One of the advantages of the evidence I gained access to in The Lancashire Textile Project interviews is that we can sometimes shed light on personal reactions to great national events. Billy Brooks is a good example. In 1905 he was 25 years old and met a young lady, Elizabeth Wharton, who was working as a farm servant at Gutteridge. So, by 1914 he was married, in a good job and buying his house. How did a settled man like this with responsibilities react to the news of war?
Billy was 33 at the time and had already seen war because he went to what he called 'The African War' in 1899 as a St John's Ambulance Service volunteer aged 18 years. I have to admit that when he first told me about this I thought he was talking about the Great War. It wasn't until he described soldiers in red uniforms forming squares and being fired on by men circling them on horseback that I realised he was talking about the Second Boer War! So this wasn't a man who had airy fairy notions about conflict, he had seen men killed and wounded and had helped transport them to a hospital ship moored off the coast.
When he heard the call for volunteers, Billy and his mate immediately jumped on their bikes and went to the recruiting office at Skipton. When they got there they found a long queue and the recruiting sergeant told them they might as well go home and come early the next day as there was no chance all the volunteers would be processed. So they came back to Barlick. I asked Billy what happened then and he said that “it went off them” and they didn't try again. Shortly afterwards he was declared an 'essential worker' and never served in WW1. A narrow escape!
I asked Billy what on earth possessed him to rush off like that and he told me it was the general atmosphere in the town. Military bands were sent to towns to march round playing martial music while the call went out for volunteers. He said it was exciting and the general opinion was that it would be a walk over, they would all be home by Christmas. This enthusiasm has often been disparaged by historians but the evidence from Billy bears it out and by September 1914 750,000 men had volunteered so I believe him.
We have the advantage of hindsight, we know what a bloody and long drawn out affair the war was going to be so it isn't surprising that we are more cynical but we can't ignore the direct evidence we have from Billy. These men were enthusiastic for what they saw as a just cause. They had watched the build up of German military power and believed what they were told by the politicians. After the war, in a poem inspired by the death of his son at Loos, Rudyard Kipling wrote “If they ask you why we died, tell them that our fathers lied”.
Billy Brooks in 1978.