Boy Soldiers of the Great War (19 page)

‘Short of disclosing facts of advantage to the enemy I recognize no limits,’ he wrote. His mission statement included advice, ideas and recommendations on how to improve the prosecution of the war. But it also included something else, his first known attempt to formulate, in writing at least, his dissatisfaction with the Government’s handling of the issue of underage soldiering. In it he cites no letters or particular cases, though he is clearly aware of the concerns voiced by parents:

The most serious complaints come from women who declare that they applied for the release of their boys upon enlistment but were assured by the recruiting officer, the adjutant, or the commanding officer, that the boys would not be sent abroad until they were nineteen.

Relying upon the word of honour of these English officers and gentlemen – a word which had never been known to fail in the past – these women were glad to leave their boys to ‘do their bit’ in the Home Defence Army.

They now feel that they have been tricked, deceived, and lied to, in the most scandalous and un-English fashion. The ‘word of an officer and a gentleman’ no longer runs in these families or in the circle of their acquaintance. These people are convinced that the army is run and managed by a set of men who have no sense of honour, justice or truth.

The spring battles of 1915 and the stationary nature of the conflict highlighted the appalling conditions in which men had
to serve. The number of casualties among boy soldiers had grown remorselessly, often caused not by injury but by succumbing to the effects of weather and disease. Until this point the Commons had not raised the issue, but for the next six months it was to become a hot political topic, as the full extent of the enlistment errors of 1914 and early 1915 came to public attention. The sometimes chaotic and amateurish way in which both recruiting sergeants and medical officers had not hesitated to enlist tens of thousands of boys into the British Army was at last being recognized.

It was another backbench MP, Barnet Kenyon, who first raised the issue of underage enlistment with the Government, as Hansard transcripts for 22 June 1915 reveal:

Barnet Kenyon asked the Undersecretary of State for War, Harold Tennant, whether he is aware that numbers of lads between the ages of fifteen and seventeen have for patriotic reasons enlisted, making a false declaration of their ages; whether, seeing this is well known to the responsible authorities, he will say why the War Office permits lads of these ages to be recruited; whether he will instruct the recruiting officers to call for birth certificates in the cases of all young lads who desire to enlist; and whether he will dismiss any recruitment officer who enlists lads under the age laid down by the regulations.

The reply from Tennant was perfunctory.

The lowest age at which a man may be accepted for the Regular Army is nineteen. If any doubt exists as to the age of a recruit when he presents himself, the examining medical officer is referred to. If the medical officer is in doubt, the recruiting officer is required to make full inquiries before finally approving the recruit. I am afraid that the suggestion that every recruit should produce a birth certificate is impracticable. The Regulations give
the parents of any lad below seventeen who has enlisted a right to claim his discharge.

It was a solitary question and the issue, at least on the floor of the Commons, appeared settled for the time being. Perhaps the enquiry jolted the War Office into action, for on 26 July it notified all general officers commanding

to use their utmost endeavours to stop the enlistment of young men who are below the prescribed minimum age of nineteen, and to issue stringent orders to this effect. Where it is considered that there is reasonable ground for doubting the accuracy of the age given by the recruit, some proof should be required before his enlistment is proceeded with. It is of special importance to secure that no youth, even though of a physique superior to that of the average of his age, should be encouraged to say that he has attained the prescribed age when as a matter of fact he is below it.

The problem with voluntary enlistment was that it was always subject to the vagaries of public sentiment, swayed by duty, fear, patriotism, plain resignation or deep-seated anger. Recruitment figures were prone to rise in response to reports of desperate fighting on the Western Front or news of an atrocity, but they would subsequently fall. In early May, news broke of the sinking of the Cunard Liner
Lusitania
, with the deaths of 1,198 civilian passengers. As a direct result of the perceived outrage, the numbers of men who enlisted that month rose steeply. There was a similar response in October that year when the English nurse Edith Cavell, working in a Brussels hospital, was executed by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers escape to the Dutch frontier; lurid reports of her fate helped bring more volunteers into the fold.

