World War One

This is a huge subject and Tim wanted to “cover it all”!  He therefore took us from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 through to Armistice Day on 11 November 1918 at Compiegne in France at a pretty high level, picking out especially interesting matters along the way.

And his eloquent commentary was embellished with copious facts and statistics, maps and diagrams, as well as his respectful reporting of the moving stories of some of the many individual heroes and heroines.

The many highlights included:

• The German invasion of Belgium, the subsequent battle at Mons where Lieutenant Maurice Dease (posthumously) and Private Sidney Godley were awarded the first Victoria Crosses of the war, and the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force towards Paris.
• The Battle of Le Cateau at Le Cateau-Cambrésis.
• The “Affair of Néry” and the heroic rearguard action of L Battery Royal Horse Artillery – three more Victoria Crosses were won and the battery was awarded the honour title of “Néry”.
• Lord Kitchener’s “Your Country Needs You” recruitment drive for his New Army and the various “Pals” battalions – such as the Manchester Pals, Grimsby Chums, and the Football Battalion – in which men who had enlisted together served alongside their friends, neighbours, and colleagues rather than being arbitrarily allocated to battalions.
• The famous Christmas Truce of 1914.
• Cuinchy where Sergeant Michael O’Leary was awarded the Victoria Cross for single-handedly charging and destroying two German machine gun posts. Also, where Lance Corporal John Morrison was killed in 1915.  A farmer made a chance discovery of a spoon engraved with his service number “5181”.  This enabled his remains to be discovered and then buried at the nearby Woburn Abbey Cemetery in December 2016.
• Mabel Florence Lethbridge BEM who lied about her age in order to work in the National Munitions Filling Factory in Hayes and was severely injured when a shell she was packing exploded. She later became “the first woman to own and run an estate agency”.
• Women’s football – women working in the dangerous munitions industry and other factories began to play football during lunchbreaks. Eventually some organised themselves into teams, such as the Jarrow Ladies FC and Blyth Spartans Ladies FC, and staged matches which attracted crowds of thousands.  And the Munitionettes Cup was a knock-out competition between women’s football teams.  In 1921 the FA concluded that football was “unsuitable” for women and banned women’s teams from playing football on League and Association-affiliated grounds, effectively banning women’s football.
• The explosion at the National Shell Filling Factory, Chilwell, Nottinghamshire, in 1918. 134 people were killed, of whom only 32 could be positively identified, and a further 250 were injured.  Nevertheless, the factory returned to work for the war effort the next day and within one month of the disaster reportedly achieved its highest weekly production.  The factory was awarded the Victoria Cross.  During the war it filled some 19 million shells with high explosives.  (The unidentified bodies are buried in a mass grave at nearby St Mary’s Church Attenborough.)
• Louise Marie Jeanne Henriette de Bettignies, who was a French secret agent operating under the code name Alice Dubois, spied on the Germans for the British. She set up an intelligence network – the Alice Network – and apparently carried messages written in lemon juice on her petticoats (they became visible when the petticoats were ironed).  She reported the preparations for a massive German attack at Verdun in 1916 but the French commander refused to believe it.  (Subsequently the French suffered over 350,000 casualties in the Battle of Verdun.)
• The 40,000lb mine exploded under the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt in July 1916 filmed by Geoffrey Mallins, an official war cameraman.
• A “body density map” of the Battle of the Somme showing the number of soldiers killed in squares on a map of the battlefield. Each square was 166 x 166 yards and was subdivided into four squares of 83 x 83 yards.  In some instances there were more than 750 deaths within a single square of 83 x 83 yards.
• The Zimmermann Telegram, a secret diplomatic communication from the German Foreign Office to the German ambassador to Mexico, in January 1917 that proposed a military alliance between the German Empire and Mexico if the United States entered the war against Germany. With Germany’s aid, Mexico would recover Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.  The telegram was intercepted and decrypted by British Intelligence and had as much to do with the United States declaring war on Germany in April as the sinking of the Lusitania two years previously.

Tim finished with a poignant picture of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey adorned with red poppies of remembrance.

Tim’s numerous fascinating photographs (old and new) showed all aspects of wartime activities – key battlefields (both then and now), trenches and tunnels, troops training and on battlefields, aid stations, medals, munitions factories and workers back in Britain, as well as cemeteries large and small, war graves, monuments, memorials, and much more.

This was a fascinating and enlightening talk, eloquently and knowledgably presented, and extensively illustrated by Tim’s collection of evocative images.