Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T15:22:45.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Common Meeting Places and the Brightening of Rural Life: Local Debates on Village Halls in Sussex after the First World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Extract

In the burgeoning literature on war memorials and the commemoration of the war dead in Britain after 1918, the growth of village halls in rural areas has not been extensively analysed. K.S. Inglis has alerted us to the dichotomy of monuments to mourn the dead and amenities to serve the living. He noted that where a preference was made for utility over monumentality, local war memorial committees did not confine their attention to commemorating those who died on active service and made the Great Sacrifice, but also had in mind those who served and returned. The complex locally-determined processes of negotiating ways which would bring solace or comfort to the bereaved, through the creation of an object of mourning, has been examined with great care and detail, but analysis of urban-centred initiatives predominates.

Consequently, the linkage which might be made between the experience of war and the participation of ex-servicemen in village war memorial debates, the demise of old elites and the quest for improved social and material conditions in rural areas, the diminishing support for parish churches as the focal point of community life and the emergence of undenominational social centres, all point towards the need for further examination of the proceedings of local committees, where parish records allow. As British participation in the Great War contained the powerful rhetoric of a religious crusade and was not connected to the improvement of social conditions until the publication of war aims in January 1918, many committees gave priority to the creation of sacred objects of mourning, with much use of exhortatory moral language and Christian iconography.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Inglis, K. S., ‘The Homecoming: The War Memorial Movement in Cambridge, England’, Journal of Contemporary History 27 (1992), 601CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Inglis, K. S., ‘Ten Questions for HistoriansGuerres Mondiales et Conflit Contemporains 167 (1992), 10.Google Scholar

2. The outstanding introduction to communities in mourning is Winter, J., Sites of Memory Sites of Mourning (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 2553.Google Scholar See also Moriarty, C. ‘Private Grief and Public Remembrance: British First World War memorials’ in Evans, M. and Lunn, K. (eds), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1997), pp. 125142Google Scholar; Wilkinson, A., The Church of England and the First World War (London, 1978), pp. 294310Google Scholar; Cannadine, D., ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’ in Whaley, J. (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London, 1981), pp. 188241.Google Scholar

3. This article does not refer to non-functional memorial halls, which are covered areas which memorialise the dead, often with neo-classical use of space, see Borg, A., War Memorials (London, 1991), pp. 132134Google Scholar, who does not refer to memorial halls as functional sites of mourning.

4. Moriarty, C., ‘Christian iconography and First World War memorials’, Imperial War Museum Review, 6, 6375Google Scholar; Hoover, A. J., God, Germany and Britain in the Great War: A study in Clerical Nationalism (New York, 1989), pp. 103117.Google Scholar

5. King, A., Memorials of the Great War in Britain (Oxford, 1998), p. 77.Google Scholar

6. Mansfield, N., ‘Class Conflict and Village War Memorials, 1914–24Rural History 6 (1995), 77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Mansfield, N., ‘Class Conflict’, pp. 67, 78.Google Scholar

8. Mackerness, E. D. (ed.), The Journals of George Sturt 1890–1927 (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar, Vol. 2, 5th April 1918, p. 806.

9. Weaver, L., Village Clubs and Halls (London, 1920)Google Scholar Preface, v. Lawrence Weaver, architectural journalist and advocate, through Country Life, of the vernacular aesthetic in domestic buildings, was a formidable proponent of improving rural amenities after the armistice as head of the Land Settlement Office at the Ministry of Agriculture. Williams-Ellis, C., Lawrence Weaver (London, 1933), pp. 3337, 4850.Google Scholar

10. Meynell, V. (ed.), Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, Morris, M. to Cockerell, S., 13th November 1918, p. 73.Google Scholar

11. Weaver, L., Village Clubs and Halls, p. 3.Google Scholar

12. Weaver, L., Village Clubs and Halls, p. 54Google Scholar; National Council of Social Service Village Halls: Their Cost and Management (London, 1928), p. 1.Google Scholar

13. East Sussex Record Office (hereafter ESRO) PAR 304/43/2, East Dean and Friston war memorial, minutes of meetings, newspaper cutting, n.d. [1919].

