Corporation had responsibility for providing public services such as education, utilities, transport and so on. It was quite separate from East Suffolk County Council which administered the surrounding area. Political control swung between Liberals and Conservatives, with the Labour Party yet to make a showing. The last council elections before the war were held in 1913 and it would be another six years before local elections were held again.

The town had two parliamentary seats, both held by Liberals in the years before the war; the MPs were Daniel Ford Goddard and Silvester Horne (interestingly, the father of Kenneth Horne, who found fame much later in the BBC Radio series Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne). Horne died suddenly in May 1914, and a Unionist candidate, Francis John Childs (Jack) Ganzoni, was successful in the ensuing election, and became MP for Ipswich with almost unbroken tenure until 1938.

Neptune Quay, 1890s
Harry Walters, the well-known photographer of Victorian and Edwardian Ipswich, perfectly captured this working day at Ipswich docks. (Stuart Grimwade of the Ipswich Maritime Trust and David Kindred)

Daniel Ford Goddard MP
Goddard was a graduate chemist and ran the Ipswich Gas Company. He was also a Liberal town councillor, one-time mayor of Ipswich and local MP from 1895 to 1918. He founded and funded the Ipswich Social Settlement in Fore Street, a place available to all social classes, which provided a wide range of services from ‘poor men’s lawyers’ to children’s clubs and billiard tables.

Ipswich had a long tradition as an army town. A large barracks just north of St Matthew’s Street had opened in 1795, near what is still known as Barrack Corner. When war was declared, it was home to V Brigade, Royal Horse Artillery which had recorded over 200 officers and men in residence there on census night in 1911.

The Territorial Force (TF) also had a substantial presence in the town, with several units headquartered here. The TF was set up by Lord Haldane in 1908 as a reserve of volunteer soldiers, trained and ready to be called up when needed. They were specifically established for home rather than overseas service and included former regular soldiers as well as men who had never previously served. Nine or so TF units had an Ipswich base, notably the 4th battalion of the Suffolk Regiment who were mostly men from Ipswich and east Suffolk, and the cyclist battalion (6th Suffolks). There were TF drill halls in Great Gipping Street, Portman Road and at the bottom of Woodbridge Road.

Barrack Corner
Barrack Corner marked the convergence of no less than seven thoroughfares, including St Matthew’s Street and Norwich Road which together formed the main road out of Ipswich to Bury St Edmunds and all points west. (Author’s collection)

6th (Cyclist) battalion, Suffolk Regiment
The Cyclists at their annual camp, Saxmundham 1913. (Taff Gillingham)

RNTE Shotley (later known as HMS Ganges)
Two photos of naval personnel at the base. Firstly, a formal photograph of a group of officers and boys (with dog) and then an indoor shot of boys in the dining hall. Their training covered subjects such as seamanship, gunnery and signalling – plus hours and hours of physical drill. (HMS Ganges Museum)

Eleven miles or so from Ipswich is Shotley Gate, home to the Royal Naval Training Establishment (RNTE) Shotley from 1905 to 1976. (It was known as HMS Ganges from 1927.) By the declaration of war, this shore-based training school was catering for around 1,800 boys. These youngsters often came from very poor families or institutions such as Dr Barnardo’s. Conditions and discipline were notoriously harsh.

Ipswich, then, was a sizeable and busy county town, with a strong industrial economy, bustling town centre and a long association with the military, both on land and at sea. These close connections with the army and the navy meant that the impact of war would be seen and felt in the streets of Ipswich from the very beginning of the conflict.

CHAPTER 2

‘England to Mobilise Today’

So read the headline in the East Anglian Daily Times of Tuesday, 4 August 1914 announcing that the British government had ordered troops to mobilise. Later that evening, war against Germany was formally declared and from the very next day, according to the Ipswich Evening Star, the town was ‘thronged with khaki-clad men, while at the various drill halls were scenes of great activity'.

Territorial battalions of part-time soldiers from the Suffolk Regiment assembled in Ipswich as soon as they could. Arriving from their training camps on the east coast, they reported for duty at their drill halls. Over 1,000 territorials from Ipswich were affected by the call, mostly, but not all, from 4th and 6th Suffolks. Another 700 reservists for regular (full-time, professional) battalions were also mobilised that week. Reservists of the 2nd Suffolks were recalled by telegram to join their battalion in Ireland. They were to find themselves among the first British troops to arrive in France when they landed at Le Havre just a week or so later.

From early on Wednesday, 5 August men of the 4th Suffolks – mostly from Ipswich and east Suffolk – busied themselves at their Portman Road Drill Hall, sorting and loading boots, socks, cartridges and other essential supplies. There was paperwork to be completed too and separation allowances to be arranged for the wives of married soldiers and the mothers of single men. Dr Jefferson examined the men and rejected a few outright as unfit to serve. Later that day, hearty cheers rang out when the popular Lieutenant Colonel Frank Garrett arrived from Leiston to lead his troops out of Ipswich.

On the same morning, across town at Woodbridge Road Drill Hall, about 200 cyclists of the 6th Suffolks gathered. Their senior officer, Lieutenant Colonel W.F. Pretty, led them off to Saxmundham – which was to become their base for the war years – cheered on by a large contingent of friends and family.

Crowds gathered, too, to watch the comings and goings at the Drill Hall in Great Gipping Street, now guarded by sentries, where the 3rd East Anglian (Howitzer) Brigade was based. Large guns and wagons were parked on the ground outside and men were busy polishing harnesses for the horses that would pull the howitzers.

That Wednesday, the Suffolk Chronicle & Mercury described some of the poorer quarters of the town which were conspicuously busy. Around Fore Street, St Helens and the Mount there was scarcely a house without at least one man leaving for war. There were parting scenes everywhere, with:

Going hammer and tongs
Business was brisk at George Cook’s smithy in St Margaret’s Plain. (David Kindred)

‘knots of women and their children clustering round to discuss the grim reality of war. The situation has been met with a calm seriousness in which hysterics are conspicuous by their absence.’

Over at the railway station, women were waving goodbye to grim-faced soldiers amid scenes of loud crying and silent weeping. In that first week, hordes of holidaymakers added to the commotion at Ipswich station as they were forced to leave Suffolk early. One group included a large number of ‘pauper’ children from London who had come for a camping holiday. Notwithstanding their disappointment, a highlight for them was spotting a lone sheep wandering along the busy platform. As their train pulled out of the station, the children ‘saluted it noisily’, laughing and shouting.

Quick off the mark
Footman, Pretty & Co. was quick off the mark. Just one week after war was declared, the drapers had substantial stocks of essential wartime textiles for sale. (SRO, Ipswich)

A few days later, the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) left town for Romford on foot, cheered on by hundreds as they marched through the Cornhill and along St Matthew’s Street. It took forty-eight hours for them to get there, being billeted overnight first in Colchester and then in Chelmsford.

So Ipswich was full of bustle, excitement and fond farewells in the first few weeks of the war. The Times described the town over those days as:

‘a lively Continental garrison town, with the khaki in ascendant. Regulars, Special Reservists and Territorials seemed to dominate the thoroughfares, all good nature and cheeriness.’

CHAPTER 3

Daily Life

Living with DORA

After the initial excitements of mobilisation, things settled down to some sort of routine, made ever drabber by the new wartime regulations gradually being introduced to control civilian life. Anticipating the need for extra legal powers should war break out, the government had already drafted the necessary legislation, and so it was that the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) was ready to be passed by both Houses of Parliament just four days after war was declared. Although just one page in length, DORA was written so that new regulations could easily be added. Over the course of the war, more than 1,700 orders were appended to it. By 1918, DORA regulated almost every aspect of civilian life. Despite some complaints, the population accepted these strict measures as necessary in wartime and, for the most part, abided by them. So how did these orders operate in Ipswich?

The licensed trade quickly found itself heavily controlled by DORA. The government’s aim was twofold: to conserve brewing ingredients for food production and, at the same time, to lessen any effects of drunkenness on industrial output. Publicans were given an early taste of what was to come when, in August 1914, Ipswich magistrates advised them to close at 10.00 pm, rather than at 11. In swift response, however, licensees held a meeting at the King’s Arms in The Thoroughfare and politely told the magistrates to mind their own business as, according to the Star, reporting on 25 August, ‘everything at the present time is orderly and quiet in the town’.

However, licensees could not call the shots for long. For example, in the autumn of 1914, the government massively increased the duty payable on beer and this continued to rise throughout the war. The Star reported in April 1917 that a pint of mild ale now cost 7d in Ipswich when it had been just 2d in 1914, a threefold increase in as many years. Much to the disgust of brewers, publicans, and the drinking public, beer supplies were also reduced and, adding insult to injury, ale was made thinner and weaker. A ‘No Treating Order’ – of all things – banned the buying of alcoholic drinks for other people, and pubs had to close for an afternoon break instead of being open all day – a requirement which was to last in England until late into the twentieth century.

In rural areas such as Suffolk, brewing controls like these threw up a particular difficulty for farmers. How were they to provide sufficient ale for their harvest workers? Ipswich Co-op managers, for example, struggled every year to source and pay for enough beer to satisfy their thirsty harvesters at Bentley Farm. Their men expected to be supplied with ale as part of the job. In 1916, the Co-op managers decided to buy 144 pints from Tollemache Brewery just to cover the haysel (an East Anglian term for haymaking). More would have to be bought for the main harvest.

The brewing industry in Ipswich – Cobbolds, Tollemaches and Pauls – struggled. Where they could, these companies diversified. Pauls’ response was to use its steamers and barges to ferry supplies of other goods to the ports of northern France.

Also under DORA, a government Press Bureau was set up in London with powers to dispense official war news and to censor information from non-official sources. Newspapers publishing anything deemed false or restricted were liable to prosecution. Censors would have doubtless been quite happy, though, with the text of a letter published under the headline ‘Censored letter from the Front’ by the Star in August 1914. Ipswich soldier Walter Ford, address withheld, wrote:

‘Just a line to say that we have got on the other side. We are steaming down the xxx. We are not allowed to state where we are going but perhaps you can guess. Everything is kept secret, which is very proper. It is the loveliest scenery I have ever seen.’

Local newspapers did sometimes print sensitive information and do not seem to have been as strictly controlled as their national counterparts. Certainly readers of the Star in September 1914 were able to read about adverse conditions and possibly low morale at the Western Front:

‘Mr Pierce, of Wickham Market, has received a letter from his son Isaac, who was among the first to go to the seat of war. The writer, who states that he is quite well, refers to what he describes as a terrible engagement, and says his regiment, the King’s Own Rifles, was 800 strong, and only five remain unscathed. The others were killed, wounded or reported as missing.’

Other forms of censorship imposed by DORA included a ban on using invisible ink when writing abroad, and injunctions forbidding talk about military matters in public places.

Lighting orders, issued under DORA, affected everyone across the country. From Monday, 28 December 1914 Ipswich and other coastal towns were obliged to reduce their night lighting. Air raids over East Anglia had made it imperative not to give enemy aircraft any clues as to where the large centres of population were. Unfortunately, as the Star reported:

‘a worse night upon which to start the new order of things could not possibly have been chosen. It was not only dark, but the wind was blowing at the rate of about seventy miles an hour. Tales are rife of citizens having their hats blown off, and owing to the darkness, not being able to recover them!’

Ipswich residents complained. People were knocked down by bicycles in the dark – there were even some fatalities – and the gloomy evenings were said by the Suffolk Chronicle to be ‘melancholy’, unsettling and ‘positively dangerous’.

But a much deeper gloom was to come. From 26 January 1915 and until further notice, no lights at all were allowed to be visible from private and public buildings between the hours of 5.00 pm and 7.30 am. The use of powerful lights on motor or other vehicles was also prohibited. Ipswich streets were thereafter plunged into total darkness for winter evenings and nights. Afternoon school in the winter months started and finished earlier so that children could hurry home before it was too dark. By and large, though, people put up with the darkness for the sake of security. Infringements of the Lighting Orders were mostly the result of forgetfulness and oversights, not deliberate acts of defiance.

In 1916, Daylight Saving Time was introduced using DORA as a way of conserving energy and providing more usable hours of daylight. The first day of Daylight Saving Time, 21 May 1916, was widely reported in the press. The Star explained to readers that it was an idea whose time had come:

‘Before the war we looked upon the advocates of legislation to achieve this result as simply cranks, smiled, and passed on to the next business. Whilst we have been smiling, however, Germany and Austria have been acting, and they have just put the clocks forward by an hour ... and are doing great things, in so far as coal and gas saving is concerned.’

From that time, as now, all clocks were put forward one hour in springtime and returned to Greenwich Mean Time in the autumn.

Before the war, as has been noted, only a handful of foreign-born nationals lived in Ipswich. During the war their numbers dwindled even further. From August 1914, Ipswich, as a port town, was designated under DORA as a prohibited area, meaning that no citizens of enemy countries were allowed to live here or nearby.

Soon, more anti-alien regulations were introduced to control all foreigners, regardless of whether they hailed from allied, neutral or enemy countries. This meant, for example, that foreign sailors arriving in Ipswich docks were prohibited from coming ashore after 9.00 pm, even if they were serving on allied ships. In one instance, in December 1914, three seamen from the French grain ship Jules Gommes were fined for being ashore after curfew. In another incident, a Spanish woman, Camilia Garcia, was arrested for failing to register with the Ipswich police. She did not know that anti-alien legislation applied to people like her who came from neutral countries. As the Barcelona agent for Pretty & Sons, she was visiting the corset factory on business and had taken a room at the Waterloo Hotel in Princes Street. She was arrested for failing to register with the police, and although Prettys confirmed that Camilia was a bona fide visitor, she was fined 6s and told to leave Ipswich pronto.

Register of Aliens
All hotels had to list guests from foreign parts in an official government register. (SRO, Ipswich)

Marriages, births and other new arrivals

Over the course of the war, thousands of men left Ipswich to join the armed forces, leaving their jobs and their loved ones behind. With the departure of so many men, the economic and emotional burden of running homes fell solely on the shoulders of the women remaining. For most families, this lasted until their men were demobbed, though over 1,400 Ipswich men never returned.

The other great change was in the massive increase in the number of females – particularly married women – going out to work. They were recruited to fill the jobs either left by men or newly created by the war effort. In more socially conservative circles, this gave rise to concerns about women’s behaviour – in particular, fears of promiscuity and child neglect.

Despite fears to the contrary, the wartime upheaval did not deter Ipswich folk from getting married. The number of marriages registered in the town in the war years fluctuated between 600 and 700 per year, similar to pre-war figures. However, there were two significant peaks: the first in 1915, when men went off to war (or briefly came back on leave), and the second just after the war, when servicemen finally came home. The bare figures do not, of course, tell the host of individual stories there would have been of lost loves and newly found romances.

(www.freebmd.org.uk)

There were an estimated 25,000 or so children living in Ipswich during the war years. The graph below shows, quite simply, how births fell when men were away and rose again when they returned after the war.

These figures also show the estimated level of illegitimate births in Ipswich. A number of moral commentators at the time were concerned that illegitimacy rates would soar when war disrupted home life, but this does not seem to have been the case in Ipswich. The highest average illegitimacy rate across England and Wales was in 1917, when it was 8 per cent (double the immediate pre-war figure and falling to 6 per cent in 1918). If these percentages hold good for Ipswich, then we would expect to find between forty and fifty more illegitimate births in the town during the whole war period than in peacetime – hardly cause for moral panic.

(www.freebmd.org.uk)

But who would look after babies and young children with their mothers going to work? Several extremely sad cases were reported in the local press linking babies’ deaths with their mothers being out at work. In one example in 1917, an inquest investigated the death of a young baby who had died in his sleep in bed with his mother. The coroner found that the infant had been accidently smothered, either by bedclothes or by his sleeping mother, who was a munitions worker on long shifts. The father was away on the Western Front and an aunt had helped care for the baby while the mother was working. The coroner made a point of commenting on just how tragic the case was as, despite the difficult circumstances, the child had been well cared for during its short life.

There was, nevertheless, a noticeable increase in women serving time in Ipswich Prison for offences against children. Their numbers rose from eight in 1911, to fifteen in 1916, and to twenty-three in 1918 and included offences such as cruelty, neglect, abandoning a child, and concealing a birth. Although these numbers are tiny, the offences were serious. Clearly, it is not possible to say from these figures alone whether this increase was part of a national wartime trend or just a local phenomenon. Overall, of course, most women continued caring for their children as best they could, whatever the circumstances – just as they have always done.

As familiar faces disappeared, they were quickly replaced by newcomers. Many women came to Ipswich to take up new factory jobs, and men in khaki arrived from across Britain and the Empire – either just passing through, billeted at training camps or being treated at one of the hospitals. A relatively small but interesting group of new arrivals fetched up in Ipswich early in the first September of the war. These were refugees from Belgium who had fled the German invasion. They were escaping en masse, often with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. Crowded onto every sort of vessel imaginable, many arrived at East Anglian ports, including Harwich, Southwold, Lowestoft and Ipswich.

The Ipswich refugees were moored outside the Wet Dock, on the St Clement’s side of the river. They appeared to be a ‘cleanly group, quiet and well-conducted’, according to the Suffolk Chronicle and living in conditions that satisfied the borough’s sanitary inspectors. They were some of the first arrivals from Belgium, and later waves of refugees from the homeland would visit them and bring news.

Belgian refugees arrive in Ipswich
Four tugs, carrying crewmen with their wives and children, arrived from Antwerp in early September 1914 and took refuge in Ipswich docks. (SRO, Ipswich)

There seems to be no record of the number of Belgians who fled to Ipswich. It is quite possible that there were more than just a handful of families as, for example, St Mary’s Catholic School had to quickly take on an extra teacher in September 1914 ‘owing to an influx of children’. Were these the newly arrived Belgian children, almost certainly all Catholics?

The Belgians were sympathetically received in Ipswich, as elsewhere, based no doubt on a good deal of fellow feeling. As the mayor of Southwold wrote:

‘There was great excitement about these poor people and we thought it might be our fate later.’

Voluntary committees set about placing the refugees with hosts, finding them work and raising funds for them. For example, the Catholic Orchestra gave a fund-raising concert in October 1914 in the Old Museum Rooms. The Star reported that their programme included the ‘National Anthems of England [sic], Belgium and France’ which became standard concert pieces at this time. The evening was rounded off with a dance and raised £10.

The girls at St Matthew’s School, always up for a patriotic challenge, were keen and busy too and by Christmas 1914, they had raised nearly £9 to spend on wool and other materials to make socks, scarves and the like for Belgians. They continued giving donations to refugees for at least another year.

By early October 1914, there were about 200,000 exiled Belgians living in Britain as a whole. It is unclear how long Ipswich’s Belgians stayed in the town and what subsequently happened to them.

May Sarton, Belgian refugee and writer
May Sarton fled to Ipswich with her parents as a refugee from Belgium. The family was hoping to stay here with May’s English grandmother. When they found she had no room for them, the family emigrated to the USA where May was to become a celebrated novelist and poet.

Food

When war was declared, people in Ipswich were understandably worried about what would happen to food supplies. How long would they last? Would prices rocket? In the very early days, food shortages did indeed occur but were localised and short-lived. In Leiston, for example, the Suffolk Chronicle reported in the first weeks of the war that potatoes were temporarily scarce after large amounts were commandeered to feed the troops gathering in Ipswich.

The paper went on to tell readers that the harvest was yielding well, and that there were plenty of potatoes in storage and beef cattle in the fields. Despite this, there was a rush for food. Shopkeepers in Ipswich were inundated with so many grocery orders that customers had to wait up to three weeks for their goods to be delivered. One shopkeeper managed his stocks by allowing regulars just half what they had ordered, while strangers got nothing. Others closed early because they could not cope with the demand.

There’s plenty for everyone!
Almost as soon as war was declared, food companies started reassuring customers that there were no shortages, using war-themes to give their adverts immediacy. This advert was carried by the Suffolk Chronicle just ten days into the conflict. (SRO, Ipswich)

Although there were no real food shortages to speak of in these early days, a number of unscrupulous shopkeepers did take this opportunity to put their prices up. Tradesmen’s organisations such as the Ipswich Butchers’ Association were outraged at such profiteering and advertised their recommended prices in the local press for all to see. Of course, this could not prevent overcharging which continued for the duration of hostilities. One amongst numerous examples which appeared in the Star was the case of Eliza Palmer, a greengrocer at the Old Cattle Market, who was fined in the Ipswich courts in 1917 for charging a young child on an errand double the recommended price for potatoes.

In the early months of the war, while military households were waiting for separation allowances to be paid, kitchens were opened in Duke Street, Fore Street and Elm Street to feed the poorest children. Dinners consisted of such staples as a hearty meat pudding and two veg. But by the end of September it was clear that, with 2,500 meals having been served, these three feeding centres were not enough. The service was then rapidly expanded to seven other locations in the most deprived areas of town.

Notwithstanding earlier reassurances, by early 1915 it was clear that there was a real decline in food supplies both locally and nationally – a situation that only worsened as the war drew on. Some shortages became desperate; in November 1916, for example, the Ipswich Cooperative Society had just one-week’s supply of flour in hand, according to minutes of their regular meetings. And in March 1917, only one stallholder on Ipswich Market had any potatoes for sale. He would come in from the Bealings and ration his customers to a maximum of 4lb a day. It was quite normal for there to be up to eighty women and children queuing at his stall and sometimes the police had to be called to keep order.

