Boy Soldiers of the Great War (27 page)

Just as the League was writing to Markham, Markham in turn was in correspondence with Lord Derby. Ironically, Derby had written to him in the hope of enlisting his sister Violet to help in his campaign. Markham diplomatically made no mention of his contacts with Curnock, but one has the impression that a delicate political game was being played out by all three men, each with his own agenda.

28th October, 1915

Dear Lord Derby

I had intended asking a question in Parliament next week about your recruiting campaign, but perhaps you would rather I wrote to you about the matter. The point on which I wish information is whether under your campaign you are going to continue to take boys of 15 and 16 years of age as has been done under the old system.

Since I raised this matter in Parliament I have had quite a snowball of letters [up to 300 a day] from people all over the country saying that their sons have enlisted against their wishes, and in some cases boys of 14 have actually been enlisted. I think it would be very much better to reduce the age limit to … if you wish 17½, but I do not think it is right to continue taking these young lads who for patriotic reasons make false declarations. Before the war is over, these boys will probably be wanted and you are, therefore, destroying useful material.

I do not think any voluntary system which openly connives at taking young lads while others remain at home can be justified or defended. Now that you have the Register there ought to be no difficulty in ascertaining the ages of the recruits you are enlisting.

I hope now that the matter of recruiting has passed into your hands, you will put a stop to this scandal.

Yours sincerely

Arthur B. Markham

Derby’s answer arrived the next day:

Dear Sir Arthur

I am in receipt of your letter. I am entirely agreed with what you say about enlisting boys and very strict orders have been sent out to recruiting officers that they are not to do so. It is quite
young enough to take them at 18 and then not send them abroad for a year and anything I can do to carry this out I shall most certainly do.

Yours sincerely

Derby

Curnock’s first letter to Markham was dated the next day, and pursued the idea that the War Office should insist on the mandatory examination of birth certificates on enlistment, not only to prevent so many young boys joining up but also to stop men over the current maximum age of forty-one trying to enlist fraudulently.

I estimate that scores of thousands of useless underage boys and over-age married men have been taken into the army and are still being taken by recruiting officers with the result that the Nation pays for a worthless article, and the article when bought is a continual source of trouble to the War Office and the army. All this might be avoided by insistence upon a birth certificate …

His letter concludes: ‘If you like to take the matter up in Parliament, I can give you any number of sound cases to proceed upon, including a “Gunner” of 14!’

I am glad to have your letter saying you have issued instructions to recruiting officers not to enlist boys, but I would remind you that the War Office have repeatedly given the same answer in Parliament that boys would not be enlisted; nevertheless the recruiting officers totally ignore the instructions.

The form of declaration the medical men have to make does not even permit the doctor to say a recruit is under age. Some doctors
say they well know the recruits who have been enlisted are under age.

Now that you have the Register and all people of military age have registration cards, it seems that the sensible thing to do is to instruct the recruiting officers that they are not to enlist any person unless he produces his registration card …

The country is under a very great debt of gratitude to you for all you have done and are doing in the matter of recruiting, and I do not desire, therefore, in any way to criticize or make any suggestions in Parliament which might in the smallest degree cause you any annoyance …

Yours sincerely

Arthur Markham

The suggestion that birth certificates ought to be produced on enlistment continued to be rejected by the Government. It was a decision that Markham appears to have accepted. His reply to Curnock has not survived, but his proposition to Derby of the alternative use of the Registration card had been recognized, as is evident from Curnock’s next reply to Markham:

Very many thanks for your letter and the most practical suggestion that the Registration Card should be produced by all recruits, an obvious and easy precaution against the enlistment of immature boys and old men; if, as I presume, the ‘Class Number’ is an indication of age …

I shall be very pleased to give you all the time necessary to a full examination of the cases brought to my notice.

Yours faithfully

George C. Curnock

Despite Sir Arthur’s tendency to exaggerate at times, his letters to Derby indicate that he was an adept political player, praising and cajoling, respectful but mildly threatening.

He already knew the answer when, on 10 November, he rose in the House and asked the Undersecretary of War:

Seeing that all persons who desire to join the army have now in their possession a registration card, will he, to prevent boys being enlisted, give instructions to the recruiting officers that no recruits are to be enlisted who do not produce their registration cards?

Tennant replied:

Recruiting officers have already been instructed to examine the registration cards of recruits presenting themselves, and their attestation is being directed specifically to the question of age.

This was a breakthrough for Sir Arthur. Even if the change was not of his own making, his persuasion might well have brought the concession that recruiting sergeants were to pay special attention to a recruit’s age. The truth was that the Government had every intention of ordering the scrutiny of registration cards. A great effort had been expended in generating an accurate record of the nation’s available manpower, and there would have been no point in subsequently losing track of thousands of individuals by ignoring registration cards and permitting continued fraudulent enlistment.

With registration came rules governing where a man could enlist. For administrative purposes, the country had been divided up into areas and sub-areas. While a man could enlist anywhere in the country, area commanders accepting a recruit had to register the address against each man’s name, as well as full particulars regarding his enlistment.

In the case of men who have been registered outside the recruiting area in which they present themselves for enlistment, it will be necessary to notify all particulars regarding the man’s rejection or enlistment to the area commander concerned, i.e., the commander of the area in which the place where the address given by the man on his registration form is situated.

