John Beckett – The Centre for Hidden Histories: Community, Commemoration and the First World War

The Great Escape – from Sutton Bonington!

October 20, 2017Michael Noble

The Centre’s Principal Investigator, Professor John Beckett, uncovers the story of a daring escape from Sutton Bonington, today one of the University of Nottingham’s UK campuses.

During the centenary commemorations of the First World War, The Times is running a daily column reprinting a war-related activity first covered one hundred years ago. On 26 September 2017 it reproduced a story from 26 September 1917 headed ‘Escape of 23 War Prisoners’. It was about the escape of German officers from the internment camp at Sutton Bonington.

The Times reported the story with a certain sardonic humour. The German POWs had dug a tunnel and collected supplies ready for the break out, but having escaped they then struggled to put much distance between themselves and the camp. Six of them were caught near Nottingham, two were found asleep in a wood ‘worn out by their walk’, and three were arrested when they aroused suspicion by asking the way to the nearest railway station. Captain Muller was caught when schoolchildren found him blackberrying in Tollerton woods, six miles from the camp. Two more were found in East Leake ‘playing at cards while crouching beneath a hedge’.

These two men do not seem to have been trying all that hard to make their way back home, and apparently confessed the whole story. The escapees had tunnelled a distance of 50 yards over a three months period. Having escaped they divided into groups of four and started out on different routes towards the coast ‘where they hoped to get away by tramp steamers’.

Eighteen of those who escaped had been recaptured by 28 September 1917, and four more were taken at Chesterfield by Derby police on 30 September.

The story is, of course, well known. The Midland Agricultural College had been preparing to move from its premises in Kingston on Soar to the main building and men’s hostel newly built at Sutton Bonington. That building had a date stone of 1915. Before the move could take place the buildings were taken over to house German officers, who were generally well treated when they were captured as prisoners of war. In 1915 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle complained that they were quartered well away from ordinary soldiers, often in country houses or in the officers’ quarters of barracks. These were comfortably furnished, and servants were found for them from among the soldiers held as POWs. One of the prisoners, named in The Times, Captain Muller, had been in command of the Emden, a German raiding cruiser which had bombarded Madras in September 1914, and was subsequently sunk off the Cocos Islands on 9 November.

Photograph, 3 German Officer prisoners, Sutton Bonington campus, c.1917-1918

When the Sutton Bonington escape was reported, special constables were called out ‘and every measure was taken to apprehend the escaped prisoners’. With night patrols and road blocks, as well as special constables at strategic points, the prisoners were prevented from making much headway.

Lieutenants J. Stadelfaauer and P. Bastgem were recaptured in Derby after a week on the run – perhaps an inappropriate term since they had travelled just twelve miles from Sutton Bonington. Three men caught in West Bridgford on 25 September 1917 had among their possessions sardines, milk, bacon, ham, cheese, prunes, sausages, biscuits and dried toast. They might not have got far in their search for a packet boat to take them to Germany, but they were not going to starve. In fact, in the course of the First World War, only one German officer made it back home.

Event review: The Sherwood Foresters in Dublin, Easter Week 1916

October 9, 2017Michael Noble

The Sherwood Foresters in Dublin, Easter Week 1916

Nottingham Lakeside 7 October 2017

The Centre for Hidden Histories has provided financial support for a public engagement partnership examining the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and, in particular, the role of the 7th and 8th Reserve Battalion Sherwood Foresters. The battalion was mainly made up of young working-class men from Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.

The subject has been researched in some detail by Professor James Moran of the University of Nottingham’s School of English, and he has also forged the public engagement programme with Hall Park Academy, Eastwood. Jim Moran has worked on the project with Professor Fintan Cullen of the University’s Department of History of Art. Fintan is from Dublin.

The Sherwood Foresters who were sent to Dublin had little idea of what they were walking into, and the battalion suffered the greatest casualties of all the British regiments involved in the insurrection. The soldiers were also made to participate in the firing squads that executed the rebel leaders. Jim and Fintan have researched the story of what happened both during Easter week and immediately afterwards when they were moved to Galway. They used archival material to explore how, at the time of the rebellion, the Sherwood Foresters believed that they would be remembered.

Much of the research was embedded in a specially devised performance at Lakeside by year 10 students from Hall Park Academy in Eastwood. The intention was to recover the voices of the soldiers from Nottinghamshire, and the play used the words of the soldiers, their opponents, and Eastwood’s most celebrated son D.H. Lawrence who, the audience was reminded, was not a conscientious objector but was found (on three occasions) to be unfit to serve on the front line.

Jim Moran introduced the play, in order to set the scene for the performance. The Second Battalion of the Notts and Derbyshire Regiment, better known as the ‘Sherwood Foresters’, were the last of the 1914-1918 war volunteers. They went to war to defeat the Germans but soon found themselves in combat on the streets of Dublin. The Foresters arrived in the Irish capital on 26 April 1916. They marched from Kingstown port (now Dun Laoghaire) into the city. The battalion was divided into two. Two thousand troops were sent into the city along the tree-lined Northumberland Road, cheered on by many of the citizens of Dublin – although some of the soldiers appear to have thought they were in France and were surprised to be greeted by cheering crowds speaking in English rather than French!

Far from having an easy ride against what they had been assured was an ill-disciplined and poorly trained rebel force, they found themselves up against well organised fighters, and within hours of their arrival more than 220 Foresters had been killed or wounded by just 17 men of the Irish Volunteers.

The Foresters had received just 12 weeks training, and they were ill-prepared for combat; indeed, some of the men had not even learned to fire a rifle. Their machine guns and hand grenades had been left on the dockside in Liverpool. The British military leaders believed that a show of force would be enough to end the uprising. It was a serious miscalculation.

The letter to Capt. Dietrichsen from his children

One of the officers leading the men was Nottingham barrister Christian “Freddie” Dietrichsen, a Captain in the regiment. Before the war, Dietrichsen – who was of Danish extraction, hence the surname – had married an Irish women, Beatrice Mitchell. They settled in Nottingham’s Park estate but with the outbreak of the war Freddie, fearing the possible impact of Zeppelin raids, sent his wife and children to Watford. Unbeknown to Freddie, Beatrice decided this was still too close to the action, and moved with her children to Dublin. They were among the crowd waving flags on Northumberland Avenue when Freddie marched past. He was surprised, because he thought they were in Watford, and they were surprised because they thought he was in France. The march into Dublin stopped briefly for Freddie to kiss his wife and children before carrying on. Shortly afterwards he was killed by a sniper’s bullet. In his jacket pocket were letters to him from his children, and a letter he had written but not sent, to his wife.

All of this was recounted in the Hall Park Academy’s performance at Lakeside, together with appropriate quotations from Lawrence. For the pupils, this was their first opportunity to perform on a public stage, for the parents it was an opportunity to be proud of their offspring, and for the Centre for Hidden Histories and Jim Moran it was an opportunity to find out more about a First World War event which the British army chose (presumably from embarrassment at having underestimated the Irish rebels) to play down. But, first and foremost, congratulations to the pupils of Hall Park Academy.

Review: Nottingham in the Great War

September 23, 2015Michael Noble

John Beckett reviews Nottingham in the Great War by Carol Lovejoy Edwards

One of the more heartening aspects of the First World War commemorations is that they have not concentrated purely and simply on the Western Front. There are, without any doubt, plenty of reasons for remembering the great slaughter which took place in Belgium and France, particularly during the ‘trench’ period of the conflict, quite apart from the linked conflicts elsewhere in Europe and further afield . But there are also many reasons for remembering the home front, not least the fact that so many families lost members in the conflict and were often left simply to get on with life. Bodies were not repatriated, so the best they could hope for was a name on a war memorial, and perhaps a few personal possessions which might reach them many months after their relative died.

The publishers Pen & Sword have started a ‘Your towns and cities in the First World War’ series, in order to highlight just what those ‘at home’ had to handle. Carol Lovejoy Edwards has written the Nottingham volume, largely through sifting photographs from the Picture the Past Collection,[1] and then surrounding the images with an explanatory text divided into annual chapters 1914-1919.[2] It is written with a light touch, plenty of examples, many of which appear to be from newspapers although none are acknowledged, no great depth, and some occasional errors which suggest the author is not familiar with the city – where, for example, is or was the Southward Council School?

The home front was only partially involved with the actual day to day action on the Western Front because unlike the Second World War the threat from the air was as yet relatively limited. The problem for most families lay at home, not just in respect of sons and grandsons going to war, but also in terms of earning power, fund raising, work, and the occasional threat of a Zeppelin raid. At times food was also an issue, and some responses to war were distasteful in the extreme – notably the attitude to German-born people living peacefully (until August 1914) in the city. Other social changes included women moving into work, taking on roles such as tram conductresses, and shell filling – notably at the Chilwell depot which suffered a catastrophic explosion in July 1918.

What the book does not do is to offer any real depth of discussion. There is nothing on how families coped with separation, death and often serious injury to loved ones? And by stopping with the Armistice in November 1918, there is nothing on returning soldiers and the problems of reintegration, or of memorialisation, or of the impact of the war on the suffragette movement. Anyone who has been to the battlefields, or to the great memorials at Arras, Ypres, Verdun and elsewhere, knows that the war was a tragedy – a generation of young men wiped out, a whole society dreadfully aware of its loss, and a home front on which those left behind struggled to keep life going, and to respond to the call.

Nottingham had its military tribunals from 1916 with the introduction of conscription, and even a handful of conscientious objectors, but in general this was a war which the British accepted as a necessary response to German Imperialism. This book is too lightweight to do real justice to the way in which the people of Nottingham handled a conflict in which they were caught up, and which they felt, for the most part, compelled to accept for the greater good of the state and the Empire. Their job was to act as support for the war, and in general they did a remarkably good job.

[1] www.picturethepast.org.uk

[2] Carol Lovejoy Edwards, Nottingham in the Great War (Pen & Sword, 2015)