Grimwade Memorial Hall, 2015
A feeding centre was opened at the Grimwade Memorial Hall in Fore Hamlet in October 1914. Others opening at the same time were at the Girls’ Ragged School, St Lawrence Parish Hall, the Rope Walk Primitive Methodist Sunday School, St Mary’s Convent, St Bartholomew’s Parish Room, and Vernon Street Mission Room. (Author’s collection)

In the face of limited supplies, some customers could not resist the temptation to hoard. The Star described the problem:

‘Some people have bought flour in very large quantities ... Several persons in Ipswich have purchased as much as a side of bacon from the large stores, where in ordinary times they would buy only a few pounds; and there is also a run on such foods as rice, tapioca, macaroni ...’

As foodstuffs became scarcer, so they became more expensive. In June 1916, the Star gave a detailed breakdown of the figures and explained that, overall, prices had risen by 55 per cent in the first year of the war. But this average figure masked huge variations in the price rises of different foodstuffs, as the graph opposite shows.

(Star, 16 June 1916)

Over the course of the war, food prices rose overall by around 130 per cent, despite government attempts to impose price restrictions.

Thrift with food was considered to be an ever-present patriotic duty. Suffolk folk with a surplus of milk were urged to have it made into cheese. Garden produce was to be used to the full, and hedgerow fruits made into jam. Recipes were printed in the local papers, too, suggesting delicious new ways with leftovers. And as Mrs Pember Reeves from the Ministry of Food told a packed meeting in Ipswich in April 1917, bread should not be sliced ‘until the mouth was ready to eat it’.

Even in the crowded town centre, Ipswich residents were urged to use every piece of available space to grow vegetables. All ‘luxury gardening’ was discouraged. Advice was issued from East Suffolk County Hall in St Helen’s Street on such matters as raising crops under glass or in frames, how to push wheat on, and how to nurture potatoes through the winter. The Star of 8 January 1918 made sure everyone knew what they were expected to do:

‘Hedge trimmings, loose straw, or any other rubbish such as often abounds around a farm makes excellent material for keeping out frost. Faggots which contain grassy material are also good.’

This was a timely piece of advice, as a few weeks after it was published, it became a DORA offence to fail to care for a potato crop.

Children played their part, too. At school and in their own backyards, they helped keep chickens and cultivate vegetable plots. They were keen contributors to the Eggs for Wounded Soldiers and Sailors scheme, which Miss Waspe of Gusford Hall ran from 1917.

In response to the ever-deepening food crisis, the government established the Department of Food in November 1916. This new department, with powers under DORA, was led by Lord Devonport, who became the national Food Controller. From then on, the Department issued reams of orders to control the price and supply of essential foodstuffs. Town councils were ordered to set up their own Food Control Committees. The Ipswich Committee got into its stride by September 1917 and comprised borough councillors (including the mayor), trade union representatives, and Mrs Allport from the Board of Guardians.

Cllr Kavas Jamas Badshah (1859 – 1931) – Food Committee member
Born in Bombay, Kavas Jamas Badshah became a Liberal member of Ipswich Borough Council in 1913. He had spent his working life as a high-ranking civil servant in Bengal and retired to Ipswich with his family in 1904. His strong sense of civic duty saw him serving on the local Food Committee, helping to organise military recruiting sessions, and running the War Savings scheme in the town. He was awarded the OBE in 1918 and became mayor of Ipswich in 1925. (SRO, Ipswich)

Despite this, there was widespread discontent with how food supplies were being managed.

We demand justice!
By 1918, there were demonstrations and meetings in the town to protest at how the food situation was being handled. Organised by the local labour movement, the demand was for a fair deal for all and an end to profiteering. (SRO, Ipswich)

The food crisis came to a head locally in the autumn of 1917 over the scarcity of margarine. By then, margarine was only on sale at the Maypole Dairies (in Tavern Street and St Matthew’s Street) and there was not enough to meet demand. Just before Christmas, the mayor had to wire the national Food Controller for an extra five tons, which duly arrived at Ipswich police station. It was divided up there and then under police supervision, ready to be shared out between the Ipswich shops.

By the February of 1918, it was still extremely hard to buy any margarine. Very early one frosty, foggy morning, some 500 women and children were queuing outside Maypoles in St Matthew’s Street hoping to buy some. Only a hundred customers were served before supplies ran out, causing an absolute rumpus in the queue. In response, Ipswich trade unions took a stand. Members of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) announced that they would walk out of work ‘and take our wives’ places in the queue unless drastic action is taken on the food question’. A packed meeting at the Unicorn Inn (Foundation Street) sent a delegation to the Ipswich Food Control Committee demanding fair rationing. The Committee accordingly delegated two of its members (Mr Curl from the NUR and Cllr Badshah) to meet the national Food Controller to put the case for rationing in general and, while they were at it, more jam for Ipswich in particular!

Food coupon
Everyone had to register with a shop and present their ration card for the shopkeeper to mark whenever they bought a rationed item. This coupon was issued to Florence Bailey of Kensington Road to use at Willis Grocery in Bramford Road. (SRO, Ipswich)

Compulsory sugar rationing was introduced at the beginning of January 1918. Margarine and butter went on the ration book from 25 February 1918.

Meat rationing in Ipswich came in a few weeks later. Individuals were permitted to buy 11b of meat and 5oz of bacon every week from their nominated butcher.

Bread stayed off the ration but production was strictly controlled. It was sold by weight, not by the loaf. It was not permitted to be sold fresh as there was less wastage when slightly older bread was sliced. The mayor of Ipswich suggested through the press that the town should set up a League of Bread Savers – individuals who would pledge to keep bread consumption down. Mr W.P. Burton from the Ministry of Food replied in agreement, adding without a hint of humour, that under no circumstances, however, should eggs be served on toast as it is (a) wasteful and (b) disgusting!

‘Save bread and win the war!’
By 1917, wheat stocks were so low that civilians were continually urged to eat less bread. Ipswich Co-operative Society took full advantage of a recent Food Order and added potatoes to their bread dough to make it go further. They also experimented with baking rusks which used less wheat than traditional loaves. Housewives were advised to add mashed or grated vegetables to bulk out cake mixtures.

Schools

Head teachers’ logbooks provide a unique insight into the impact of the war on everyday life in the classroom. The story of Ranelagh Road School stands out. Early in September 1914, Ranelagh Road teachers were told that the school had been taken over by the army. Pupils were sent home for an extra week’s holiday while staff set about securing alternative premises. The school had to be dispersed amongst make-do rooms dotted around Ipswich – in church and chapel halls at Barrack Corner, Bramford Road, Pitcairn Road, Museum Street, Chevallier Street and Clarkson Street. These haphazard arrangements lasted until 1920.

The move was very disruptive. Many of the children lived a long way from their new classrooms. Each school department – Infants, Boys, and Girls – had to re-jig its timetable and half term holidays had to be re-arranged to fit in with whatever suited the array of new landlords. In October 1915, the long-suffering headmaster of the Boys’ School, Charles Dring, noted in a frustrated tone that even his desk had been commandeered by the military.

These makeshift classrooms were clearly not dedicated to the purpose. Meetings and dances were held in some of them in the evenings, school desks were damaged, things were not put back properly and boy scouts were accused of chipping the inkwells! Headmaster Dring was clearly relieved when the Feeding Centre at the Clarkson Street rooms was moved elsewhere:

‘thus providing free space which can be utilised for marching, games, etc. This is a great improvement, especially as the children cannot go out to play in the playground during the winter months.’

Ranelagh Road School, 2015
Ranelagh Road School was commandeered by the army and used as a recruiting station, barracks and military hospital. (Author’s collection)

By October 1918, the tone of Mr Dring’s log was weary but determined:

‘up-hill work, space-cramped rooms, ill-ventilated, dreary and not clean – but, under the circumstances, work is going on well. Teachers working loyally.’

On 12 April 1920, the school returned to Ranelagh Road after what Mr Dring described as ‘five years of enforced absence owing to Military Occupation’. Two years later, a critical HMI report said that, although he had done his best during the war and was good with poorer boys, Mr Dring now needed to concentrate on preparing formal lesson plans. Dispirited, he signed off sick and never returned to work.

A recurring theme in Ipswich’s wartime school logs was the problem of keeping staff. Staff shortages often meant that the remaining teachers would have to cope with as many as sixty children in their class. At most schools, the male teachers joined up. Although many of these men were unqualified as teachers themselves, they were often replaced by women who were completely inexperienced as well as uncertified. In January 1916, for example, Mrs Maud Baxter of Cemetery Road – with no experience of teaching at all – was sent to help at Ranelagh Road Boys’ School exiled in rooms in Crown Street.

There were also very many absences through illness or the need to care for family members. When men came home on leave for example, or were wounded, female staff would be given time off to be with them. In addition, throughout the first years of the war, the Ipswich Education Committee made official requests for rotas of teachers to leave their classrooms and help out at recruiting offices.

Classrooms could get impossibly cold in winter and shortages of fuel and lighting would have added to the wartime pressures on schools. School logs reported:

‘No fire at all today. Terribly cold for the boys. Boys permitted to keep their coats on.’ (Ranelagh Road Boys’, 1915)

‘No fuel! No warmth from the pipes. Very cold.’ (Ranelagh Road Boys’, 1916)

‘The rooms this morning strike intensely cold. The thermometer in the classrooms registers 35°.’ (Bramford Road Girls’, 1918)

On several occasions in June 1917 and again in the October, Ipswich schools were dismissed early because of daytime air raid warnings. When these warnings sounded, children – even in the infant schools – were dismissed immediately and told to make their own way home. In many cases, this would have meant a long, lonely walk – something that would be unheard of today.

Older children left school to join the armed forces or to take up employment. At St Matthew’s Boys’ School, the head wrote in November 1916 that three boys had just left, two to work as railway clerks and one to join the navy. He commented that ‘there is necessarily a great demand for child labour just now’. Before the war, many children from poor households would have had paid jobs outside school hours but, in wartime, children’s labour was needed even more than ever by their families and by employers:

‘A number of boys availed themselves of the opportunity to work this week.’ (Argyle School, Christmas 1914 and 1918 – boys over 13 years old were allowed by the Education Committee to help tradesmen deliver parcels in the Christmas rush).

‘Seven boys out of a standard of eighteen were absent on paper-rounds in the snow and can’t attend school.’ (Ranelagh Road Boys’, 1916).

‘Boys working out of school hours and falling asleep in class.’ (Ranelagh Road Boys’, 1917).

From early 1918, school logs started to record pupils being absent because they were queuing at food shops for their mothers. Sometimes, in the really bad weather, once they had been served in the shops, the children simply went home for the day.

Even given the exceptional pressures put on schools by the war, the everyday business of keeping the buildings, teachers and children in good order carried on. School logs record visits by inspectors, clergy, the great and the good. The Education Committee continued to issue piles of circulars advising school heads of new initiatives, strictures and structures, including guidance on the standards of dusting and cleaning to be observed. And children carried on being quite naughty – scrumping apples, dropping orange peel, smoking, reading ‘trash’, acting like ‘guttersnipes’ and using clappers in the street to frighten the horses ...

CHAPTER 4

The Enemy Within?

Were civilians at risk from Germans living in Britain? Certainly some people thought so. Well before the war, elements of British popular culture, particularly novels and plays, drew on a lurid distrust of Germany for their appeal. With the declaration of war, this anti-German feeling spiralled, a phenomena well-illustrated by the story of Dr Rudolf Diesel.

On his way to visit his Ipswich factory in 1913, Dr Diesel mysteriously disappeared at sea. Theories were published in the press almost immediately, speculating that he was a German secret agent. Then, in October 1914, British military intelligence sent a Colonel F.J.S. Cleeve to Ipswich to investigate whether Dr Diesel’s factory might actually have been built to help invading Germans! Cleeve reported back that the premises would indeed ‘be ideal for transacting the staff and administrative work of a large army’ and that machine guns could be mounted on the water tower ‘to overawe the town and command the adjacent country’. But, far from becoming a German command centre the factory was soon sold to Vickers who used it to repair and maintain Royal Navy submarines.

Dr Diesel
Dr Diesel’s inexplicable disappearance at sea fuelled a flurry of anti-German speculation and paranoia.

As the conflict deepened, many Ipswich residents felt increasingly threatened and angry about what one of the Star’s readers described as ‘everything with a Hunnish flavour’. By May 1915, not only had there been Zeppelin raids over East Anglia – with one direct hit on the town – civilians were all too aware of mounting losses on the Western Front.

Anti-German feelings came to a head in Ipswich in mid May 1915, just ten days after the sinking of the Lusitania with the loss of over 1,000 civilian lives. The East Anglian described what happened:

‘Stone-throwing was witnessed in Carr Street, Ipswich, during the dark hours on Saturday night and again on Sunday night, the object being a large establishment carried on by Mr. Scheuermann, butcher, who is naturalised in England, and whose son fought in the British Army during the South African campaign. The disturbers of the peace were certainly of the class inclined to disorder, who appeared to be anxious to take advantage of the darkness of the streets and the prevailing unrest to do something in the raiding line. Stones and other missiles were thrown at the windows on Saturday night, the missiles being evidently brought from a distance, but the police, augmented by a force of special constables, were able to prevent raiding. On Sunday the lower windows of the establishment were protected by boarding.

   ‘On Sunday evening, so soon as darkness had fallen, a renewal of the disturbance was threatened. A noisy crowd assembled and assumed a menacing attitude. The authorities, however, were in readiness promptly to deal with the mischievous gang. Uniformed police, strongly backed by sturdy special constables, speedily got the crowd on the move, and in a short time still more drastic measures were adopted, the military authorities supplying the necessary display of force to effectively disperse the assemblage.’

Similar anti-German disturbances erupted that weekend in Bury St Edmunds, Neath, County Durham, Annan, Tamworth, Walton-on-Thames, Blyth, Winchester and Bedford.

Dr Johannes Georg Bakker
Dr Bakker (middle of the front row) ran the Ipswich School Officer Training Corps from 1906 to 1908. Born in Germany, he became a naturalized Briton in 1907 and taught modern languages at the school. After war was declared, he was forced to retire to Cambridge – well away from the coast – after he was seen scanning the Orwell with binoculars and heard singing patriotic German songs at home. (Ipswich School Archive)

Words, phrases and names pertaining to anything German became taboo. Kelly’s 1915 Ipswich Directory referred for the first time to the ‘North Sea’ rather than the ‘German Ocean’. Members of the Scheuermann family, mentioned earlier, anglicised their surname to ‘Sherman’ and, most famously, the British Royal Family changed its name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor. To appear to be British rather than German was the clear order of the day.

CHAPTER 5

Business as Usual?

As men left for war, employers had to look elsewhere for labour. They found themselves starting to rely on young lads as well as unfit and older men. For the first time in many industries and occupations, they then had to turn to recruiting women, particularly once conscription was introduced.

Nationally, over a million women of all classes and situations joined the workforce during the course of the war. Figures from the Xylonite works – a large plastics factory in Brantham making combs, hairbrushes and stiff, formal collars for men – clearly demonstrate these workforce changes locally. As the graph below shows, a fair few women were employed in the plant before the war, but their numbers more than doubled as male colleagues left for active service. They fell again as the men returned.

(British Xylonite war service register)

These kinds of changes in the make-up of the workforce were amongst a number of challenges that confronted companies in this difficult business environment. Most firms also faced ever-increasing costs and shortages of essential supplies. Wartime thrift meant that reinvestment in machinery and other equipment stalled, and trade was controlled by emergency legislation as well as by German U-boats. Markets also changed dramatically. Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies, for example, lost its Odessa depot in Russia, and Xyonlite’s Austrian and German customers disappeared overnight. Neither of these lucrative markets ever recovered.

Munitions

In May 1915, responding to a desperate shortage of munitions, Lloyd George created a Ministry of Munitions to oversee and co-ordinate the production and distribution of armaments. In other words, heavy industry was brought under government control and munitions were to be manufactured as a matter of urgency. Ipswich was well placed to respond. Engineering was in the town’s industrial blood, and the large-scale conversion of engineering to wartime production – challenging, no doubt – was achieved with remarkable speed.

So in the spring of 1915, nineteen representatives of East Anglian engineering companies travelled down to the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street Station to meet a representative from the War Office. The group, led by Wilfrid Stokes of Ransomes & Rapier and Francis Crittall, whose company made metal window frames, proposed to work together to supply War Office munitions contracts. As a result, the successful East Anglian Munitions Committee (EAMC) was set up.

The Ipswich members of the EAMC were: Egertons, motor engineers of Northgate Street; Kenyon & Trott, cycle agents of Coytes Gardens; H.E. Phillips, engineers of Great Colman Street; Ransomes & Rapier, railway plant manufacturer of New Cut West and other sites; Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies, engineers, iron founders and agricultural implement makers of Orwell Works and other sites; Reavell & Co. mechanical engineers of Ranelagh Road; E.R. & F. Turner, general engineers and ironworkers of College Street and other sites and, finally, H. Warner, engineers of Lion Street. In all, forty-two EAMC companies across Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex came together to supply the government with shells, casing, fuses and bombs.

To get started, Stokes and Crittall undertook a fact-finding mission across the region to assess existing capacity. On the strength of their findings, the EAMC was able to bid successfully for a large War Office contract to manufacture 200,000 high explosive shells, all to be delivered within six months. The contract was completed by the end of August 1915, making East Anglia the first collaborative area to deliver this type of shell.

Eight EAMC companies worked together on the next contract for shells, including three Ipswich firms – Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies; Turners; and Ransomes & Rapier. And so it continued throughout the war, with each company collaborating with East Anglian partners, bringing their own specialist expertise. By the end of the war, the EAMC had manufactured an estimated £6 million worth of shells of many types, in addition to other sorts of munitions.

These figures show the massive increase in national shell production in 1916 which peaked the following year at just over 70 million units. (Bilton, Home Front in the Great War)

In 1915, an EAMC depot was built at the Ransomes & Rapier site. Over time, the depot grew to employ around 350 people, mostly women, including their ‘lady motor drivers’. There was a canteen, an ambulance and welfare department and a large clerical and technical staff. Under the leadership of Mr Crittall, the workforce laboured all week, day and night, to fulfil contracts, interrupted only by air raids.

Stokes’ mortar
The successful Stokes’ mortar was invented by Wilfrid Stokes as an easily portable weapon capable of firing bombs right down into trenches. Developed at Ransomes & Rapier and made by Ipswich women, it was issued to Allied troops during the latter half of the war. Stokes received a knighthood for his contribution to the war effort.

Engineering companies also fulfilled government contracts in their own right. For example, Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies built 800 aircraft for the Royal Flying Corps, and Reavells produced air-compressors for guns and submarine parts. Turners designed lathes and tools that unskilled workers (often women) could use.

Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies total wartime output

Shrapnel shell case forgings

1,000,000

Shell cases

440,000

Stokes gun bombs

10,000

Bombs

3,800

Mine sinkers

1,500

Airplanes

800

Aircraft sheds and hangars

650

Sets of chemical smoke apparatus for ships

400

Trench howitzers

225

This table of figures from Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies’ records shows the volume and nature of war production undertaken by the company, in stark contrast to their peacetime mainstay of award-winning lawnmowers and agricultural machinery.

Airplane built by Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies
Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies started aircraft manufacture in 1916 in a purpose-built factory. The first was completed 1917 and was one of the aircraft that successfully shot down a Zeppelin over Theberton in East Suffolk. (Ipswich Transport Museum)

During the first summer of the war, Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies lost nearly a third of its male workforce and, like Xylonite, the Co-op and other large employers, had no option but to recruit women, soon to be known in the press as ‘munitionettes’. By 1918, Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies employed around 2,000 females on munitions contracts. Indeed, the national munitions workforce was almost entirely female by this time.

Munitions work in any factory could be dangerous. As staff noted at East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital:

‘With the employment of thousands of new workers in the munitions and other factories of the town and district, there has been a marked increase in the number of minor casualties treated at the Hospital.’

Women on the factory floor at Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies
Munitionettes were paid less than their male counterparts but much better than most other women workers. There was often a sense of camaraderie on the shop floor, which many women enjoyed. And there were fewer restrictions on their out-of-work hours, particularly appreciated by those who had previously been live-in maids. These factory workers at Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies were among thousands of British munitionettes who were breaking new ground by working alongside men on the shop floor – and wearing trousers. (Ipswich Transport Museum)

Despite this, many women were more than ready, willing and able to do the work. Not only was it a way of helping the war effort, it also had the huge advantage of paying better than most jobs traditionally available to women. The average national weekly wage for ‘munitionettes’ in 1918 was 42s; compare this with the 17s-24s per week that the Ipswich Co-operative Society paid their female workers in 1917 and with the basic wage of 24s offered by the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Agnes Garlick and family
Agnes Garlick, in her work clothes, sits next to her father (on the far right). He made malt extract at Pauls while Agnes probably worked in one of the munitions factories. (Kelvin Dakin)

With such a change in women’s role in society, it was perhaps inevitable that moral watchdogs would express fears that women would now ‘let go of the reins’. For example, Ipswich’s Moral Welfare League were concerned that ‘women and girls were walking and loitering in the streets wherever there were soldiers about’. They asked the Borough Council to appoint a female supervisor to patrol the town and encourage women to be on their way. Although sympathetic to this appeal, the Council decided not to intervene.