This information would also be passed on to the sub-area, making it far harder to enlist and harder still to disappear into the army. The days when boys ran away from Kent to Scotland to enlist incognito had largely gone. As it was a legal requirement to carry a registration card, there could be little excuse for a volunteer not to present one, and, just as importantly, little excuse for the recruiting sergeant not to look. A boy’s enlistment in the past had often relied as much on the willingness of the sergeant to turn a blind eye as it did on the boy to lie convincingly; it would be harder now for a sergeant to ignore the instructions.

The information carried on the card was basic. Each card had the name of the holder, his profession and address. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no designated place to write the owner’s class number, and it was usually – but by no means always – written next to the recruit’s job description. Another apparent weakness was the absence of an identifying photograph, opening up the potential for a recruit to use someone else’s card. This was an offence taken much more seriously than merely falsifying a birth date in a flash of patriotism.

Registration would do nothing to help the thousands of boys who had enlisted before 15 August. Release would remain dependent on families making an application for their son’s temporary removal from the firing line, or, if he was under seventeen years old, his probable – but not guaranteed – discharge.

The linking of the registration card to the enlistment process must have pleased Markham, but he was still driven by his distrust of the War Office and Government to tackle the whole
problem head on. He was well aware that the majority of those he had set out to help were already in the army, and their immediate future was far from being settled other than by shell explosion or bullet. It is clear from Markham’s letter to Derby that, reluctantly, he would countenance seventeen-year-olds serving in France, but that boys as young as fifteen or sixteen were still soldiers remained a disgrace.

The Derby Scheme, originally intended to finish in November, was extended to December in a final effort by the Government to procure the numbers needed through the voluntary system. In the light of this extension, George Curnock wrote to Sir Arthur again. Curnock was concerned that Markham should not rest content in the knowledge that recruiting sergeants would now examine Registration cards. ‘I hope you were not satisfied with the answers on November 10th and will continue to interest yourself in the underage enlistment question …’ wrote Curnock on 15 November.

Conscription was so close that Curnock was unwilling to relax for a moment. Throughout November, he continued to feed Markham information on boy soldiers, encouraging the MP to raise their harrowing stories in the Commons. Curnock highlighted two battalions of the London Regiment, one the ‘Wandsworth Regulars’ as he called them and one raised in Bermondsey, which, he claimed, were inundated with underage recruits. He wrote:

I have written to the Mayor of Bermondsey, asking him if it is a fact that he has many boys of 14 to 16 in the Regiment, including two who enlisted on the day after they left school at the age of 14.

He also raised the pitiful case of a boy badly wounded at Gallipoli.

The enclosed notes will I trust be useful to you and your friends in the House. They summarize the case against the War Office in the matter of boy soldiers. I hope you will see in ‘The Daily Mail’
tomorrow a little article I have just sent to the Editor, describing one of the boy victims. As you may wish to refer to this case in the House I send you the following particulars:

Pte James Henry Robinson, 1st Lancashire Fusiliers.

Enlisted at Fleetwood, Lancashire, when 17 years and 3 days old.

Told by recruiting sergeant, who knew him well, to say he was 19.

Allowed to volunteer for Dardanelles after
1
month’s training.

Shot in both legs and right hand on landing.

Sent back to England.

Left leg amputated above the knee after six months’ agony.

Now at Westminster Hospital where Members of your House can see him and hear his story.

Hopes to work again as a grocer’s assistant ‘when I get my wooden leg’ …

It is perhaps a sign of Markham’s impetuous nature that he took the story of Private Robinson direct to the floor of the Commons on the very same day. In what was one of the most rancorous exchanges in the House, he addressed his fellow MPs:

I do not like to use strong language, but when the facts are strong, strong language is warranted. I do not think that there has ever been a period in the whole history of the British Army, except under the direction of Lord Kitchener, when the word of a British officer has not been synonymous with that of a gentleman … There has been fraud, deceit, and lying practised by the War Office. You have taken boys of the ages of fourteen, fifteen and sixteen rather than face the issue of Conscription … You have taken these boys knowing that they were boys, and then the War Office have said that they did not think they were under age. You have said that you would not send them to the Front until they
have reached the official age, but you have time after time broken this promise and sent little lads to the Front.

I have here hundreds of letters of cases where the War Office, knowing that the ages of these boys are fifteen, sixteen or seventeen, and after they have received the [birth] certificates from the parents, have written back saying the age of the boy [on the enlistment papers] is the official age, knowing what they are saying is untrue. Yet they have the impudence to write to the parents saying it is not their wish or intention that boys under nineteen should go out.

There is a boy in Westminster Hospital today who was sent, when seventeen years of age, to the Dardanelles. He had only one month’s training. He has had a leg amputated, and is now within two hundred yards of this House.

The honest and right thing for the War Office to do is to reduce the age limit, and to say so now. What is the objection to taking youths of seventeen and a half or eighteen? Let boys go at that age to serve their country, if you like, but do not put it forward in your official papers that nobody will be taken under the age of nineteen, and then take little boys of fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, who are totally unfitted to fight for their country when older boys are not doing their duty.

Rising, Harold Tennant replied, as he had on so many occasions, with equal force: