Nun the wiser

ellimondo 1 Comment

Pleased to hear about Doris, I should love to see her for its such a long time since she saw her Biddy give her my love and I hope to see her soon as she left that school.

Read the whole letter from the 17th September.

21st September 1914

When I first saw the 1911 census result for Doris Crawshaw it was something of a surprise to find that she was at boarding school in Gloucestershire. The Catholic Who’s Who and Year Book 1908 advertises the St Rose’s Dominican Convent Boarding School for  Young Ladies.

This Convent occupies one of the most convenient and health situations in the lovely neighbourhood of Stroud. The School apartments are excellently ventilated, effectually heated by hot water, and well provided with everything conducive to the health, comfort, and convenience of the pupils.

Pupils are prepared for the University Local Examinations, Associated Board and London College of Music, etc. For prospectus and other particulars, apply to the Rev. Mother Prioress.

How was Doris, a child of seemingly working class parents, at a boarding school on the other side of the country? It’s also the first reference to Roman Catholicism I’ve found in the family tree. It’s a mystery to which I have no answer at this time. One of the most compelling answers I can think of is that the grandparents intervened when Frank Senior and Ada separated. Matthew Webster (1839-1921) left £408 2s 4d to his sons when he dies in 1921. This is worth about £9000 in today’s money, so he wasn’t poor by any stretch of the imagination.

The Dorsets enjoyed a rest day in billets in Jury. At 5.30pm C and D Companies were ordered to review trenches. At 7.45pm the rest of the battalion was ordered to move to “Rapreux farm”, where they bivouacked and prepared to move back into Missy the next morning. At 11:30pm the entire battalion regrouped and retired to billets. Whether this was in Rapreux farm or back in Jury the diary neglects to say. There’s a terrain de Ru Preux road near the pontoon bridge so I’m assuming the farm was originally near this location and actually called Ru Preux.

D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

ellimondo 1 Comment

Pleased to hear about Doris, I should love to see her for its such a long time since she saw her Biddy give her my love and I hope to see her soon as she left that school. Am surprised to hear about the old man getting married again, but I expected to see that come off and he is getting young again, have you seen her, who told you about it, good old mother (????thises) is that what she said you wasn’t to see Doris you tell Mrs C to what a bit don’t bolt her food, Ginger can please herself who she goes and sees, she must be nearly fourteen now.

Read the whole letter from the 17th September.

20th September 1914

This is something of a revelation. I think we get snippets of family discord in previous letters so it’s not a total surprise. Frank’s father has, or is, getting married again. Frank’s parents, Frank and Ada, were living together in 1911. Something then went wrong between them. By 1914 Ada and Mabel are living with Walter “Mattie” Webster and his wife Caroline back in Brixton.

Frank Senior may have possibly already got married again in April 1914 to a Gertrude Watson (as a Frank Crawshaw got married in Islington at that time) but I haven’t been able to prove this is him yet. I need to order the marriage certificate.

Divorce in 1914 was supposedly uncommon and, socially, it was frowned upon. In the first decade of the 20th century, there was just one divorce for every 450 marriages. I took the following statistics from the Guardian’s excellent data blog: 2600 couples got divorced between 1911 and 1914. 1397 divorces were instigated by the man and 1203 by the woman. Incidentally this figure rose to an all-time-high of 165,018 divorces in 1993.

A recent Parliamentary article on divorce cites that only men could instigate divorce before 1923 but I can’t understand how this would be when women are listed as the petitioners in 1911-1914. This is also disproved by this story in the Nottingham Evening News in 1914. It makes for depressing reading so be warned. Weirdly, my other great great grand parents, Reginald and Hannah Elliman, were also getting divorced around this time. For something that was supposedly very rare at the time, especially in the working classes, there was a lot of it about.

I love Frank’s spelling of thesis. He is defending Ginger (Doris), their younger sister as she’s obviously seen her father and her mother does not like this at all. Doris was actually 12 – she was born in January 1902. The school he mentions unearths another Crawshaw family mystery. I’ve found Doris in the 1911 Census and she’s boarding at a school in Stroud, Gloucestershire. More of this tomorrow.

The Dorsets spent the day digging trenches between Le Pavillon Farm and Sermoise. At 7.30pm they were ordered to assemble at Sermoise, but the order was immediately cancelled and they returned to their billets in Jury.

Tuppence a quarter

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Now Till dear I want you to send me out a parcel of cake and chocolate and also a pair of socks, for our rations are very small and we get them when we can now and then they are very small, so I trust you will do your very best and send me out a parcel now and again, and I will make it right when I come back well I hope too.

Read the whole letter from the 17th September.

19th September 1914

With the Dorsets still digging trenches along the Soissons-Sermoise road, Frank finally had some spare time in which to fill up with food. The trouble was that he has no money. So he asks his sister to help out.

Confectionary, especially chocolate, was hugely popular in the UK. Big brands at the time included ones we love today, including Fry’s, Rowntree’s and Cadbury’s. Turkish Delight was launched in 1914, which would prove to be something of a PR disaster in the next few weeks.

Advert for Fry's chocolate
Fry’s chocolate – Five Boys. I’m not sure there’s much difference between desperation and realisation. Perhaps it was filled with laxative?

The working class had seen their cost of living fall tremendously since the 1870s. Factory and technological improvements meant that, like guns and ammunition, processed foods could be made more cheaply, and in greater quantities, than ever before. This meant an increase in output of jams, sweets and chocolates towards the end of the Nineteenth Century.

The famous British sweet tooth developed long before the halcyon days of the 1920’s and 1930’s chocolate wars, so splendidly immortalised by Roald Dahl in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” (1964).  In 1910 Woolworth’s had launched in Liverpool and Preston bringing American-style confectionaries to the British public. Pick and mix and cheap milk chocolate became tremendously popular in the UK.

Chocolate as a food stuff for troops made a lot of sense. The energy boost and nourishing effect of chocolate are undoubted. It’s only recently that they have been removed from British troops’ ration packs.

A rationale

The rations for the troops at this time were very meagre (which explains Gleichen becoming a chicken murderer).

It might have been a sport for officers foraging for food in the field. However, for the rank and file it was harder to find nourishment. Especially when few of them had any local currency. The normal rations a solder received were meant to be supplemented by iron or emergency rations but I think that, at this time, this was all the troops in the front line were getting.

A post on the excellent 1914-1918 forums describes the regulation rations given to troops in 1914.

Daily ration

This would have been given to the men whenever possible.

  • 1 1/4 lb fresh or frozen meat / 1 lb preserved or salt meat
  • 1 1/4 lb bread / 1 lb biscuit or flour
  • 4 oz. bacon
  • 3 oz. cheese
  • 5/8 oz. tea
  • 4 oz. jam
  • 3 oz. sugar
  • 1/2 oz salt
  • 1/36 oz. pepper
  • 1/20 oz. mustard
  • 8 oz. fresh or 2 oz. dried vegetables
  • 1/10 gill lime juice if fresh vegetables not issued*
  • 1/2 gill rum*
  • 2 oz. tobacco per week

Iron Ration

This would have been carried by a soldier in the field. I think this is all Frank was getting at the time.

  • 1 lb. preserved meat
  • 12 oz. biscuit
  • 5/8 oz. tea
  • 2 oz. sugar
  • 1/2 oz. salt
  • 3 oz. cheese
  • 1 oz. meat extract (2 cubes.)
Image of an old tin of corned beef
Fray Bentos corned beef

Preserved meat was generally a tin of Fray Bentos “bully beef”. You know the kind; tapered with a key in the top. Bully beef is simply corned beef, which is salted beef minced up with added fat and then compressed into a tin. The phrase “bully beef” comes from the French “bouillon beef” (boiled beef), picked up and mangled by British troops during the Crimean War. They were going to do a lot of that over the next four years.

No wonder Frank made a clarion call home for “not a fancy bit of stuff just a bit of you know the sort mate”. I know what he means: proper grub.

I haven’t found any Thomases yet

ellimondo 1 Comment

You say you haven’t heard from Tom yet, well you can take it from me that he is alright thats what we have heard, that we have beaten the Germans quite easily as sea. I wish we could say that out here.

Read the whole letter from the 17th September.

18th September 1914

This is a snippet from the letter Frank sent home yesterday. Frank is referring here to the Battle of Heligoland Bight. This was a raid by the British Grand Fleet on German patrols in the North Sea on 28th August 1914. It very nearly didn’t succeed and communication between Royal Navy senior staff was very poorly handled. But it, nevertheless, resulted in a British victory and severely curtailed Germany’s willingness to move their fleet into the North Sea for some time.

Tom is obviously out with the British Fleet. They had moved to Scapa Flow, a natural harbour in the Orkney Islands,  at the outbreak of the war. Quite who Tom is remains a mystery. Was he a cousin of some sort? I am still expanding the Crawshaw/Webster family tree but I haven’t found any Thomases yet. That said, his first name could be anything. I’ve got Alexander as Frank, Maud as Till, Doris as Ginger, Walter as Mattie and Caroline as Carrie or, possibly, Muff (although I am starting to think she’s a different aunt). The Crawshaws certainly love to obfuscate.

Franks ends this section of his letter with the rather downbeat “I wish we could say that out here”. It was obvious to the British troops in France that they were really up against it. The German Army was held in the same high regard on land as the British Fleet was on the open seas. Then again, as he sits sniffing in a damp barn, having spent the last month fighting and roughing it, with only memories of a pint of mild to draw from, you can somehow forgive Frank his gloominess.

The Dorsets continued to dig trenches along the southern section of the Aisne. Larger calibre guns were arriving at this new frontline all the time and began to assault the heights to the north.

Gleichen recalls, “It was a nice time for the Artillery; for guns were there in large numbers, and they had some good targets to shoot at, over Vregny and Chivres way, in the shape of the enemy’s batteries and lines, when they could be seen.” But the downside was that this attracted the attention of the German guns.

The squat pen(cil) rests; snug as a gun.

ellimondo 7 Comments

Envelope addressed to Miss M Crawshaw, 29 Strethleven Rd etc franked APO 17(?) Sep 14 and London 25 Sep 14 passed by Censor 137

Letter dated 17.8.14 – written in pencil

Dear Till,

Just a few lines in answer to your welcome letter which I thought was never coming and I was very pleased to hear from you. Glad to hear that Aunt got my P Card and that they are all getting on alright and I hope that Uncle Matt sticks his job at the Post Office for Aunt will be much happier. You say you haven’t heard from Tom yet, well you can take it from me that he is alright thats what we have heard, that we have beaten the Germans quite easily as sea. I wish we could say that out here. Well Till mate I am getting on alright up to yet and still in the pink, we have had a rough time of it just lately and I have got a terrible cold. The weather out here has been lovely up to this last week and its been raining night and day and we have got properly drenched. I hope it clears off, for it is proper miserable.

Now Till dear I want you to send me out a parcel of cake and chocolate and also a pair of socks, for our rations are very small and we get them when we can now and then they are very small, so I trust you will do your very best and send me out a parcel now and again, and I will make it right when I come back well I hope too. We haven’t had any pay for seven weeks now and there isn’t any chance of getting any so we can’t buy any and we don’t get much chance either, so I hope you will do you best and send it out soon not a fancy bit of stuff just a bit of you know the sort mate, be sure to do it up strong or else it will get busted up.

Pleased to hear about Doris, I should love to see her for its such a long time since she saw her Biddy give her my love and I hope to see her soon as she left that school. Am surprised to hear about the old man getting married again, but I expected to see that come off and he is getting young again, have you seen her, who told you about it, good old mother (????thises) is that what she said you wasn’t to see Doris you tell Mrs C to what a bit don’t bolt her food, Ginger can please herself who she goes and sees, she must be nearly fourteen now and I expect Aunt has fits what with having to get Mother up so early as that, how does she manage to get up so early as that.

Now Till I hope you are getting on alright at Stewarts and that you are still merry and bright. Don’t forget to send out the Sunday paper every week all of it and don’t leave out the sporting part me old dear. Now I don’t think there is any more news just now, except you can tell Aunt and all off them at home that I am in the pink and I should like a few lines from one of them at home. Now I must conclude trusting to hear from you soon.

I remain

Your loving Brother
Frank xxxx

17th September 1914

Frank’s not feeling too great today and neither am I, so I am going to revisit the contents of this letter throughout the rest of the week. Tomorrow we’ll look at what’s been happening in the war at sea.

 

The Dorsets joined the rest of the 15th Brigade and began to dig trenches along the main road between Soissons to the north west and Sermoise in the east.

All along the Aisne the two opposing sides began to dig in. The British were totally unprepared for this new type of warfare and, having also left a lot of equipment on the retreat from Mons, were forced to scour local farms and businesses for tools.