On War Service brooch
This brooch, issued by the War Office in 1916, probably belonged to Agnes Garlick. It was designed to be worn by women ‘engaged in the manufacture of munitions of war or other urgent war work’. (Kelvin Dakin)

On a related theme, Blanche Lord, who ran a corset shop in St Nicholas Street, wrote to the Star in October 1917 as follows:

‘Sir, – May I through your columns ask if some Ipswich ladies will help me to form a League against “swearing” amongst women, which is growing so much? At one of our munitions works in the town, when women labour was introduced, the men were most particular in their language before women, till they found swearing among girls was thought smart, and they did not mind men hearing them swear, with the result that it has become ordinary talk; but to refined natures one can imagine how revolting it is and I am sure many would gladly help to try and stop it ...’

Her well-meaning but rather prissy letter brought an immediate, if surprising, response. Two anonymous female correspondents swiftly replied that a bit of swearing was harmless and that ‘girls of today are more highly respected’ than ever before!

Ipswich docks and shipping

The war years saw a dramatic fall in trade in and out of the port. By June 1918, nearly three quarters of all ships left Ipswich with nothing but ballast on board. Nevertheless, trade never completely stopped.

Ena, Thames barge
The Ena was a Thames barge owned by Pauls. She was registered in Ipswich and saw service in both world wars. (Author’s collection)

East coast trade was largely the province of Thames sailing barges. The two largest fleets were owned by Cranfields, who milled flour, and Pauls, the maltsters. Barges were usually safe from magnetic mines as their hulls were mostly made of wood, not metal, and were shallow enough to sail straight over mines.

International shipping into Ipswich docks also decreased through the war years and long-distance arrivals fell spectacularly after 1916, as the graph below shows. German U-boat activity had a huge effect on British overseas trade. Nevertheless, some ships still managed to make it to Ipswich throughout the war, bringing grain to Pauls from as far away as New Orleans and Argentina, and Tunisian pyrites and phosphates for Packards’ fertiliser plant.

(Ipswich Docks Arrivals and Clearance Books)

New to the docks in wartime were submarines from the naval base at Harwich. From 1915, one or two subs a month came in for repair or maintenance by Vickers which had taken over the former Diesel Works in Hadleigh Road.

Cranfields, flour millers
Cranfields at the Wet Dock was a fairly large operation with 167 employees in August 1914. Although severely affected by wartime trading conditions, they managed to carry on milling throughout the war.
   The company’s records detail their various struggles. For example, over the course of the war, 108 of their men signed up (many joining the 4th Suffolks) but they kept production going with a workforce of older men and others deemed unfit for active service.
   In May 1917, complete control of the business passed from Cranfields to the national Food Controller. (Nostalgic Picture Library)

Submarine D4
Built by Vickers in Barrow in Furness, this submarine was completed in November 1911. She carried a crew of twenty-five men and could dive to a depth of 100 feet. D4 came into Ipswich docks for maintenance in February 1915 and returned to Harwich a month later. She sank a grounded German net-layer in the North Sea later that year and torpedoed a U-boat in 1918 off Guernsey. She was scrapped after the war.

Motoring for pleasure

Motoring for pleasure virtually ceased during the war and was in any case frowned upon and, ultimately, regulated by law. Motoring taxes were increased and licences to buy petrol only granted for ‘journeys which cannot otherwise be conveniently accomplished’. The police could stop suspect cars and oblige the driver to satisfy them that they were using petrol legally. In Ipswich, new vehicle registrations peaked in 1915, reaching the giddy height of nearly 300, but plummeted dramatically afterwards, as the graph below shows.

(Bridges, Early Country Motoring)

Botwoods in Woodbridge Road and Carr Street was the main motor company in Ipswich before the war. In August 1914, they received an urgent government order for eighteen ammunition trucks. Although short of staff because so many men had left for the army, they managed to convert large touring cars into the required number of military trucks, in double quick time. After such a success, this sort of work became the mainstay of their business.

Valentine Revett sold pushbikes and motor bikes from his shops in and around Berners Street. When he left for war in 1914, he told his wife it would all be over in a couple of weeks – and so it fell to her to take the reins for the next four years. When Mr Revett eventually returned after the war, he specialised in the motorbike side of the business, and opened another shop in Granville Street. The company continued to trade until 2001.

Chenerys taxis first started as a horse cab business based in Felixstowe. But when their horses were requisitioned by the military, the family moved to Ipswich to set up as a motorised taxi firm. They worked from the rank on the Cornhill, doubtless vying for business in competition with Olive Turney in her Model T Ford, shown in the photo later in this chapter.

Working on the land

In 1914, the loss of experienced labourers from Suffolk farms was an immediate worry. The army needed men but, equally, the harvest had to be brought in. Many agricultural workers delayed joining up until after the harvest-home, but then men left and others had to step into their shoes.

The Cornhill
Looking from Grimwades across to Tavern Street, this postcard shows just how busy the Cornhill was. Chenerys and Egertons ran motorised taxi services from their ranks here and jockeyed for road space with open-top electric trams, horse-drawn taxis and carriages, cyclists and pedestrians. By 1916, there were between twenty and fifty motor cars on the Cornhill each day, some parking for over an hour. No wonder the Chief Constable ordered that parking there would have to be limited to no more than half an hour to keep traffic flowing. (Author’s collection)

Leonard Aldous, a saddle maker from Debenham, later recalled having to do the work of more experienced men who had enlisted:

‘After I’d been at the saddler’s shop roughly eighteen months – that was in August 1914 – the Great War broke out; and as two of our workmen joined the armed forces I had more or less to be pushed on. Within two years of starting my apprenticeship I was having to do roughly a man’s work, but my wages were still only half-a-crown a week.’

Sometimes, the military authorities allowed men to return to their villages to help with important tasks. For example, in 1916, Private George Goodchild of the 7th Suffolks wrote to his mother in Grundisburgh, saying that there was a chance he would be allowed home to help with the haysel and the main harvest. Although stationed in nearby Felixstowe, in the end he was not permitted to go. Even when men were released to return to the fields, things were not always well organised. In the East Suffolk Gazette, 24 April 1917, for instance, farmers complained:

Hoeing sugar beet
This photo shows women from the Great Blakenham area hoeing sugar beet, probably intended for processing in Norfolk. Note that Miss Laflin and Mrs Gillingham, the women at either end of the line, are wearing black mourning bands on their left arms. (SRO, Ipswich)

Members of the Women’s Forage Corps feeding a hay baler
Nationally, over 4,000 women enrolled in this Corps to support the massive demand for horse fodder.

‘many soldiers who were ploughmen were free to be used after 1 March, but Ipswich had not organized things properly and only a few arrived in time. A ploughman was asked for, but a weaver was sent!’

Many countrywomen were used to farm work as part of their daily lives. They cared for livestock and could turn their hands to most land work. For example, one group of women living near Ipswich worked right through the war sewing chaff sacks for the Army Forage Department. They sat on the ground, working outside in all weathers until, in the bitter winter of 1917, a thoughtful soldier made them a lovely warm straw hut.

In the Ipswich area, farm workers were supplemented by women recruited by Lady Rendlesham and, to a very small extent, by German prisoners of wars (PoWs) and conscientious objectors (COs). They were joined from 1917 by volunteers from the Women’s Land Army. In April 1917, the Suffolk Chronicle carried an advertisement urging women to enlist. They would be issued with free high boots, breeches, an overall, a hat and wages of 18s a week. Nationally, 5,000 milkers, 4,000 field workers and 1,000 carters were needed. Between March 1917 and May 1919, 23,000 women became official full-time members, a small but significant part of the 300,000 women across the country who, by 1918, were working on the land.

Ipswich Co-operative Society

Ipswich Co-op directors met throughout the war, meticulously recording their discussions in detailed minutes. When the electricity supply failed during air raids, they finished meetings by candlelight. From time to time, they were to find themselves at odds with both the military and municipal authorities as they tried to stick to their founding principles whilst adapting to wartime realities.

Never men to hold back on expressing their views, the Co-op directors had several brushes with the local military authorities. Not least, there were arguments about the Co-op rooms in Carr Street being commandeered for army use. The large Co-op hall in Carr Street was normally used for community activities by all sorts of groups, from the Catholic Women’s League to ‘revolutionary wasters’ but the army requisitioned it several times during the war, in the face of strong objections from the Co-op. Then there was the scare when the army arrived at the Co-op’s stables to draft fifteen of their working horses. This would have seriously affected delivery services but, fortunately for the Co-op (and most of the horses), only one animal was passed fit for military service and was bought on the spot for £50.

Co-op directors were outraged when they realised in the autumn of 1917 that the newly established Ipswich Food Control Committee would not be inviting them to send a delegate to join the main committee. They, like other food retailers, would merely be eligible to sit on its advisory bodies. However, the Co-op, with its 14,000 members, did not see itself as a run-of-the-mill food retailer. They challenged the mayor to justify their exclusion, taking their case right up to the national Food Controller in London. The grievance ran for months. In the end, the Ipswich Co-op and the Trades’ Council established their own Food Vigilance Committee to discuss and lobby about prices and food distribution. They met, naturally, at the Co-op premises in Carr Street.

Ipswich Co-operative Society, Carr Street, 2015
Should they restrict sales to existing Co-op members only; should they allow customers to buy more than their usual quantities; should they accept more local people as members? In the end, the government largely took these matters of principle out of the Co-op’s hands by introducing strict rationing of essential foods. (Author’s collection)

Customers were not backward in coming forward, either, and started complaining about high prices, shortages and the quality of Co-op bread. One customer even found a piece of string in her loaf!

Co-op managers began discussing the possibility of recruiting women in October 1915. The following month, they placed their first advertisement for female grocery assistants and received over a hundred applications. The successful candidates were put to serve in the shops. From then on, women were routinely recruited, mostly as shop assistants, but also in food packaging and in the offices. Some female staff were issued with waterproofs so they could get out and about to help with home deliveries in wet weather. Having female shop assistants also meant that new toilets had to be installed. The first ones were built at the groceries in York Road, Vernon Street, Fore Hamlet and Springfield Road.

Some of the Co-op’s female workers were given formal training and, in 1917, three young women were signed up on formal apprenticeships. They were Blanche Davey, Muriel Cracknell and Mabel Knight, all 14 years of age. At least two of them, it is worth noting, were the daughters of Co-op managers – so much for equal opportunities! Another Ipswich apprentice, Miss Locke of York Road grocery, went on to be awarded the title of best all-England Co-op apprentice.

Olive Turney

One woman who joined the Ipswich workforce is noteworthy both for her working life and for the journal in which she described it. She was Miss Olive Turney, a middle-class woman with an independent turn of mind and the ability to drive. From Monday to Friday and on Saturday mornings, she worked as a lorry driver for Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies, transporting airplane parts from their factory to Ipswich railway station. On Saturday afternoons, she was a private chauffeur for an elderly couple. But her favourite time was Saturday evenings, when Miss Turney drove a Model T Ford taxi from a rank in the Cornhill. She loved the contrast between the respectability of private chauffeuring in the afternoon and the rakishness of taxi driving, standing by her car on the lookout for fares and then driving as fast as possible around Ipswich’s narrow, twisty streets.

Olive Turney – the changing face of local labour
Olive Turney (1884-1976) was the daughter of a wealthy family originally from the Midlands. Before the war, she led a busy, independent life and learned to drive. She moved to Ipswich during the war and worked as a driver.

Labour disputes

A number of minor labour disputes, usually about wages, war bonuses, or working hours, flared up in Ipswich, particularly from 1916 and then intermittently throughout the second half of the war. Wages had risen but the cost of living had risen even more.

Total trade union membership in Ipswich in 1916 stood at around 5,000, most of these working in munitions and on the railways. Members were nevertheless in a minority at the two large munitions firms, Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies and Ransomes & Rapier. Even so, a two-day strike of munitions workers took place in September 1918. Thousands of men downed tools, demanding a 10s a week pay rise. Their union did not back the strike but, despite this, the men held a mass meeting at Alexandra Park. As they headed along Rope Walk, workers on their way to the meeting were barracked by women to get back to work. The strike ended when the employers agreed to meet the men. Although the strikers’ demands were still not met, this episode does show how dissatisfied these wartime workers had become.

As might be expected, there were continual debates about labour matters at the Ipswich Co-operative Society. Should they pay their coalmen when there was no coal to deliver? Should they give charitable donations to outside bodies, like the Anglo-Russian Hospital Fund, when their own employees were demanding pay rises? What should they do about the militants at Cauldwell Hall Road bakery who were threatening to walk out? As ever, the Co-op had to strike a delicate balance between competing demands: the needs of their business, the demands of employees, the interests of their members, and the exigencies of war – and all in accord with their founding co-operative principles.

CHAPTER 6

Public Services

By 1914, Ipswich Borough Council was responsible for supplying all essential public services and utilities in the town. The role of the council in providing and regulating this infrastructure was critical to the success of the war effort in Ipswich. But it was under many of the same pressures as private businesses: staff shortages, lack of funds, scarcity of supplies, rising prices, and so on.

Policing

Like private businesses, Ipswich Police operated under tight financial restraints and only bought new items when absolutely necessary: a couple of bicycles were procured in September 1914 (thereby doubling their ‘fleet’) and, later, a number of waterproof coats and leggings. Two Colt revolvers were acquired for senior police officers to use in ‘special circumstances’. And a telephone was installed in the Chief Constable’s bedroom for emergencies.

Staff shortages were not as acute as in other sectors. As officers left to join up, their places were taken by men from the Police Reserve. There was also a successful drive to recruit special constables in August 1914. By the end of the month, there were 350 registered for service in Ipswich, all quickly sworn in by magistrates. Their particular duties involved guarding vital services, such as the town’s water supply.

Fire service

Similarly, reserve fire fighters stepped forward to fill the places of municipal firemen who left to join the troops. After conscription was introduced in 1916, fire service managers would appeal to the military authorities against their men being forced into the armed services, but this usually fell on deaf ears.

Trams at the railway station, crossing the river into town
The tram service covered routes criss-crossing the town, each vehicle carrying twenty-six passengers downstairs and twenty-four on the open top-deck. There were worries about electric arcing at night as the great flashes of light might be seen by enemy aircraft. (Author’s collection)

New fire-fighting equipment was bought very sparingly and resources were used carefully. To save money, motorised fire engines were not purchased until after the war and so the town had to make do with horse-drawn tenders. Crews were under strict instructions not to attend fires – not even burning Zeppelins – outside the town boundaries.

Trams

Electric trams (which ran on tracks and were powered by over-head cables) had come into public service in Ipswich in 1903. The service was run by Ipswich Borough Council which also provided the electricity generation and distribution network for the trams and the town as a whole.

Tram conductress, Mary Ann Lambert
Miss Lambert left her job as a horsehair weaver in Lavenham and moved to Ipswich where, as she shows in this smart studio portrait, she was proud to work on the trams. (Ipswich Transport Museum)

Young unmarried men working on the trams were encouraged to enlist with the promise of getting their jobs back at the end of the war. At first, the council decided not to employ women as conductors, ‘owing to the number of troops in Ipswich’ but within a month, this decision was reversed. By June 1916, thirty women conductresses had been employed, each issued with a uniform skirt, tunic and hat. They worked an eight-hour day and had access to the Croquet Club pavilion as their own rest room.

Gas

The Gas Light Company supplied gas for lighting Ipswich. In addition to the ubiquitous staff shortages, its particular wartime challenge was procuring enough coal to make the gas the town needed. At first, gas consumption in Ipswich fell as public places were not lit at night. However, as factories swung into wartime production, demand increased. By this time, though, coal could not be freighted down to Ipswich docks from Tyneside as it had been before. Hand-to-mouth measures were necessary and so, for example, in May 1916, a Gas Light Company engineer was sent north to buy coal. He managed to secure six months’ supply, just in time to top up Ipswich’s dwindling stocks.

Burroughs adding machine: machines replacing men
By 1917, ninety-four gas company employees had signed up, leading directors to note that the ‘works at present is being run by lads and old men’. Some of the clerical workers were replaced by the Burroughs adding machine.

Ipswich Mental Asylum

The Borough Asylum in Foxhall Road had capacity for about 350 patients, mostly Ipswich people. As male orderlies left for the armed forces, the men’s wards became very short-staffed. The asylum was under constant pressure from the military to reduce the number of attendants to a bare minimum, except where patients were ‘highly dangerous and troublesome’. The government, however, did not regard asylum employees as essential workers and so did not permit them to wear distinctive ‘on war service’ badges. Equally, Military Tribunals did not allow them exemption from conscription. Even the most senior doctor was under continual threat of being transferred away from Ipswich.

As elsewhere, asylum staff and patients faced diminishing food supplies. Bread rations were cut by 5oz a day for male patients and by 7oz for women. To make up the shortfall, they were given porridge and treacle for breakfast instead. Extra bread and cheese was allocated to patients who were able to work in the asylum laundry or on the farm. Every possible inch of space in the asylum grounds was used for staff and inmates to grow food. The Ministry of Agriculture advised them to cultivate beet, artichokes and parsnips as the most important crops, and then turnips, cabbages, broad beans, carrots and onions where possible.

Ipswich Prison

The prison was located behind East Suffolk County Hall. It was quite small, with just seventy-two inmates (men and women) listed on census night in 1911. It was a ‘hanging prison’, but most of the inmates in the pre-war period were there for non-violent offences such as begging, vagrancy and debt. Over the war years, however, there was a huge change in the make-up of its population. The numbers of women remained more or less constant (at around eighty each year) but there were far fewer men. Whereas there had been a total of 749 male prisoners incarcerated at some point during 1911, that number fell to just 299 in 1918. And they were imprisoned for very different offences. Over a quarter of them had committed serious offences under wartime legislation and many were conscientious objectors, some of whom were subjected to the harshest treatments. It was no longer the province of paupers and petty criminals.

CHAPTER 7

Marching Off to War

On the evening of 5 August 1914, the day after war was declared, Lord Kitchener was appointed Secretary of State for War. He immediately announced plans to expand the British army by enlisting an extra 500,000 men to his new so-called ‘service’ battalions. These recruits would become known as ‘Kitchener’s Army’ and, unlike the TF, were formed explicitly to serve overseas.

Suffolkers step forward

In all the excitement of the first months of war, Suffolk men stepped forward in their thousands to join the new battalions. For instance, Henry Harwood of Tuddenham Hall held a village meeting one August evening and convinced ten men to volunteer that night. This example came to the attention of the press and was lauded in other regions as a model of how to recruit in the villages.

Lord Kitchener (1850 – 1916)
Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War and High Steward of Ipswich, made great play of his Suffolk connections. He was related to the Chevallier family and was a regular visitor to Aspall Hall and to the town. As the Star reported in late August 1914, Kitchener was confident that ‘East Anglia, with which I am personally associated, will I am sure, respond enthusiastically to my call to arms.’

Recruiting by motorised charabanc
A recruiting charabanc toured rural Suffolk. It was not brought into use until the end of August as there was a worry that farm workers would enlist before the harvest-home. (SRO, Ipswich)

The Suffolk Chronicle heralded the villager volunteers who arrived in Ipswich on Monday, 31August 1914, most of them fresh from the harvest. The first contingent to arrive that day was seventy men from Laxfield, Fressingfield and Stradbroke who all came together by special train. Marching from the station to the Corn Exchange, they were led by boy scouts in uniform, accompanied by a bugle band and villagers who had travelled in with them. The men were then taken from the Corn Exchange for a medical at the Old Museum Rooms. Some were worried about passing the ‘teeth test’ but the Star explained that:

‘a few defective teeth are no bar to enlistment, but applicants must have at least a couple of back molars which meet each other intact, or they are not accepted. The reason is plain. Soldiers must be able to chew the rations they receive on the march, even if these are hard biscuits.’

On the same day, 158 other recruits were also signed up at Ipswich Public Hall. Men found fit to serve were then sent by train to military depots, often to the Suffolk Regiment Barracks in Bury St Edmunds.

Although some volunteers from Ipswich signed up for the Royal Navy, most joined the army. In Ipswich, this usually meant one of the infantry regiments, typically the Suffolks. As a result, the county regiment was able to raise five new Kitchener battalions – the 7th, 8th, 9th, 11th and 12th Suffolks – each of around 1,000 men. These were all destined to serve on the Western Front and would fight in many major battles there.

Some men volunteered for county regiments other than the Suffolks. The Essex and the Norfolk Regiments were popular alternatives but recruits could find themselves assigned to any regiment. A number chose regiments related to their occupations. For example, medics tended to join the RAMC and railwaymen often enlisted with the Royal Engineers.

The 12th Suffolks
This was a ‘bantam’ battalion which accepted men under the usual minimum height of 5ft 3in. Its most famous soldier was Isaac Rosenberg, a Jewish Londoner and celebrated ‘trench poet’. He enlisted in the 12th Suffolks in September 1915 and was sent to Bury St Edmunds for a few unhappy months, quickly regretting ever having joined up. His first war poem, Marching – as seen from the left file, was written in Bury, just before he was transferred to another regiment early in 1916. Killed in action near Arras in 1918, his most renowned poems were published posthumously. (Sketch of proposed statue of Isaac Rosenberg by Etienne Millner)

With the sudden influx of soldiers into Ipswich, the immediate problem was how to accommodate, clothe and train them all. In the early days they were billeted in tents and in requisitioned buildings. Wooden barracks huts were built, such as those which were, until recently, still in use (but not as barracks!) at the back of the Labour Club in Silent Street, before being moved to Taff Gillingham’s First World War Project in West Suffolk.

The Cobbold brewery played its part by making over a hundred of its pubs available to accommodate men and horses. Some soldiers were even given temporary shelter at the Empress Skating Rink in Portman Road where they enjoyed skating in the evenings.

