Buch lesen: «Tommy’s War: A First World War Diary 1913–1918»

Foreword

A small man in a badly made suit, a hat jammed on his head and an empty pipe between his lips, is walking down the street towards the tram, with a small boy attached to one hand, in turn clutching a mouth organ. Around him are men in uniform, loud gossipy women on the corner, the rattle of horse-drawn carts, the smells of sulphur, oil, coal and sweat. On the walls as he passes, lurid recruiting posters urge him to join the lads in France, to fight to save his women from the Hun, or simply exclaim that his country needs him. Head down, fingering his last stiff collar, he disappears into the crowd gathering by the tram stop. The streets are shabby and the war news is terrible. There is a faint sound of the mouth organ being played. Who is he, this man? What does he do? Does he have a wife at home, her hands coarsened with heavy washing and scouring, but her bread smelling sweet? Will he soon be wearing a khaki uniform, and die choking in French mud thinking of the small boy; or will he survive this so-called Great War? Does he like cards? What does he think of Germans, and this throbbing, clattering city where he has spent his life? But he has gone, vanished into time like the millions upon millions who lived through momentous times but who were not Lloyd George, or Haig, or even Harry Lauder.

Well, by extraordinary luck and chance, he has not gone. Back from the dead, Thomas Cairns Livingstone of Rutherglen, a clerk, married to Agnes, who was often ill, and the proud father of Wee Tommy, is returned to life through handwritten diaries and drawings discovered in an auction in Northumberland in 2005 and bought for £300. So now we know what he thought, who he was and what happened to him later. It is a story extraordinary in its ordinariness; it is good to have him back. For in general, history is owned by those who record it. Only a handful of truly powerful people were recorded by others at the time. Mostly, historians have depended on autobiographies, property records, diaries, letters, newspapers and account books. So ‘history’ has too often been that of those at the top of the pile, the politicians, writers and professional leaders; and it has been a hard task to disinter the lives of millions who left no written trace. It was not until 1937 that ‘Mass Observation’ began to accumulate the diaries and thoughts of ordinary Britons. Before that, the voices of the majority had been heard through snippets in newspapers, court reports or in rare sociological exercises, like Charles Booth’s studies of the London poor. There were a few memoirs by people further down the tree, clerks and governesses; some of the working-class Suffragettes and trade unionists left written records, for instance. There was the knowledgeable mimicking of working-class and lower-middle-class life by novelists – the clerks and shopkeepers of H. G. Wells, or the miners of D. H. Lawrence. But the material was always scanty.

During the First World War there was much recording of the lives and heroism of the men at the front, who wrote letters back home. Some retold their stories much later to historians. Little by comparison was written about the home front, where, of course, the vast majority of British people were living their lives. Oral historians like Richard van Emden and Steve Humphries have done much to salvage material from those they could find who were still alive; numerous local historical societies have done the same. But the diary of Thomas Livingstone is a rare thing. Here is the Great War as it was seen by an ordinary man, no hero, living in the backstreets of Glasgow. You might call him a Scottish Pooter, except that his drawings and humour are more self-knowing. He was no special rebel, indeed no special anything. But that is the point. As with family history, the stories of plain people upend and challenge the stories told by historians. For instance, I had no idea just how near the trenches seemed until learning that my family, also from Glasgow, got laundry back from sons in the trenches every week, and sent the clean underclothes back, along with cakes, chocolate and tobacco. The fast train service made Flanders seem very close. Thomas’ story is family history, except that his immediate family has long gone and it has been returned as a family story for all of us.

