Remembering all the Harrys

by Antonia Senior

Private Harry Reynolds died in France on 29 October 1914, aged 25. A careerist soldier, his service was undistinguished. He appears in the army records only when he lost his equipment and slipped cigarettes to prisoners he was supposed to be guarding.

Harry, who joined up at the age of 14, was 4ft 11, with defective eyes. This short, unremarkable soldier left no family behind. There is no grave for Harry.

I found his story as part of a fantastic community history project in Herne Hill, the leafy corner of South London in which I live. The Herne Hill Society, in partnership with The Charter School and local volunteers, undertook a project to map the men and women connected to Herne Hill who were killed in World War 1. The team believe that as many as 700 local residents were killed. On my street alone, there were five telegrams delivered, five families left bereft.

This is their website and I urge you to explore it: www.memorial.hernehillsociety.org.uk/.

The team has unearthed many heart-breaking stories, including a family which lost its three sons. But somehow, Harry’s story is the one that has lingered. As historical writers, the lives we focus on tend to be the ones that are significant: either because they are remarkable, or they are important, or they fit the narrative pattern we’re seeking to impose.

Harry’s story brings no clarity to the greater picture. It adds nothing but a single digit to an unbelievably large number. The mud of France cracked open, swallowed Harry, and sealed again. 

Most of us will be invisible to posterity and to be troubled by that lack of significance is pompous and hubristic. But most of us will be mourned by someone. Perhaps Harry had friends in the army who missed him. Perhaps poor, short, squinty Harry had a girl at home.

As the veterans of the World Wars die of old age, we need new ways to remember the Harrys. The map that this history project has created is hugely powerful. Children, in particular, need specific stories of flesh and blood people, not numbers, to force them to empathy. My older children were fascinated and appalled by the stories of the fallen soldiers who had lived on our road. The geographic specificity gave them a sense of connection and helped them really think about the lives, and deaths, of these men. 

We talk of bringing history alive, in fiction and non-fiction. To do that demands an emphasis on the commonality of human experience even as we mine the past for instances of difference and uniqueness.

But London, much as I love it, is a strange and hotchpotch place which constantly erodes a sense of commonality. People pass through, neighbours fail to connect. Most of us are incomers to our London villages. Most of us, too, are not church-goers. We don’t have that sense of belonging to a place that can make Remembrance Sunday so unbearably moving: I remember, in particular, being in a village church in Norfolk for one Remembrance Sunday service, and the surnames of the fallen were the names on the graves and, doubtless, in the records of marriages and baptisms.

We Londoners live, secluded in our overpriced houses, and disconnected to our past. We are ancestor-less. 

I was thinking about this, as I watched a friend’s ten year old find the story of a man who grew up in the house next door to her: Lieutenant John Hood. John was born in Herne Hill, and baptised in the church attached to my kids' old school. He studied at Cambridge, and was beginning a career as a teacher, before enlisting. He joined the 29^th Siege Battery in France in November 1916 and for the next two years fought in Belgium and France. John Hood survived the German guns, but caught influenza on 11 November 1918, and died three days later in France.

An early image of the church where John Hood was baptised.

One hundred years after John Hood caught influenza, the team behind the Memorial project organised a two minute silence in the centre of Herne Hill during the usually busy Sunday market. We stood amid the veg-sellers and the artisan butchers, the smell drifting past from the cheese stall; the fat from the burgers spitting and the steam rising from the giant vat of tartiflette. Kids and dogs and hungover youngsters clutching coffees.  All the busyness of a London Sunday.  Then a teenager from The Charter School played The Last Post, and we all fell still.

Herne Hill's town crier announcing the silence

There is a particular intensity to a silence that falls on a busy London street. I found it deeply moving - all these decent, unremarkable strangers standing together. It gave me a much needed dose of optimism. I have been dispirited of late by the mood music of public life, and its combative, fearful timbre. We seem to be more frightened than I can remember, more growlingly convinced of the coming apocalypse. Frightened people who feel powerless find anger easy.

We have different visions of the peril: for some it is Trump and Brexit, and the rise of the right; for others Corbyn and a resurgent Marxism. Then there’s the climate. The decline of the US and the rise of a more brutal Chinese hegemony. The coming of artificial intelligence. Putin gurning at Europe’s growing chaos. The likelihood that future generations will, at best, be poorer than us; at worst, face horrors that we cannot imagine. There’s a competitive edge to the catastrophising – my vision is more true and more terrifying than yours. We are strangers, gawping at a pick ‘n mix of dystopian futures.

I keep telling myself that there is an impulse in humans to anticipate an imminent Armageddon. True, yesterday’s silence reminded me that, sometimes, we are right and the Horsemen do sweep in and scythe us down. But it also reminded me that within all the tremulous cacophony of modern British life, there can also exist two minutes of meaningful silence.

@tonisenior 

antoniasenior.com

Industrial Revolution - how I came to love history

Barbara Mitchelhill

Today is my birthday. Hurray. Yes, three cheers! But that said, my birthday was the first thing that turned me off history. It was marred by the fact that it fell on Armistice Day and made me feel unbelievably miserable. From the time I was five, the school assemblies on my birthday were filled with prayers and images of the dead of two World Wars. I was very cross about it. Everybody made such a song and dance about the past while I wanted to concentrate on the present. By the age of eleven, I had come to the conclusion that history was very dull and very boring indeed.

When I went to grammar school, I had a second reason for disliking the subject. Our history teacher was Miss G – a read-page-ten-in- your-books-and-answer-the-questions type of teacher. These dinosaurs of the teaching profession must be extinct by now. I hope so.

Of course, Miss G couldn’t take all the blame for my dislike of history. The curriculum must shoulder some responsibility. That first term at Grammar School covered Ancient Egypt but I don’t remember stories of Egyptian gods or the wonderful artefacts discovered by archaeologists. We studied agriculture on the shores of the Nile. Why I should care about methods of irrigation thousands of years ago? As I had never travelled more than fifty miles from home, Egypt might as well have been on Mars. After the Nile delta, we plodded through the Romans, returned to England with William the Conqueror and worked our way through kings and queens and wars with lots and lots of dates and nothing which sparked my imagination.

Was Miss G really so bad or was it me?

But when I was sixteen all that changed. Suddenly I got it. Suddenly I understood what my history lessons were all about because the subject on the curriculum was the Industrial Revolution. Let me explain. I was born and brought up in Rochdale in Lancashire where evidence of the Industrial Revolution was all around me. There was no doubt about it, I became excited. History was real. Now I understood why how the weavers’ cottages I knew so well, with their loom windows on the top floor, had been made redundant by the huge woollen mill that blocked out the light in our front room. I also learned that even our two up and two down had its own history. It was a part of four streets of terraced houses with back alleys and shared privies which had been built for mill workers, giving them only a short walk to and from the their place of employment.

This was doubtless done for economic rather than humanitarian reasons, most probably to ensure that both adults and children were never late for work. After incredibly long days of labour, it must have been so hard to get up in the morning. These houses were tied to the mill, meaning that employees couldn’t change jobs easily. Their wages were paid partly in tokens which could only be spent at the corner shop. Shrewd move on the part of the mill owners. No wonder they could afford to build grand houses on the outskirts of town.

But I found signs in Rochdale of movements to improve the lot of ordinary people during the Industrial Revolution. For years, I had walked up Toad Lane to the Grammar School, passing a small shop without a glance. With my heightened interest in the period, I found that this very shop was the model for the modern co-ops we all know. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers was set up in 1844 by a group of weavers and artisans who opened the store to sell food at more affordable prices. Various groups had tried this in other parts of the country, but the shop in Toad Lane is believed to be the first successful co-operative.

If I walked home from school to save the bus fare, I passed a statue of John Bright without registering his name. Yet he was born in Rochdale, the son of a textile manufacturer, served in Gladstone’s cabinet and co-founded the Anti- Corn Law League.

I was so interested that I went to the library and found out that the Corn Law was had a devastating effect on the price of the staple part of poor people’s diet – bread. And when I discovered that my own grandparents had travelled north to Rochdale when agricultural work was in short supply, I realised that living in the country wasn’t all roses round the door but meant no work and empty bellies. My grandmother believed that the grime and dirt of the town was better than going hungry in in the country.

So the past was becoming clearer. It was fitting together. At the grand old age of sixteen I had learned to love history through looking around my own town and at my own family. I had found a realistic way to the past.

Luckily, the teaching of history has change hugely. Young children start by investigating their family roots, by walking around their town, asking questions, drawing plans. They talk to their grandparents about life when they were small. Older people come into schools and talk about their early life. And so history begins where is should begin, with our surroundings and things we can understand. Things that are real. Then the children step back in time, further and further, knowing where they have come from.

Today is Armistice Day – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – when the First World War came to an end. I know more about it now than I did when I was ten. I shall think about those who died in that terrible conflict and say a prayer for them -but I shall also have a happy birthday.