There was an initial shortage of uniforms for recruits. Private George Goodchild from Grundisburgh wrote to his mother:

‘I was lucky in getting my uniform. Jackaman did not get his till this afternoon and I got mine on the ninth day after I came to Bury. They have got no more khaki. Jackaman’s clothes are white canvas. Mine are khaki just the same as regulars.’

Empress Skating Rink – temporary shelter for new recruits
This rink, with its pleasure gardens and tearoom, stood on the corner of Portman Road and Portman Walk. (David Kindred)

The really unlucky ones were given blue uniforms, much hated because recruits thought they made them look like postmen!

A number of training camps were set up around Ipswich. There were at least four on heathland to the east of the town: at Bixley, Foxhall, Martlesham and Warren Heath.

At the same time as Kitchener battalions were being raised, TF battalions were also actively recruiting. The 6th (Cyclist) battalion of the Suffolk Regiment was one of them. Bicycles were becoming increasingly popular in the army as they were lighter, quieter, cheaper and very much easier to manage than horses.

The 6th Suffolks’ Ipswich headquarters were at the Woodbridge Road Drill Hall. The men moved swiftly from Ipswich up to Saxmundham when war was declared. From there they patrolled almost the entire Suffolk coastline, watching out for German landings. With the arrival of cyclist battalions from other parts of the country, the Suffolks became responsible for patrolling just that stretch of coast between Bawdsey in the south up to Southwold harbour – still a pretty long and draughty bike ride! Cyclists were posted from the Saxmundham HQ to places such as Southwold, Leiston, Sizewell and Wickham Market. By the time the battalion was at full strength, it included men from right across Suffolk, although the largest group always came from Lowestoft, which probably reflected the battalion’s wartime base in the north-east of the county.

When still more cyclists were needed, a second line cyclist battalion (2/6th Suffolks) was formed in September 1914. As new recruits, these men were bedded down on straw in sheds at the Leiston Garrett Works until they moved to Ipswich, where they were billeted briefly at the temporarily disused Diesel Works in Hadleigh Road. Shortly afterwards, they were dispatched to Lincolnshire, where they stayed for the duration.

Arthur Saunders’ badge
When Arthur Saunders VC enlisted in the 9th Suffolks, he was issued with this cardboard badge to show he had joined up. (Suffolk Regiment Museum)

Man and machine
A standard issue British Army bike would be issued to each cyclist. It was designed to carry everything he needed, from his rifle to his cape and ground sheet. (Suffolk Regiment Museum)

Main battlefronts in Western Europe
The shaded area of the map represents territory occupied by the Central Powers. (Map drawn by John Rixon)

A short-lived third line battalion was raised in Ipswich in May 1915 but was disbanded the following year. Suffolk Cyclist battalions were never sent overseas but, right from the beginning, fit volunteers were asked to step forward for attachment to non-cyclist battalions serving abroad. Many did, and went on to fight on the front line.

Keeping the numbers up

By March 1915, nearly 20,000 men from Suffolk alone had responded to Kitchener’s call, but the initial excitement was wearing off. The local newspapers did what they could to keep recruitment up. They continued to run upbeat features (with photos) about Suffolk families who had men in the armed services. Readers of the Star were told in September 1914, for example, that Mrs Hatcher of Hacheston boasted no fewer than ten serving sons, and that Mrs Bird of Theberton had all six sons plus a son-in-law in the armed forces. In February 1915, the newspaper even published league tables – parish by parish – of the numbers enlisting.

‘Ladies’ Recruiting Drives’ were organised in Ipswich to encourage women ‘to win men’ for the army. In December 1914, and again in 1915, women held meetings and attended tea parties at the Town Hall. Patriotic parades of wagonettes wound their way through the streets, carrying the mothers of serving soldiers as the guests of honour.

A national programme to speed up recruitment was introduced in October 1915 by Lord Derby, Director-General of Recruiting. At the time, there were thought to be almost 3 million British men of military age who were in jobs not considered essential to the war effort. Under Lord Derby’s scheme, these men were told they either had to enlist immediately or ‘attest’, which meant they would be obliged to join up if ordered to do so at a later date. They had until 11 December 1915 to decide which option to choose. In Ipswich, the scheme began rather slowly. The order applied to around 6,500 men and Cllr Badshah and his large team of volunteers were faced with an uphill task to process them all. After a somewhat sluggish start, there was a last minute rush. The Star of 10 December announced:

‘Great recruiting boom. Eleventh hour rush to the colours. Stirring scenes. Men march singing to the depots.’

However, it was clear within just a few weeks that the scheme had actually been a local and national failure. A large number of men of military age working in ‘inessential’ jobs had simply not come forward. Now the government saw no option but to introduce conscription and quickly passed the Military Service Act in January 1916. This meant that every unmarried man between the ages of 18 and 41 who lived in Britain was automatically deemed to be a member of the armed forces. In April the law was extended to include married men. Employers were legally required to display posters reminding their men about the law and faced prosecution if they employed anyone who should be in the armed forces.

Several classes of men were exempt: those living in Ireland; clergymen; the medically unfit; and most men in ‘essential’ occupations. Ipswich Corporation set up its Military Tribunal in February 1916 to hear cases of men who believed they belonged to one or other of these exempted groups or who were challenging conscription on grounds of conscience. Employers who wanted to retain their essential staff would be summoned to appear before the tribunal to argue that particular employees should not be called up. The outcome would depend on the tribunal’s view of what was ‘essential’. Decisions often seemed inconsistent and were frequently taken to appeal, on both sides of the argument. The cases below were reported in the Star in May 1916; the first of the examples was taken to appeal by the soldier, and the second by the military authorities:

Soldier’s appeal: ‘A draper’s assistant, aged 25, and married, who had been refused exemption by the local tribunal, asked to be placed on munition work, stating that he was physically unable to go on military service. Besides his wife, he maintained her mother, as well as his own widowed mother.’ (The appeal was dismissed and the draper’s assistant had to join up.)

Army appeal: ‘The military appealed against conditional exemption granted on the application of the employer in respect of a carter, aged 39, with four dependants, who was engaged in carting tar from Ipswich Gas Works. It was stated that the by-products from the tar were required by the Minister of Munitions.’ (A conditional exemption was upheld as long as the man stayed in the same job.)

Conscientious objectors

Around 16,000 men in Britain took a stand as COs and refused to fight. Some were Christian pacifists, such as Quakers and Plymouth Brethren. Others were socialists who believed that the war was unjust and was only being fought to serve the interests of capitalism. Yet others had their own idiosyncratic views and reasons. Whatever their objection to military service, these men were widely unpopular. The press was full of derogatory names for them: cowards, conchies, curs, and so on.

The majority of COs applied to their local Military Tribunal for a formal exemption. At this point, the outcome was one of the following: an absolute exemption (very rare); permission to perform non-combatant work to help the war effort; or an order to join a fighting unit immediately.

‘The Peace Crank’ or ‘one of those Pro-German skunks’
A cartoon lampooning COs appeared in Jack’s Yarns, a weekly column of illustrated verses written from the point of view of a ‘no-nonsense’ patriotic ‘Jack Tar’. Jack’s Yarns was published weekly in the Suffolk Chronicle and other provincial newspapers.

Some men were willing to undertake non-combatant duties. This might mean humanitarian work with the RAMC or the Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU), or physical labour (building, cleaning, loading and unloading) in support of the military.

Some 6,000 COs refused the option to undertake non-combatant work and these men ended up in prison. They were known as ‘absolutists’. Percy Collis, a socialist and future inmate of Ipswich Prison, typified this stance:

‘I apply for absolute exemption as I cannot conscientiously undertake non-combatant services ... as this would be helping the country when prosecuting warfare.’

Once he had been packed off to join a regiment, a CO would typically resist the orders of senior officers. This would lead eventually to a court-martial and prison sentence, usually served in a civilian gaol. Seventy or so of them served time in Ipswich. Usually, Ipswich prisoners would have been court-martialled in Harwich or Felixstowe. They encompassed the full range of COs: Quakers and other Christian pacifists, socialists, and a mixed bag of ‘others’ who included brothers Francis and Oliver Mansfield, ‘agriculturalists with no religion’ as they described themselves.

COs lived in the tower on Shrubland Hall estate
At Coddenham, there were a number of COs living at the tower on the Shrubland estate. Village resident, Hilda Smith, recalled that they had to chop wood and perform other labouring tasks. Their families sent them food parcels which they collected at the Post Office. She added that they were not at all popular in the village. (Author’s collection)

Arriving at Ipswich Prison, a CO would normally face one month in solitary confinement with the exception of forty minutes daily exercise. He would sleep on a bare board without a mattress and expect – and receive – harsh treatment. One of the Quaker prisoners, Corder Catchpool, later wrote vividly of his ‘cold slab of life’ in Ipswich. His recollections capture his bleak isolation:

‘During a continuous spell of sixty hours rain, the perpetual twilight in the cell, the incessant trickling, day and night, of a water-pipe just outside the window, got on my nerves ... I have been near the top several times, but saved from going over. These are the times of depression.’ (Quoted by William Hughes in his biography)

Catchpool found delight in the little creatures that came to his cell, especially a group of sparrows which sat in a row on his windowsill and pecked up the crumbs he left there for them. He kept his mind alive by learning German – of all things – and reading on his own in his cell. He enjoyed keeping busy sewing mailbags, but some of the other COs would not do any prison work. For example, a fellow Quaker, Harold Pugmire, refused to make mailbags. He was punished with ten days confinement to his cell on bread and water. Continuing periods on short rations and in solitary confinement did not persuade Pugmire to change his mind, and by January 1918 he was still under report.

Some of the Ipswich COs went on hunger strike as a further protest and were subjected to forcible feeding. As with suffragettes in previous years, the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act was invoked in several cases. This meant that prisoners would be released after forced feeding had made them weak, only to be re-arrested when they had regained some strength.

Ernest Rudman
Ernest Rudman, according to his granddaughter, was ‘a quiet, stern man with strong beliefs’. (Anna Low Ernest Rudman’s granddaughter)

In March 1919, questions were asked in the House of Commons about the continued imprisonment of one hunger striker, Ernest Rudman, a socialist from Bristol, who had been forcibly fed twenty-eight times in Ipswich Prison. He had subsequently been transferred to Wormwood Scrubs hospital in a very bad state of health, having contracted influenza, pneumonia and bronchitis. Like many other COs, he was not released until the late spring of 1919 as the government did not want them to be freed before servicemen had been demobbed.

Women in the armed forces

Women were not allowed to serve in the British Army until 1917, when the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was established. The War Office had realised that a number of army jobs – both at home and overseas – were being carried out by men who could otherwise be sent into battle. It therefore decided that females could replace male soldiers in certain roles. As a result, some 57,000 women served with the WAAC, later renamed the Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps.

Corder Catchpool (1883 – 1952)
Corder Catchpool, a birthright Quaker from Leicester, served as a member of the FAU from early in the war. However, when conscription was introduced in 1916, he resigned and refused to undertake any work that would service the military machine. Famously, he wore his Mons Star campaign medal at his military tribunal hearing.
     Catchpool served sentences in several prisons, the last eighteen months being in Ipswich. After his release in 1919, by now a proficient self-taught German speaker, he moved to Germany and devoted his life to working for peace and reconciliation there.

Guardroom at Landguard Fort, Felixstowe
Edward Herbert Cox was a wheelwright from the little village of Alburgh on the Norfolk/Suffolk border. He was conscripted against his wishes into the Bedfordshire Regiment in June 1916. He was found guilty of disobedience at the end of the month and sent to Ipswich Prison. On release, he re-offended. He was held in the guardroom at Landguard Fort and tried at the Pier Hotel in Felixstowe. This time he was sentenced to hard labour at Wormwood Scrubs.
     Cox’s fitness had been graded as A when he was conscripted, but by the end of the same year, his health was broken. He was discharged home with a diagnosis of neurasthenia (a term covering nervous exhaustion, posttraumatic stress disorder, shell shock and similar conditions). He died in 1932. (Author’s collection)

Women from across the social classes joined the WAAC. Two Ipswich examples are Esme Aurelia Hume and Gladys Norton. Miss Hume was a well-educated young woman who grew up near Christchurch Park and attended Ipswich High School for Girls. Before joining up, she worked for Ipswich Borough Council as an accountant’s assistant. She was posted to Wimereux Hospital near Boulogne and worked as a senior clerk where she earned 33s 6d as she was skilled and experienced. However, she was ill for most of her time in France and was repatriated to the Endell Street Military Hospital in London just two days before the Armistice. She was discharged from the service a few months later.

Gladys Norton lived close to Ipswich docks and had a very different background from Miss Hume. She left school at fourteen with no qualifications and worked at Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies as a painter and ‘doper’. This dangerous job involved applying flammable ‘dope’ to varnish, tighten and waterproof the wings of aircraft. Miss Norton applied to the WAAC to work as a stores-woman but found herself posted as a general domestic to Wimereux at the basic rate of pay, 24s a week.

One quite exceptional woman with local connections who made her own idiosyncratic way to the battlefront was Flora Sandes (1876–1956). She was the only British woman to serve as a frontline combat soldier in the Great War. Her life was truly extraordinary. Flora Sandes, although born in north Yorkshire, grew up in the rectory in Marlesford, about fifteen miles from Ipswich. She always loved adventure and, well before the outbreak of war, learned to drive and served with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

Lily Hopkins
Lily Hopkins, cutting a dash here in her khaki uniform, was dispatched to the large WAAC hospital at Wimereux near Boulogne to work as a clerk. Other WAACs worked as cooks, cleaners, mechanics and telephonists. (Peter Hopkins)

Sandes returned to Britain in 1916 for a few months to raise funds for the Serbian cause, and to write an account of her adventures. (Mike Sandes)

Flora Sandes, proud to wear the Karageorge Medal
Sandes’ exploits were well known in Suffolk. Her photo was published in the Suffolk Chronicle in January 1917, alongside the news that she had been awarded Serbia’s highest military honour.

When war was declared, she immediately applied to nurse British soldiers but was turned down. Undeterred, she joined a group of women who were travelling to Serbia – one of the key Allied nations – to provide nursing care there. They left England in August 1914.

Her first hospital posting was in central Serbia, where she cared for local soldiers and Austrian PoWs. When the Central Powers defeated Serbia in the autumn of 1915, she refused to be evacuated to safety with other foreign nationals. She plucked the Red Cross insignia off her arm and, to her immense pride, was accepted as a private in the Serbian army. She loved everything about soldiering, from the difficulties and dangers of the life to the camaraderie between ‘officers and men mucking in, singing and eating together’.

Over the harsh winter of 1915/1916, she retreated with the defeated Serbian army across the mountains to Albania and then on to safety in Corfu. Back in England for a few months, she busied herself writing An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army to raise awareness of the Serbian cause. Later in 1916, she rejoined the Serbian army as it advanced through Macedonia. Sandes was seriously wounded by a grenade in hand to hand combat. For her valour at the Battle of Monastir she received the highest decoration of the Serbian military and was promoted to the rank of sergeant major.

After the war, Flora Sandes remained in the Serbian army and reached the rank of major. She lived for many years in Belgrade and eventually retired to Wickham Market. Here she would often be seen out and about in her electric wheelchair with her ‘white hair streaming behind her in the wind.’ She died in Ipswich at the age of eighty.

Battle honours

The news that local men had been awarded the highest honours for gallantry was naturally celebrated in the press. It leavened the stream of bad-news stories and was a great source of pride for many Ipswich people in dark days. Three soldiers with Ipswich connections were awarded the Victoria Cross: John Bent, Sam Harvey and Arthur Saunders.

Drummer John Bent of the East Lancashire Regiment received his VC for gallantry at the First Battle of Ypres in late 1914. A Mr Curtis of Ipswich also awarded him a bounty of £50 for being the first man from Ipswich to win the VC in the war.

The following year, Private Sam Harvey and Sergeant Arthur Saunders both won their VCs at the Battle of Loos. Harvey had moved to Ipswich as a young boy and attended Argyle Street School. Constantly in trouble with the law, he joined the army in 1903 and by 1914 was serving as a private in the York and Lancaster Regiment. According to his VC citation, he resolutely ran back and forth across open ground under intense fire for thirteen hours, carrying boxes of bombs to front-line soldiers.

John Bent VC (1891–1977)
Bent was from Stowmarket but had been brought up at Witnesham, which was considered close enough to Ipswich to qualify him for the prize money. (SRO, Ipswich)

Arthur Saunders was an Ipswich man, born and bred. He attended St John’s Church of England School and then California Boys’ School followed by service in the Royal Navy and work at Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies. When war was declared, he joined the newly formed 9th Suffolks. He was seriously wounded at the Battle of Loos but, despite a shattered leg, stuck to his guns and doggedly defended the battalion he was covering. Saunders was repatriated to a hospital in Harrogate which was run by Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia. He was able to buy a house in Foxhall Road with money collected in Ipswich to honour him.

Sam Harvey VC (1881 – 1960)
After the war, Harvey struggled in civvy street. He died penniless in Stowmarket in 1960 and was buried in a communal paupers’ grave in Ipswich, but with full military honours. A headstone was eventually erected in 2000 after a campaign by the Western Front Association.

Sergeant Arthur Saunders VC with Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia
Local newspapers were intensely proud that this ‘real Ipswich hero’ was the ‘first native of the ancient town’ to receive a VC and devoted many column inches to his story. (Arthur Saunders’ granddaughter)

Shot at dawn

During hostilities, 346 British soldiers were executed by military firing squads. Most of these men, including Benjamin Hart from Ipswich, had committed serious breaches of military discipline, but were granted posthumous pardons in 2006. However, a group of forty were not exonerated as they had committed capital offences, such as murder.

Shot at Dawn memorial, Staffordshire
Benjamin Hart (1896–1917) was born in Ipswich and worked for Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies. He was already in the 4th Suffolks (TF) before the war but, for some reason, was not sent to northern France until January 1916. In a terrifying incident there, Hart was buried alive by a German mine which left him in a state of severe shock. Some months later he went missing. When he gave himself up three days later, he was arrested and charged with desertion.
     After due process of military law, Private Hart was shot at dawn by firing squad at Suzanne in Picardy in February 1917. He is buried at a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery nearby and commemorated in Ipswich on the main memorial in Christchurch Park and on the Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies’ memorial. Neither his headstone nor the memorials say he was shot for desertion. His relatives – who still live in Ipswich – grew up being only dimly aware of his life story. (Peter Zabulis)

British prisoners of war (PoWs)

Soldiers from the Suffolk Regiment were among the first British prisoners to be captured by the German army. After the Battle of Le Cateau in August 1914, around 720 of the 2nd Suffolks – the majority of the battalion – were listed as killed, missing, wounded or captured and taken to PoW camps in Germany.

Throughout the conflict, the local press printed the names of Suffolk men who were known to be imprisoned, and published letters like the example below from relatives who had received news of their loved ones:

‘Mrs. A. Fuller, of 64, Upper Green, Higham, has received a postcard from her son, Private Charles Fuller, 1st Norfolk Regiment, who was taken prisoner after the battle of Mons and is now at Hakenmoor. Private C. Fuller says he has had a good time of it lately, helping the farmers to get their corn up.’

According to the Star, there were 127 Suffolk prisoners of war in camps across Germany and Poland by December 1915.

Officers were exempt from labour but other ranks were often put to heavy industrial duties or set to work on the land. Private William Manning from Helmingham later reminisced about harvest practices he had seen as a PoW in Westphalia:

‘Well, I didn’t know Sunday from a weekday in Germany; but I knew their farming. It weren’t no different from the farming in Suffolk – except they grew a lot of rye and they drove their plough horses with one rein ... They cut the corn with the scythe and cradle; and, here and there, with the self-binder – everything the same. The barns were the same and they did their threshing in the barn just as I’d done myself over here before going into the army.’ (Quoted in Evans, The Farm and the Village)

James Bardwell, 2nd Suffolks
Private James Bardwell from Ipswich was captured at the Battle of Le Cateau in August 1914 and taken to Doberitz PoW camp in eastern Germany. In this photo, Bardwell is wearing ‘Kitchener blues’ – surplus dark blue uniforms sent out to prisoners by the British Army. He is wearing his Suffolk Regiment cap badge and shoulder titles. On his jacket he has a German badge displaying his PoW number and a small coloured triangular flash denoting that he is a prisoner. (David Empson)

Some prisoners died of exhaustion or accidents at work. But the most common cause of fatalities by far was disease, as many prisoners were already weakened by wounds, poor diet, or fatigue. Many died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Support for Suffolk PoWs was co-ordinated by the Suffolk Prisoners of War Help Committee. Set up in 1915 and chaired by Bunnell H. Burton (of the confectionary family), the committee was one of the first of its kind in the country. It was established when reports arrived back in Suffolk that prisoners taken at Le Cateau were being treated harshly. Its first dedicated office was opened at 8a, Princes Street in October 1916 and local tradesmen fitted it out free of charge.

Individuals, schools and other organisations, such as the Ipswich Co-op, raised funds for the PoWs and donated cigarettes, nonperishable food, knitted ‘comforts’ and other clothing for the men. PoWs were naturally very appreciative. For example, Private S. Saunders, 2nd Suffolks, wrote to the Committee from Friedrichsfeld PoW camp, thanking them for the parcel of boots, pants, shirts and socks they had sent. Like other Suffolks, he also received three food parcels every fortnight, plus cigarettes and a bread ration.

