The NUT and The Great War 1914-18

5/23/2018 The NUT and The Great War 1914-18

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The NUT

and

The Great War 1914-18In the NUTs post war publication, War Record 1914-

1919 printed in 1920, 186 members of the NUT North-ern Region are noted as being killed during hostilities.

Of those who were killed in the First World War some 77

NUT members were enlisted into the Durham Light In-

fantry and a further 30 were members of the Northum-

berland Fusiliers (together these amounted to some 58%

of all those members of the Northern Region who died).

Almost a third of those Northern Region members who

died would have been members of what we regard today

as The Durham Division of the NUT. Viewed from 1914,

the number would have been larger. At that time the

associations of Gateshead, Houghton le Spring, SouthShields and Sunderland were all part of County

Durham.

It appears that no NUT members fought with either the

Tyneside Irish or Scottish Brigades, and it may well be

that these regiments were seen as more the province of

miners and other working class groups with Irish or

Scottish affiliations. In terms of where the teachers are

buried or commemorated, 20 are listed on the Thiepval

Memorial to those whose bodies were never found and

identified at The Somme; 21 are remembered in Ypres at

The Menin Gate, and 6 at the Tyne Cot Cemetery. TheUnions own records provide details of a further 12

members of the Northern Region who were known to

have been killed or died in the war, but so far the loca-

tions and dates of their deaths have proved elusive.

On the 22nd April 1915 at Ypres, the Germans made

their attack. Ypres represented the last remaining major

town held by the Allies in Belgium. That day marked

one of the first extensive and intense uses of chemical

weapons in modern warfare. Thousands of chlorine can-

isters exploded in the French, Algerian and British trenches. Prior to that date the Germans had used

gastear gas, not chlorine- on both the Eastern and Western fronts but only to the extent that it was an

irritant. The French had also made some use of gas grenades. Moral indignation of the effects of the gas

did not prevent the British Generals from demanding that they too were equipped with the gas to use

against the Germans.

By the end of June 1915, the defence of Ypres had cost the British some 60,000 deaths. Some 17 NUT

members of the DLI were killed there between April and June. They were part of the 50 thNorthumbrian

Division which fought at this, the Second Battle of Ypres. Three NUT members in the Northumberland

Fusiliers were killed on the first day of the Somme. Most of the deaths of teachers in the Fusiliers oc-

curred in 1917-1918.

Another member whose final resting place is not currently known to us is the only woman member of the

NUT to die in war service, Miss K E Ogg. Kate Ogg was the daughter of a brass finisher who himselfwas born in Walker. She was born in 1887 and baptized at Bath Lane congregational Church in the cen-

tre of Newcastle. The family moved to Heaton but by 1911 they had moved to Elswick living on Havelock

Street. Kate was teaching and still living at home with her family when war broke out. She taught at

Wingrove County School in Newcastle and she joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD). She was

one of four women members who dies in service. In Kates case in was nursing military casualties during

the Spanish flu outbreak of 1919 rather than enemy action that caused her death.


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Some 17,500 women teachers were recruited to replace those men teachers who were missing from

their schools due to volunteering or, from 1916, conscription. For some women this meant a return to

teaching. Prior to the First World War almost all local authority employers and indeed the Civil Ser-

vice required women to leave the profession upon marriage. As male teachers volunteered, the au-

thorities were prepared to allow married women to return to the classroom for the remainder of the

war, though the marriage ban itself remained imposed on women teachers and BBC employees till

1944 and to Civil Servants and Local Government Workers until the mid 1950s. Other single women

members left the classroom to work in munitions factories where wages were better than in school.

The 1920 NUT Report states that around 200 women NUT members joined the VAD. If this is cor-

rect then a significant number - just over 20% came from the Northern Region. The largest number

came from theUnions Barrow Association closely followed by those from the Sunderland and New-

castle Associations. Many other women members who stayed in school additionally supported the

war effort by undertaking farm work, fruit picking and clerical work during school closure periods.

Others collected for and purchased a variety of equipment including ambulance cars for the wound-

ed, invalid chairs, spinal carriages and other medical goods.