14. Information taken from Kelly's Directory of Sussex (London, 1924).Google Scholar

15. Bourne, G. (Sturt), Change in the Village (London, 1912, (reprint 1966)), p. 198.Google Scholar

16. Strathern, M., Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon a Village in North-West Essex in the Nineteen Sixties (Cambridge, 1981), p. 31.Google Scholar

17. Strathern, M., Kinship at the Core, p. 38.Google Scholar On village clubs without halls, see Weaver, L., Village Clubs and Halls, pp. 2630.Google Scholar

18. Kelly's Directory of Sussex, 1924, p. 34.Google Scholar

19. William Wilson Grantham (1866–1942) of Balneath Manor was a major in the 6th (Cyclist) Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, active in the Imperial Yeomanry in 1900 and, after 1911, a lay reader of the diocese of Chichester.

20. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/1, Barcombe war memorial committee, minutes of public meeting, 28th April 1919. On ‘A Cross for Sacrifice and a Stone for Remembrance’ see Blomfield, R., Memoirs of an Architect (London, 1932), pp. 178180Google Scholar; Hussey, C., The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens (London, 1953), pp. 374375.Google Scholar

21. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/1. Barcombe, minutes of the war memorial committee meeting, 10th May 1919.

22. On memorial committees as an expression of local voluntary work see Bushaway, B., ‘Name upon Name: The Great War and Remembrance” in Porter, R. (ed.), Myths of the English (Oxford, 1992), p. 147.Google Scholar

23. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/1, Barcombe, minutes of war memorial public meeting, 30th June 1919.

24. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/4, Barcombe, Memorial resolution, printed sheet, n.d. [1919].

25. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/1, Barcombe, minutes of war memorial committee meeting, 28th August 1919.

26. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/1, Barcombe war memorial sub-committee meeting, 19th April 1920.

27. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/6, S. Grantham to T. Bourdillon, 15th October 1920.

28. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/2, Barcombe, minutes of war memorial committee meeting, 19th August 1921.

29. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/2, Barcombe, minutes of public meeting, 26th September 1921.

30. The central importance of private patrons in Anglican church life and the consequent social distance between clergymen and rural labourers by the end of the nineteenth century is explored in Hammond, P.C., The Parson and the Victorian Parish (London, 1977), pp. 196198Google Scholar, and Goodenough, S., The Country Parson (Newton Abbot, 1983), pp. 132, 162165.Google Scholar

31. Beard, M., English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century (London, 1989), p. 30Google Scholar, Sussex Daily News 7th February 1915Google Scholar; Whitcomb, H.Family Notes and War Memoirs, oral history tape 1979Google Scholar, West Sussex Record Office (hereafter WSRO), MP 2413.

32. Dunkel, W. D., Sir Arthur Pinero: A critical biography with letters (Chicago, Illinois, 1941), p. 93Google Scholar; on the beautiful churchyard at North Chapel see Wearing, J. P. (ed.), The Letters of Sir Arthur Pinero (Minneapolis, 1974)Google Scholar, Pinero to Mrs H. A. Jones, 4th July 1919, p. 273. Pinero died in 1934 and his grave in the churchyard at North Chapel has striking late Gothic embellishments.

33. WSRO, PAR 142/4/5, Arthur Pinero to G. Bright, 14th February 1919.

34. WSRO, PAR 142/4/5, Arthur Pinero to G. Bright, 9th April 1919; Times 9th April 1919.

35. J. Horace Pound of 15, Brunswick Terrace, Brighton, took a leading part in founding the Victoria County History. He was an historical essayist of medieval themes who responded, often very critically, to the work of others. He wrote 29 short papers for Sussex Archaeological Collections. Pound, J. H., Family Origins and Other Studies, edited with a memoir by Page, W. (London, 1930) preface xxxiv–x/viiGoogle Scholar; The London Mercury 18, July 1928, p. 234Google Scholar; Times, 26th June 1928.

36. WSRO, PAR 142/4/5, Amy Burroughs to G. Bright, 14th April 1919.

37. McLeod, H., Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1970 (Oxford, 1981), p. 69.Google Scholar

38. A. W. Waterlow King wrote ‘I hear that the “inarticulate” village seems to want a stone memorial on the Green ‘WSRO, PAR 142/4/5, A. W. Waterlow King to G. Bright, n.d. [written in response to the public meeting]. The phrase is subsequently used to locate the no longer silent labouring opinion in ‘close’ parishes, which sought to exercise power to the surprise of propertied inhabitants. On the complexity of power relations in diverse rural communities see Short, B., ‘The Evolution of Contrasting Communities within Rural England’ in his edited work The English Rural Community (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 3741.Google Scholar

39. WSRO, PAR 142/4/5, Laura Pemberton to G. Bright, n.d. [April 1919]. The mental landscape of the Western Front therefore became ubiquitous in towns and villages in the 1920s as sites of mourning connected the anguish of those at home to the Absent Dead. In this way panels in village halls became sacred objects.

