published by Audley & District Family History Society 2008 ISBN 978-0-9551158-5-1 (£5.00)
There’s no shortage of published letters from soldiers to parents and relatives posted home from First World War battle areas. Nevertheless, it’s still a moving experience to find a new collection of quite long accounts of life as men wanted their families to think they lived it under the stress of military action. Two brothers from the mining village of Audley in North Staffordshire supplied the 42 or so letters, plus numerous brief card messages, which are the central feature of this 116 page book, to which there is added a plentiful range of photographs, and extracts from official battalion war diaries. Brief biographical accounts are given of Albert and Edward Riley, their family background is sketched in and newspaper extracts are appended, although these raise more questions than there are answers in the text. As a result, the book appeals at several levels to military historians, those looking for family history material, social historians and anybody with an interest in the past living in North Staffordshire.
The ambition of the editor, Katherine Bailey, a young Durham history graduate, was clearly to provide the maximum original material, transcribed but not amended, and with minimum explanation and editorial interpretation separating readers from the thoughts of Albert and Edward and the messages they sent home. There is a sense, in other words, that the letters speak for themselves – or better, that readers are capable of understanding them without guidance. This is raw data; letters and field postcards are interspersed in chronological order with extracts from the regimental diaries to provide the context, and the contrast.
One particular example (p73-77) counterpoints an appendix to a Royal Warwickshire Regiment War Diary, written by a lieutenant-colonel summarising a series of operations in December 1917, with Edward Riley’s brief note home from hospital, on 8 December 1917, five days after he was wounded. Shrapnel damage in the fleshy part of his thigh, now painless and not at all disabling, is his almost cheerful report. “We had a funny time up there for a few days,” he said, “I have never been in such a show before.” He and his fellows spent nights in the open, covered with hoar frost, he recounted, but he gave no other details about the nature of what he had to do before meeting with the offending bit of metal. The officer’s description of events speaks of “heavy opposition” to his attack along trenches and the disappearance of two companies almost entirely. Intense artillery barrages rained down on the Warwicks and Gloucesters under his command; his own ammunition ran short, and he had to abandon front posts and Battalion Headquarters. No doubt this was a typical trench warfare incident of horrifying emotional trauma, but there was no way that Ted Riley was going to tell his mother what her son had been through. Did he guess that there would be a telegram delivered in Halmerend, Audley, to report his hospitalisation? If he did, his letter would have achieved its object, for what the telegram called a “Severe gunshot wound thigh”, he dismissed as a bit of a cut which left him wasting time in hospital!
Albert Riley had been a bank clerk before joining up aged 21 years, and he served as a corporal for a time before being recommended for a commission in 1917. He ended the war as a full lieutenant. He had an ambitious streak and was a bit of an authoritarian according to his letters. He could write evocatively, however, of certain aspects of war service, as he did to his sister, Annie, in November 1917. For example, he found French girls could look pretty, “at least they are pretty when dressed up and you are not too near.” They didn’t have baths very often, didn’t make much of Christmas but did their best on All Saints Day. Washerwomen used excessive starch on his pyjamas which left him most uncomfortable, but as he had a servant (being an officer) he could always get some advantages denied others – including a hot bath for himself. It would appear that Albert took to the life which gave him a personal servant.
One doesn’t have any insight into Audley or North Staffordshire society from these letters, but the nuggets of gold for the social historian are plentiful. True, news of the Minnie Pit disaster in January 1918 reached France and shocked the Riley boys, but they must have been inured to horrific causes of death by then. A stronger, more wide-ranging narrative of their experiences of war on the Western Front could be compiled on the basis of this material as found in private and public records, but readers will have to do this themselves. Taken at face value, what is here is what two men wanted their families to know about their life away from home. If they were believed and their stories taken to be the full extent of military experience, then they were deceivers. Ted’s account of his accommodation in March 1918 – a tent with a stove which can get far too hot in three minutes from a fire laid by his servant – smacks of Boy Scout camps and boyish adventures. Even the addition of a description of the mess room cut into a trench with its roof level with the ground, cool by day and warm by night, fails to convey the repulsive nature of the soldiers’ environment.
Both men transferred into the ranks of the commissioned officers and were by no means always in front line positions. Their accounts of fun and impressions of France and the French were genuine responses to circumstances they could never have anticipated prior to 1914 as boys at Orme Boys’ School, Newcastle-under-Lyme. The war did create opportunities and there were many like the Riley brothers who took the chances conflict produced to give their lives a direction different from that they would have had as sons of shopkeepers in a North Staffordshire mining village. One of the few disappointments in the book is the absence of any looking forward beyond 1918 in the case of Edward, and the bare reference to Albert’s later life in the form an account of his funeral in December 1952. This is a tantalising way to end what is a publication of great significance to a wide range of readers
Paul Anderton April 2009