Northern Industrial Slums: The Working Class and the Great War

[Guest]

On 03/12/2017 at 12:01, Phil Wood said:

This thread prompted me to compare my own town - Newbury in soft southern Berkshire with a northern town.  I picked on Accrington - where all those pals were lost.

 

I looked at them in a very crude manner - comparing their 1911 populations and the number of names on their great war memorials.  The result surprised me.

 

Newbury 339 casualties, population 12107 - casualty ratio 2.8%

Accrington 865 casualties, population 45029 - casualty ratio 1.9%

 

I know that names on a war memorial is a poor measure of casualties, nevertheless this seems to suggest that the southern slums made a greater sacrifice than the nothern ones. How could this be?  Did the more industrialised town have a higher proportion of younger men exempt from conscription? DId Newbury had a higher proportion of junior officers?

 

Phil.something has been troubling me with these stats and the penny has just dropped.your population for Newbury is understated by a considerable margin. 

 

Your calculation for Newbury only takes into account Newbury Rural District. You need to add Newbury Metropolitan Borough which is another 10,757.  You will see on the Boundary image on Visions of Britian the the Rural District effectively surrounds but does not include the town itself. When you add the Metroplitan Borough to your 12,107 it increases the population by 89% to 22,864. The casualty ratio therefore drops to 1.5% on the correct population base. Unsurprisingly this is below Accrington's fatal casualty ratio. 

 

 

 

 

 

I trust you you don't mind me pointing this out. It is worth reminding ourselves that casualties and fatal casualties are only a crude measure of any community's contribution to the war. 

 

 

[Phil Wood]

On 04/12/2017 at 11:48, QGE said:

 

Phil.something has been troubling me with these stats and the penny has just dropped.your population for Newbury is understated by a considerable margin. 

 

Your calculation for Newbury only takes into account Newbury Rural District. You need to add Newbury Metropolitan Borough which is another 10,757.  You will see on the Boundary image on Visions of Britian the the Rural District effectively surrounds but does not include the town itself. When you add the Metroplitan Borough to your 12,107 it increases the population by 89% to 22,864. The casualty ratio therefore drops to 1.5% on the correct population base. Unsurprisingly this is below Accrington's fatal casualty ratio. 

Click

MG

 

I trust you you don't mind me pointing this out. It is worth reminding ourselves that casualties and fatal casualties are only a crude measure of any community's contribution to the war. 

 

No  - the population figure I used was for the Municipal Borough - 12,107 - and the number on the town memorial - 339.  There is some overlap in that a few names from adjoining parishes appear on the Borough memorial - notably where the town had burst the boundaries of the Borough - but these and other overcounts in the memorial figure (emigrants etc) are counterbalanced by the dead who are not on the memorial (I have a list of around 100 to investigate once I finish researching those who are on the memorial - I'm sure the number will fall when I do this).  War memorial counts are not a measure that gives me a lot of confidence, but I can't see a better alternative.

 

If I added the Rural District population I would need to add the number of names on the 18 war memorials in the indvidual villages that make up the district - some of which I now realise suffered considerably worse proportionate losses than Newbury (thanks for getting me looking at them).   There are 412 names on their war memorials - 3.8% of 10,757, worse losses than Newbury itself. The largest village, Thatcham, has 4.5% losses based on this measure (108 out of 2,416). 

 

So I now wonder if rural populations were worse hit than urban? This could easily arise if proportionally more men were fit to serve and fewer were in badged occupations.

 

It is interesting that the national figure (assuming 700,000 deaths) is around 1.6%.

 

 

 

[phil andrade]

Four and a half percent of a community’s total population is quite extreme: bearing in mind a rough and ready estimate that male population of military age equates to one fifth of population, the implication is that between one fifth and one quarter of the men available for service died .

 

I suspect that men from rural communities were more inclined to front line service than their urban counterparts : perhaps they were more eager to escape the toil and constraint of parochial life.

 

Maybe those very conditions made them reconcile more readily to the hardships of the soldier’s life.

 

Phil 

[Guest]

On 04/12/2017 at 20:04, Phil Wood said:

 

No  - the population figure I used was for the Municipal Borough - 12,107 - and the number on the town memorial - 339.  There is some overlap in that a few names from adjoining parishes appear on the Borough memorial - notably where the town had burst the boundaries of the Borough - but these and other overcounts in the memorial figure (emigrants etc) are counterbalanced by the dead who are not on the memorial (I have a list of around 100 to investigate once I finish researching those who are on the memorial - I'm sure the number will fall when I do this).  War memorial counts are not a measure that gives me a lot of confidence, but I can't see a better alternative.

 

If I added the Rural District population I would need to add the number of names on the 18 war memorials in the indvidual villages that make up the district - some of which I now realise suffered considerably worse proportionate losses than Newbury (thanks for getting me looking at them).   There are 412 names on their war memorials - 3.8% of 10,757, worse losses than Newbury itself. The largest village, Thatcham, has 4.5% losses based on this measure (108 out of 2,416). 

 

So I now wonder if rural populations were worse hit than urban? This could easily arise if proportionally more men were fit to serve and fewer were in badged occupations.