The international trades union bodies had repeatedly passed motions against war in the years prior

to 1914, but following the outbreak of hostilities, the TUC took a line of supporting the war effort and

it promoted a culture of avoiding strife at work. In general teachers, no different from those in other

strands of British society, vol-unteered. A Board of Trade

Report noted that of the 54,000

male teachers in the labour

force nationally 34% had enlist-

ed by July 1916. Most teachers

were NCOs and privates. Little

detailed evidence is at present

available, but it is clear that

some, including a Northumber-

land headteacher, joined the

ranks as privates.School headteachers found

themselves in a particularly

difficult position during the

war years. The authorities, lo-

cal communities and parents

expected their schools to stay

open despite limitations on

teaching space, shortages of

qualified teachers and, for

schools within range of enemy

aircraft, frequent air-raid drillsand occasional bombings. Many

headteachers fell within the

age range for military service,

creating personal dilemma and

sometimes community tension

over where their real duty lay.

Some were prevented by their

Governors and Local Tribunals

from enlisting, whilst others

found themselves appealing to

the same tribunals to spare in-dividual teachers who were

needed to staff the curriculum.


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Coming to terms with the death and maiming of Old Boys, reading lists of casualties in school as-

semblies, and trying to make sense of the conflict as it unravelled to the remaining pupils was part

of the headteacher's role in the war.

After the War, in 1919, the NUT reported that members had contributed to various Union support-

ed relief funds. Contributions from members via the NUT to the Prince of Wales Relief fund yielded

16,470. Further sums were collected to support local relief funds. They totalled something short of

100,000. At the outbreak of the War a significant focus was put on the fact that the German attack

was on Belgiuma neutral country. Reports came in of German barbarity against the civilian pop-ulation. The NUT collected funds to support Belgian teachers some in Belgium and others who

fled to England as refugees. In excess of 2,600 was raised around the country (equivalent in 2014 to

some 252,000) and a further 2,000 was raised by London teachers. 10,000 sets of garments were

collected and sent to help Belgian and Serbian children. The NUT also supported a delegation of

Russian teachers which had been in England prior to the start of the war. These teachers were pre-

vented from returning home via the traditional route through France. Funds were used to support

their travel from London to Newcastle and then on to Bergen as a way of returning to their home-

lands.

The NUT created a further fund for the widows of those teachers who were killed and for those

teachers who were disabled during the war. The fund did not just support the families of NUT mem-

bers but also those of any teacher employed in a state aided school. The fund was raised by mem-bers subscribing and by late 1916, it had reached its target of 100,000the equivalent of some 9.7

million in 2014. The NUT noted after the war that this sum had been raised alongside members con-

tinuing to make contributions to the Benevolent and Orphan Fund (the modern TBF).

Grants, sometimes monthly, were given to widows and aged mothers; one off grants were used to pay

for sanatorium fees, artificial limbs or mechanical appliances to assist movement.

Following the Armistice in 1918 and the collection of information prior to publication in 1919, the

NUT was not able to list all of the NUT primary teachers who had joined up or to find a final figure

for those who had served. It is estimated that the total number of teachers known to have served

(NUT and non union teachers) was around 23,000. (the Board of Trades figures may also have in-

cluded those working in non state settings.)

NUT members and Durham teachers James and Percy Cook:

(from material supplied by Durham County Record Office)

The Durham County Hall War Memorial lists the names of 179 County Council employees who died

during the First World War. In total some 122 men died between 1914-18.

Many of the men listed on the memorial were teachers. In World War One the 1,134 employees who

joined up for war service included 823 teachers and 311 employees from Health, Surveyors, Clerks,

Accountants and other County Council departments.

One such teacher was James Edward Cook, born on 12 January 1891 at Thornley in East Durham.

He was baptised on 29 January at home (a possible indication that he was a sickly baby), and the

baptism is recorded in the Thornley Wesleyan Methodist Circuit baptism register. He was the sec-

ond son of John George Cook and his wife, Ann (or Annie) Sarah Cook. John kept a greengrocers and

fruit shop at Hartlepool Street, Thornley, and had done so from the early 1880s.

James had attended a Pupil Teacher Training Centre at Henry Smith School in Hartlepool and had

worked as a Pupil Teacher at Wheatley Hill Council School.

In the summer of 1909 he applied to Bede College in Durham City, with references from the head

teacher in Hartlepool and the vicar of Thornley, Rev. Ernest Biggs.

Given his Methodist baptism and his close ties with the Wesleyan Church in Thornley, it is perhapssurprising that he applied to Bede College, a Church of England Mens Training College.