Red Cross index cards
The International Red Cross recorded the whereabouts of men missing in action or taken prisoner. This card documents two soldiers from the 2nd Suffolks. The first, Charles Abbott, went missing at the Battle of Le Cateau (26 August 1914). He was never found. His life is commemorated at a memorial east of Paris and in Christchurch Park. Clifford Abbott, the second soldier, was taken prisoner at the same battle and then detained at Sennelager camp in Germany. (http://grandeguerre.icrc.org)

Christmas parcels for Suffolk PoWs
An extra-special parcel of essential food and baccy was dispatched to each man at Christmas. Gong soup was included – instant packet soup available in twelve varieties, from ‘thick gravy’ to the more exotic mulligatawny and hare.

German PoWs in Suffolk

Twenty-two wounded Germans were captured by HMS Amphion in the opening days of the conflict and were taken to Shotley Naval Hospital for treatment. These were among the very first German PoWs in Britain. A few weeks later, some of these men were dispatched by train to a PoW camp in Sussex. Most of them were ships’ stokers who spoke good English and chatted freely with their guards, saying how relieved they were to have survived.

Elsewhere in the Ipswich area, a number of small PoW camps were set up on a more permanent basis. The workhouses in the villages of Barham and Semer were cleared to house German prisoners. Villagers at Semer later recalled prisoners being taken out each day on a flatbed wagon, ‘with their legs hanging over the side,’ and dropped off to work at farms. Edith Eccles, who grew up there, remembered that one of the prisoners was taken on at the blacksmiths. He made iron hoops with long handles for the village children to play with. They called them ‘stodders’ – possibly after the prisoner who made them.

The Suffolk County Handbook reported in 1918 that there had been 200 German PoWs working within five miles of Ipswich in the previous year. By the end of the war, there were around 50,000 such prisoners across Britain, most employed in agriculture and construction, just as they were in east Suffolk.

Covered Way, RNTE Shotley
German PoWs were kept in a wooden hut at the end of the Covered Way until they were transferred to prison camps. (HMS Ganges Museum)

Barham Workhouse
Barham Workhouse was cleared for military use in the autumn of 1915. (David Kindred)

‘Gorgeous Wrecks’ from Witnesham
The Volunteer Training Corps were nicknamed the ‘gorgeous wrecks’ from ‘Georgius Rex’ (King George) on their armbands. (Taff Gillingham)

‘Gorgeous wrecks’

A home defence unit was established in Ipswich in the first winter of the war. It was for men who were ineligible to join the armed forces but who wanted to help keep Ipswich safe. In just a few months, a couple of hundred men volunteered – the Great War equivalents of ‘Dads’ Army’ – and would have included men such as Mr Whatling of Beck Street who had written to the Star in September 1914:

‘I am prepared to give Saturday night or Sunday to guard the water supply of the town. As a man who has used a gun for years, and still has one, I am prepared to take my corner. Though I do not believe in war, at the same time I am still prepared to do my little bit as far as Ipswich is concerned if my services are needed.’

Volunteers were issued with rifles but were expected to pay for their own khaki uniforms and ammunition if they could afford to. They helped to guard vulnerable places in town and along parts of the coast. From 1917, the Ipswich unit was renamed the 1st Volunteer Battalion Suffolk Regiment. Training was stepped up to include more drill, physical training, musketry and bayonet fighting. Men had to attend on two evenings every week and on Sunday mornings. If anyone in the Ipswich battalion needed spectacles to shoot a gun, Colonel Cobbold was there with a generous offer to supply them free of charge. For most of the war, the Volunteers had a central base at 26 Princes Street.

Horses

From the very first week of the war, the Army issued calls for horses suitable for riding or for towing artillery guns. That week, the Star reported:

‘the official purchasers of horses for the army in the Ipswich district had a busy time on Thursday inspecting the large number of horses which have been brought in from the town and the district. All day long horses, 15 h.h. and over, and five years and over, passed through a speedy, but nevertheless critical examination. There were remarkably few rejections.’

The selected beasts were then branded on one hoof with a broad arrow, denoting their new status in the British Army, and taken away to an uncertain new life.

As the war went on, the demand for horses for the Front only increased. The military authorities began to take them wherever they could find them. Mr Wilton from Ipswich recalled seeing:

‘a horse on an Ipswich street being taken out of its cart by a party of soldiers; the cart was left on the side of the road for the owner to get home as best he could.’ (Quoted in Evans)

Spurlings Sale Yard, Princes Street, 1960s
Spurlings Sale Yard, scene of brisk horse-trading in the first few weeks of the war. (Ipswich Society)

As experienced and strong horses left the farms for the battlefield, their workload fell to younger animals. One Suffolk farmhand recalled:

‘We were left with only young horses to do the work. I know we were breaking them at two year old and working them as if they were four year olds. All the horses, the five or six year olds, the hard, well-seasoned good horses, they’d all gone away to France.’ (Quoted in Evans)

Just as there was a need for horses for the army, so too was there a demand for men who were used to working with them. One horseman who joined up was James Welham, who worked for Red House Farm in Hintlesham. He had been working with horses since he was fifteen. Years later he remembered:

‘There was no alternative to horses, they did everything –ploughing, binding, cultivating, harrowing, carting to Ipswich. Then the war come ... and I went off myself, joined up with the Royal Fusiliers.’ Near Ypres, ‘Fritz gave us a real pasting. You’ve never seen such dead – horses, men, you just rolled them aside and went on.’ (Quoted in Watkins, This Other Breed)

Horses were occasionally returned from the battlefields to farm work. Another local horseman recalled:

‘I had one come back from France; he’d been shell-shocked. Oh, didn’t I have a job with him! If he saw a soldier he’d go mad ... If he heard the report of a gun we used to have to go and put him in the stable, in the dark to let him settle down – poor thing.’ (Quoted in Evans)

Not all of the men or animals returning from war were treated with such understanding.

CHAPTER 8

War at Sea and in the Air

Hundreds of Ipswich-born men served in the Royal Navy during the conflict. Over 300 of them joined up in the war years, three quarters just for the duration of hostilities and the rest for a fixed term, usually twelve years. These men were all (officially) over 18 years of age and tended to come from heavy engineering companies such as Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies where they had worked as fitters, machine-turners and boiler makers. Ipswich men also served as merchant seaman and sailed out of many British ports, transporting troops, military supplies, food and other raw materials to and fro, keeping the country going despite the menace of German U-boats.

The Royal Navy Training Establishment at Shotley Gate, continued throughout the war to train youngsters for naval life. Many were as young as 15½ years old. They came from all parts of Britain, with a sprinkling of local lads – about thirty enlisting from Ipswich during the war years. Alongside their usual training, boys had particular wartime duties, most notably making thick rope mats and anti-submarine nets for the naval base at Harwich, just across the estuary.

Shotley boys’ lives were notoriously tough and got even harder in the war years. Food was never abundant, but by 1917 rations were positively meagre. A loaf of bread previously shared between eight boys now had to feed ten. In one incident, the bread store was broken into and hungry boys mustered on the quarterdeck demanding to see the Captain. A signal was flashed to ships in the harbour and landing parties warned to standby in case of mutiny. When the boys heard the Captain’s explanation for the food situation, however, they dispersed peacefully.

Albert McKenzie VC and King George V
Former Shotley boy, Able Seaman McKenzie, was awarded the Victoria Cross for his part in the Zeebrugge Raid in 1918. Sadly he died in the influenza epidemic later that year. (Colin McKenzie)

The hospital at RNTE Shotley was well-appointed and much used in the war years. Staffed by nurses from the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Naval Nursing Service, thousands of wounded sailors were treated there. Casualties were admitted from the very first British engagement of the war, which was the sinking of HMS Amphion off the Suffolk coast. This incident occurred when the conflict was barely two days old. Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, told the House of Commons what happened:

‘The day before yesterday a flotilla of British destroyers ... found the German mine-laying ship Königin Luise and sunk her. About fifty members of crew ... were humanely saved by the flotilla. The Amphion continued to scout with the flotilla, and on her return journey to Harwich was blown up by a German mine. The greater part of the officers and men were rescued by boats, but ... nearly 130 British sailors were killed outright by the explosion and, in addition to that, twenty of the German prisoners.’

HMS Amphion, 1911
HMS Amphion was the first British ship to be sunk and crew members who died were the first British fatalities of the war. She went down off Orfordness where she still rests, a protected war grave. (HMS Lance, which sailed in the same flotilla, fired the first British shots of the war.)

Mariners’ graves in Shotley – British and German
Men and boys from RNTE Shotley were buried in the churchyard at the back of Shotley parish church. British sailors and German prisoners who died when HMS Amphion was sunk are also interred there. (Author’s collection)

Many of the dead and injured were brought to Harwich and RNTE Shotley. Some of the fatalities – five British and two German – were buried in Shotley churchyard on a cold, wet Monday afternoon, witnessed by villagers and the naval authorities. Boys solemnly escorted farm wagons as they trundled the flag-draped coffins through the country lanes from the hospital to the graveyard.

RNTE Shotley was a major telegraphy centre. In 1913, a signal school was set up there to teach wireless telegraphy and visual signalling. From 1917, women from the newly formed Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) were stationed there and operated telephone exchanges on the base and in Ipswich.

Fortunately for Ipswich, the Orwell estuary was strongly guarded by the defences placed in and around Harwich harbour, but there was always the possibility of disruptive raids further up the east coast. Accordingly, cyclists from the 6th Suffolks, coastguards and boy scouts were sent to guard potential landing places immediately war was declared. And after Lowestoft was bombarded from the sea in 1916, defences were stepped up along the Suffolk coast: trenches were dug, guns emplaced and pillboxes built.

Coastal pillboxes
Rare Great War pillboxes survive in east Suffolk, including one now hidden in a hedgerow in Alderton and three others in Bawdsey, in varying states of disrepair. They are all one-storey buildings made of concrete. The Alderton pillbox retains its small double-armoured doors. This was (and remains) an isolated part of the coast, but only a few days’ march from London. (Author’s collection)

Harwich Harbour
The Felixstowe shores of Harwich harbour were protected by guns emplaced at Landguard Fort, Martello Tower N at Walton and the new Brackenbury Battery in Old Felixstowe. Tower P was used as a wireless station serving Harwich shipping. The Harwich side was guarded by the Redoubt and the Beacon Hill Battery, along with a large battery at Martello Tower L located within RNTE Shotley. Harbour defences also included searchlights and a minefield. (Map drawn by John Rixon)

Harwich harbour – with RNTE Shotley forming part of its northern shore – was home to the Harwich Force, a Royal Navy squadron led by Commodore Reginald Tyrwhitt. It played a vital wartime role and undertook numerous raids against enemy ports as well as full-scale engagements in the North Sea, including the Battles of Heligoland Bight and Dogger Bank. These encounters resulted in massive numbers of casualties arriving in Harwich. Civilian boats from Ipswich would be called to hoist the Red Cross flag and help ferry the wounded across the Stour to Shotley Gate where boys would be waiting, ready to stretcher the wounded up to the naval hospital.

Churchman’s cigarette card of SMS Moltke
This German battleship, SMS Moltke, took part in the bombardment of Yarmouth in November 1914 and was also involved in major battles against the Harwich Force. She was surrendered on 24 November 1918 and scuttled with the rest of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow in June 1919. The Moltke appeared in Churchman’s 1915 cigarette card series, ‘Silhouettes of Warships’. During the war, Churchman, the Ipswich tobacco company, also issued series on topics as diverse as army badges, boy scouts, footballers and east Suffolk churches.

Sketch by Gordon Redvers Evenden
Gordon Redvers Evenden, a former Shotley boy from Sussex, sketched the J7 submarine, his home for the last fourteen months of the war. The sub was based at Blyth in Northumberland but is now submerged and awaiting salvage in the middle of the marina at Melbourne Yacht Club in Australia. (HMS Ganges Museum)

There was also a submarine squadron based in Harwich Harbour, under the command of Commodore Roger Keyes. Its subs were routinely brought into Ipswich docks to be repaired and maintained by Vickers.

In the air

Zeppelin airships started to attack Britain in 1915 and carried out around twenty bombing raids over Suffolk during the course of the war. A number of civilians were injured and property was damaged. Around two dozen people were killed in the county, including seven in Bury and six in Woodbridge.

Ipswich took two direct hits. The first was on 29 April 1915 when, around midnight, a Zeppelin dropped incendiaries as it flew over the town. One set fire to the surface of Waterloo Road and another landed close to the Artillery Barracks but did not explode. A third landed on an open field between Bramford and Whitton and the fourth hit 60, Brooks Hall Road. It came crashing through the roof and ignited the bedroom where a twelve-year-old girl was sleeping. Although her foot was injured, she was rescued from the blaze. The Zeppelin flew on for another hour and dropped more bombs on Bury St Edmunds.

The second direct hit was almost a year later – 31 March 1916 – when a German Zeppelin attacked Ipswich docks. One bomb landed behind the Old Custom House, killing a man. Another fell into the dock, causing no damage, and a third destroyed huts at Stoke Bathing Place. The airship flew on towards London for a while before being brought down in the sea off the Essex coast.

Whenever there was a daytime air raid, Ipswich Corporation alerted factories to sound their hooters to warn the public. However, for much of the war, alarms were not sounded if the raid was at night, presumably because it caused too much disruption in the town. Help for residents was provided by men from the local Voluntary Aid Detachments who would attend whenever alarms went off.

Recruiting poster, 1915
Zeppelin raids, launched from north-west Germany, were frequently targeted on East Anglia, London and Kent.

Zeppelin damage in Key Street
Zeppelins caused considerable damage to houses in Key Street near the docks. It was believed at the time that a hooter sounding the end of a shift at Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies had attracted the raid. (David Kindred)

During air raids, the town’s electricity supply was often cut without warning. This security measure clearly created major problems at the munitions factories and for hospitals. In response to various complaints, the Corporation decided in 1917 that electricity would not be cut off if raids occurred on bright moonlit nights as enemy pilots would be able to see the town clearly anyway. On the same day, they also agreed not to build any public air raid shelters.

In Ipswich, Zeppelin raids did relatively little damage, but the threat from the air must have put residents in absolute fear of their lives. In the country as a whole, over 500 British civilians were killed and more than 1,300 people injured.

Zeppelins were largely superseded by bomber aircraft in the last two years of the war. These tended to target London, Essex and Kent rather than East Anglia, although a Zeppelin was famously shot down over Theberton in east Suffolk in June 1917 and most of its crew were killed.

There were two significant air bases near Ipswich: Felixstowe and Martlesham Heath. Felixstowe airfield was established by the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) as a major aviation base just before war was declared. Aircraft from Felixstowe and other RNAS east coast bases flew long-range patrols to spot the German High Seas Fleet and in-coming Zeppelins. By the end of the war, Felixstowe was one of the largest seaplane and flying boat stations in the world.

Unlike the Felixstowe airbase, Martlesham Heath airfield was not established until well into the war. It was where the Royal Flying Corps (the air arm of the Army) tested airplanes. Early flying pioneers, such as Cecil Lewis, were posted there to try out new combat techniques and to evaluate the latest aircraft. In his autobiography, he rated the Sopwith Triplane he had trialled at Martlesham Heath as the best airplane he ever flew:

‘Other machines were faster, stronger, had better climb or vision; but none was so friendly as the Tripe ... set the engine at three-quarter throttle and wind the tail well back and the Tripe would loop indefinitely. I once did twenty-one loops in a row!’

The RNAS and the RFC merged to form the Royal Air Force in April 1918. The first group captain of the newly formed RAF Felixstowe was Charles Samson.

Sea-plane trials at RNTE Shotley
In 1911, Charles Samson of the RNAS trialled this seaplane over the east coast, much to the amazement of villagers. His aircraft was housed in a specially built hangar near Admiralty Pier at Shotley Gate. A bomber pilot for most of the war, Samson was put in command of the aircraft group at Great Yarmouth for the last twelve months of hostilities. He was responsible for anti-submarine and anti-Zeppelin operations. During that time, his group shot down five Zeppelins. (HMS Ganges Museum)

Sopwith Triplane
A very young Cecil Lewis spent a large part of 1916 flying reconnaissance missions over the Battle of the Somme but that winter he was moved to Martlesham Heath to test new aircraft, including the Sopwith Triplane. (Johnny Powell)

CHAPTER 9

Caring for the Sick and Wounded

Large numbers of servicemen needed treatment for a wide range of battle injuries and ailments throughout the war and beyond. From 1915, gas poisoning was a constant danger on the Western Front. But, over the course of the war, non-battle casualties actually exceeded those injured directly in the fighting. Conditions such as trench foot were widespread, with nearly 75,000 cases being treated in hospitals in France and Flanders over the course of the war. However, although trench foot has come to symbolise the squalor of the conflict, a soldier was much more likely to end up in hospital suffering from a venereal disease. Indeed, it has been estimated that roughly 5 per cent of all the men who enlisted in Britain’s armies during the war became infected with it. A significant (but unknown) number of men also suffered from shell shock.

In Ipswich, at the end of 1914 and in the absence of official orders, local civilian doctors, Shotley medics and the RAMC met to decide how best to care for military patients in the area. They agreed that auxiliary hospitals and the Naval Hospital at RNTE Shotley would take as many as they could, but the lion’s share would go to East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital.

Mark 1 gas mask
A soldier from the Suffolk Regiment wearing what one ex-serviceman has described as the ‘Mark 1 Gas Mask’ i.e. a pyjama leg with a plastic-covered window cut out for the eyes! (Suffolk Regiment Museum)

Postcard of East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital, 1919
East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital was the main general hospital serving Ipswich and district. Fortunately it had been substantially modernised and extended in 1910. (Author’s collection)

East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital

Immediately war was declared, the children’s wing was cleared to make space for servicemen. Later, when pressure for beds in the main building became severe, four large wooden huts were erected, one in the hospital grounds and the other three on Ipswich School cricket field. One particular period when the hospital was exceedingly full was in the autumn of 1917, when men were brought in from Passchendaele. By 1918, the hospital could take a maximum of 425 in-patients at a time, triple the 1914 figure.

Between August 1914 and February 1919, nearly 8,000 wounded and sick servicemen were admitted. Fifty-two of these died. It was a matter of nursing pride that these men were not left to pass away alone. Their bodies would be covered in flowers and accompanied to the mortuary by Matron and a volunteer from the Northgate Street Hospital Depot. As a rule, families were not allowed to visit military wards. However, the relatives of dying men had their travel expenses paid by the hospital so that they could come and say their final farewells.

There were serious staff shortages throughout the war. Already by May 1915, twelve employees – doctors, nurses and porters – had left to serve overseas. As the months rolled by, the depleted staff found themselves even busier with ever-more convoys of patients arriving. Despite this, hospital managers faced continual pressure from the military authorities to release more staff.

Outpatient numbers also increased significantly. In 1917, for example, there were 56,722 outpatient attendances, a rise of about a quarter since the beginning of the war. This was partly accounted for by new workers in Ipswich’s factories needing treatment for minor workplace injuries. There were also a large number of servicemen from other hospitals or at home on sick leave who came in for electrical or massage treatments.

Women and children were not given priority at the hospital as long as bed-space was needed for servicemen. Civilians had to join ever-lengthening waiting lists, and some must have suffered deteriorating health as they waited for treatment. At a meeting of hospital managers in 1917, a bemused official commented on the ‘phenomenal influx of women patients lately, which seems to be one of the unaccountable by-products of this war’.

Broadwater Hospital

The maltster, William Paul, made a large house with extensive grounds available for the Red Cross to use as an auxiliary hospital. Known as Broadwater, it stood at the top of Stoke Hill in Belstead Road. Mr Paul himself was directly involved in managing it and lived conveniently next door at Orwell Lodge. Broadwater opened with thirty-two beds which made it the second largest hospital in the town. It was widely supported by charitable donations, and parishioners of St Mary’s Stoke took a particular interest in it. Towards the end of the war, the Matron was awarded the Royal Red Cross for her work and Mr Paul received an OBE. Broadwater Hospital closed in January 1919.

Belgian refugees were nursed at Ipswich Nurses’ Home
In August 1914, Mrs Dashwood of Wherstead Hall fitted out a ten-bed hospital at Ipswich Nurses’ Home in Lower Brook Street. Within a few months, some of the newly arrived Belgian refugees were admitted for treatment. (SRO, Ipswich)

Other smaller hospitals for military patients included: the Sanatorium (Foxhall Road), Heathfield Hospital (part of the workhouse at the top of Woodbridge Road), the auxiliary hospital at Ranelagh Road Boys’ School, and Ipswich Nurses’ Home.

Auxiliary hospitals were also hosted in the homes of wealthy residents, such as Lieutenant Colonel W.T. Pretty in Belstead Road and the Pretymans at Orwell Park. Patients at these hospitals were generally among the less seriously wounded and were sent there to convalesce. Servicemen often liked these hospitals because they were less strict and far less crowded than others.

Hospital convoys

When men were seriously wounded on the Western Front, they would be passed along a casualty evacuation corridor to a seaport – often Boulogne – to be repatriated by hospital ship. The majority of hospital ships came into Southampton or Dover. From there an ambulance train would deliver the wounded to a British hospital.

Stad Antwerpen, hospital ship
Men from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were evacuated from France in this former cross-channel ferry. Most had gunshot wounds. In September 1916, just over a hundred of them were transferred from this very ship to the No. 16 ambulance train bound for Ipswich. (Eddie Lannoo)

More than seventy convoys of ambulance trains were consigned over the course of the war to Ipswich. Coaches were kitted out as hospital wards and teams of nurses and medics tended the soldiers. Movements of ambulance trains across Britain were published in the press in advance so that well-wishers could cheer them on as they passed by and bring gifts to the stations. In Ipswich, ambulance trains were usually met at the station with a good deal of razzmatazz – civic dignitaries, bands and cheering onlookers. But some trains were inevitably delayed and arrived in the middle of the night, to be greeted by deserted platforms and empty streets. At times, it seems, people were just too busy or weary to turn out.

The gates of East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital had to be dismantled and the entrance widened to allow for the volume of traffic coming to and fro. The last convoy of wounded and sick men to arrive was in January 1919, two months after the Armistice.

Donations of money, medical supplies and food were made throughout the war to the local hospitals. Clubs, factories, churches and individuals treated patients to various entertainments. The bowls and quoits team at one of the Conservative Clubs invited men for a slap-up meal and games. Other patients went on boat trips down the Orwell. Numerous concert parties and teas were arranged. A travelling fair in Falcon Street invited military patients to come and marvel at the ‘chapeaugraphy’, a form of entertainment popular at the time involving impersonations using hats and facial expressions, and to have a go on the shooting galleries.

Ambulance train 16 with members of the FAU
Ambulance train No. 16 was donated to the Red Cross by Cranfields of Ipswich and other members of the UK Flour Millers Association. In September 1916, it arrived in Ipswich, the twenty-sixth consignment of sick and wounded soldiers to come to the town. Poignantly, it pulled into the station just as another train filled with recruits was being waved off to war on the other side of the platform. Ladies from the station buffet gave the patients milk-and-soda, chocolate and cigarettes. Men from the local Voluntary Aid Detachments helped ferry them off to one of the hospitals by motor ambulance or in private cars belonging to wealthy benefactors. (Religious Society of Friends [Quakers] in Britain)

One of the busiest performers at such events was a William Yell of St Helen’s Street. He performed all over Ipswich and was renowned for encouraging even one-armed soldiers to dance. Patients at East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital presented him with a marble clock for the many hours of entertainment and amusement he had given them.

Caring further afield

Many people with Ipswich connections were involved in providing an array of medical and rehabilitation services far away from Suffolk. Amongst them was Oliver Coleman, an insurance clerk from Cemetery Road who joined the RAMC as a private towards the end of the war. He kept a diary which provides a fascinating insight into how RAMC units functioned. He was posted to the Western Front and worked at all points along the casualty evacuation chain, from front-line stations to base hospitals. The following is an edited extract from his diary.

March 1917. Home leave in Ipswich before being deployed. Went to Hippodrome, stroll, billiards, hockey, musical evening, sang in church choir. Then back to barracks in Wendover, excited and in high spirits.

29 March. Seven hour channel crossing to France. Not seasick, but worried about U-boats. Marched to camp. Visited a cafe, drank some port and had ‘great fun with the two mademoiselles’.

30 March. Marched through Rouen, singing merrily. Great welcome from French.

31 March. Chatted to an Indian soldier and had first taste of red wine. Spent next few days training and learning about toxic gas.

3 April. Chatted to a Punjabi solider and learned ‘several words of his lingo’.

5 April. Got into conversation with soldiers from Jamaica. Half a round of bread and bully for dinner.

9 April. First duty at hospital. Lots of wounded coming in. Very tired. Read for an hour in bed by candlelight.

12 April. Large convoy in. ‘Among my cases were two “blown ups” suffering from shellshock. One stuttered like the devil and the other has lost the use of his legs.’

30 April. Sent up to the front line, packed like sardines on the train, carrying shrapnel helmets, goggles and very heavy packs.

1 May. ‘Big guns booming all afternoon and evening.’ Had a ‘rough haircut sitting on a biscuit tin’.

3 May. Old London buses outside camp waiting to take the troops up the line.

7 May. Packed in charabancs and taken to Berneville, near Arras, where met others from Suffolk.

15 May. Marched off to Arras to work at the hospital. Hot. Shelled day and night. Casualties coming in – gas cases.

2 June. Left Arras for Rest Camp in the country. ‘Supper of fried spuds.’ Also goats milk, lettuce and eggs.

28 June. ‘Had a terrible long march right through Poperinge which was heart-breaking on an empty stomach and rotten night in trucks.’ Slept in barns with sounds of shelling, dripping roof and rats running around head.

Late June/early July. Horses lying dead on road. A ‘real hellish experience’. Could feel almost casual about wounded strangers but ‘you feel it for people you know’.

20 July. Rest Camp in western Flanders. Fruit in orchard, grapes in the conservatory, fine sprung bed. Good pastries. Had fortune told in the village and a ‘ripping tea of rabbit’.

1 August. Rain started – ‘up to our necks in mud’.

September. ‘Drank my first Guinness’. Didn’t like it.

4 October. Now back in the thick of it. Still raining. Heard twenty comrades had been killed or wounded. ‘Hardly know what to do tonight – all alone in the tent’.

A number of local nurses travelled abroad to work with medical units set up by public subscription. One such was Margaret Barber, an independent and capable woman, the daughter of the rector of St Mary’s Stoke and his aristocratic wife. The family lived in Ipswich from about 1900 to 1915. Her father’s parishioners kept up to date with Nurse Barber’s wartime exploits through the parish magazine.

Miss Barber was a trained nurse and worked with wartime relief missions in central Serbia, the Caucasus Mountains, and in the Samara region of Russia. She also spent a year in Astrakhan caring for Armenian refugees. It was during this period that the Bolshevik Revolution took place and she worked in a Soviet hospital. After the war, she was repatriated to Britain but eventually managed to return to the USSR where she spent the rest of her life. She became a Soviet citizen, married, and died in Simferopol on the Crimean peninsula in 1965.

Margaret Barber, Vrnjacka Banja, Serbia, 1915
Miss Barber nursed with the Berry Mission in central Serbia. In this photo, an Austrian PoW is holding a sign in German which reads ‘To commemorate our captivity at the English mission of Dr Berry, Serbia 1915’. (Berry, Story of a Red Cross unit in Serbia)

Nearer to home – albeit a good 500 miles from Ipswich – Miss Daphne Jervis-White-Jervis of Freston Hall did her bit for the war as an orderly in the Scottish Highlands. In her late teens, she became a member of Suffolk Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) 46. County branches of the Red Cross had their own groups of VAD volunteers which had been set up in 1909 to care for territorial soldiers in the event of war. They expanded hugely after 1914, with women being trained quickly as nurses or taken on as orderlies. Some were paid, others were not.

Daphne Jervis-White-Jervis, VAD
Born in Freston in 1900, Miss Jervis-White-Jervis was related to the Cobbold brewing dynasty. Her father was a banker and both her grandfathers were Conservative MPs, the sort of upper class background shared by many VADs. (Isobel Hutchison)

At the personal invitation of the Duchess of Atholl, Miss Jervis-White-Jervis went as an unpaid VAD orderly to Blair Castle in Perthshire. She worked in the auxiliary military hospital that had been opened in the ballroom and was set to ‘pantry work’. Unfortunately, she died of flu in early 1919 while she was still working at the castle. Her name is recorded on the dramatic wooden war memorial which stands in Freston churchyard.

In a wonderfully bizarre episode, another local woman, Miss Daisy Daking, was asked by the YMCA to go to France in 1917 to teach folk dancing as therapeutic exercise for convalescing soldiers. She was born in 1884 at 108, Bramford Road, the daughter of Frederick Daking and his wife Elizabeth. No one knows where Miss Daking learned to dance but she became a well known teacher of English dancing.

Daisy Daking
Miss Daking was truly diminutive – reputedly only three feet tall – and usually stood on a chair to conduct her dancing classes. (Sheila Jones)

Miss Daking dances
Many shell shocked and depressed soldiers benefitted from Miss Daking’s classes and demonstrations. (English Folk Dance and Song Society)

In 1917, she wrote excited letters to her colleague, Cecil Sharp, from northern France:

‘I’ve had a thrilling piece of work at Trouville in an enormous convalescent camp. I mustn’t of course give you the number of thousands of the men there. All the staff are medical and the whole spirit of the camp is for sports and games and anything to divert the men. ... The men are frightfully keen. They cheer the roof off and run with our car all through the camps when we leave afterwards.’

In addition, Miss Daking taught morris, sword and country dancing to off-duty men in the military rest camps. Was any remotely similar service provided elsewhere during the war?

CHAPTER 10

News About the War

Despite censorship and government propaganda, newspapers were an important source of information for civilians. Many Ipswich adults would have been literate enough to read a newspaper. At least a generation of children had been through compulsory primary schooling by this time, although not everyone would have wanted to read a paper or could afford one.

In the war years, the main papers for the Ipswich area were the Suffolk Chronicle & Mercury, the Ipswich Evening Star and the East Anglian Daily Times. Throughout the period, they carried international, national and local news. They devoted whole page spreads to news of the war, much of which must have made grim reading. Accounts of battles fought, lists of fallen men and the names of Suffolk prisoners of war all became regular features. And throughout the war, the Suffolk Chronicle ran a weekly page of stories about local servicemen, many illustrated with photographs, despite the increasing shortage of newsprint and ink. Never before had a war been so extensively covered.

Although the subject matter could be wretched, articles were often written with gritty optimism and resolve, exemplified by this little piece from the Star in December 1914:

‘Lieut. C.A.H. Hillier, of Stowmarket, who, in the first days of August last, was figuring in the Suffolk County cricket eleven at Ipswich and Felixstowe, is now in the trenches in France, and in his first letter from the front, brimful of cheerfulness, he says: “I tell you honestly, I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.”’

Jack Ganzoni, Unionist MP for Ipswich
Ganzoni, one of the wartime Ipswich MPs, was in the 4th Suffolks and his military exploits were frequently in the local press. He was gassed twice, but, fortunately for him, he was at home with frostbite during the Battle of the Somme, where many of his relatives and comrades died. (Taff Gillingham)

Letters, postcards and telegrams

Serving soldiers writing to their loved ones often gave interesting if general descriptions of life at the front, knowing that what they wrote had to get past the censor. In one of his many letters home to Grundisburgh, George Goodchild offered his mother a snapshot of camp life – with a promise to be less discreet on his next visit home.

‘C Company had an open air service the night before last. They had no music so one of the fellows played my accordion, so we sung to that. Our platoon officer had some cake and chocolate, cocoa and coffee sent us from his home. He gave us this writing paper too. The trenches have names just like streets have in town. There are so many trenches that they have to be numbered, so we shouldn’t lose ourselves. I will let you know when I want anything. ... I am pleased to say I am quite well and am getting on quite alright. It is interesting to know our goings-on. I shall have plenty to tell you if ever I come home again. There are certain things which I cannot tell you.’

Sergeant Wilfred Howard was less inhibited in what proved to be his last letter home to Ipswich, sent from the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917:

‘It was a grand sight to see the guns open out on that Monday morning and from where we were in position we could see the barrage open out on Vimy Ridge. It was a very fine sight I can tell you. Then, as we advanced, the cavalry were cantering into action. It was a glorious sight I can tell you. We saw the cavalry go over the Ridge to take Monchy, but they didn’t half get cut up. The Bosche put up a barrage of about twenty rounds per minute so you can tell what they went into and they still shell the place like the devil. ... It knocks the Somme and Loos into a mere nothing.’

Wilfred Chapman Howard MM
Sergeant Howard was born in Friars Bridge Road in 1891, served with the Royal Field Artillery in northern France, and was killed in action near Arras in May 1917, just a few days after writing home to his parents. He was awarded the Military Medal and his example inspired future generations of his family to take up military careers. (Sheila Hardy and Carolyn Saxon)

Postcard from Picardy
This postcard, passed by the censor, was sent from France to Hemingstone in October 1918. The name of the town printed underneath the statue has been scratched out for security reasons (but a few minutes on the internet identifies it as Abbeville in northern France). (Author’s collection)

Mass-produced military postcards
This ‘humorous’ postcard was produced en masse for different regiments. German soldiers were popularly depicted as vile or cowardly – or both. (Suffolk Regiment Museum)

Over 12 million letters and postcards crossed the channel from Britain each week. Official communications from the Front – telegrams for officers’ families and standard army forms for other ranks – were the one type of message that was dreaded at home. If the news was that a family member had been killed, a comrade or a senior officer would usually send a personal letter of condolence to follow.

Talks and lectures

One of the first people in Ipswich to give an eyewitness account of the opening days of the conflict was the Reverend John Gleeson, minister of the Congregational Church in St Nicholas Street. He told a packed meeting at the end of August 1914, reported later in several editions of the Suffolk Chronicle, that he had set off from Ipswich in late July for a holiday in the Alps, assuming that the international crisis would blow over. Leaving Dover by ferry, he observed that the harbour was on war–alert, full of warships with British gunners lined up along the breakwater. Then, as he travelled by train through France bound for Geneva, he saw French troops moving up towards the Belgian border. At stations, freight trains were being loaded with guns and munitions, and heading north. As his train entered Switzerland:

‘at every station drums were beating and proclamations were being read. There were great crowds in Geneva. The station gates were guarded by police and people were reading the order announcing the mobilisation of the French Army.’

Gleeson found himself unable to continue his journey and there he was, stranded, until he managed to get on a train back home through France. This time, he witnessed French soldiers with fixed bayonets guarding strategic locations by the railway line and parties of captured German soldiers being marched along under French military guard. After these experiences, Gleeson’s message to Ipswich was simple: this was not a time for merriment, but for seriousness and sobriety of purpose.

Sadly, in a twist of fate, the year after his talk Rev. Gleeson died as a direct result of the war. On his way home from a meeting one dark and unlit evening, he walked into a gate at the back of the County Club in Northgate Street, fell down some steps, and was fatally injured.

Films

During the war years there were three cinemas in Ipswich: Poole’s Picture House (Tower Street); Central Cinema (Old Cattle Market); and the Picture House in Tavern Street which, with its tearoom and restaurant, liked to think of itself as a cut above the other two. They all did good business, showing mixed programmes of feature films and short news reports, complete with stirring captioned commentaries. Pathé Gazette released three newsreels a week during the war and these quickly became a major source of information for civilians. Just imagine how local audiences would have reacted to the newsreel of the 1915 Zeppelin raid on Ipswich – it is inconceivable that they would have just sat there in polite silence.

Later in the war, lengthier propaganda films were released. The most widely watched of these was The Somme, a silent documentary shot in black and white. It went on general release on 21 August 1916. The film showed preparations for the Battle of the Somme and its early days. It was a great success, viewed by around 20 million British people in its first six weeks. Arriving in Ipswich in September 1916, it was shown at the Picture House and at the Central. The Central appealed to readers to come and ‘see the brave Suffolks in action’; eight battalions of the Suffolk Regiment took part in the battle. Both cinemas staged multiple screenings each day the film was in town and, at the Picture House, they put on a special exhibition to accompany the show.

First-hand experience

Ipswich civilians experienced some of the realities of modern warfare at first hand when enemy aircraft began raiding East Anglia in 1915. It was also said that prolonged firing could be heard very distinctly in east Suffolk over a period of a few days at the end of June 1916. The wind was blowing from the south-east at the time, and many people believed they were hearing the sounds of the Battle of the Somme as it occurred.

CHAPTER 11

Doing our Utmost

Few facilities were in place in the town to deal with the huge upsurge in demand for emergency services and supplies when war was declared. It often fell to volunteers to raise money, organise services and supply ‘extras’ for serving men. But there was no shortage of willing helpers. The declaration of war was greeted with almost universal enthusiasm and patriotic fervour and civilians were keen to do what they could to help the war effort. As the war continued, many people kept up this resolve as they learned about the conflict through family members, news reports and through their own experiences of life on the home front.

Work on wartime committees in Ipswich and east Suffolk was dominated by town councillors, landed gentry and successful businessmen. Their wives also took on prominent public roles: women such as Stella, wife of Clement J.F. Cobbold; the Hon. Mrs Douglas Tollemache; Lady Lilian Rendlesham and Helena Countess of Stradbroke. Energetic and confident, these women were wealthy enough to work without payment.

East Suffolk War Relief Committee

This committee was formed in August 1914 and met at County Hall in Ipswich under the chairmanship of Colonel Rt. Hon. E.G. Pretyman of Orwell Park. It raised money for the Red Cross and for families who had fallen on hard times because of the war. The hardworking Countess of Stradbroke and Stella Cobbold took on the initial task of determining what was needed across Ipswich and east Suffolk.

From the outset, the committee was guided by clear working principles. For example, recipients would be given vouchers rather than cash and unemployed beneficiaries would be helped to find work. Also, no activity supported by the Committee, such as making garments or supplying materials, should undercut anyone who produced such things for a living. Their enlightened paternalism, their spirit of noblesse oblige, was summed up perfectly at the time by Pretyman who described committee members as:

‘private persons who, being themselves in comfortable circumstances, are desirous of making matters easier for respectable people of the working class.’

Northgate Street Hospital Depot

Early in the war, a depot was set up to organise supplies for hospitals treating the military sick and wounded. It was run by a committee of women, and familiar names, including Stella Cobbold and the Hon. Mrs Tollemache, were among the leading lights.

Northgate Street Hospital Depot
The practical work was done by over one hundred and fifty volunteers, mostly women. In this grainy newspaper photo, pillows are being sorted to be sent to a military hospital in France. (SRO, Ipswich)

Their central premises at 18 Northgate Street were donated to them by Mr William Paul who had also opened Broadwater Hospital. It was a substantial building with plenty of space for all types of stores: antiseptic pine dressings, surgical supplies, splints, swabs, flannels, linens, and so on. In addition to supplying hospitals in Ipswich, the depot became the main medical store for Suffolk. It also did what it could to send medical supplies abroad. In 1916, it offered to supply Allied forces in Mesopotamia (Iraq). When the military authorities declined their offer, the depot organisers were so disgusted that they resolved to send warm clothes there anyway. The Northgate Street Depot proved to be a popular cause in Ipswich and was well supported by many local townspeople and organisations.

VAD Camp
Suffolk and Norfolk VAD nurses camped out together at Shrubland Hall on the eve of war in July 1914. Fifty-five of them refined their practical skills and attended lectures about sanitation and hygiene. The public were welcome to visit and had the chance to inspect Ipswich’s first motor ambulance. In this photo, Miss Coulcher of the St John Ambulance is sitting in the front row on the right. She had organised the Ipswich ambulance service before the war, and then became the VAD commandant of Broadwater and Gyppeswyck military hospitals. She was awarded the CBE for her war service. (SRO, Ipswich)

British Red Cross and St John Ambulance Brigade

The British Red Cross and the St John Ambulance Brigade both had a presence in Ipswich well before the war. The St John Ambulance Brigade ran the ambulance service in the town. The local Red Cross had set up VADs to provide basic nurse training to volunteers. When war was declared, the Red Cross and St John Ambulance Brigade combined at a national level to form the Joint War Committee, which set up several auxiliary military hospitals in Ipswich and the surrounding area.

Lady Rendlesham

The spirited Lady Lilian Rendlesham headed the East Suffolk Women’s Agricultural Committee. She made herself available every Tuesday at County Hall in Ipswich to meet farmers who wanted to recruit female agricultural workers. Although she did not believe that women should work on the land in peacetime, she was adamant that their labour was essential now. In April 1917, she was able to announce proudly that her committee had helped place 2,000 women in farming jobs in east Suffolk.

She was particularly keen to encourage all women to grow potatoes and onions on any small plot of land available to them. She sought to persuade them that this would not take them away from their domestic duties for too long each day, and she was sure they would be able to sell their produce at a reasonable profit. She proposed setting up committees in each parish to market the produce and, should the scheme succeed, she suggested that they could diversify into growing carrots. However, Lady Rendlesham eventually resigned from her committee in protest at what she saw as political interference. She thought the new agricultural schemes the government were introducing would be expensive and unworkable. Undaunted, she went ahead with her own initiative and set up the East Suffolk Vegetable Produce Cooperative Society which ran until the war ended.

Cash and ‘comforts’

It was not just the great and the good who volunteered to help on the home front. Townspeople rallied round in their own more modest ways. A few examples make the point. At the beginning of the war, three Ipswich tramway-men ‘went round town with a barrel organ’ and raised just over three guineas for the National War Relief Fund. The following year a Mr Griss of London Road sold thousands of copies of a booklet he had written about the Union Jack and donated all his profits to Queen Alexandra’s Field Force Fund.

Across the town, women of all ages and every social class got busy sewing and knitting ‘comforts’ to make life a little less arduous for servicemen. Working on their own, in groups or in sewing parties led by the mayoress, they made numerous scarves, pyjamas, socks and gloves. In the first winter of the war, for example, Ipswich knitters got busy knitting gloves for the 4th Suffolks, who urgently needed a thousand pairs.

Many schoolgirls were encouraged to knit and sew, either to raise money from selling what they had made, or to donate directly to servicemen. Girls from St Matthew’s School, for instance, were particularly keen to make ‘comforts’ and to raise funds because it was the school nearest Ipswich Barracks and so many of the girls had relatives in the army. They donated their handicrafts to the Northgate Street Depot, or sent them directly to family members. During one school term, pupils from Bramford Road Girls’ School also made and sold over 200 ‘golliwogs’ to raise money for the depot.

