Barking and Dagenham in the Great War

By Stephen Wynn

The First World War was only a matter of days old when Barking placed itself firmly on the map, after Driver Job Henry Charles Drain of the 37th Battery, Royal Field Artillery, was awarded the Victoria Cross. He was born in Barking on 18 October 1895, and on 26 August 1914, the 18-year-old Drain was at Le Cateau, France, when Captain Douglas Reynolds of the same battery was trying to recapture two guns. Driver Drain and another driver, Frederick Luke, volunteered to help and gave great assistance in the eventual saving of one of the guns. He survived the war and died on 26 July 1975 aged 79, and is buried at the Rippleside Cemetery at Barking. A second man, Laurence Calvert, who although not born in the area, died in Dagenham in 1964 aged 72, was also awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions on 12 September 1918 at Havrincourt, France at the Battle of Havrincourt.

Barking War Memorial is slightly unusual in that it is different from most, because it includes all those from the town who served (1812) in the First World War, those who returned home (1212) and the 600 men who didn't. It carries the names of 802 men from the town who gave their lives for their King and country, so that peace could prevail and the world could become a better place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Jun 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781473865389

Stephen Wynn

Stephen is a retired police officer having served with Essex Police as a constable for thirty years between 1983 and 2013. He is married to Tanya and has two sons, Luke and Ross, and a daughter, Aimee. His sons served five tours of Afghanistan between 2008 and 2013 and both were injured. This led to the publication of his first book, Two Sons in a Warzone – Afghanistan: The True Story of a Father’s Conflict, published in October 2010. Both Stephen’s grandfathers served in and survived the First World War, one with the Royal Irish Rifles, the other in the Mercantile Marine, whilst his father was a member of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps during the Second World War.When not writing Stephen can be found walking his three German Shepherd dogs with his wife Tanya, at some unearthly time of the morning, when most normal people are still fast asleep.

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Introduction

In writing about Barking and Dagenham in the Great War, I have tried to draw a balance between the war as a whole, on the world stage, in the form of a year by year snapshot of the major events or battles of the war, and then compare those events with everyday life in the towns of Barking and Dagenham.

I believe that for me to provide those two distinctions is important for the book to work. It wouldn’t be right just to write about the two towns in isolation without looking at the war as a whole, because the two are connected on so many different levels.

Life in both Barking and Dagenham at the beginning of the First World War was much the same as it was for many of the nation’s towns and villages. Although war had begun and the nation was fighting for its very survival, everyday life on the home front was still going on as normal as it was possible to in the circumstances. People were still going to work, children to school, and many of the men, especially the younger ones, were going off to fight in the war. Hospitals were springing up all over the place, to deal with the influx of wounded Allied soldiers, who had been returned to the UK to have their injuries treated.

The nearest census to the outbreak of the war was taken in 1911 and records that the population of Barking in its entirety, was 37,590, and that of Dagenham, was much lower, at just 9,641.

Both towns at the time were mainly rural areas, with labourer related jobs being the biggest employers for men looking for work. The work was hard and the days were long, with men usually toiling from dawn to dusk, which meant longer days in the spring and summer than it did throughout the rest of the year.

Here are a few examples of the type of work undertaken by people living in Barking and Dagenham at the time of the 1911 census. These roles wouldn’t have changed much by the start of the First World War.

I will start with the residents of Dagenham, men first. There were a total of 711 men who were engaged as labourers, but this covered different types of work ranging from farm work to building work, as both required general labourers. There were 157 men who were clerks, which, among others, included registration clerks, bank clerks, a civil servant assistant clerk and insurance clerks. Seventy-one were gardeners of different types. Forty-nine were bookkeepers. There were thirty men who were farmers, with a further twenty-three men working as butchers. Six were teachers. Three men were serving soldiers, one of whom was Harry Roseland Rodman, living at the Chequers Inn, Ripple Road, Dagenham. He was one of the first local men to be sent overseas and arrived in France on 17 August 1914. One man, Charles Samuel Cottrell, was a tailor who specialised in coat-making. Arthur Deeks, who was 46 years old was employed as a butler.

