News from the Front - 13th April 2023
The weekly newsletter from from 1914-1918 - The First World War.
News from the Front exists to share great stories and interesting historical aspects of the First World War.
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One anniversary
The death of William Gladstone MP
The 13th April marks the anniversary of the death of William Gladstone, grandson of the former Prime Minister, in combat on the Western Front.
Gladstone was a serving Member of Parliament when the Great War broke out and help with recruitment efforts in Flintshire, which he represented. He was not a natural warrior, writing in August 1914 that “far from having the least inclination for military service, I dread it and dislike it intensely.” However, despite these misgivings, and after a brief flirtation with the idea of enlisting as a private soldier, he joined up and was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.
On completion of his training, he was sent to France, arriving in mid-March and being sent up to the front lines on the 21st March. Gladstone’s combat career was brief, and he was shot by a sniper near Laventie in France on April 13th whilst engaged in a trench raid. He died shortly afterwards.
His family wrote to the Prime Minister and the King and received permission for his body to be brought home for burial alongside other members of his family in Hawarden, Flintshire, and he was buried on the 23rd of April 1915. In the early stages of the war, it was possible for families, particularly those who were well-connected or not short of money, to organise the repatriation of their loved ones. This had the unfortunate effect of showing that, even in death, one’s social class would affect the way that you were treated, as it was mainly officers who were repatriated. Understandably, this was not a great message to be sending when you’re in the middle of recruiting and training a large citizen army that would, necessarily, result in many deaths amongst the poorer, less well-connected, working classes.
As a result of this, and other cases, in 1916, a blanket ban on repatriations was put in place. Major Fabian Ware, of the Red Cross, lobbied for the ban, citing the need for all men to be equal in death, however, the official reason given was the sheer logistics of bringing large quantities of bodies home and the impact on morale of all these acutely visible burials. For obvious reasons, none of the original combatant powers were willing to commit to returning their war dead early in the war when the scale of the task was still unfolding before them. An exception to this rule is the United States which, after the war, repatriated the bodies of around 40,000 soldiers to American soil.
As for Gladstone, you can still see his grave in St Deniol’s Church, Hawarden, so we’ll leave the last word to him. This was taken from a letter he wrote to his mother during his brief spell in the trenches.
"You will be wrong if you regret my coming, for I am very glad and proud to have got to the Front. It is not the length of existence that counts, but what is achieved during that existence, however short."
One news story
Heugh Battery restoration funding
Heugh Battery, an artillery emplacement in Hartlepool has been given funding from Historic England to help safeguard the site for future visitors.
The gun emplacements, now a museum, helped to defend the town of Hartlepool against German raiding ships during the Great War. The artillery site has the distinction of being the only First World War battlefield site actually in Britain.
In recent years, part of the site has been closed as the concrete and metalwork has succumbed to the ravages of time and parts of the site have struggled with flooding issues. The funding from Historic England will help initially with a survey to understand the scale of the deterioration.
Tom Gledhill, who’s an Historic England employee, and works on helping sites that are at risk said, "The Heugh Battery is one of the most important historic military sites in England. We are really pleased to be working with the Heugh Gun Battery Trust to restore this cherished local attraction."
This is not the first time that the museum has been given help; the Swedish heavy metal band Sabaton, who specialise in writing and performing songs about the Great War, previously donated £4000 from the sales of a t-shirt to help keep the museum open.
One from the archives
Old Bill
This week’s one from the archives is a cartoon showing Bruce Bairnsfather’s iconic British soldier “Old Bill” enjoying a bit of a snooze.
Bairnsfather was born in 1887 in India and in the early 1900s, joined the Cheshire Regiment after failing his entrance exams for Sandhurst and Woolwich. He left the army in 1907 and trained as an artist, with mixed results.
In 1914, he joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, commanding a machine gun unit as a 2nd Lieutenant. While serving in France, he sketched various scenes from his daily life and drew cartoons, sending some of the off to the “Bystander” magazine for potential publication. He recorded his time in France in his diary-memoir “Bullets and Billets”, which you can read on Project Gutenberg if you fancy it (I also serialised it on my podcast, which can be found in all good podcast apps and here). His other cartoons are published in his book, “Fragments from France”.
Bairnsfather was injured in 1915 when a shell exploded near to him, damaging his hearing and leading to his hospitalisation for shellshock.
Whilst his depictions of grumbling “Old Bill” and his trials and tribulations weren’t to everyone’s taste, being far from the heroic images seen in propaganda posters, they were popular with the public. This popularity kept Bairnsfather in business during the rest of the war and in the post war period, leading to work as an artist for the United States during the Second World War.
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