 

It is interesting that the national figure (assuming 700,000 deaths) is around 1.6%.

 

 

 

 

Phil - thanks for the clarification on MB and RD 

 

SMEBE page 636 shows for England that 11.57% of the population enlisted and 24.02% of the male population enlisted. Applying these figures to Newbury's 12,107  would imply 1,401 men enlisted (based on pop of 12,107) or 1,364 enlisted( based on male pop of 5,680) Fatalities of 366 would imply fatality ratios between 26.1% and 26.8% or more than double the national average. Is this remotely possible?  Put another way for Newbury's fatal casualties to come close to the national average would mean that they enlisted in more than double the proportions. 

 

I would be interested in understanding how many of the 366 on the Newbury Memorial can be identified on the 1911 Census. Have they been linked back to the Census?  Is there anywhere I can see the complete list? Is it possible that men are on the memorial who were not on the 1911 Census for Newbury MB? 

 

 

[Phil Wood]

On 04/12/2017 at 21:36, QGE said:

 

Phil - thanks for the clarification on MB and RD 

 

SMEBE page 636 shows for England that 11.57% of the population enlisted and 24.02% of the male population enlisted. Applying these figures to Newbury's 12,107  would imply 1,401 men enlisted (based on pop of 12,107) or 1,364 enlisted( based on male pop of 5,680) Fatalities of 366 would imply fatality ratios between 26.1% and 26.8% or more than double the national average. Is this remotely possible?  Put another way for Newbury's fatal casualties to come close to the national average would mean that they enlisted in more than double the proportions. 

 

I would be interested in understanding how many of the 366 on the Newbury Memorial can be identified on the 1911 Census. Have they been linked back to the Census?  Is there anywhere I can see the complete list? Is it possible that men are on the memorial who were not on the 1911 Census for Newbury MB? 

 

 

 

SMEBE - the page is 363.

 

The Newbury war memorial has 339 names - a list can be found here and the stories of 290 of them here - as far as I recall all 290 and another 20 or so have been found on censuses, almost all on the 1911, but a few had migrated away by then, others hadn't migrated in. I have Newbury addresses for all but a very few. 

 

One of the issues with memorials as a measure of loss is that the numbers are far from precise; the Newbury memorial has a few names of men who may never have lived here - but their wives did at the time the memorial was erected, or who had left here, but their parents remained and had them added to the memorial. Appearance on multiple memorials is common - the effect of migration within the UK - I am not sure (let me rephrase that, I haven't got a clue) whether the imprecise nature of the ways names were chosen means that memorial numbers inflate or deflate numbers over all. I can't help suspecting that village memorials will be more accurate than urban ones - smaller communities would surely have a better grasp of the situation than large ones.  Nevetheless war memorial numbers is a very imprecise measure. On the other hand these issues will affect most memorials so, for comparative purposes, their numbers have some merit.

 

As for the number who served - I have a list from the local paper of 1186 who volunteered, (Newbury Borough) once conscription took effect the list was seemingly abandoned - obviously conscripts would inflate the figure considerably.  The list does include a couple of hundred National Reserves, many of whom were over military service age.  Similar lists exist for all the local villages - but I don't have them all digitised (another job for the future).

 

1,364 seems to me to be a low figure for Newbury - more evidence to suggest that it was rural areas that took a disporportionate share of the load? I return to the idea that better fitness and lack of war industry meant higher levels of recruitment in rural areas (I would include a market town like Newbury as 'rural' in this context.

 

I don't think the divide is North/South  - look at Richmond, Yorks - 15-24 yr olds 1911 = 399, 25-34 yr olds 1921 = 293,  a remarkably close match to the 101 names on the memorial (1911 pop = 3,934) a 2.6% attrition rate.  The pattern is pretty close to that of Newbury and well above the national figure.

[Guest]

On 04/12/2017 at 23:28, Phil Wood said:

 

SMEBE - the page is 363.

 

The Newbury war memorial has 339 names - a list can be found here and the stories of 290 of them here - as far as I recall all 290 and another 20 or so have been found on censuses, almost all on the 1911, but a few had migrated away by then, others hadn't migrated in. I have Newbury addresses for all but a very few. 

 

One of the issues with memorials as a measure of loss is that the numbers are far from precise; the Newbury memorial has a few names of men who may never have lived here - but their wives did at the time the memorial was erected, or who had left here, but their parents remained and had them added to the memorial. Appearance on multiple memorials is common - the effect of migration within the UK - I am not sure (let me rephrase that, I haven't got a clue) whether the imprecise nature of the ways names were chosen means that memorial numbers inflate or deflate numbers over all. I can't help suspecting that village memorials will be more accurate than urban ones - smaller communities would surely have a better grasp of the situation than large ones.  Nevetheless war memorial numbers is a very imprecise measure. On the other hand these issues will affect most memorials so, for comparative purposes, their numbers have some merit.

 

As for the number who served - I have a list from the local paper of 1186 who volunteered, (Newbury Borough) once conscription took effect the list was seemingly abandoned - obviously conscripts would inflate the figure considerably.  The list does include a couple of hundred National Reserves, many of whom were over military service age.  Similar lists exist for all the local villages - but I don't have them all digitised (another job for the future).