For fourteen-year-old Albert Harvey, the son of a bricklayer from Hull, the stimulus was more directly personal: he reacted to an attack on his hometown. Albert had already attempted to
enlist in 1914 and had been rejected, but now he was stirred once again into action after the first Zeppelin raid on his birthplace in June 1915. He was at home that night and had actually seen the Zeppelin from the top storey of his house. Later, he went out into the street to find many people roaming around, a number still wearing nightclothes.

There were at least three big fires and much damage, including Edwin Davis’ shop, near Holy Trinity Church, which was destroyed. There was much excitement and no doubt people were fearful and angry. It was Sunday night and a number of people attacked German pork butchers’ shops, one in Charles Street.

A policeman who attempted to protect a German shop from the maddened crowd was chased down the street and was lucky to escape. In all, the bombing had claimed the lives of twenty-four civilians while another forty had been injured, enough of an atrocity in Albert’s young eyes to make him want to enlist: ‘I felt that I wanted to get at the Germans.’

Periodic and unpredictable atrocities could act only as a useful top-up to the monthly requirements of the army, but it was no way to run a recruitment campaign. The daily work of organizations such as the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee (PRC) was vital to pull in a steady stream of volunteers, but gone were the days when it was easy. Between 11 and 25 April the PRC held 852 evening and 124 dinner-hour meetings in London’s fifty-nine constituencies, as well as 268 Sunday meetings in parks and open spaces, and sixteen in employers’ shops, works and factories. A total of 150 speakers had been used. Again, between 27 June and 11 July another PRC campaign in the capital was launched: this time a total of 1,421 meetings were held, using a variety of bands and marches to stir men to action.

In June 1915, the Conservative politician Lord Derby published an updated summary of methods to be employed during a
recruitment drive in west Lancashire. Derby had been a prominent figure in the campaign. He had spoken at rallies across the country and so felt sufficiently expert to offer advice to others.

Do not forget that under the present system you are asking a freeborn Lancashire man to offer his services, possibly his life, for his country, and that he is within his rights to refuse you. If he refuses do not threaten him with conscription. He knows that at present you have no power to enforce that threat, and will probably only be the more stubborn in his refusal. For the same reason, if you are unsuccessful, do not call the man ‘a coward’ and a ‘shirker’. Experience has shown that a quiet explanation of conditions, rates of pay, terms of service, separation allowances, given courteously and tactfully, is far the most successful recruiting method. DON’T HUSTLE; DON’T THREATEN; REMOVE DIFFICULTIES. Talk personally, then you will bring recruits.

The public rally, the bread and butter of the recruitment drive, still attracted huge attendances but was not always able to translate spectators into volunteers. All too often, the new recruits were the boys who, too young to enlist in 1914, were now a little fuller in figure, a little bolder in attitude. One Tunbridge Wells newspaper recorded such a rally in May 1916 when an enormous crowd of 10,000 people gathered on the common to be addressed by Captain Campbell Duncan, DSO, and other notables of military and civil life. An appeal was soon made for recruits to join the colours.

A tall, slight youth of fair complexion stepped forward, and numerous comments were made upon his extremely youthful appearance, but, boy though he was, Roy Upfold had the spirit of his fathers, a soldier family, still burning within him, and he stepped forward dauntlessly to do that which many older men hung back from.

He was fifteen.

George White, at the time of his enlistment, was even younger than Roy Upfold. George had not been driven to join up by news of atrocities or the loss of a friend at the front. Rather, as the son of an artilleryman and now the stepson of a man who had served in the 9th Lancers, it was his desire to serve that drove him on. Towards the end of May 1915, he saw a poster indicating that there would be an open-air meeting at Ospringe on 2 June. George and his friend Charlie went to the meeting in the hope of enlisting.