Although he passed the qualifying examination he did not attend Bede College, but instead went to

Sunderland Training College in September 1909 for a two-year training course.


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James appears in the 1911 Census as a Student (Teaching Profession), since at the time of the cen-

sus he was still at Sunderland College. However, later in that year he was appointed as a Certifi-

cated Assistant at Thornley Council School (Boys Department), and the school log book notes that he

commenced his duties on 14 Augustone of three fully-trained teachers in a staff of five. His time at

Thornley School appears to have been uneventful, in that his name only appears in the log book

once, noting an absence through illness on 2 and 3 March 1914.

James was later described as a young man who had obtained in a remarkable degree the good

word of everyone with whom he came in contact. He was deeply involved with the Thornley Wesley-an Methodist Society and read papers to the debating society which were all marked by earnestness

and high intelligence.

On 10 September 1914, one month after the outbreak of war, the log book notes that James left

school for War Service, following one of the other Certificated Assistants, Alfred Turner, who had

joined-up 17 August. Permission for him to enlist was formally given by the Education Committee on

30 September.

He joined B Company of the 1/7th battalion of the Durham Light Infantry, which, after seven

months training, landed in France on 19 April 1915. Within a week the battalion was in action at

the second battle of Ypres, which began when poison gas was released into the Allied lines north of

Ypres, the first time that gas had been used in the war. The effects of the gas and the strength of the

German attack forced a British withdrawal to a shorter defensive line. James was killed, aged 24,

five weeks after landing in France, on 26 May 1915 (Whit Monday), having written what became his

last letter to his parents on the day before.

According to the Durham Advertiser report (which refers to him as John) his parents had not been

informed officially of his death by the end of July, but received the news in a letter from a soldier in

a Lancashire regiment who had found James body on 3 July and had buried him. The soldier said

he had found James watch, diary and a photograph, but apparently had not signed the letter. A me-

morial service was held at Thornley Wesleyan Methodist Church on 18 July.

James had written to the boys at the school while he was at the front, thanking them for the ciga-

rettes which they had sent, and said that although his thoughts were often with the school, he pre-

ferred to be out in France than walking about Thornley in civilian clothes We are all happy herebecause we know this is the place where we ought to be.

James Cook has no known burial place, but is commemorated on the Menin Gate memorial at Ieper

(Ypres), with 54,000 other British soldiers whose graves are unknown. The Menin Gate memorial

was designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield and is one of four memorials to the missing of Flanders - its

site was chosen because the original gate was known to thousands of British soldiers who marched

through it on their way to the Ypres Salient front.

James younger brother, Percy, was also an NUT member. Percy attended Henry Smith School in

Hartlepool for four years and he too was a Student Teacher at Wheatley Hill Council School. He left

Wheatley Hill in 1913 to begin a teacher training course at Westminster College. The college had

been founded in Horseferry Road, London, in 1851 to train teachers for Methodist schools (andmoved to Oxford in 1959). On the completion of his training in 1915 he returned to County Durham

and to a post as a Certificated Assistant teacher at Thornley Council School (Boys Department), the

same school in which his older brother, James, had taught until joining-up in September 1914.

Percys obituary in the Durham Advertiser notes that he intentionally shortened his course at West-

minster College since he had been anxious to enlist (and in his service records his occupation is giv-

en as student, and his religion as C of E). Percy Cooks arrival at the school is not mentioned in the

school log book, nor is his departure on war service. However he joined-up at Durham on 3 April

1915 (although formal permission to enlist from the Education Committee is only recorded in Sep-

tember 1915). In fact, there is only one mention of Percy Cook in the school log booka note, on 22

August 1916, that news had been received of his death on 27 July.

Percy was posted to the 18th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry, the Durham Pals. 18 DLI

was one of the Kitcheners Army battalions, raised from the enthusiastic flood of volunteers in the

first months of the war, and it was unique in that the expenses for raising it were paid for entirely

by the County of Durham. The battalion was formed and trained at Cocken Hall, and became part of

the 93rd Infantry Brigade and the 31st Division.


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Percy joined the battalion on 8 April 1916 following its redeployment from Egypt to France. He

trained as a bomber (responsible for clearing enemy trenches and dugouts after an attack) and was

initially attached to the 3rd Entrenching Battalion (from which drafts were sent to line battalions).