 

1,364 seems to me to be a low figure for Newbury - more evidence to suggest that it was rural areas that took a disporportionate share of the load? I return to the idea that better fitness and lack of war industry meant higher levels of recruitment in rural areas (I would include a market town like Newbury as 'rural' in this context.

 

I don't think the divide is North/South  - look at Richmond, Yorks - 15-24 yr olds 1911 = 399, 25-34 yr olds 1921 = 293,  a remarkably close match to the 101 names on the memorial (1911 pop = 3,934) a 2.6% attrition rate.  The pattern is pretty close to that of Newbury and well above the national figure.

 

 

Thanks Ian. It is an impressive amount of work. Trying to trace the names to men in the SDGW and CWGC must have been quite challenging. I tried to resolve the list on the IWM with CWGC and could only match 111 with any degree of confidence. It was very rough and ready though.... As I am sure you are aware there are a stack of men whose parents lived in 'Newbury' who are not on the town memorial. Like most provincial towns the lines on the maps are not always observed when describing places. I note 'Newbury' is a suffix to most surrounding villages in the CWGC data. It must have been a nightmare untangling that bird's nest.  

 

Your conclusions are very thought provoking.  It would be interesting to understand how many men on the 1911 Census you believe enlisted. I suspect one might reasonably double the 1186 who volunteered on the vol/conscription ratio of 50/50. That would make around nearly 2,372 of a male population aged 15-45 (1911 Census) of 2,589. That would imply an enlistment ratio of 92%.  This seems impossibly high. It would imply a  only 8% didn't enlist. It is all predicated on the Newbury Borough Newspaper figure of 1,186 for the volunteer period. Even adjusting down for a few hundred National Reserves we would get 2,172  or  84%.  Staggering.  Is there any remotes chance they were conflating Newbury MB with outlying areas? On that basis Newbury could have raised two battalions on its own. 

 

92%. I am now fascinated to better understand enlistment ratios across the country. 

 

Can anyone suggest a community - preferably an isolated town in the middle of the country  - that has a War Memorial that has been analysed?  I need to start registering some targets for some analysis.

 

[Phil Wood]

I can't believe in 92% - fitness levels can't have been that good, and there were some in reserved occupations

 

.  The effect of conscription was probably considerably lower than a doubling of the volunteers - simply because so many had volunteered there weren't so many left to conscript. 

 

I don't know how tight they were in compiling the list, but the Newbury one was maintained by the Borough Education Officer so there was a borough focus. Adjoining parishes all had lists too - which seemed to be some sort of recruiting tool - settlements competing to be the one with the highest percentage of volunteers. Each list had the population of the settlement so comparison could be made (I think they used the 1911 figures). I have come across men who would have been on the list had their names been submitted - men from Newbury who were Regulars or Kitchener volunteers. Again I take the broad brush approach and consider (without a shred of evidence) that there is a rough balance between those who maybe shoudn't be there and those who should but weren't.

 

The work I have done could not have been acheived without the local paper - many of the identifications came through their columns. Some were a real pain - and a few remain unidentified.  Several are in error a number of names changed when the memorial was refurbished and extended in 1950, there are a number of (I believe) duplicated names - which I cannot prove of course, and a number of them are unrecorded by the CWGC - several of which I have been able to bring In From the Cold, others don't have the necessary documentary evidence. The memorial was quite a late one (Oct 1922) so there are also a couple who fall outside the CWGC qualifying period.

 

I posted in this thread because I have become aware that it is in many ways an average memorial - the number of omitted names appears typical for medium sized memorials, the attrition rate seemed normal at about 15% of those serving (assuming about 2200 serving - my extrapolation from the 1186),  but I hadn't compared it in terms of percentage of total population etc. I am now thinking that it falls twixt two stools - the truly rural everyone knows everyone else communities with very accurate war memorial numbers and the faceless urban communities where someone from the next street is a stranger - with the resultant omission of names.

 

I do have a list of about 80 names selected from the CWGC & SWDGW databases on the basis of a Newbury address for the next of kin, birth etc - I have filtered out all those that are obviously from around Newbury, but not within. When I get to looking seriously at them I would not be surprised to lose a good chunk, 20% or so, on the same, if less obvious, basis.  These and others found in Newspaper reports etc are in the section for the Newbury Virtual Memorial on my website - here.

 

However, I think it is unwise to read too much into absolute figures of war memorial numbers - there is definitely inflation in regard to any snapshot figure of pre-war population. It would be interesting to understand how many of the names on the memorials (real and virtual) were in town on census night 1911.  It could well be fewer than the 339 on the memorial.   I shall check a subset and see what trend emerges.

 

Dates could also be an issue - 11 of the 330 names I have identified died after the armistice.  8 of them are not recognised by the CWGC (which reminds me to get the In From the Cold case sorted out for the one for whom I do have the necessary paperwork).

 

 

[Phil Wood]

Okay - based on a small sample size (25 names) it looks like any assumption of absolute correlation between the 1911 census and the war memorial would be folly indeed.

 

25 total - 10 in Newbury in 1911, 3 in local villages (1 in the town but not the borough), 5 in the Navy or Army, 2 away at school, 6 elsewhere (not in Berkshire) and 2 not found. So only 40% in Newbury on census night.  All have reasonable reasons to be on the memorial.

 

I shall look at some more . . .

[Phil Wood]

76 names checked - 47% in town for the 1911 census.

[Guest]

Phil - many thanks for the continued input. It is fascinating. 

 

I suspect the Memorial included men on just about every qualification. I can see about a dozen who qualify by dint of the fact their parents lived on the boundary, butsjust outside. This is understandable but does distort the data. There are others who may have at some stage lived in the MB but who were certainly living elsewhere when they died. Small but important adjustments. 

 

Separately I looked at my local town/memorial  and the relevant data - Chichester, a nice regional town within a fairly rural setting -  and the rough numbers (based on the memorial data of 170) suggest 6.2% fatalities of the 1911 men aged 15 - 44 and  2.9% of all men and 1.4% of total population in 1911.  Incidentally total population is  12,591 or within 4% of Newbury's population. Edit if the 10-14 year olds are included the ratio drops from 6.2% to 5.2%. This cohort saw a -36% drop in numbers between each Census. 

 

I then looked at the Isle of Wight (which I can see from my study) which seems like an excellent 'clean' sample that limits spillover by dint of the fact it is an island. It also had its own dedicated unit - the Isle of Wight Rifles that fought at Gallipoli. The same data  (again simply based on the County's memorial of 1,624 names) comes to 8.48% of 15-44 age group and 3.92% of all males and 1.84% of total population.. Interestingly if I extended the observation group to include 10-14 year olds in 1911 on the assumption that the 11, 12, 13 and 14 year olds would be 18, 19,  20 and 21 by 1918 the ratio drops to 7% on the increased denominator. It is worth noting that the cohort of 10 -14 year olds in 1911 who would be the 20-24 year olds in 1921 saw a  massive -31% drop in numbers Census on Census. ...which makes me wonder if this cohort should be in the denominator for all calculations. 

 

Either way on these two small and random samples I cant get anything close to Newbury MB. As and when I find suitable study towns I will build a lot more reference points. Ideally I need to find communities of roughly the same size to  make comparison  more meaningful. Full of caveats - particularly the accuracy of the memorial's ability to accurately  capture men in the area of enumeration for the 1911 Census ..... but it is an interesting exercise.  

 

[kenf48]

5 hours ago, Phil Wood said:

 

more evidence to suggest that it was rural areas that took a disporportionate share of the load? I return to the idea that better fitness and lack of war industry meant higher levels of recruitment in rural areas (I would include a market town like Newbury as 'rural' in this context.

 

 

The evidence is that rural areas were very under represented during the period of voluntary recruitment from August 1914 to February 1916.  As every man of military age ordinarily resident in the UK was deemed to have been enlisted after the introduction of the Military Service Act consideration of that period surely requires different criteria than that which went before, not least because of a more organised system of protected employment.

 

There are many reason why rural areas were under represented, especially during the period of voluntary enlistment,not least the underpopulation of rural areas compared to the cities.  The poor recruitment and apathy towards the war in rural areas in the early days, compared to the crowds storming the recruiting offices in London and other cities, was defended in Country Life as,"in the first place the harvest had to be garnered in and  in the second place news filters into the rural mind very slowly".  Nevertheless many villages did not provide a single recruit, which prompted Lord Derby, the arch recruiter, when introducing his scheme to Parliament to single out agriculture for special criticism, saying, "while agriculture had done extraordinarily well in some parts of the country in other parts it had done extraordinarily badly".

 

The cities and corporations also competed with each other to raise as many Battalions as they could, whereas in rural areas there was not that kind of organisation, for example the 9th Battalion Devonshire Regiment could only raise eighty men and its ranks were filled with Londoners.   This highlights another fallacy about 'local' regiments there are many examples of men being moved around the country so we have Newcastle men in in Sussex and the 8th East Surrey was formed from a trainload of recruits, mainly from London and Suffolk, the 'Manchester Scottish' had to go to Edinburgh to fill their ranks and many of the locally raised battalions amended their terms of enlistment as they could often only raise a company.

The rural population was not fitter than those in the cities and towns.  It is true there are many examples of city recruits blossoming under canvas and better nutrition but that was not the lot of the agricultural worker.  They tended to be older and physically broke down earlier than those in the cities due to poor nutrition, overwork and exposure to greater hazards to health.  Young men had already moved to the industrial centres to use their brawn in industry.  My family from rural Wiltshire jumped on the Great Western to work in the South Wales coalfields.

 

Prof.J.M.Winter has been cited above, he makes  the point that men engaged in commercial or distributive trades were in uniform longer and more at risk than any other group of workers.  The main reason for this is not only were men of military age in these trades more easily replaced but also the yearning for adventure away from the humdrum existence.  I recall reading a study of the Barnsley Pals where it was noted the initial recruits were predominantly from those trades.  

 

Winter has analysed the figures and they show over 40% of men in the pre-war labour force for finance and commerce volunteered and a similar percentage from the professions and entertainment industries.  Agriculture and industry had 28.2% and 28.3% respectively of the pre-war labour force volunteering.  Accepting the percentage can be misleading, this translates to 1,743,000 from the industrial sector and 259,000 from agriculture, from a pre-war industrial workforce of 6,165, 000 and 920,000 men employed in agriculture.He gives the figure of 3,081,000 voluntary recruits, so industry provided well over half of all volunteers in terms of numbers.

 

Ken

[Guest]

On 05/12/2017 at 06:29, kenf48 said:

 

Prof.J.M.Winter has been cited above, he makes  the point that men engaged in commercial or distributive trades were in uniform longer and more at risk than any other group of workers.  The main reason for this is not only were men of military age in these trades more easily replaced but also the yearning for adventure away from the humdrum existence.  I recall reading a study of the Barnsley Pals where it was noted the initial recruits were predominantly from those trades.  

 

Winter has analysed the figures and they show over 40% of men in the pre-war labour force for finance and commerce volunteered and a similar percentage from the professions and entertainment industries.  Agriculture and industry had 28.2% and 28.3% respectively of the pre-war labour force volunteering.  Accepting the percentage can be misleading, this translates to 1,743,000 from the industrial sector and 259,000 from agriculture, from a pre-war industrial workforce of 6,165, 000 and 920,000 men employed in agriculture.He gives the figure of 3,081,000 voluntary recruits, so industry provided well over half of all volunteers in terms of numbers.

 

Ken

 

 

Ken . many thanks your your comments.  Could you annotate your original with the reference material for Winter. It mighthelp others  with access to his books to read more detail. Thanks

 

 

[kenf48]

On 05/12/2017 at 06:49, QGE said:

 

 

Ken . many thanks your your comments.  Could you annotate your original with the reference material for Winter. It mighthelp others  with access to his books to read more detail. Thanks

 

 

The table is from an article in Population Studies

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2173368.pdf?cid=labsrecdlpdf#page_thumbnails_tab_contents

Population Studies. 1977; 31(3):449-466.the table is on p.454

 

Referenced in Beckett and Simpson p.9.which you may find more accessible

 

Ken

 

[Guest]

On 05/12/2017 at 07:20, kenf48 said:

 

The table is from an article in Population Studies

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2173368.pdf?cid=labsrecdlpdf#page_thumbnails_tab_contents

Population Studies. 1977; 31(3):449-466.the table is on p.454

Referenced in Beckett and Simpson p.9.which you may find more accessible

Ken

 

 Thanks Ken. Sadly I cant access JSTOR but it is at least useful to know. One day I might get access... .

[Phil Wood]

3 hours ago, QGE said:

Phil - many thanks for the continued input. It is fascinating. 

 

I suspect the Memorial included men on just about every qualification. I can see about a dozen who qualify by dint of the fact their parents lived on the boundary, butsjust outside. This is understandable but does distort the data. There are others who may have at some stage lived in the MB but who were certainly living elsewhere when they died. Small but important adjustments. 

 

 

War memorials will often include a good proportion of thise who had moved away - if you look on them as points of reference for the bereaved this makes total sense - but it will inflate numbers considerably - my theory is that this was commonplace in memorials. As men could readily be included on multiple memorials there was no reason to exclude recent incomers - a few on the Newbury memorial are men whose families moved to Newbury while they were in service - I suspect that some of the names I can't identify may even be men from families who moved to Newbury after their decease. Of course some memorial committees will have been stricter in the collection of names - Newbury was pretty much an open letter asking people to submit names - with the possible exception of two sucides there is no suggestion of any names being excluded.  Even the suicides may simply have been their families deciding not to submit their names.  So I would not be surprised to find it at the high end of the scale when it comes to numbers commemorated.

 

However, Newbury was not suffering from net migration, the town was growing slightly - departures were being replaced either by increased infant survival or incomers.  Looking at the 76 names I checked, eleven were civilians out of county - a mix of past emigrants and future immigrants. Nine were out of town/in county  all future immigrants - the common drift from country to the local town.  Eleven were military -  RN (2), Regular Army (8) and one would be recruit overnighting at the local regimental barracks. Five at boarding school (Newbury may be a little skewed here as they sent quite a few poor kids to Christ's Hospital thanks to a charitable bequest - 2 of the 5 where at Christ's).   4 not found and 36 in Newbury complete the 76, 

 

Parents living on the boundary does not mean that the son did not live within, or that the parents didn't move in between 1911 and 1922 (date of the memorial) - many families moved around the town a lot. My view all along has been that war memorial numbers could be used for comparative purposes not as accurate count of casualties, close correlation between the war memorial count and fall in numbers of the male 15-24 1911 group in both Newbury and Richmond was a surprise to me - not least because there were plenty of casualties from outside that group.  But two is not a brilliant statistical sample size!

 

 

 

 

[Phil Wood]

4 hours ago, kenf48 said:

 

The evidence is that rural areas were very under represented during the period of voluntary recruitment from August 1914 to February 1916.  As every man of military age ordinarily resident in the UK was deemed to have been enlisted after the introduction of the Military Service Act consideration of that period surely requires different criteria than that which went before, not least because of a more organised system of protected employment.

 Interesting - I will dig out the volunteer lists for more  local villages but here are a few (all in the Newbury Rural District, March 1916):

 

Leckhampstead pop 261 serving 42

Midgham pop 308 serving 28

Stockcross pop 641 serving  66

 

Wasing pop 54 serving 11

Woolhampton pop 489 serving 33

Shaw cum Donnington pop 636 serving 82

 

Compare with Newbury pop 12,705 serving 1186 - some of the villages had higher volunteering rates.

 

Taking the 1911 age group 15-34 as a measure of the target group for volunteer  this suggests that, in Newbury RD, only 16% were males of military age in 1914/15.  I guess I should add something for the under 20s and over 38s - call it 20% in total. 

 

Which leads to some strange results - and certainly a far higher volunteer rate than 28%.  Shaw and Stockcross are in easy walking distance of Newbury - so the workforce would be less agrarian. Whereas Wasing and Leckhampstead were pretty much 100% agrarian. If my guestimate of the proportion of men of military age is at all accurate Leckhampstead had 42 of the 47 available men signing up.  Wasing even had more signing up than were available!   Makes me pretty sure the lists include sons living and working elsewhere.

 

One village (Wantage RD) was East Ilsley pop 445 serving 71 - it added a list of those tried and rejected, 12. Interesting as snapshot of health. 1 in 7 rejected is not the greatest indicater of hearty rural types.

 

I will try to find earlier lists to look at the 1914 volunteer rates. 

Edited 5 December , 2017 by Phil Wood

[Guest]

In very broad terms Winter argues in The Great War and the British People:

 

Pre war poverty in Britain was at levels that we now associate with the worst in the third world. Infant mortality in "Birmingham, Blackburn, Bootle, Burnley, Dudley, Middlesbrough, Preston, Salford, Sheffield, Stockport, Wakefield, Wolverhampton and York" was at 200 per 1,000 -  nearly double the pre war national average of 105 .. Note: This the national average was slightly worse than the infant mortality rate in modern Afghanistan (the worst in the world at 113) and slighlty better than Mali (100).

 

Pre-war deprivation impacted the manpower available. The long term effects of poverty led to "appallingly low standards of health in many urban working class districts". Exceptions were miners and agricultural workers, although the latter group were impacted by older age dynamics. 

 

Up to Nov 1917 social class and the likelihood of service were highly correlated.  "Higher social status carried with it increased risks of becoming a casualty during the war". 

Manual workers were slightly under-represented and non-manual workers were over-represented during the volunteer period.

 

From Jan 1916 Conscription produced more men however the needs of industry meant that the recruiting was uneven across regions and industries. In September 1916 the rules changed again and medical standards fell dramatically. The proportion rejected dropped from 29% to just 3% in less  than six months. The proportion classed Grade A jumped from 25% to 50%. From Nov 1917 recruiting was overhauled again and finally centralised along industry priorities.  Despite this, the standards of medical examination remained extremely lax and very high proportions of men were graded too highly as the examiners were instructed by recruiters to simply increase the numbers passed. Consequently less-fit men from the lower socio-economic groups were classified Grade I and Grade II (the new grading system).

 

The Percentage Distribution of over 2.4 million men in Grades I and II in each recruiting region were:

 

Region.........................................Total Examined...Grade I&II....% Grade I&II

London and the South East...........432,400........224,632.........51.4%

North West........................................385,579........216,308..........56.1%

West Midlands.................................231,835.........137,238.........59.2%

Yorkshire and East Midlands........388,479..........246,020........63.3%

Eastern Counties..............................216,012.........122,964..........57.9%

Northern Counties............................146,324...........88,360..........60.4%

South West........................................188,746...........102,530........54.4%

Scotland..............................................258,878..........164,382.......63.7%

Wales..................................................171,931...........115,611.......67.3%

Britain................................................2,425,184........1,1458,045.....58.3%

 

Source: report on the Physical Examination of Military Age by national Service Medical Boards from 1st Nov 1917 to Oct 31st 1918

 

The observant will note the disproportionate contribution within England of the North West, Yorkshire, Northern Counties and West Midlands compared to London, and the Southern Counties during this phase of recruiting. Winter argues that 60% of men placed in Grades I & II were unfit for combat. If this was true it might go some way to offsetting the fact that some had previously escaped conscription due to poor health. 

 

Despite the physical factors and the demands of industry, the final year of the war saw a huge rebalancing of recruiting which drew out more men of lower physical stature. However Winter still argues that "roughly 1 million more working -class men" were exempted from the British forces. 

 

 

 

[Phil Wood]

41 minutes ago, QGE said:

In very broad terms Winter argues in The Great War and the British People:

 

Pre war poverty in Britain was at levels that we now associate with the worst in the third world. Infant mortality in "Birmingham, Blackburn, Bootle, Burnley, Dudley, Middlesbrough, Preston, Salford, Sheffield, Stockport, Wakefield, Wolverhampton and York" was at 200 per 1,000 -  nearly double the pre war national average of 105 .. Note: This the national average was slightly worse than the infant mortality rate in modern Afghanistan (the worst in the world at 113) and slighlty better than Mali (100).

 

 

A great contemporary poster from the Save the Babies campaign:

[Guest]

 2 small comments.

1)  Is "military recruiting" all arms or just army?   It makes a difference.   Given peaetime traditions and location, there might be a distortion to the South-West (Devonport)  or anything with Portsmouth in it. And, as a Plymothian , a rough and ready rule would be for every Jolly Jack there is, there will be a Dockyardie behind him.  The North-West is not noted for it's great Royal Navy dockyards.  A small point that is often overlooked is one of  geographical location of the Western Front with British regions-  the supply and logistics effort  of the war was not evenly spread around the country- it stands to reason that  more civilian population was employed on this is the SouthEast for the obvious reason that, regardless of where it was produced in the UK, it had to be humped and shumped to France from the South-East. Productive industries tend to be recorded easily-cotton mills, shipyards, coal mines- distribution effort is more nebulous.

 

2)  The comparative decline of the standards of recruits may be being gauged against the wrong comparator. We tend to gauge it against the standard of the recruits at the beginning of a war or even against peacetime recruiting standards. But the casualties of prolonged war give a perverse military version of dear old Jim Slater's "Zulu Principle" -if you have read one book on the Zulus then you appear as an expert because 999 of every thousand have read none- That is, what is important is not ABSOLUTE advantage but,rather, COMPARATIVE advantage

     Through the course of the war, the German army was ground down as well- thus, what counted was not the ABSOLUTE recruit standard over the German but whether at a COMPARATIVE level, British recruits  either equalled or excelled.  Here, the effects of the Potato Winter and the Blockade in 1917-1918 I think are underrated in their effects on the military food situation of the German armed forces.  Conventional literature ,from memory, suggests that the German High Command tried to  maintain food- or at least- minimum nutrition requirements for front-line troops but stories are plentiful in the literature about the poor food levels of German soldiery.

      I have not seen reference to it but I will bet my bottom dollar that the British military kept a close eye on the dietary of the German army through the war- and on the physical standards and quality of equipment of German prisoners as they came in-the latter is bog standard intelligence work anyway. But the food levels?  Is there a kindly GWF member who may know the location of British intelligence assessments of  the German military  dietary as the war progressed. And I would expect somewhere comparisons were made of the decline of the quality of the German recruit when set against the Briton.. So, in 1917-1918, it was not the standard of the British recruit when measured against his forebear of 1914 that mattered -it was how he compared with his German equivalent of the same time

    

 

Edited 5 December , 2017 by Guest

[phil andrade]

There was a story going the rounds that Charteris ensured that fit and robust German POWs captured in the Third Ypres fighting were removed from the cages so that the impression was conveyed that the enemy was scraping the barrel in terms of manpower. It might be another pernicious myth, of course.....

 

One year earlier , Hankey had visited the scene of the Somme battles and saw the German prisoners, commenting on their robust physical condition.

 

Alistair Horne, in one of his books - The Price of Glory (?) - mentioned how the British soldiers were surprised to see that their French counterparts were bigger and stronger than themselves.

 

I recently finished a rather good book THE HUNGRY EMPIRE , by Lizzie Collingham, which tells us about the eating habits of the British people over the last few centuries. The impact of addiction to sugar was very apparent in the deteriorating physical condition of the poorer people, and I wonder how far this was still impinging in the Great War.

 

I must say that, just looking through photographic histories of the Great War, I could not escape the impression that German soldiers seemed more robust than the British.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

Phil- Thanks for the anecdotes of the quality of German prisoners- accords with various bits and bobs I have as well. And for reminding me that Lizzie Collingham's book is out at last-  it was billed for so long, I hadn't noticed it was finally published (London as an Empire City is another long-term interest- thus, empire food varieties are something I hope she has lots of new info. on) .  I wonder if she has anything about the army dietary- in part the TA marching contests in the pre-war years were part of the preparations of a "professional" army to get the balance of rations, nutrition and energy right. 

[Guest]

To what extent did the creation of Labour Companies and the Labour Corps have in realigning residual fitness with military needs? Having worked on transcribing a number of 1914 Star and 1914-15 Star medal rolls I am always struck by a number of surprisingly large dynamics;

 

1. High fatal casualties, skewed towards the first 12 months from disembarkation 

2. Similarly high levels of men discharged. Within this, large proportions Discharged Medically Unfit and a smaller but significant proportion Discharged to Labour Corps (from 1917 onward)

3. Significant numbers Transferred to serve in a Garrison Battallion. 

 

what these medal rolls don't show is significant numbers of men medically downgraded but not discharged. One possibly unique insight is provided by the Royal Sussex Regiment ledger which recorded the fate of every man sent out from its 3rd Reserve battalion. There are large proportions who were evacuated  to England never to return. In the medal rolls the comments columns are blank, yet we know they were wounded or injured or sick, evacuated never to return. One can only make an educated guess what happened to these men. My assumption is that they were medically downgraded but not enough to be struck off the books. It follows that this must have been happening across the whole Army and sampling of a number of battalion rolls clearly shows typically less than 3% of men 'survived' the war still serving in their original battalion. This attrition and in particular the non fatal attrition suggests large scale recycling of medically downgraded men - equivalent to Grades III and IV?  which may have had a profound impact on the recruiting dynamics.