Charlie had no difficulty with his family about volunteering as he was seventeen but I was in a different position being two months away from my fifteenth birthday. Charlie supported me when I first broached the subject of joining up to my parents but, naturally, they said ‘No’. However, I kept up the pressure with help from Charlie and hinted that I might run away to enlist, as lots of other young lads were doing.

I think Dad [his stepfather] sympathized with me as he had left home at the age of seventeen to join the 9th Lancers and he knew that I was well advanced, physically, for my age. This, and the fear of my leaving home, helped to persuade Mum to make, what must have been to her, an abominable decision to let me volunteer at the meeting. No doubt she felt and hoped that those doing the enrolling would see that I was too young and therefore refuse me.

The 2nd of June was a lovely day and Charlie and I proceeded to attend the gathering in an Ospringe field that evening. We listened to the speech followed by a powerful plea for the men to come forward to do their duty to God, King and Country. We two walked proudly forward to do just that and Charlie was interviewed first.

Much to George’s surprise, Charlie was rejected by the recruiting sergeants as being under age.

I thought, ‘Well, that’s done it, they certainly won’t take me.’ However, I gave my name and my age as nineteen. Forthwith, I was asked further questions, the answers to which were written on a form which I had to sign. While this was going on, my disappointed colleague looked on and all the time I expected him to blurt out that they should take him as he was two years older than me. But he kept quiet and was so pleased that I had succeeded.

Derby’s advice not to threaten or bully was all well and good, but threats and bullying had been precisely the tactics used by many of those charged with finding recruits, and they had often proved productive, especially among boys. In the late summer of 1915, Hal Kerridge was still sixteen years old when he was accosted by recruiting sergeants in Richmond in Surrey.

You had sergeants wandering about all along the pavements and anybody who looked a likely soldier they’d stop, positively stop you, and ask you to join up and walk beside you and try and pester you to join.

William Bagwell was one parent who became very annoyed at the tactics. In early October 1915 his son Clarence had been accosted on his way home from work by a recruiting sergeant. ‘He was almost forced with others by a crowd to the recruiting office,’ his father wrote. Despite telling the sergeant that he was only sixteen, Clarence was told to lie. ‘The lad was quite disheartened when he came home. He is not a very strong lad, we have had quite a lot of trouble with him.’ William Bagwell forwarded his son’s birth certificate.

This form of coercion was becoming all too common. The Adjutant of the 4/10th Middlesex Regiment wrote to the War Office requesting to release not only Bagwell but another boy he named as Private Mills, aged fifteen. Significantly, the letter added that the recruiting sergeant had clearly acted with ‘very misplaced zeal’, especially as Bagwell’s age had never been concealed.

The fullest enquiries are being made to find who the sergeant in question was with a view to withdrawing him from the recruiting staff if no satisfactory explanation is forthcoming. It seems that the approval and examination of recruits at the administrative centre must occasionally be carried out in a somewhat lax way as these letters from parents are very frequent now.

News of intimidation came to the attention of Sir Arthur Markham, who raised the issue in the Commons, challenging Tennant to give instructions to the recruiting sergeants to desist from insulting and intimidating persons living in the Mansfield division. Was the Undersecretary of State for War aware, he asked, that at recruitment meetings held in Mansfield, speakers had threatened to boycott tradesmen who, it was alleged, had refused permission to their sons to enlist? He also inquired as to whether Tennant knew

that a youth of fifteen years of age from New Annesley, in the Mansfield Division of Nottinghamshire, has constantly been accosted and insulted by recruiting sergeants in Nottingham, who informed him that he was a rotter and a slacker, and that he was not telling the truth when he told them his age was fifteen.

Such practices were ‘contrary to the spirit of voluntary enlistment and the policy laid down by the Prime Minister’. In reply, Tennant stated merely that he had ‘instituted an inquiry’.

The enlistment of some young recruits could scarcely be called voluntary. In September 1915 a county magistrate and MP, Sir Frederick Banbury, was sitting in court as usual, next to the chairman, when