These were momentous times, and Glasgow in 1913—18 was a city at the edge of turmoil, seen by some as the next Bolshevik Petrograd. Yet as Auden famously pointed out while contemplating a painting of the fall of Icarus, great events take place in the middle of ordinary ones, ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. Tommy’s War is a war in a world of dull work, shortages, crying children and everyday diseases. He is not much concerned with high politics, though he has a shrewd and cynical take on government and its wartime propaganda: ‘This is SOS Week in Glasgow. Save our souls. Sink or swim. Stew or sausages. Steal or starve. Save or starve. Sew our shirts. Have your choice …’ He has a rebellious streak, but his rebellion is more directed at the hated factor, or rent-collector, than the government itself. In that, as in so much, he was pretty typical. The revolt which is remembered as ‘Red Clydeside’ was a series of disputes, starting with one over rent controls. The vast majority of Glaswegians rented their homes and when 20,000 munitions workers arrived in the city, the shortage of rooms was quickly exploited by the private landlords. Rents went up by more than a fifth. Factors were attacked by women, pelted in the street and went in fear. People refused to move or pay up. Placards reading ‘Rent Strike’ and ‘We are Fighting Landlord Huns’ went up in the windows and when, by May 1915, around 25,000 tenants were refusing to pay, ministers started to panic. Thomas, surely, would have sympathised but at the time he was much more interested in a huge rail crash at Gretna, which killed around 227 people but which has been largely forgotten by history. And this, too, is part of the appeal. The ‘story’ of those times that has been smoothed into predictability by historians is constantly disrupted by small surprises.

Thomas had no desire to be a soldier. In that, too, he was typical. After the great torrents of excited volunteers in the early days of the war, when patriotic enthusiasm had been dampened by stories of the reality of trench warfare, millions of men tried very hard not to serve their country, at least not in France or in khaki. We remember the ‘white feather’ campaigns and the famous Kitchener recruitment posters, and indeed huge citizen armies were created. But the feathers and the posters were needed because of widespread reluctance, particularly as a sense of the length and grimness of the fighting settled in people’s minds. As the war advanced, reflected in newspaper stories about victories and defeats, the pressure piled on. Like Thomas, it became impossible to be both patriotic and a quiet civilian. He is darkly humorous about his dilemma. When the Derby scheme was announced, offering men the chance of volunteering in return for a delay in being actually called up, he reports, ‘Got a love letter from Lord Derby egging me on to enlist before they make me.’ And later: ‘Recruiting sergeant up at night to assist me in making up my mind. I did not go away with him.’ Finally, on a snowy December night in 1915, he gives way: ‘Could resist no longer. Joined the army today … God save the King.’ In fact, Thomas never did have to become a soldier. For him the war is always just off-stage, as in a classical tragedy, a succession of liners and battleships being sunk, poison gas used, terrible losses reported, revolutions erupting and aircraft raiding. We must remember, this is how most people would have experienced it. And most, too, would have been more immediately concerned, as Thomas was, with the small things of life – rain, wind, coughs, shortages, chores, food and family.

As with Pepys or Boswell (admittedly, greater diarists) we enjoy the constant rub of the ordinary against the ‘historic’. Given that some historians have insisted the general public was fairly ignorant of the war it is interesting that Thomas, from his Glasgow flat, pretty accurately records each major event as it happens. Thus he is fully aware of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, even recording that it started ‘at 7.30 a.m. today’. But with 67,000 British casualties on the first day alone, a third of them killed, he quickly moves on, so that two days later, his main worry is that his young son Tommy is being teased by another boy: ‘Nice warm day. Tommy getting abused by the young microbe next door called Alec Gray. So I spoke severely to the aforesaid young microbe surnamed Gray. His ma then abuses Agnes.’ It is a moment to be compared with Pepys’ worries about the fate of a cheese during the Great Fire of London. Sometimes the juxtapositions are cheerily surreal: ‘The King doing Glasgow this week and round about. I saw him today. Agnes made plum jam at night.’ Or, from 16 March 1917: ‘Doctor up in the forenoon. Tommy has the German measles. Doctor says it is a mild case … Revolution in Russia. Czar dethroned. The Duma are in full power. The Czar and Czarina are prisoners.’ This, we all know, is how things are, the pattern of life. Great events occur. We note them. Meanwhile we have to cope with German measles, or a local lout.