 

A man in a military Agricultural unit (for example) would relieve an agricultural worker for military service. To what extent did military units take on what was ostensibly "civilian" work. The creation of the Labour Corps also raises the large possibility of working class men of lower grade fitness being conscripted but not actually getting anywhere near the front line. If memory serves the Labour Corps was around 17% of the Army at its peak; significant numbers.

 

It also raises questions on how one measures the contribution of groups to the Great War. In total war Is a medically unfit man or woman in an ammunition factory any less valuable than a man with a bayonet in the front line? Perhaps one of the reasons why casualty stats are a poor measure of contribution to the war. 

 

Earlier inthe the thread it was argued it was the Blockade 'wot won the war'. I don't have a strong view but somehow I feel that had there not been a long row of Tommy Atkins* and his Indian, French and Belgian colleagues in 1914 the Germans might have been sipping champagne in the Champs Elysee in September 1914 before the Royal Navy had left Scapa Flow. 

 

 

 

* the BEF of 1914 was heavily recruited from the lower socio-economic groups. A trend that had been in existence for over 100 years. Unskilled labourers were the single largest tranche of recruits since records began. The K1 and K2 appear to have a significantly different profile, K3 and K4 still more different and the recruits of the last two years seem to have reflected national demographics more closely. MG

 

 

[Guest]

    Interesting points- I was unaware of the analysis of  3(R) RSR- given the anecdotal stories about the lack of "originals" in many of the Regular battalions of 1914, then I would expect it to be representative of the Regular,  Territorial and Service battalions of 1914-I was surprised when they went online by just how many  Silver Badges there were. It is a factor of modern warfare that for every man in the front line, there are X  behind the line supporting him- 3:1 in the Great War????    Thus, the structure, fitness and manpower problems of support units-and of industry and agriculture beyond that are vital, yet comparatively unknown. Read a description of all the kit carried by a British Tommy on 1st July 1916 (or listen to the excellent Taff Gillingham) - it all had to come from somewhere. And the materiel costs of the war beggar belief on top of that- How much timber!!  Someone like Denis Winter was interesting because he detailed the kit carried- has anyone calculated just how much  kit the average British soldier got through during the war???   Another surprise to me was in the War Diaries-  how much time units spent both in and out of the line on salvage work.

      You have alluded to one problem that is almost an unknown- transfer to labour companies and battalions.  I have several local casualties whose stories involve being wounded and transferred to labour companies rather than being discharged. In effect, this was industrial conscription -  conscription of labour for industry, even of those who were "volunteers" of 1914-1915. "Duration of War" terms allowed a direction of labour (ie Knackered and wounded men with a "trade") without further legislation in a way that that could not be done over civilian industry.  Much more complex and subtle than our current concentration on front-line narratives. Labour battalions and companies took a lot of thought and organisation-not just a holding mechanism for the damaged goods.

     You allude to the substitution effects of labour dilution- a returned wounded man or woman new entrant in industry shuffled the order on the manpower perch and freed up men for front line service.  (We have discussed Ireland before-in my view a subtle and complex way of getting the most out of manpower without the problems of a conscription regime)

     There were some very, very smart economists and staats-apparat managers of quality around in the Great War-  not Just Keynes at the Treasury- people like EHM Lloyd and Beveridge -used to big  ideas,big numbers and big  strokes of activity.  When it comes to  military matters, we have Fritz Fischer, spurred by Germany's aims in the Second World War and backtracking to the First. How the British war effort was organised and managed in 1939-1945 should be the starting point for looking at the Great War- the successful command economy of the the second  should be the starting point for look back at the First. And that of the Second did not spring from the womb fully formed-  there is a lot more interesting stuff out there about how the army managed it's industrial labour force-even before we get to who was kicking aorund Northern towns.

[SiegeGunner]

8 hours ago, voltaire60 said:

Conventional literature ,from memory, suggests that the German High Command tried to  maintain food- or at least- minimum nutrition requirements for front-line troops but stories are plentiful in the literature about the poor food levels of German soldiery. 

 

At Fromelles, in the spring and summer of 1916, the daily orders of Bavarian RIR16 included an invitation to anyone wishing to do some vegetable gardening to make themself known to the Adjutant, then later, the instruction that 'no-one is to start lifting the new potatoes until told to', and later still, an observation that complaints had been received from the local French baker about late payment for the supply of white bread, accompanied by a list of which elements of the regiment owed what, and an order that all outstanding bills should be paid within 7 days.  Another item reported that a visiting veterinary inspector had commented very favourably on the condition of the regiment's horses, which was largely attributable to the quality of the home-grown hay.

[Guest]

A visual interlude. In 1994  some 800 films made by Mitchell and Kenyon from the Edwardian period were discovered in the basement of their original shop in Blackburn. Between 1897 and 1922 the partnesrhip focused on the "factory gate genre". it is difficult to imagine life over 100 years ago, and these films provide a unique perspective on working class life. What is striking about the many hours of film footage of factory and mill workers is their apparent good physical stature.  This documentary provides an interesting glimpse and touches on some of the working men and women. There are some quite surprising insights.

 

 "The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon" presented by the susurrating but enthusiatic Dan Cruikshank;

 

 

 

 

Edited 6 December , 2017 by Guest