Dressmaking with ‘Sylvia’
The Suffolk Chronicle usually carried sewing patterns for women to make garments at home. This one, for making kimono style pyjamas for soldiers, appeared in August 1914. Brutally frank, ‘Sylvia’ explained to readers that this style was suitable for servicemen on the front line as the pyjamas could be ripped open quickly for surgical emergencies. (SRO, Ipswich)

‘arf a mo, Kaiser
Pipe tobacco and cigarettes were so important to troops that several national funds, such as the Weekly Dispatch’s Tobacco Fund, were set up specifically to send smoking essentials to soldiers. Millions of tobacco products were manufactured under War Office contracts – a major boost to tobacco companies which included local firm, Churchmans of Portman Road.

Warm woollen clothing was not the only comfort that Ipswich people could send their loved ones, as this grateful letter reproduced in the Star of 7 October 1914 illustrates:

‘Have just received your letter and fags, and thanks very much for them. The fellows were soon round me when they knew I had got some Woodbines ... please send some more; we can’t buy fags about here.’

And George Goodchild, at a camp in Folkestone, was delighted to receive his parcel of tobacco and tasty titbits:

‘Aunt Nelly sent me a parcel this week, cake, pipe and tobacco, some nice fish paste and some peppermints’

National War Savings

From 1916, ordinary people could support the war effort by investing in National War Savings certificates. This mass savings movement provided an easy and safe way for people to save small sums of money by lending it to the government. Savings associations were formed all over the country. In Ipswich, Cllr Badshah visited schools, churches and workplaces to explain the benefits of the scheme. Argyle Street School had a particularly active association, recruiting thirty-three members in its first week.

However, not everyone was keen on these sorts of schemes. For example, although Ipswich Co-op allowed Cllr Badshah to come and speak to its employees in December 1916 about War Savings, it drew the line later at War Bond posters being put up at their premises. Coop members, it maintained, should invest their savings with the Co-op.

War Savings Certificate
The recommended arrangement was to form an association of thirty-one people, each person paying 6d a week, which would buy a 15s 6d certificate every week. After a minimum of a year, savers could cash in their certificates with interest, but the longer savings were left, the more interest they accrued. War Savings certificates were branded with a Hindu sign of good luck, later known as a swastika.

Schoolchildren

Many schoolchildren were keen to do what they could for the war effort. The ‘conker campaign’ was particularly popular. Government posters were put up in schools across the country in the autumn of 1917 encouraging them to gather horse chestnuts which could be used to make a shell propellant. Several Ipswich schools took part. Ranelagh Road boys collected so many that it took twenty-eight pupils to carry them across town to the Education Committee offices. The conkers were then sent on by rail to a top-secret factory in King’s Lynn for processing (although many never arrived and were left rotting in station yards). The following autumn (1918), no one told the Ranelagh Road boys that the horse chestnut campaign was not running again that year. They started collecting only to find themselves in the November lugging baskets of their stinking, rotten harvest back to Christchurch Park. From 1917, schoolchildren were also put to sewing sandbags and grenade bags in lesson time. From the numbers recorded in school logs, thousands must have been made in Ipswich alone.

Organised, military-style clubs and schemes for young people, such as the boy scouts, girl guides and boys’ brigade, grew to assume considerable importance during the war, especially in urban areas. At the beginning of August 1914, over a thousand Suffolk scouts were mustered at their summer camp in Rendlesham. As soon as war was declared, Baden-Powell, the Chief Scout, sent a telegram to the Suffolk Scout Commissioner asking him to provide boys ‘to aid local, civil or defence authorities’. This call to arms meant that the camp at Rendlesham was immediately broken. Boys went home and asked their parents for permission to volunteer. Of the forty boys in the 1st Ipswich Troop, thirty-eight volunteered at once with the ready consent of their parents. A central office was set up in Cox Lane, manned around the clock. Anyone requiring scouts’ services could telegram or write to them there. Their duties were broad ranging: guarding telephone wires and bridges, putting out heath fires, and keeping a lookout on the coast for invading Germans.

The scouting movement in Ipswich grew rapidly. By 1916 there were twenty-seven troops of boy scouts in Ipswich alone, plus two troops of girl guides who could take useful specialist badges in engineering, telegraphy and milkmaid duties.

Ready for action
The author’s father-in-law, Harold Field (centre) with his brothers, Arthur and Charlie. Scouts were enthusiastic helpers on the home front and had a reputation for being responsive and responsible. (Author’s collection)

Although very many people put their best foot forward to support the war effort, not all offers of help were welcomed with open arms, as this correspondence in the Star shows:

Offer of help (13 August 1914): ‘Sir, – Please allow me a little space to ask if an ambulance class for young ladies could not be started in this town. There are many, I am sure, who would respond to the call. I myself know several who would willingly help, and would also pay a small fee for their teaching, so that in case of emergency they could help. I am, etc., ANXIOUS.’

Shirty reply (14 August): ‘Ambulance work and nursing is not learnt in a week or a month. Some self-denial in the past would have been worth far more than any amount of anxiety to learn now, when it is practically too late, as a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I am, etc., Agnes F. Farren, Commandant, VAD, Suffolk.’

CHAPTER 12

Keeping Our Spirits Up

What took people’s minds off the daily grind in wartime Ipswich? Then, as now, films, live performances, music and dancing helped to jolly people along and keep their spirits up. Sport, too, played its part.

Cinema and theatre

There was plenty of much needed entertainment and escapism to be had at the pictures with full programmes of short feature films and news reports on offer at the three commercial cinemas. The Social Settlement in Fore Street also screened films on Saturday evenings.

Ipswich Hippodrome
Twice-nightly shows often played to capacity audiences (1,800 bottoms on seats for each full house). (SRO, Ipswich)

Marie Lloyd
The legendary musical hall artist, Marie Lloyd, was on the Hippodrome bill three times during the war, and would take wounded soldiers off for a little treat after each show. Always well dressed in a smart blue and white outfit or a little French number, she was famous for putting over a song with a wink and a cheeky pause. She invariably had bottles of stout and some fish and chips smuggled backstage into her dressing room – strictly forbidden by the Hippodrome management! At the end of her wartime shows she would finish by wishing her soldier boys ‘Good luck and a safe return’.

The two main theatres in Ipswich were the Hippodrome for variety shows, music hall and reviews, and the Lyceum for ‘proper’ plays. Both were popular and successful venues.

The Hippodrome in St Nicholas Street opened in 1905 as a variety hall and put on shows throughout the war for soldiers and residents. Shows frequently starred top-line singers, comedians, acrobats and speciality acts.

Animal acts were great crowd pleasers, such as girls swimming with seals in a huge glass-fronted tank, and chimps dressed in human clothes. We can only wonder what Ipswich audiences would have made of one artiste who sailed a wireless-controlled Zeppelin around the auditorium, dropping paper bombs on the crowd below!

Archie Leech
Comic acts were always a favourite at the Hipp. A very young Archie Leech appeared as the back-end of a comedy cow in May 1918, before going off to the United States to seek fame and fortune. He was later to change his name to Cary Grant.

Lydia Yavorska
The glamorous Russian actress took the title role in Anna Karenina at the Ipswich Lyceum on a countrywide tour in October 1914.

In contrast, the Lyceum Theatre in Carr Street put on ‘legitimate’ plays. In the war years, they staged works such as Charlie’s Aunt, Damaged Goods (about venereal disease) and The Man Who Stayed at Home, a rattling tale of German secret agents and English spy-catchers set in a boarding house on the East Coast.

‘Making our own entertainment’

These were the days when we still ‘made our own entertainment’. In pubs, halls and clubs all over town, amateur concert parties were always ready to put on a show. Dancing, singing and whist evenings remained as popular as ever, as were traditional pub games such as draughts, dominoes and darts. In the war years, all these sorts of gatherings were also used as opportunities for fundraising.

Shotley Scallywags concert party, 1916
Complete with banjos and hand-bells, a Pierrot troupe from RNTE Shotley poses with senior figures from the base. (HMS Ganges Museum)

Lantern shows were still widely enjoyed. Bizarrely, one Monday evening in 1915, paupers at Ipswich workhouse were treated to a show of ‘scenes in Belgium before and since the outbreak of war, and many were most pathetic’. At the end, the workhouse master cordially thanked the lanternists on behalf of the inmates for kindly coming to ‘give them a little pleasure’!

High days and holidays

Not everyone could afford a holiday away from home before the war and many did not expect one. Some Ipswich families would have had days out to the coast at Felixstowe or at one of the other Suffolk seaside towns that were accessible by train. This all stopped in wartime as the coast was declared a prohibited area. In any case, travel of any kind was difficult and holidays, in particular, were thought to be an unpatriotic luxury. A number of traditional high days and holidays, such as bank holidays, the Suffolk Show and Guy Fawkes Night, were cancelled for the duration. Some changed venue, like the Lamb Fair which was moved to the Cattle Market instead of Handford Hall, which had been taken over by the military.

Other celebrations were held with rather more enthusiasm than usual. Patriotic festivals on Trafalgar Day (21 October) and Empire Day (24 May) in particular were marked at schools with renewed fervour, as ordered by the Ipswich Education Committee. For example, at Argyle Street Boys’ School on Empire Day 1915, a special assembly was held in the morning, followed by lessons on the navy and the British Empire. In the afternoon, the boys filed out into the playground, sang three verses of the National Anthem, marched around, saluted the flag and then went home.

Throughout the war, an extra effort was made to make Christmas special, whatever the circumstances. In 1914, traditional dinners for well over a thousand poor children were served across Ipswich. On the menu that day was roast beef, potatoes, bread, plum pudding and dessert, all washed down with ginger beer. Each child was given a cracker with two shiny new halfpennies, and a bag of oranges and nuts. Everyone was urged to think of the soldiers at the front. Over the same Christmas, according to the Star, the dining room at Ipswich Workhouse was festooned with a banner reminding inmates that ‘man’s inhumanity to man makes countless numbers mourn’. Fortunately, a little Christmas fare was served, followed by music from Mrs Scheuermann’s band, just a few months before she was reviled in the town for having been born in Germany.

Civilians did their best to send festive treats to servicemen. ‘Comforts’ were knitted, plum puddings boiled, hampers assembled. Early in December 1915, Private Rich of the 4th Suffolks made a special Christmas appeal in the Star:

‘I am sure a few mouth-organs would cheer the lads up. If the appeal is a success, they could come very nice for Christmas.’

Goodrich Ward, East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital 1916
Everything was done to give sick and wounded soldiers the best time possible. Nurses put up decorations and arranged entertainments. In 1914, they ‘sang capital glees and coon songs’ and a ‘gallant’ Belgian patient sang and did a dance to ragtime music. A couple of years later, celebrations extended over two months ‘to brighten the lot of the Dardanelles men’. And Christmas 1918 saw Lieutenant Colonel A.C. Churchman himself handing out cigars, cigarettes and matches to patients, while Cobbolds donated four casks of ale. (Author’s collection)

No doubt bumper-bundles of mouth organs were soon in the post to cheer up the Suffolk boys on the Western Front.

Sports

Official sporting events went into the doldrums. While men were away it was thought unpatriotic to waste effort and money on grand sporting occasions. Usually fit and young, sportsmen were wanted in the army from the outset. On 9 March 1915, the Star published this call to sporty types:

‘The 2nd Sportsman’s Battalion Royal Fusiliers appeals again to Suffolk sportsmen to join. A further 400 are required.’

Official football competitions were mostly suspended in Britain for the war years. Ipswich Town Football Club, still an amateur side, fell in with the national sentiment and cancelled their programme of matches as of autumn 1914. However, Town did play the occasional fund-raising game, such as on Boxing Day 1914, when they took on a team from the Norfolk Regiment (of course!), a local derby which was doubtless enjoyed as much then as it would be today.

While the men were away, some female munition workers took up football. A women’s team was set up in 1917 at Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies’ Orwell Works. They played teams from factories in the eastern counties, including the all-conquering ‘munitionettes’ from Marconi in Chelmsford. Orwell Works hosted their home games at the Sidegate Lane ground, where they held the Marconi women to a draw in February 1918. The Star reported that the match attracted an excellent crowd, all proceeds going to East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital.

Ransomes’ cricket team, 1918
Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies managed to field a cricket team in 1918. (Orwell Works Magazine)

Steel quoits, popular in Ipswich and east Suffolk right up to the 1970s, was virtually abandoned for the duration of hostilities from the end of August 1914. The last competition match in the town that summer was between the Waterside Works team and the Salutation pub. The Waterside Works won to finish top of the Ipswich & District Association.

Although official sports were largely cancelled, in towns like Ipswich where plenty of soldiers were stationed, teams from the military would often be put together for football, cricket and other sporting events. With this in mind, a local promoter, Harry Marney, set up a boxing gym in Museum Street for Friday night bouts, staging ‘door-die’ contests between soldiers.

A few sports did carry on regardless and were as popular as ever. Controversially, horseracing continued throughout the war at Newmarket. The Essex & Suffolk Foxhounds carried on hunting until the spring of 1918 when the sport’s ruling body held a well-attended crisis meeting at Tattersall’s, which was reported in the Star:

‘Owing to the short supply of cereals and to assist in economising the stock of provender in the country, this meeting of the Masters of Foxhounds Association has voluntarily agreed to stop hunting on Saturday, March 2nd, for this season.’

Not surprisingly, rifle shooting had a great revival, with the ranges at Broomhill and Felixstowe Road doing record business.

And there was always swimming. In the summer terms, Ipswich schools encouraged their pupils to take swimming lessons right through the war. These were available at the West End Bathing Place, Fore Street Baths and the Stoke Bathing Place, situated just before the entrance to the New Cut. Mr Dring, the characterful head teacher of Ranelagh Road Boys’ School, was so keen for his pupils to learn to swim that, one afternoon when it was too wet for official swimming lessons, each boy had to practise his strokes at school lying on a large table!

A good read

Popular children’s books for families who could afford them were Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan and The Railway Children. There were also worthy picture newspapers such as the Boy’s Own Paper and the Girl’s Own Paper aimed at young audiences. Both these titles extolled the virtues of Christianity, patriotism and clean living. Bestselling authors of books for adults at this time included John Buchan, Sax Rohmer (who created the Fu Manchu series), and the Ipswich-educated writer, Rider Haggard. These, and more highbrow titles, would have been available from W.E. Harrison’s bookshop in the Ancient House in the Buttermarket.

As ever, local newspapers liked to include heart-warming stories to lighten the load of otherwise dismal reading. The Chelmsford Chronicle of 6 November 1914, for example, told of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton’s generosity as he travelled by train between Ipswich and Norwich:

‘Some forty or fifty soldiers and sailors were travelling on a dining-car train, when Sir Thomas, hearing of their presence, invited them all into the dining car to dinner.’

Other staple newspaper fare included weddings, particularly if they were both glamorous and ‘khaki’, and there was always that favourite standby – ‘answers to correspondents’. This was a feature somewhere between an agony aunt column and an episode of QI, except that the identity of the questioner and the questions themselves were never revealed, giving rise to some wonderfully baffling reading:

• ‘ANXIOUS. – We don’t think so, but courtesy sometimes demands it.’ (Star, December 1915)

• ‘MAC. – Keep out of the matter. Don’t seek trouble.’ (Star, May 1916)

Woman’s Weekly, April 1915
This popular magazine cost a penny throughout the war – with no price rises – and so many women were able to afford it.

• ‘ABC. – There is no law against your keeping a monkey, but it must not be a nuisance to your neighbours.’ (Star, January 1918)

Local papers continued to keep Ipswich readers up to date with major events of the day that were unrelated to the war. Ernest Shackleton’s trans-Antarctic expedition (1914-1918) for example, was covered in detail, as was the ‘Brides in the Bath’ murder trial in 1915. Many women would have enjoyed the items specifically written for ‘lady readers’ in the newspapers and women’s magazines. The ever-popular Woman’s Weekly magazine, launched in 1911, continued in print throughout the war, featuring cookery tips, clothes patterns, light fiction, some true-life romances and an agony aunt column. The Star and the Suffolk Chronicle ran similar material.

And finally ...

Ever alert to the need to remind citizens of the ludicrous and desperate nature of the enemy, the Star reported the mind-boggling news in February 1918 that:

‘paper trousers are now being worn by a large proportion of the men in Germany.’

What on earth did Ipswich people make of that!

CHAPTER 13

After the War Was Over

The end of the war came as a surprise to most civilians. In London, at 11.00 am on 11 November 1918, maroons were fired, an air raid signal sounded and church bells rang out. Crowds gathered in the streets. Similarly in Ipswich that morning, people started to realise that the war was over when they heard guns firing and bells ringing. Olive Turney, still driving for Ransomes, described the day in her journal:

‘Armistice Treaty signed at 5.00 am. Hostilities ceased from 11.00 am. Ransomes closed for the day. Ipswich extremely crowded all day. The streets quite impassable. Thanksgiving services in the evening. Kaiser fled to Holland. Socialist government proclaimed in Germany.’

Later that week she wrote that Ransomes did not open again for two more days. When it did, no one felt like working. In Ipswich, she said, church bells rang out, flags flew and public clocks were once again allowed to strike at night after a long silence. She summed up the historic week:

‘Everyone rejoicing in this town, standing around in throngs and not quite knowing what to do with themselves.’

Further afield, Private Oliver Coleman, still serving with the RAMC on the Western Front on Armistice Day, wrote in his service diary:

Mast manning at RNTE Shotley
The boys put on a spectacular display of mast manning and every single one went up. Unfortunately some of the stanchions holding up the safety net gave way and several boys were injured. (HMS Ganges Museum)

‘DER TAG!! How can I describe our feelings? About 7.30, three of our boys went down to the next relay for rations and came back with ... the rumour that hostilities would cease at 11 o’clock this morning and that great cheering could be heard. We nearly went mad with delight ... hu-blooming-ray!’

On the same night, back in Ipswich, the Co-op Society President spoke at a meeting about his hopes for the future:

‘We are now at the end of the slaughter but what of the future? We co-operators will have to take our part. Before the next meeting we shall probably have recorded our votes at the ballot box. Ladies, consider the use of your vote carefully. If we all do that in the true co-operative spirit and banish the old party cries, we need have no fears as to the future.’

And Corder Catchpool, writing later about his time as a conscientious objector in Ipswich Prison, remembered feeling completely overwhelmed when he realised that the war had ended:

‘I was sitting alone, stitching as ever – on special bright red mail-bags. A hooter broke the silence ... What is this? All the sirens in the town were booming. The war was over? The prison-bell tinkled timorously, evidently fearing punishment for its temerity. Then it rang out ... It was only 11.00 am by my sewing ... Suddenly I went a little mad too, and did an unheard of thing. I rang my Emergency Bell! A warder unlocked my door. The war was over. It was 11.05 am. Click, click, went the lock again.

     ‘I stood confused and started to sing the Te Deum, but stopped half-way. I was overwhelmed, oppressed with a sense of the awful responsibility of being spared, going on living, a sense of not knowing how to try harder to do more than in the past. I could simply ask over and over again to be helped to give my whole life in service, however lowly.’

When the first group of German submarines surrendered to the British on 20 November, at least 100 more of them gathered off Shotley, making an ‘avenue’ a mile and a half long in the mouth of the Orwell. This spectacular sight attracted crowds of onlookers coming to see their first visible proof that the war really was over.

Peace Day was celebrated nationally eight months later, in July 1919, to mark the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the official end of the First World War. At Warren Heath, a twenty-one-gun salute was fired at midday, followed by the British National Anthem and Speed the Plough, the official march of the Suffolk Regiment. Meanwhile, huge crowds gathered in the Cornhill and followed a military pipe band up Northgate Street to Christchurch Park for an afternoon of celebrations.

In the same year, Rear Admiral Sir Reginald Tyrwhitt and Field Marshal Allenby were granted the freedom of Ipswich in recognition of their war service. Fifty-six highly decorated servicemen from Ipswich were granted the same civic honour in 1920. These included Arthur Saunders VC.

Reginald Tyrwhitt on the Town Hall steps
Rear Admiral Sir Reginald Tyrwhitt, commander of the Harwich Force, received the Freedom of Ipswich in July 1919 in recognition of his war service. Here he is on the steps of the Town Hall with the mayoress on his right, and, on his left, the mayor (Cllr Rands), Lady Tyrwhitt, and Jack Ganzoni MP. Note the curious boys leaning forward to get a good look! (David Empson)

Death and commemoration

The total number of military and civilian casualties in the Great War on all sides was over 37 million, of which 16 million were deaths. Nearly 1,500 men from Ipswich perished. It was the deadliest conflict in recent history.

As there was no consecrated military burial ground in Ipswich, a group of influential women formed themselves into a Guild in 1915 to establish a Field of Honour at the Old Cemetery. They raised funds, secured the land and arranged for soldiers in the town to clear and prepare the site where over 100 casualties would be buried – men from all over the country who had died in Ipswich. The Commonwealth War Grave Commission later took over responsibility for running the plot.

A temporary memorial was erected in Princes Street with the names of the Ipswich dead inscribed on boards standing alongside. Many had died overseas with no known grave for family members to visit, even if they could travel there, so it was important for relatives to have a local place where their loved ones were remembered – a physical focus for their grief and pride.

After the war, a fund was set up to finance some sort of permanent memorial in the town. The mayor’s proposal to build a memorial wing at East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital was explained and accepted at a well-attended meeting at the Town Hall in March 1919:

[it is] ‘better to express our gratitude for the sacrifices which have been made for us, and for the horrors from which we have been preserved, by making provision for the sick and suffering than to spend a large sum of money on some grand monument.’

The new memorial wards were opened in July 1924, and stood between the main hospital in Anglesea Road and Henley Road.

