Isle of Wight in the Great War

Chapter One

1914: For King and Country

ON THE AFTERNOON of Sunday, 28 June 1914, a car took a wrong turning in Sarajevo, a small and unimportant Bosnian town. In the back seat rode the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria and his wife Sophie. The open-topped limousine purred past a pavement café where a 19-year-old student, Gavrilo Princip, sat in astonishment. He was astonished because he believed Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were dead already, the victims of an assassin’s bomb, thrown earlier in the day. He pulled himself together, walked up to the almost stationary car and pulled the trigger of his revolver twice. Sophie died almost instantly; Franz Ferdinand minutes later. Their deaths sparked the Great War and four years later, an estimated 16 million men were dead with a further 20 million wounded.

The summer of 1914 was a scorcher, 1300 miles away from Sarajevo in the Isle of Wight. Ladies in white frothy dresses and parasols wandered the sea fronts of Ventnor, Sandown, Shanklin and Ryde on the arms of men with boaters and striped blazers. There was ice cream and candy floss (called cotton candy, then), penny slot machines along the Island’s many piers and pretty children laughed and played at the water’s edge where the bathing machines stood. The Island’s hotels were full and scores of German waiters bustled about in white aprons serving the guests and the day-trippers. The German waiter was something of a caricature at the time and there are examples later, in France, when ‘Tommies’ from the British trenches would call ‘Waiter!’ to their opposite numbers across No Man’s Land. Island bookshops sold the brand new book by Miss Wylie, published by Mills and Boon and called Eight Years in Germany. ‘The German is the world’s pagan,’ Miss Wylie wrote and tried to correct the rather dim view that most Britons had of them.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand his wife Sophia and their three children Prince Ernest, Prince Maximilian and Princess Sophia.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife lying in State at the Burgkapelle, Vienna.

The Isle of Wight was no stranger to Germans. For years after the death of Victoria in 1901, her nephew, the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, stayed at Osborne and raced his yacht during Cowes Week. Various writers in the local and national press, once the war was underway, laid the blame for it squarely on the German emperor’s shoulders – ‘It is now quite evident,’ said the editor of the Island’s County Press in October,

‘that when, only a few years ago, the Kaiser visited England, he was plotting against us while professing friendship for us. Sweet words were on his lips, but in his heart was bitter hate …’

Edward VII had summed up his nephew better years before when he said, ‘It is not by his will that he will unleash a war, but by his weakness.’

Edwin (Ted) Kingswell survived the war. He was a stoker on HMS Canopus, launched at Portsmouth in 1897. The ship took part in the hunt for Admiral Graf Spee’s Asia squadron early in the war and was involved in the naval bombardment of Gallipoli from the Dardanelles. (Yates)

Pre-Dreadnought battleship HMS Canopus armed with four 12-inch and twelve 6-inch guns; with a speed of 18 knots.

The local newspapers carried no hint of trouble during July although that was a month of frantic diplomacy as the major powers in Europe called in favours and put their military might behind the paper promises of various treaties signed since the 1880s. All holiday-makers had to do to reassure themselves that all was well was to look out into the sea-roads of the Solent where the annual Fleet Review took place on 18 July. Flags of all colours fluttered from the halyards of the Dreadnoughts, the most powerful warships in the world. The German Kreigsmarine might boast twenty ships of this class, but we had thirty; all would be well in the (unlikely) event of conflict. And to prove that the 20th century had dawned, there were four airships, eight aeroplanes and twenty seaplanes. This was the largest navy in the world, with more ships than any other two of the world’s nations put together.

Revisionist historians today put responsibility for the First World War squarely on the over-ambitious militarism of the new Germany (which was largely the British view in 1914), but it was far more complicated than that and everyone involved, the Central Powers and the Allies, believed that the war would be fluid and swift; certainly it would be all over by Christmas. Britain declared war on 4 August, only because the Germans had invaded Belgium and treaty obligations stretching back to 1839 gave us no choice. The Isle of Wight Observer spoke for the entire nation – ‘the warlike bureaucracies of Berlin and Vienna’ had decided on the ‘arbitrament of the sword’.

‘There are things which are more precious even than peace and one of these is honour … We go into this war with clean hands and the highest of motives … and, terrible as we know it must be, we enter upon it with calmness and confidence.’

German infantry advancing into Belgium in August 1914. Thirty miles a day had to be achieved by soldiers of the First Army to conform to the Schlieffen Plan.

The Island braced itself. Four miles across the Solent from Ryde is Portsmouth, the home of the Royal Navy. The Germans had been involved in a naval arms race with us for ten years and had been building an unknown number of submarines – Untersee boats, which would become a terrifying new weapon of the war. It is odd that, in an Island like the Wight, part of the outer defences of Portsmouth, relatively little is made of the Navy. Comments in the local Press are few and of the correspondents who provided me with family information for this book, there is no paperwork and only one photograph of a sailor.

This is largely because the Navy was usually far away, blockading Germany or defending the far-flung Empire and much of what they did was routine. Their work was essential to the war effort, especially in keeping the Merchant fleet going and Britain fed, but it was unspectacular. The only major battle at sea was fought at Jutland in 1916 (see Chapter 3) and unlike the Kreigsmarine which was hugely proud of its U-boats, submarines in the Royal Navy were regarded by British civilians as rather ‘sneaky’.

The local Red Cross formed a Men’s Detachment and practised their first aid at every opportunity. No one knew exactly what the war would bring, but at the back of everyone’s mind (and still being warned against as late as 1917) was the risk of invasion. Everybody had to be ready. Firework displays and concerts were cancelled early in August; the season came to an abrupt halt. There were worries over unemployment as a result of the blow that was bound to fall on the tourist industry. The superstitious worried about an impending eclipse of the sun – what could it mean for the war now underway?

Under a new section called War Items, local newspapers like the Observer and the County Press told the public that no volunteer serviceman would lose his right to vote and Post Offices took on the task of sticking accurate war news up in their windows. The accuracy of this news must be called into question. At first, Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, refused to allow journalists anywhere near the Front for fear of betraying secrets to the enemy via the British Press. This meant that first reports were vague and hopelessly out of date, especially in provincial papers which relied on the National Press as their source of information. A Press Bureau was set up by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, but it could only print expurgated news so that Fleet Street called it the ‘Suppress Bureau’. Even weather reports from France were censored and Lord Rothermere, the newspaper magnate, admitted later, ‘We’re telling lies; we know we’re telling lies; we daren’t tell the truth.’

Cowes and East Cowes were the only Island towns engaged in heavy industry and the shipbuilders J S White were already building destroyers. These had been ordered by the Chilean government but there