The census lists 157 of the women who worked as being in domestic service, as cooks, chambermaids and nannies. There were twenty-three women employed as nurses, many of whom worked at the Isolation Hospital at Rush Green. There were also a few who were what were termed as ‘Monthly Nurses,’ nurses who looked after a mother and her baby, in the weeks following the birth of the child, the postnatal period. The teaching profession employed fifteen women from the town.

Moving on to Barking and the type of work the men and women of the town undertook.

A large number of men (2,355) were recorded as labourers. There were 539 men who worked as clerks of some description, 97 men who worked as butchers, 53 who were employed as gardeners, 33 who worked as teachers, 27 men who were farmers, and 11 who were already serving soldiers.

There were 454 women of all ages, employed as domestic servants. Ninety-eight women worked as teachers, but this category included piano teachers as well those teaching in schools. Fifty women were employed as nurses.

Of course this isn’t the whole picture. As well as those mentioned, the majority of the working-age population followed some occupation, working hard in a diverse range of roles.

The arrival of the war brought changes to both towns. The War Office became the largest employer of men as those of fighting age enlisted in the army and other services and the number of women in the workplace continued to increase as they stepped forward to fill the vacancies left by men, work in munitions, train as nurses or work as volunteers for the cause.

With both towns having close-knit communities the war affected everybody in one way or another. When the men and women of Barking and Dagenham were called upon to do their duty they were not found wanting.

CHAPTER 1

1914: Starting Out

The first five months of the war saw 1914 draw to a close, but sadly the end to the war had not materialised as many had expected. When the war had begun in August, many thought that it was going to be a case of ‘jolly old hockey sticks,’ a few ‘fisty-cuffs’ and everybody back home in time to enjoy their Christmas dinner.

Although there had been rumblings about a war for a few years prior to the actual fighting, nobody really thought it would continue for so long, or come at such a cost in human lives. The period between August and December 1914 had really come as a shock to many. British forces had already lost 33,828 men, whilst India had already lost 7,303. Next was South Africa who had lost 217, Australia 99, Canada 84, and New Zealand had lost 15 of its men. Add to these figures those who were wounded, and all of a sudden the war had become very real indeed.

The first major battle of the war for the British Expeditionary Force was the Battle of Mons, which took place on 23 August 1914. In essence, it was a rearguard action by British forces as they attempted to make good their escape from a much larger, advancing German 1st Army. It had begun when they tried to hold the line at the Mons-Conde Canal, but were let down by the French 5th Army, who were positioned on the right flank of the defensive line but suddenly retreated without communicating their intentions to the British forces, who then found themselves dangerously exposed. Such was the strength and speed of the German advance, the British retreat, or tactical withdrawal as it was also referred to, from Mons, continued for two weeks, and resulted in the British being forced all the way back to the ‘gates’ of Paris, before they enacted a counter attack, with the by now regrouped French forces. This in turn became the Battle of the Marne, and lasted between 6 and 10 September 1914.

Even though this was very early in the war, the counter-attack by the British and French forces on the outskirts of Paris was a pivotal moment of the war. It could have ended up as the equivalent of the evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940, during the Second World War.

If the Battle of the Marne hadn’t taken place, that could have been the war over, there and then. If the British and French hadn’t counter attacked when they did, the First World War could easily have ended on the beaches of the French coast, where the Allied forces would have either had to surrender or been annihilated.

The intentions of both sides were made very clear at the Battle of the Marne, the desire to obtain a quick and decisive victory and end the war as early as they could. Official figures show that both sides committed more than one million men into the battle, out of which the Germans are estimated to have had nearly 70,000 men killed, whilst the French lost 80,000 men and the British lost 1,700, with six times that number wounded.