40. Quotations in this paragraph are taken from WSRO, PAR 142/4/5, Laura Pemberton to G. Bright, n.d. [April 1919].

41. Both preceding quotations are from ESRO, PAR 142/4/5, North Chapel war memorial committee, printed circular, n.d. [September 1919]. No longer would the men turn to the church at home for guidance. See White, G., ‘The Martyr Cult of the First World War’ in Wood, D. (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies (Ecclesiastical History Society, Blackwell, 1993), p. 383.Google Scholar

42. ESRO, PAR 142/4/5, Lord Leconfield to G. Bright, 21st September 1919.

43. Quoted in Beard, M., English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century, p. 60.Google Scholar For a stoical portrayal of agricultural conditions in the early 1920s see Ernie, Lord, The Land and its People: Chapters in Rural Life and History (London, 1925), p. 217.Google Scholar

44. WSRO, PAR 142/4/5, North Chapel war memorial committee, subscription list, n.d. [1921].

45. WSRO, PAR 142/4/5, James Smith and others to the chairman, memorial committee, 31st January 1920. On the ubiquity of military hutments on pastureland in Southern England in wartime see Horn, P., Rural Life in England in the First World War (Dublin, 1984), p. 86Google Scholar, and on the continuing availability of Army huts of all sizes see Sellers, E., ‘Self-Supporting Village Clubs’, The Cornhill Magazine LVI, 1924, 154.Google Scholar She noted that huts 60′ × 20′ could be purchased for £35 and erected for a total cost of £200.

46. The Comrades Journal, 1/12, (October 1919), p. 6.Google Scholar

47. On the aesthetic of small wall tablets see ‘Wall Tablets and Memorials’, The Studio 66, December 1915, p. 191.Google Scholar

48. WSRO, PAR 142/4/4, North Chapel war memorial committee, newspaper cutting, dedication of the memorial to the men of North Chapel who fell in the Great War, n.d. [June 1921]. A similar sentiment was offered, in retrospect, on the ‘noble sight’ of soldiers in church in a late Victorian rural context by Masefield, J., Grace before Ploughing: Fragments of Autobiography (London, 1966), p. 52.Google Scholar

49. Lowerson, J., ‘The Mystical Geography of the English’ in Short, B. (ed.) The English Rural Community, p. 154.Google Scholar On the church in post-war ‘doldrums’ see Masterman, C. F. G., England After the War: A study (London, 1922), p. 197Google Scholar and Scott, J. Robertson, England's Green and Pleasant Land (London, 1925), pp. 8591, 197, 210211.Google Scholar

50. Lowerson, J. ‘Mystical Geography of the English’, pp. 159, 160.Google Scholar

51. For relevant and stimulating exploration of different perspectives on ‘belonging’ within geographic locales, both specifically and conceptually, see Strathern, M., ‘The Village as an Idea: Constructs of Village-ness in Elmdon, Essex’, p. 250Google Scholar and Cohen, A., ‘Belonging: The Experience of Culture’ in his (ed.), Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures (Manchester, 1982), p. 12.Google Scholar

52. On cultural nationalism see Smith, M., ‘The War and British Culture’ in Constantine, S., Kirby, M. W. and Rose, M. B. (eds.), The First World War in British History (London, 1995), p. 174.Google Scholar

53. Inglis, K. S., ‘War Memorials: Ten Questions for Historians’, p. 10.Google Scholar

54. See Bushaway, B., ‘Name upon Name’, p. 188Google Scholar; On the challenge of pluralism to the Anglican church in the longer term see Gilbert, A. D., ‘The Land and the Church’ in Mingay, G. E. (ed.), The Victorian Countryside (London, 1981) Vol. 1, p. 47.Google Scholar

55. Blythe, R., Akenfield (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 21.Google Scholar

56. ibid, p. 46; Newby, H.The Deferential dialectic’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17 (1975), 145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. Rowland, S. (ed.), The Life of a Country Carpenter: The Story of Harold Felling's early life in Offham and his Service in the First World War (Offham, 1993), pp. 38, 40.Google Scholar

58. ESRO, PAR 254/4/12, Brightling war memorial, William Haviland to Archdeacon, 20th June 1920. See also enclosed memorandum as to site for recreation room, 28th June 1920.

59. Whitechurch, V., Downland Echoes (London, 1924), p. 233.Google Scholar

60. ibid, p. 234.

61. Sussex County Magazine 28 (1954), 351Google Scholar; