Tommy’s War: A First World War Diary 1913–1918

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.’

Unlike the Second World War, this was not really a people’s war – not at least for the British, though it was for many Russians and Germans. The Zeppelin and Gotha raids and the occasional bombardments by German warships against east coast towns are recorded by Thomas but direct danger reached little of the civilian population. In this war, only around 850 civilians died in Britain, as compared to 60,000 in the later conflict. Yet the war affected Thomas and his family, and every other family, in multiple less dramatic ways. It was not simply the friends who left for the fighting, or the growing evidence that the Empire was not performing as well as people had expected. Britain herself rapidly became shabbier, duller and hungrier. Famously, Lloyd George insisted on weaker, more watery beer and introduced tough pub licensing hours to try to deal with the (very real) problem of low productivity caused by drunkenness. Tobacco, as Thomas finds, becomes harder to obtain. Unlike the later world war, this one passed mostly without rationing. Until halfway through it, the Liberal government remained wedded to small-state, free market beliefs and tried hard not to interfere too much. The result was a life of unpredictable shortages, fast rising prices and adulterated food, which provoked riots in some parts of Britain, though not Glasgow.

Yet when Thomas notes in the spring of 1917 that the Germans are trying to starve Britain he is quite right: he may not have known just how close they were coming to success. The U-boat campaigns in the Atlantic had been devastating and Britain came within weeks of having to sue for peace simply for lack of food and oil. It was only a late directive to try the convoy system which saved the day. Meanwhile government action would eventually result in rationing by 1918, while strenuous efforts were made to increase agricultural production at home. In the country, people turned back to snaring rabbits, raiding birds’ nests and growing their own vegetables but in the towns the population struggled with meagre, dull diets featuring the much-hated National Loaf, a soggy, greyish concoction which nevertheless contained more nutrition and fibre than the white loaf everyone preferred. Shortages were everywhere, from coal to clothing. To save energy, street lighting was conserved, theatres closed early and entertainment much restricted; it is notable that Thomas’ most frequent references to entertainment seem to be dubious books from the library, games of cards and walks in the park, rather than nights out in bars or at the cinema.

Women, meanwhile, got their first chance to break into male trades, whether they were the tartan-uniformed bus conductors on the Glasgow trams, or women police officers patrolling parks in search of vice, or female munitions workers. This clearly affects Thomas, as it did most traditionally minded men, though he rarely voices derision and seems to accept that the world is changing fast around him. His wife is often sick, as is his son, and he clearly has few domestic skills, but it is a small, tight, traditional family in which he does his best. Glasgow was notorious for its drunkenness and domestic violence, and indeed across Britain battered women rarely complained to the police about drunken husbands: when they did, they got little sympathy. By those admittedly low standards, Thomas seems to have been a good husband. His wife Agnes’ ill health was again typical. Ill health and medicines, mostly ineffective still, feature heavily in these diaries. Mortality rates, particularly in urban Scotland, were shocking. The ravages of so-called Spanish Flu, which took a huge toll of the world just after the war, are well known; but it was a time still when less exotic infections, from measles to whooping cough, killed many. Agnes struggles with mysterious internal pains, lumbago and toothache so excruciating that she talks of killing herself. That was life – sorer, rougher and more dangerous by a country mile than it is today. Thomas notes her troubles and does the heavy lifting, and the cleaning, and does not complain. He is hardly romantic or gushing in his descriptions of Agnes but that is not his style. It is eloquent that his diary suddenly ceased when she died. These were two undemonstrative people who needed and loved one another very much.

So here is a slice of Britain from below, during some of her darkest years, and seen through the prism of the empire’s Second City, and the pen of one of the countless millions who mostly went unrecorded, unsung and unremembered. The message is an individual, human one, the more moving and memorable because it does not fit neatly into a historian’s grand narrative. Here, amid the malfunctioning chimneys, boat excursions, bad food and worse news, the little domestic feuds and distant echoes of hectoring from politicians, is the story of one undistinguished, shrugging, perky, rather loveable man who just wanted to get on with his life, be kind to those around him and – if pushed – ‘do his bit for the Flag’ but please, not something too dangerous and please, not quite yet. Here clear and unmistakable is the voice of that fabled abstraction, the man on the street – not the man on the Clapham Omnibus, as it happens, but the mannie on the Kelvingrove Tram. He isn’t easily taken in. He is only a little sorry for himself. He is not noticeably religious or political. He stands aside from the great enthusiasms and lunacies around him; in his sensible, defiant ordinariness, he is almost Charlie Chaplin-esque. He is the man the rest of them are fighting for. And, luckily perhaps, I for one closed his diary realising that I liked him rather a lot.

Andrew Marr, June 2008