Both sides hardly had time to dust themselves down, have a rest and something to eat, than they were back fighting again. This time it was the Battle of the Aisne which took place between 12 and 15 September 1914. This ended up as a bit of a stalemate. The Germans held the high ground between Compiegne and Berryau-Bac, north of the river Aisne. On the night of 13 September, elements of the British Expeditionary Force crossed over the river Aisne, under the cover of a heavy fog, which once it disappeared the following morning, left them in a somewhat exposed position.

With neither side willing to retreat, the situation quickly became a stalemate. Sir John French, the man in charge of the British Expeditionary Force, ordered his men to entrench, despite the fact that his men did not readily have to hand the equipment needed to do this. Nearby farms and villages were visited to beg, steal and borrow any tools that could be effectively used to dig. The initial idea was for shallow slit trenches to be dug, so that the men at least had some kind of cover from the expected German artillery bombardments. In no time at all the British had dug trenches some seven feet deep. This certainly wasn’t what the Germans had planned for. Their forces were all about speed, mobility and surprise, with the intention of achieving a victory and a quick end to the war within six weeks. A blitzkrieg approach to war if ever there was one.

With manpower sapping, direct frontal assault attacks now a thing of the past and trench warfare the way it was going to be on the Western Front for the rest of the war, there then followed what history has recorded as the Race to the Sea stage of the war, where both sides attempted to outflank the other. This lasted between 17 September and 19 October 1914 and came to an end when Belgian forces managed to occupy the area between Diksmuide, in Belgium and the North Sea. But this wasn’t the end of the matter. There were still more battles, and trench warfare became the norm on the Western Front.

The Battle of Yser lasted between 16 and 31 October 1914, and saw a heroic defence by Belgian forces halt the German advance between the towns of Nieuwpoort and Diksmuide, over a 22 mile stretch of the Yser River. Despite this victory by Belgian forces, Germany still had control of 95 per cent of Belgian territory.

The First Battle of Ypres, which was in fact made up of five smaller battles, at Langemarck, La Bassée, Armentières, Gheluvelt, and Nonne Bosschen, took place between 19 October and 19 November 1914 and saw the combined strength of the Belgian, French and British forces up against the might of the German Army. It was an epic encounter. The Allies had a combined strength of 4,400,000 men against an even larger German force of 5,500,000. By the time the fighting had ended the combined casualties for both sides (including dead, wounded and missing) numbered more than 100,000 men.

According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, there were seventeen men who were either from Barking or who had connections with the town who were killed or died between the outbreak of the war and 31 December 1914.

The same website records that the first man from Barking to be killed-in-action, on 20 September 1914, was Edward Bridges, who was 25-years-old, and a gunner (45692) in the 44th Battery, Royal Field Artillery. He has no known grave, but his name is commemorated on the La Ferté-sous-Jouarre Memorial, situated in the Seine-et-Marne region of France.

The youngest man from Barking to be killed during the course of the war was William Richard Pinborough, who was 19-years-old when he died on 1 November 1914. He was an ordinary seaman (SS/4667) and serving with the Royal Navy as part of the crew of HMS Monmouth, when it was sunk during the Battle of Coronel off the coast of Chile.

During the battle, which started at 7.04 pm when the Monmouth was engaged by the German armoured cruiser, Gneisenau, the German fire was extremely accurate, and because her bigger guns were more powerful she was able to open fire from over 12,000 yards away, whilst still outside of the maximum range that Monmouth’s guns could reach. The Germans struck first causing a fire to break out on the Monmouth. Despite the obvious danger, the Royal Navy vessels, which were under the overall command of Rear Admiral Christopher Craddock, knew that they had to get closer if they were to have any chance whatsoever of defeating their German counterparts.

At 7.23 pm, a shell fired from the Gneisenau blew the roof off Monmouth’s forward turret, starting yet another fire, which in turn caused a large amount of ammunition to explode with such force that it blew the turret completely off the ship.