As it turned out, there was enough money left in the fund for a grand civic memorial to be built in Christchurch Park. It was unveiled in 1924. The huge bronze panel spanning the rear wall records the names of Ipswich servicemen who had died, arranged by regiment and rank. Roughly a third of all these were in the Suffolk Regiment, another third in other county regiments, and the rest were mostly (though not exclusively) from other sections of the army, such as artillery regiments and the Royal Engineers.

War memorial wing
The inscription reads: ‘Ipswich War Memorial Wing, erected by public subscription in grateful memory of the men of Ipswich who gave their lives for their country in the Great War, 1914 – 1918. Their names are recorded on the memorial in Christchurch Park.’ (Author’s collection)

Christchurch Park memorial, 2015
The official borough memorial was designed by Edward Adams. This photo of the front of the cenotaph shows the bronze bundle of military emblems and artefacts at the base of the obelisk. On top of these are a soldier’s personal effects: uniform, helmet, gas mask, water bottle, camouflage webbing, and a satchel full of bombs. (Author’s collection)

Large employers whose men had died often commemorated them at their workplaces. Plaques and boards can still be seen around Ipswich erected by businesses such as Ransomes & Rapier, the Post Office and Cranfields. Similarly, churches and chapels recorded the names of the men they had lost. St Clements Parish Church in Star Lane commemorated the men of HMS Amphion who had been billeted at the church before going out to sea. Some notable village memorials can be found in Aspall, Freston and Bawdsey. But Culpho, five country miles from Ipswich, is a ‘thankful village’ – a term coined by the patriotic journalist Arthur Mee to describe villages that lost no men – so it has no Great War memorial.

Freston war memorial
A life-size wooden statue of Victory stands in Freston churchyard. It was erected in 1921 and paid for by public subscription. She holds a laurel wreath in one hand and points to the heavens with the other to indicate the source of the victory. The list of Freston people who died includes the name of Daphne Jervis-White-Jervis. (Author’s collection)

Edith Cavell memorial
In the parish church at Bawdsey, a bronze medallion commemorates Nurse Edith Cavell, shot by a German firing squad in Belgium in 1915. It hangs below her great aunt and uncle’s wall plaque. (Author’s collection)

Lord Kitchener memorial, Aspall Church
Lord Kitchener was drowned in 1916 off Orkney when his ship, bound for Russia, was hit by a German torpedo. His body was never found. (Jennie Wardlaw and Keith Woodman)

An appropriate way had to be found to commemorate members of the Royal Navy, many of whom were killed at sea where no permanent memorial could be provided. National memorials were erected at Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth. Locally, individual graves and a submariners’ memorial were erected in Shotley churchyard. The names of some hundred mariners from Ipswich are listed on the bronze panel at Christchurch Park and, years later, a granite column in memory of merchant seaman was erected on Ipswich Waterfront.

Ipswich men were buried or otherwise commemorated in all theatres of the war across the world. According to Ipswich Museum, the largest numbers were on the Western Front at Ypres (ninety-eight), Thiepval (seventy-three), Arras (fifty-two) and Zonnebecke (thirty-two).

Submariners’ memorial
In a corner of Shotley churchyard is a submariners’ memorial which records the names of men who were lost off Harwich when two British submarines collided in 1916 with huge loss of life. (Author’s collection)

Merchant seamen’s memorial, Ipswich Waterfront
Twenty-six merchant seamen are recorded by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission as having an Ipswich connection. Six of these were born in Ipswich but sailed out of Grimsby. Most of them went to a watery grave but are remembered on the recently erected Merchant Navy memorial on Orwell Quay. (Author’s collection)

The sick and the wounded

The end of war saw the return of a large number of servicemen suffering from physical and psychological disabilities. One estimate suggests that more than 2 million British servicemen, over a third of Britons who served, were disabled in some way. Up to 200 beds for servicemen were still needed at East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital immediately after the war to care for the long-term wounded from all over East Anglia. A large proportion of these men were paraplegics. The British government had no comprehensive plan to rehabilitate or to get disabled ex-servicemen back to work. Many former servicemen spent the rest of their lives coping with their disabilities as best they could. One local example among many was Ted Stapleton, a Norfolk boy who served in his county regiment. He moved to Newson Street in Ipswich after the war and worked as a postman. Gassed on the Western Front, his lungs never fully recovered. Ted was always wheezing and retired early through ill health. He died in 1960 of emphysema, probably linked to the gassing he had suffered over four decades before.

1918 was to bring an extraordinary surge in ill health for civilians as well as service-people. The run-of-the-mill illnesses of the time were toothache, diphtheria, sore throats, ringworm, mumps, scarlet fever and whooping cough – all of which were routinely mentioned in wartime school logbooks. The first unusual episode came in the summer with a fatal outbreak of pneumonic plague on the Shotley Peninsula. It was followed a few months later by a flu pandemic which was at its most deadly over the winter of 1918 and into the following spring. In Ipswich, nearly twice as many people died in these colder months than in the years before and after (as the graph below shows) although it is not clear how many of these deaths were related to flu.

This particular type of flu virus mostly affected younger people, leading to Ipswich schools being closed for weeks on end. When they re-opened in December 1918, the epidemic was still nowhere near over and pupils and staff continued to fall ill. At Ranelagh Road Boys’ School, for example, there were just two staff members left to teach 120 boys. The head teacher of California School wrote that he had himself been forced to take two days off with flu during the epidemic, the first and only sick leave he had ever taken in a career spanning forty-two years. Nationally, between 150,000 and 230,000 people died of flu by May 1919 and the epidemic killed more people worldwide than the war itself.

Mary Cox
‘Mary’s husband served in the Royal Engineers. Everyone said that he went through Gallipoli without a scratch. But the truth of it was that he came home with malaria and a violent temper. Mary and their daughters bore the brunt of it for years.’ (Rachel Jones, Mary’s great-granddaughter)

(freebmd.org.uk)

Aspects of life in the town

Ipswich did not immediately return to ‘normal’ when the Armistice was signed, and in some respects it never could. The war had touched all aspects of life in the area. A few of the most significant changes – from population to transport, and from jobs and politics to housing – are outlined in this section.

Unlike most localities in East Anglia, the population of Ipswich actually increased between 1911 and 1921, when the next national census was taken. By 1921, the town was home to almost 80,000 people – an increase of some 6,000 residents.

The town’s transport system had taken a battering. Road surfaces, tramlines, overhead cables and the trams themselves had not been well maintained during the war years and showed signs of heavy wear. Ipswich Borough Council decided to replace them all with trolleybuses, gradually introducing the new system in the early 1920s, one of the first towns in the country to do so. Private motoring picked up as soon as the war was over, with new registrations in Ipswich soaring to a dizzying 300 or so vehicles in 1919, nearly as many as there had been in 1915. Accelerated by innovations in engineering during the war, the era of horse-drawn urban transport was already almost over.

Just as many women had begun to get used to going out to work, they found themselves back at home with the pots and pans, some willingly, and others not. Many large employers had previously committed themselves to finding employment for all former male members of staff who had enlisted. Moreover, with the ending of the war, there was no longer any need for ‘munitionettes’.

On a more positive note for women, the Representation of the People Act became law in February 1918. Thereafter, women over the age of 30 who were occupiers of property (or married to occupiers) were entitled to vote in general elections – a partial victory for suffrage campaigners. According to The Times of 14 December 1918, there were 16,000 women listed on the Ipswich electoral register out of a total of 37,000 eligible voters.

The nascent Labour Party had struggled in Ipswich as elsewhere during the war years as members were split over support for the conflict. But by 1918, many voters supported socialist policies, notably the redistribution of wealth. In the first post-war Westminster election, held in December 1918, Labour stalwart, Cllr Robert Jackson, polled nearly a quarter of all votes cast in Ipswich. Although he was defeated by Jack Ganzoni, the sitting ‘soldier MP’, Cllr Jackson later became Ipswich’s first socialist MP when he won the seat in 1923.

Almost a year after the 1918 General Election, there were striking gains for Labour in Ipswich’s first municipal elections to be held since 1913. Cllr Jackson was joined in the council chamber by five new Labour members. The group could also count on support from the Independent Labour Party and Co-op councillors. It had at last become a political force to be reckoned with.

House maintenance and construction had come to a virtual standstill in the town during the war, leaving Ipswich, as elsewhere, with a dearth of decent housing. In 1919, Parliament passed an ambitious Housing Act which promised government subsidies to help finance the construction of 500,000 houses nationally within three years. Progress was slow in Ipswich, but over the following years, slum areas like St Clements were cleared and new housing estates built in Nacton Road, Hadleigh Road, Geneva Road, Whitton, Rushmere and Gainsborough. Schools, libraries and recreation grounds were also constructed to serve these communities.

Ipswich Labour Party football team
The Ipswich Labour Party provided a range of popular social and recreational activities in the post-war years. (Ipswich Labour Party)

Afterword

Although the home front in Ipswich was far away from the battlefields, war was ever-present in the town. From the very first days, the sheer busyness and bustle of war in public places was evident as men were on the move. When German air raids began, threatening the ordinary streets where ordinary people lived, the town was forced ever closer to the battlefront.

By 1916, the everyday experience of war was even more immediate. Conscription began taking family members, friends, neighbours, workmates and employees off to the front, willing or not. Local newspapers remained full of heroic and heart-breaking stories. The war was everywhere.

Some routines of life were superficially unchanged. Children still went to school, people got married, had babies, and went to church. By and large, the rich still remained in their mansions, dispensing charity and moral guidance, while the poor laboured on in their fields and their factories. However, many aspects of daily life in the town changed almost beyond recognition. Local women undoubtedly found a new kind of freedom in the work they were suddenly required to do, and many must have enjoyed some of the liberties that went with an independent income. But, with husbands away, it must have been an anxious struggle for many to manage work and households single-handedly for the first time. Families grew up without fathers, children made their own way home from school after air-raid warnings, and shops and trades were abandoned by their conscripted owners. Some men fought against the fighting and ended up in Ipswich Prison as COs. And many others marched cheerfully off to war, pulling out of Ipswich station only to see crowded ambulance trains bringing wounded soldiers back from the front.

Ever-increasing state regulation intruded into numerous aspects of daily life. This surfaced in many and various forms: from restrictions on pub opening hours to rules governing who could buy drinks for whom, and from caps on food prices through to complete state control of entire industries. The degree to which civilians’ lives were mobilised for the war effort was quite unprecedented. No other overseas conflict in British history had required such a scale of response from non-combatants. Every neighbourhood, street and household in the town paid part of the price.

Finally, we should note the extraordinary capacity human beings and their institutions have for carrying on as best they can despite the most intolerable circumstances. Daily life still saw all the usual gripes, grumbles and petty rivalries as well as a few seriously disruptive disputes, some resistance and occasional rowdiness, but also plenty of compliance and a good deal of compassion. It was all here in Ipswich.

APPENDICES

Timeline

1914
Eager for the Fray

The declaration of war against Germany takes most civilians by surprise. Men rush to ‘join the colours’ and old soldiers are recalled to their regiments. Most people willingly submit to new legislation which eventually brings many aspects of daily life under government control.

August

Germany invades Belgium.

Britain declares war on Germany.

Regular soldiers and TF mobilised.

Kitchener begins to recruit New Army.

Dead and wounded from HMS Amphion brought to Shotley hospital.

Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) passed.

Allies defeated at Mons and at Battle of Le Cateau where 2nd Suffolks gain battle honours but suffer heavy losses.

September

Recruits for Kitchener’s Army arrive in Ipswich from surrounding villages.

Ranelagh Road School commandeered by military.

Belgian refugees start to arrive in Wet Dock.

Action of 22 September fought in North Sea. German victory. Dead and wounded brought to Shotley.

October

First arrivals of sick and wounded soldiers in Ipswich.

November

4th Suffolks leave for Western Front, one of the first Territorial battalions to be allowed overseas.

Trench lines start in France and Flanders.

December

Lord Lieutenant of Suffolk issues instructions to civilians in case of invasion.

Lights out in Ipswich (DORA) for first time.

First casualties for 4th Suffolks.

1915
Deepening Conflict

British civilians attacked from the air for the first time. Hostilities get bogged down on the Western Front with stalemated battles, trench warfare, horrendous casualties and unimaginable suffering on all sides. ‘The Shell Scandal’. Men posted to distant lands, including the Balkans, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Palestine. But the Western Front, where eventually over 5 million Allied soldiers will serve, dominates the news.

January

Ipswich Volunteer Corps formed.

Air raids over East Anglia start (and continue until 1917).

Restrictions on private lighting and tram service hours in Ipswich.

February

Derelict Diesel Works in Ipswich re-opened by Vickers.

March

Battle of Neuve Chapelle (Suffolk Regiment battle honours). Minor British tactical success but with heavy losses.

April

Start of Second Battle of Ypres (Suffolk Regiment battle honours). Germans deploy poisonous gas. Battle ends in stalemate the following month.

Warren Heath Artillery Camp opens.

Zeppelin direct hit on Ipswich.

Gallipoli landings start. Campaign ends January 1916 in Allied defeat (Suffolk Regiment battle honours).

May

British liner, Lusitania, secretly carrying ammunition, is sunk off Ireland with deaths of many American (neutral) casualties.

Anti German riots in Ipswich and elsewhere.

Lloyd George starts all-out drive to produce munitions.

First female tram conductresses in Ipswich.

August

First burial in the Field of Honour, Ipswich Cemetery.

Public clocks stopped from striking in Ipswich.

Some soldiers released from duties to help with harvest.

September

Battle of Loos starts (Suffolk Regiment battle honours) – ends in stalemate in October with heavy casualties.

October

Macedonia Campaign starts (Suffolk Regiment battle honours) – ends September 1918 in Allied victory.

1916
The Realisation

The numbers of dead and wounded keep rising. Conscription introduced. Zeppelin raids continue. Food shortages and price rises begin to bite.

February

Conscription introduced and Military Service Tribunal appointed by Ipswich Corporation.

March

First meeting of the East Suffolk & Ipswich Military Appeal Tribunal.

COs appear before Ipswich Military Service Tribunal.

War Savings Committee set up by central government.

May

Battle of Jutland fought in North Sea. Britain and Germany both claim victory. 8,000 British casualties.

June

Daylight Saving Act comes into operation.

Second Zeppelin direct hit on Ipswich.

Hay crop commandeered by government.

July

Battle of Somme starts (Suffolk Regiment battle honours) – ends inconclusively in November 1916 with terrible casualties on both sides.

September

First use of tanks in battle – had been tested on the Elveden Estate near Thetford.

December

Lord Devonport, Minister of Food, recommends voluntary food rationing.

Free rest room and buffet for soldiers opens at Ipswich railway station.

1917
Seeing it Through

Hunger at home, fatherless families and uncertain relationships. Bitterly cold winter. Every aspect of life affected. Many people become war-weary and disillusioned. Labour disputes increase.

Spring term

Ipswich schoolchildren start making sandbags in class.

In Ipswich, price of potatoes set at 1½d a lb and bread 5½d for a 2lb loaf.

March

Russian Revolution starts (Tsar abdicates in February/March;

Bolshevik victory in October/November).

1st Battle of Gaza (Suffolk Regiment battle honours) – Ottoman victory.

April

USA enters the war.

National output of beer restricted to 10 million barrels (previously 30 million).

National prohibition on sale of crumpets and muffins.

Battle of Arras starts (Suffolk Regiment battle honours) – ends in May in Allied victory.

2nd Battle of Gaza (Suffolk Regiment battle honours) – Ottoman victory.

May

First airplane made at Ransomes seen flying over Ipswich.

June

Heathfields Hospital opens in Ipswich Workhouse.

July

Battle of Passchendaele starts (Suffolk Regiment battle honours). Fought in thick mud and ends in November with appalling casualties.

September

Ipswich Food Control Committee established.

October

Horse chestnut campaign.

Bakers allowed to add potatoes to bread dough, and sugar controls introduced.

November

Cllr Jackson adopted as Labour Party parliamentary candidate for Ipswich.

Battle of Cambrai (Suffolk Regiment battle honours) starts – ends December in stalemate. First mass attack by tanks.

3rd Battle of Gaza (Suffolk Regiment battle honours) – Allied victory.

December

Emergency supply of margarine sent to Ipswich.

Jerusalem falls to Egyptian Expeditionary Force (including 5th Suffolks) led by Allenby.

1918
The Final Blows

Despite German success early in the year, the Allies make advances on Western Front. Disintegration of Central Powers. Victory for the Allies. Armistice signed.

January

Butchers’ shops allowed to open only two days a week in Ipswich.

Rush for butter and margarine in Ipswich.

February

Representation of the People Act passed, giving votes to men over 21 and to women over 30 with a property qualification.

Rationing of butter and margarine in Ipswich.

March

Meat and bacon on ration in Ipswich.

Russian armistice with Central Powers.

Massive German attacks on Western Front.

June

Pneumonic plague on Shotley Peninsula.

August

Ipswich Corporation agree to build 1,400 houses between Felixstowe Road and Nacton Road, and between London Road and Hadleigh Road.

A ‘rolling barrage’ of Allied artillery, tanks, infantry and aircraft marks the opening phase of the Hundred Days Offensive. Central Powers start to be pushed back.

September

Suffolk schoolchildren pick blackberries for jam making.

Foundry workers in Ipswich on unofficial strike for two days.

November

Influenza pandemic starts – ends Spring 1919.

Armistice declared (11 November) and effigies of Kaiser burned in some Suffolk villages. Kaiser abdicates and flees to neutral Holland.

1919

Servicemen demobbed and prisoners released. Treaty of Versailles signed and Peace Day celebrated (June).

Summary of Suffolk Regiment battalions

REGULAR BATTALIONS

TF BATTALIONS

NEW (KITCHENER’S) BATTALIONS

NEW RESERVE BATTALIONS (TRAINING)

OTHER NEW BATTALIONS

Bibliography

ARCHIVES

Friends’ House Library, 173 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BJ Visitation of Prisoners Committee: case records

Suffolk Record Office (Ipswich), Gatacre Road, Ipswich, IP1 2LQ (SRO)

SRO, 305.562/oversize/stack, Ratcliffe, R. History of the Working Class Movement in Ipswich, 1953

SRO, 920 HAR/oversize/stack, Steve Harvey, Samuel Harvey VC, 2014

SRO, DB32/17, Minutes of IBC Watch Committee, 1913–1918

SRO, DB8/4 and 5, IBC Electric Supply and Tramways Committee minutes, 1913–1920

SRO, DC5/6/1/2, Argyle Street Boys’ School log, 1914–1938

SRO, DC5/6/16/3, Ranelagh Road Boys’ School log, 1907–1935

SRO, DC5/6/2/2, Bramford Girls’ School log, 1904–1936

SRO, DC5/6/21/2, St Mary’s RC Mixed School managers’ minutes, 1903–1926

SRO, DC5/6/5/1, California Boys’ School log, 1873–1926

SRO, EL1/6/11/31–35, Ipswich Docks Arrivals and Clearance Books, 1914–1918

SRO, FB95/M1/52, St Matthew’s Girls’ School log, 1898–1929

SRO, GF1/1/1/15-17, Ipswich Co-operative Society minute books, 1913–1919

SRO, HC410/F13/1, British Xylonite war service register, 1914–1922

SRO, HC464/1/3/1/1, Cranfield Brothers Ltd minute book, 1908–1922

SRO, HD1016/2/1, food coupon

SRO, HD1251/1, Aliens’ Register

SRO, HD2013, newspaper cuttings collected by Pretty & Sons (various dates)

SRO, HD498, Olive Turney’s papers

SRO, ID401/12/9, Programme for opening of War Memorial Hospital Wing, 1924

SRO, ID401/6/3, East Suffolk & Ipswich Hospital scrapbook

SRO, ID408/A1/5, Ipswich Corporation Asylum Visiting Committee minutes, 1910–1918

SRO, IH1/3/3, Directors’ minutes, Ipswich Gas Light Company, 1907–1922

SRO, IY400, Ipswich Prison Book, 1914–1918

SRO, K681/2/44/7, sugar beet

SRO, K(PC) 104/187, Hippodrome interior

SRO, P654/1, Private Oliver Coleman’s Service Diary, 1917–1920

The National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU (TNA)

TNA, MH 47/10/18, Percy Collis’ service records

TNA, WO 398/112/3, Esme Hume’s service record TNA, WO 398/166/25, Gladys Norton’s service record

CENSUS

Summary and enumerators’ books: Ipswich 1881–1911

NEWSPAPERS

East Anglian Daily Times

Suffolk Chronicle & Mercury

Aldeburgh Post

Ipswich Evening Star

The Times

DIRECTORIES

Kelly’s Directory of Ipswich. London: Kelly’s Directories Ltd.

Suffolk County Handbook.

WEBSITES (accessed 2014–15)

Ancestry. www.ancestry.co.uk

Cherish Watton. www.womenslandarmy.co.uk

Chris Baker, The Long, Long Trail. www.1914-1918.net

Commonwealth War Graves Commission. www.cwgc.org

Free BMD. www.freebmd.org.uk

findmypast with the British Library. www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

David Kindred. https://www.flickr.com/photos/kindredspirituk (a wonderful archive of photos of old Ipswich)

George Goodchild’s letters, transcribed by Henry Finch. www.ibisdesigns.ukfsn.org/camp/pdf%27s/5230.pdf

Red Cross. www.redcross.org.uk

Western Front Association: www.westernfrontassociation.com

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