Tag: food

I demand to have some booze

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10th October 1914

After more waiting, and much to-ing and fro-ing, the buses finally arrived at about 2:30pm and took them via the town of Saint-Pol-sur-Termoise and dropped them off at their billets in La Thieuloye.

The BEF was hurtling towards the west now as fast as they could go. It was hoped they could reach Lille in time, which was about 40 miles off to the north east, but Gleichen wasn’t so sure. He had witnessed thousands of young men streaming to the west away from the possibility of being interned by the advancing Germans.

Frank was known as Biddy or Bid. Nicknames are cryptic, often born from the language a group of friends or family form through familiarity. Sometimes they came from acronyms of initials (see my theory about the origins of Auntie Muff yesterday). Biddie certainly isn’t that. His initials are AFC. So where did it come from?

Biddy is an old 16th Century name for baby chicken. The origin is suggested as perhaps imitative of the chicken, so perhaps it was used as a calling sound when feeding them. A chickabiddy is an affectionate term for a small child. I think this is the most likely origin of Frank’s nickname.

Strangely enough, Biddy came up again when I was looking up references to Frank’s mention of the word “lizzie”.

“No cold tea out here or little drops of lizzie (?), could do with a drop of cold tea now.”

I’ve previously opined that cold tea was beer. I’ve subsequently read that it referred to brandy. I must opine less. But I think it’s a pretty interchangeable phrase.  Here, Frank’s probably referring to the hard stuff. I initially thought that lizzie was some kind of Babycham. But I am pretty sure it’s a reference to Lisbon wine, which was some kind of very cheap fortified wine or at least a collective noun for any cheap wine. Empire Wine is often mentioned. Wine of such unconscionable filth that they could only sell it back in Britain. It’s fair to say that cheap wine was popular in Edwardian times. It was perfect for getting drunk really quickly, which tends to be a good property for booze. Britain in the early 1900s is no different from today when it comes to drunkenness.

The quality of Lisbon wine was debatable and its reputation for potency didn’t stop here. Not strong enough for the real diehards, it was often mixed with cheap alcohol like methylated spirits to produce a truly lethal drink called “Red Lizzie”. Yes, that’s the stuff you clean your brushes with. When produced from red wine it was know as, wait for it, “red biddy”. Was Biddy a massive booze hound and that’s how he got his nickname? Had he accidentally signed up after a weekend of  too many red biddies?

Red biddy was a drink of legend that by the Second World War had largely vanished from pubs and was made at home. It rendered the drinker blind drunk and often mad. It wasn’t surprisingly compared to absinthe that so afflicted Parisians in the 19th Century. Government laws like the 1937 Methylated Spirits Bill tried to control this dangerous substance, and this report by the Medical Officer of Health for Wandsworth in 1936 highlighted the concerns that many social organisations, such as the Salvation Army, lobbied the Government with.

The Government are still struggling today with adulterated alcohol. A 2008 Guardian article highlights the rise in theft of alcoholic sanitisers from some London hospitals. It is used as a base for “the street drinkers’ favourite ‘red biddy'”. Delicious and health conscious too!

The great Kingsley Amis recommends red biddy as part of a decent breakfast in his booze-befuddled novel Lucky Jim.

The three pints of bitter he’d drunk last night with Bill Atkinson and Beesley might, by means of some garbaged alley through the space-time continuum, have been preceded by a bottle of British sherry and followed by half a dozen breakfast-cups of red biddy.

I prefer Alpen.

Let’s leave this subject with this fine English gentleman describing the appeal of pure alcohol very eloquently.

A train journey without a destination

ellimondo 1 Comment

7th October 1914

 

The Dorsets paraded at the ungodly hour of 3am and marched north through the Bois de Compiègne in order to preserve secrecy. Then began a day of complicated movements, confusion and delays. I’ll try to explain it as simply as I can without inducing sleep.

Such a large amount of Allied troops were moving along the line that it put tremendous strain on transport systems. The 15th Brigade was assigned four stations along the line. Compiègne, Le Meux, Longueil Ste Marie, and Pont Sainte Maxence. The Dorsets entrained at Compiègne.

The Dorsets still didn’t know where they were going. I think they were probably hoping to get far away from the German guns. But rather than a long train journey they were disappointed when they pulled into Abbeville, stopping briefly in Amiens after a journey littered with stops and delays.

Abbeville station was overflowing with arriving troops so they were sent back along the line to Pont Remy where the Railway Transport Officer immediately tried to send them back to Abbeville. By now the trainline was so snarled up with traffic that this proved impossible. I imagine senior officers were now at the end of their patience with trains and so the Battalion started to detrain.

 

A few notes from yesterday’s letters

Frank’s letter is very playful. He has a really cheeky sense of humour and clearly loves winding his sister up in a good natured way, like all brothers do. Today we’re looking at names in the letters.

Who is Ciss? Is this their sister, Doris? Does he mean to write “sis”? Frank assumes that Mabel is in touch with her so it could well be this simple explanation. Ciss would also be a contraction of Cissy? I cannot find anyone of that name in the immediate family.

Muff now turns out to definitely be someone else other than Caroline Webster. I thought this might be the case from the language in the last letter. Frank writes “Heard from old Muff she wrote me a letter from the old people and hopes I am alright and trusts to see me soon”. Can we assume that Muff is an older member of the family? And is she a Crawshaw? I’m not sure. The most obvious person to investigate first is the maternal grandmother, Phoebe Webster, née Oakley. She’s living in Tottenham in 1911 with her husband Matthew and youngest daughter Lilian. She would have been 72 by October 1914. Is the “old people” an old people’s home? Or could it be that the person is living with the old people. If this is the case then Muff could be Lillian Webster. She would have been 25 in October 1914. Geoff’s notes indicate that he knew an Auntie Muff in the 1930s, so it can’t be the grandmother, surely? I’ll do some more rummaging around Lillian Webster when I get more time.

“You and Aunt are still Tangoing it I would if I was there”. I wonder if this is a reference to the dance craze of the time? The tango was sweeping, or should I say striding, through the Capital on its way up from Paris. Commercially astute tea rooms and restaurants had started putting on Tango Teas, afternoon tea with a demonstration of the tango by a professional dance couple. The excellent Edwardian Promenade blog does a much better job of describing the tango phenomena than I will ever do.

Another name to track down is “stammering Sam”. I think this one is easier to solve. Frank follows this line with “You know that old saying follow in Fathers footsteps”. Their father’s full name is Frank Samuel Crawshaw. Was he also known by his second name? It wouldn’t be a surprise knowing this lot. We find out that Frank Senior probably had a stammer. It’s a bit cruel of Frank to tease his father’s affliction but it appears to be a genial comment, not a barbed one.

“Remember me to Wallie and thank him for his Bovril”. Wallie is Caroline and Matthew’s son, Walter Matthew Coulson Webster. Born in 1900, he’s only 14 at the time of this letter and was just starting work. We’ll hear more about Wallie in the future.

Tomorrow we’ll look at the strange goings-on at Number 60.

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.

A bottle of Harvey sauce and a ham-bone

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12th September 1914

By morning, the wet weather had turned the roads into a quagmire. The going was slow. The Dorsets’ war diary reports many halts, as does the Cheshires’, “Weather again very bad. Roads a sea of mud”.

The diary reports of “heavy gunfire” on their right. While the Cheshires report “a very big battle was going on to the North West along the River Aisne this day.” They were approaching the next big river crossing in their advance north. They’d made it over the Marne without too much of a fuss, but would the Aisne treat them so kindly?

The whole brigade stopped in a farm called Ferme de l’Épitaphe. Gleichen describes it as being “a huge farm standing by itself in a vast and dreary plain of ploughed fields”. There is still a farm along that road surrounded by fields, so I’ve placed them there for the night on the map. It was a tight squeeze. At one point 14th Brigade turned up but they were sent back to “Chrisy”. I think Gleichen means Chacrise, a couple of miles back down the road. The Dorsets and Norfolks were also sent back to billet in Nampteuil-Sous-Muret a mile away.

Gleichen, ever the gastronome,  laments a lack of food and is made even less happier by eating late and also having to share dinner with some gunnery officers. He turns to the contents of their mess basket, “which consisted only of Harvey sauce, knives and forks, an old ham-bone, sweet biscuits, and jam”. Delicious.

If you fancy a drop o’ Harvey’s on your ham-bone then here’s a recipe from Foods of England. It sounds a bit like Worcestershire sauce to me. It was later renamed Lazenby’s (with a great strap line – The World’s Appetiser).

Image of an advert for Harvey's sauce
Harvey’s sauce (later named Lazenby’s Sauce) – image from Foods of England

Dissolve six anchovies in a pint of strong vinegar, and then add to them three table-spoonfuls of India soy, and three table-spoonfuls of mushroom catchup, two heads of garlic bruised small, and a quarter of an ounce of cayenne. Add sufficient cochineal powder to colour the mixture red. Let all these ingredients infuse in the vinegar for a fortnight, shaking it every day, and then strain and bottle it for use.

Everlasting bully beef

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10th September 1914

As the Dorsets tentatively edged out from Bézu-le-Guéry towards Hill 189 they came across the debris of the previous day’s firefight. Gleichen remembers the Germans “had left that field battery on Hill 189 behind them, surrounded by about twenty or more corpses and a quantity of ammunition.” The war diary claims “forty-seven dead Germans were found here afterwards, nearly all shot through the head”. It would be interesting to confirm these reports. It would also be interesting to read any German accounts of the previous day’s action.

The 15th Brigade continued on its advance, the weather getting colder and wetter throughout the day as Autumn took hold. They were pretty much unhindered by any action with the enemy. There was an incident at Dhuisy where an enemy transport column climbing towards Gandelu was spotted and subsequently shelled. The Brigade was also shelled by its own guns as it waited to enter billets and bivouacks for the night at the farm in “Saint-Quentin”. But other than that, it was a day of marching, passing through prisoners and booty captured by the marauding cavalry units ahead.

Throughout the day they passed piles of discarded equipment and smashed vehicles. Gleichen allowed the men to take food at one point for themselves and corn for the horses. He praises the German’s “gulasch” and “blutwurst” over the BEF’s “everlasting bully beef”.

Other transport wagons were filled with bounty, “cases of liquor and wine, musical instruments, household goods, clothing, bedding etc”. Gleichen accuses the Germans of being “a robber at heart, and takes everything he can lay his hands on”. This is from the same Count Albert Edward Wilfred Gleichen, son of Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg.

The farm they end up in, which the Dorsets’ war diary calls St Quentin (as does Gleichen, the Cheshires and the Bedfords) is no longer on the map and I don’t, as yet, have access to an old 1912 map. So I’ve guessed where the farm was and placed it near a wood called Bois de Louvry, roughly on the path of their advance. I wondered if the farm could be this postcard.

Image showing farm at Saint-Quentin Louvry
Farm at Saint-Quentin Louvry

The British Army of 1914 has an annoying habit of shortening place names so it makes it very hard to find some of the villages mentioned in diaries. It also appears that a lot of the names have changed along the Aisne over the last hundred years or so. I have no idea why.

They had marched 16 miles. That night more reinforcements arrived. Two parties consisted of a total of 187 men under Lieutenant J.A.F. Parkinson and Second Lieutenant A.J. Clutterbuck.