Percy was killed on 27 July 1916, age 21, only four months after landing in France. As part of the

Battle of the Somme, 18 DLI were holding the front line at Neuve Chapelle and were subject to inten-

sive artillery and trench mortar fire. In a German raid on the night of 27/28 July they suffered 79

casualties, including Percy.

His parents received the news in a letter from Rev. C.R. Chappell, chaplain to the 18th DLI, I buriedhim in the military cemetery just near the lines where his grave will be looked after and a cross

erected. Later on, I hope to tell you the exact spot where he rests. He is buried in St. Vaast Post

Cemetery Richebourg-L'avoue, north-east of Bethune.

Official confirmation of Percys death did not arrive until early September, and a special service was

held at Thornley Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in memory of Percy Cook on 5 November 1916.

In the spring of 2014 members of the NUTs Northern Region retraced the steps of some of those

members who had travelled to Flanders and who had not returned. They visited the site at Ypres of

the monument to the 50th Northumberland Division which had included members such as James

Cook and his comrades in the Durham Light Infantry. They also visited Passchendaele, where a

number of NUT members in the Northumberland Fusiliers had died in 1917. The teachers laid a

wreath at the Menin Gate in commemoration of all of those teachers from the Northern Region who

had lost their lives in the war. The visit was organised as apart of a conference on Peace Education

which also included Queens University Belfast and the International Trust for Peace Education.

Whilst Professor Lawrence Kirkpatrick of Queens University talked of changing patterns leading to

something more of a common history in Ireland, the NUT expressed its concerns over the dogmatic

approach taken by the current Secretary of State for Education branding all of those who denied

his interpretation of the First World War. He alleged that those who opposed him of peddling

misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this

country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as pat-

riotism, honour and courage. History teachers might well disagree and consider his remarks assomething which might have sounded familiar and almost sectarian to some teachers in Irish schools

in Ulster in the 1930s. They were yet another of his gross attacks on the profession today.


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Below are a couple of photographs, the first of which is of a grave in The Tyne Cot Cemetery at Ypres.

This belongs not to an NUT member but to a soldier whose parents chose what was a rare inscription

for the times, but one which has a lasting resonance today. To the right is the monument at the Na-

tional Arboretum in Staffordshire to those 306 British servicemen who were executed for cowardice

or desertion The statue is modelled on a 17 year old member of the Northumberland Fusiliers, Her-

bert Burden. He lied to join up at the age of 16two years below the minimum age for volunteering.

Ten months later he was court martialled for desertion after leaving his post to comfort a recently-

bereaved friend stationed nearby, having seen many other friends killed at the Battle of Bellwarde

Ridge.

The officers considering Pte Burden's case heard his unit had been issued orders to make for the front

just before he went missing. By the time he faced the firing squad on 21 July 1915, Pte Burden was

17 - still too young to even officially be in his regiment.

The poster on the following page was circulating throughout County Durham in the months after the

Second Battle of Ypres. It acknowledges the deaths of the Northumbrian Division and the gaps innumbers this had caused. It uses this information to put pressure on others to join up. This is a tactic

that we might recognise today: death in war must be justified; others must join up to complete the

task; the deaths of those who have gone before must not be in vain, and so the cycle continues until

people decide that they are no longer prepared to accept these premises.

The years 1916-17 saw the widespread desertion of Italian troops fighting Austro Hungary and of

Russian troops from the Eastern Front culminating in the revolution of 1917; 1918 saw mutinies in

Germany most notably at Kiel and revolutionary risings elsewhere in Berlin, Bavaria, Dusseldorf,

Stuttgart, Leipzig and Cologne. In France there were also large scale mutinies during 1917. 50 years

later the war in Vietnam ceased to be sustainable amongst the American public and the US effective-

ly exited the war in South East Asia.

Material for teachers of primary secondary and post 16 students on Peace Education and opposition

to the First World War is available from the Peace Museum in Bradford. Further details available at

http://choicesthenandnow.co.uk/


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NATIONAL UNION OF TEACHERS NORTHERN REGION

3 McMillan Close Saltwell Business Park Gateshead NE9 5BF Telephone 0191 482 7700 Fax 0191 482 7720

Email [email protected]

Documents

The NUT and The Great War 1914-18