Thomas is not given to rhetorical flourish or overstatement. He is a brisk, tart, dryish writer, who presents himself as put-upon and henpecked and whose drolleries are the more striking for their rarity. Yet he is, in his way, a good writer, too: he has a distinct voice and it is impossible to spend an hour with his diaries without having a clear impression of the man. No diarist who is disagreeable will keep our attention long: Thomas Livingstone is, we come to understand, a thoroughly likeable man whose love for his wife and son and growing horror at the scale of the slaughter shine through the laconic and self-mocking entries. What I find makes this book particularly touching are the illustrations, the quick pen-and-ink sketches, carefully coloured, of Thomas and the cast of characters, wife, son, recruiting sergeant, chimney-sweep, soldiers and the rest. They have a humorous immediacy and artlessness which is very winning, and go perfectly with the tone of the written diary. In the end, the best test of a book like this is whether one wants any more of it or not: I for one ended it in 1918 with a feeling of frustration. If the diaries continue to 1933, what happens next? Let us hope we find out, but meanwhile a little more about the city where Thomas lived, and the times he lived through, may be helpful.

Glasgow is special, was special and always will be. I should know. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, my family were solidly Glasgow. They were of a higher social class than Thomas, though they yo-yoed with the fortunes of the city itself. Various branches went from farm labourers to quarrymen to quarry owners during the great days of the Victorian expansion; the owners of floridly posh new houses – a window for every day of the year in one of them, apparently – and proud members of the middle-class clubs and societies. One was a Unionist Lord Provost, the last of his political line. Others became losers in the years of depression that followed the Great War, when a pie factory, for instance, lost its shipyard worker customers. But they all belonged to the tight, self-confident world of the Second City of the Empire, remembering its glory days when much of the world’s shipping tonnage had been built on the Clyde, and further back when the ‘tobacco lords’ who had established the wealth of the new trading city were laying out grand new squares and crescents. It was a city, like Chamberlain’s Birmingham or the ‘Cottonopolis’ of Manchester, with a very strong sense of itself and its history, utterly unconnected to the airs of the formal capital, London. My own father vividly remembers being shown by his father the sight of the Queen Mary lying half-built and silent in the yards when bad times had arrived; and the veteran soldiers, with waxed ‘Kitchener’ moustaches and empty sleeves or trouser legs pinned up, employed to brush clean the points for Glasgow’s famous trams.

His city, and that of his forebears, was based on technological experiment, audacity in business and a ready supply of cheap labour, coal, steel and water. In 1840, Glasgow was a textile town of some 250,000 people, a vast increase on the previous decades. But by 1900 she was more than three times as big, and surrounded by booming satellite towns. Iron smelting and steel-making combined with the deep estuary connected to the booming Atlantic and imperial trade routes made Glasgow a perfect industrial revolutionary capital. Steamships were built on the Clyde from mid-Victorian times but the rival yards produced competitive pressure which gave Glasgow a world lead in techniques such as screw propulsion, triple and quadruple expansion, high-pressure boilers, turbines and diesel engines. For a century, ‘Clyde-built’ was a global byword for reliability and skill – a memory which lingered on long enough for the engineer on the Starship Enterprise to be ‘Scotty’. This expertise in turn led to other engineering successes, from locomotives and machine tools to sewing machines, bicycles and cars: in the pre-1914 Glasgow of Thomas’ world, the Singer factories were world innovators and the Argyll Motor Works was turning out cars which seemed as likely to dominate world markets as anything made in America. Glasgow was an innovative, aggressive, roiling and cocky place, thick with smoke, noise, the smell of oil and the raucous boasts of chisel-faced city fathers in their stock exchange and their new, grandly built churches. Govanhill, his part of the city, around a mile south of the centre, was one of the poorer districts but far from slum-ridden. Its industry included important locomotive and iron works and its red sandstone apartments were by Edwardian standards relatively spacious as working-class housing. It boasted a fine new Carnegie Library and much admired public baths.

This is not surprising. Glasgow industry sustained a cultural and intellectual self-confidence that has been all but forgotten. Glasgow has always felt oddly American, in the heavy, steel-framed structures and the shape of its public buildings – and still does. The revival churches of ‘Greek’ Thomson are one thing, but the greatest glories of the city for anyone with a taste for the daring are the buildings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the nearest Britain has ever had to a Gaudí, and a man who made corners of Glasgow as exotic as Gaudí’s Barcelona. Glasgow University never achieved quite the Enlightenment status of Edinburgh but it was a close thing. Glasgow was ancient enough, dating back to a college founded in 1451, and the city had a formidable roll-call of philosophers, scientists, doctors and religious scholars. By the early twentieth century, bright Glasgow students would no more have thought of going south to Oxbridge for their learning than of sailing to Mars. Glasgow, with her Gilbert Scott spire rising high, was as exciting a university as any in the country. Then there were the great institutions, the Mitchell Library and the riotously Spanish Baroque Kelvingrove Art Gallery. The ‘Glasgow Boys’ were a school of painters unlike any group elsewhere; and they were followed by Colourists who brought the brightness of the French Fauves to the north, as no English painters of the time quite achieved. All this was going on around Thomas, a mile or two to the west, the cultural life of a city which allowed him, at least, to visit art galleries and carefully laid-out public gardens. Among the smoke and the dirt, there were bright things gleaming.

Glasgow had her own novelists, her own songs, her own orchestral and music-hall traditions, her own favoured holiday resorts, in the southern Highlands or ‘doon the watter’ on the banks of the Clyde estuary. She had her famous and excellent High School for the middle classes and distinctive political traditions. These included, sadly, a vicious sectarianism. For Glasgow was a migrants’ city. She had been little more than a large village before Atlantic trade, and then shipbuilding caused mushrooming growth; so almost every Glaswegian had come from somewhere else. Many, of course, had arrived from other parts of the Scottish lowlands, from labouring, merchant or professional families established earlier in Edinburgh, or the smaller burghs of the country. They would be overwhelmingly Presbyterian, either loyal members of the national Church of Scotland, or members of rival churches which had broken away during the great disruptions of the mid-nineteenth century. Their traditions of serious book-learning and disputation would feed many later politicians, including some of the Marxists for which Glasgow also became famous. Another great migration came from the Highlands, the ‘Teuchters’ much ridiculed by city humorists and on music-hall stages, though the mockery was intermingled with sentimental claims about Hielan’ hames and aboriginal ‘but-and-bens’ (small cottages) in songs by the likes of Harry Lauder. These Highlanders, Macleans, Camerons, MacDonalds and Campbells, were again mostly Protestant but included a sprinkling of Roman Catholics from those islands and small outcrops which had stayed with the old faith.

The third great migration, however, was Irish, mostly Catholic but including – as with Thomas’ family – Protestants who had been ‘settled’ in the north of Ireland but who had returned. Thomas’ father was from Lurgan, not far from Belfast, and he carried his sectarianism to Glasgow where he worked as a railway clerk. He joined a Loyal Orange Lodge. His views are not hard to guess. For the Protestant majority in Glasgow, of all classes, the Catholics were seen as credulous Papist peasants, ‘bog-trotters’ whose loyalty to Scotland or the Empire could never be assumed and whose priests, taking their orders from the Vatican, led them by their whisky-inflamed noses. The ‘Papes’ did not use proper lavatories, had recklessly large families which they could not feed, and were in general treated as a lesser breed. This sectarianism was as poisonous as anything expressed by apartheid-era Boers for black Africans, and just as sharp-edged as the near-identical feelings in Ireland itself. There were Orange Order marches, complete with bowler hats and gloating banners, well into the sixties. In return, the Catholic migrants forged and defended a militant identity of their own, initially based in poor enclaves such as Cowcaddens and Maryhill, with their own football club (Glasgow Celtic was founded in 1887), a disciplined church structure and increasingly assertive membership of the trade union movement. They tended to regard their Protestant fellow workers as deferential fools, dupes of the ruling order, and terminally dull.

So Glasgow was a city divided by religion, as it still is, though less violently these days. It was also, of course, a city divided by class and wealth. The great engineering and factory-owning dynasties, plus their lawyers, doctors and stockbrokers, lived in genuinely grand style in the West End. A mile or two to the east were scattered some of the foulest slums in Europe. The world is still thus divided, but while today’s hedge fund managers, city stars and footballing plutocrats live behind high walls, or in country estates, then Glasgow’s rich and poor literally rubbed shoulders in the streets, cramming the city centre where most of the business was done, and the gossip passed on. It was not the grand terraces, though, but the Glasgow slums, especially the tenement flats of the Gorbals, that have been remembered. In many ways rightly so: these were the dark and dangerous cave-dwellings of razor-wielding gangs and heroically drunken drunks. In fact, the tenement was a sensible and popular style of housing and is still used across much of Scotland. With between three and four storeys, a common stair and flatted apartments, it offered warmth and communal living with enough space for family privacy – well suited to the wet climate and long winters of the country. A good tenement is as intelligent a housing style as a terrace, or a row of semis. What made the Glasgow tenements notorious was simply lack of hygiene and intense overcrowding as the city expanded. Conditions by the mid-nineteenth century were terrible, though no different from the slums of Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds or Birmingham. Yet the large immigrant families, working in industries with terrible safety records, and against the hard-drinking, heavy-smoking culture of the Scots and Irish, resulted in child and adult mortality rates which were shocking even by Victorian and Edwardian standards.

Out of this grew a militant socialism which touches Thomas’ life at key moments, not least when he witnesses the Marxist agitator John Maclean, a man admired by Lenin and made a Communist commissar, returning in triumph from prison. Being Thomas, he is not, of course, much impressed: ‘Saw a most unholy mob of Bolsheviks in town today. It was a procession of some of our enlightened citizens welcoming home [Maclean] (from jail). He is standing for Parliament for the Gorbals. Heaven help us all!’ Most historians believe the stories of Red Clydeside have been exaggerated by later socialists with pickaxes to grind, and it is surely true that Glasgow was never really on the edge of social revolution. But at the time, it was taken very seriously: the war-leader Lloyd George was famously heckled and abused when he addressed trade unionists about letting in less well-qualified labour. Maclean, and some others, had openly opposed the war and been removed from the city to prisons in the east of Scotland. After the war was over, troops and tanks were indeed ordered north at a time when Westminster was jittery about the prospect of British Bolshevism.

Yet the biggest story of Glasgow during the war was the recruitment, maiming and deaths of huge numbers of her citizens. Scots volunteered quickly and in great numbers: Edwardian Scotland was still a comparatively militarised country, with strong regimental traditions and a general pride in the record of Scottish soldiers in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. As a result, with some crack regiments, Scotland lost a disproportionately large number of her men. By one estimate she lost 110,000 in all, a fifth of total British losses, rather than an eighth, as her size by population would have suggested. Glasgow herself lost 20,000 men, often soldiers from the slums who formed much of the Highland Light Infantry, though nearby coal-mining and rural areas suffered even more. As in England, the upper and middle classes volunteered early and were cut down early too: Glasgow University lost one in six of her graduates. The pressure on Thomas must have been intense. Yet it was quickly realised that if Britain was to fight and win a long war, she needed her mines and industries, shipyards and offices, to continue to function and a complicated system designed to keep vital workers in place was established. Armbands and badges were provided for key employees so that they would not be harassed in the streets by women bearing white feathers; other badges were produced for those (like Thomas) who had offered to fight but were not yet needed. It was a time of sidelong glances and offensive muttering about slackers and cowards: for Thomas it was a matter of some importance that ‘I have now got my khaki armlet to let folk know I have attested and await the call.’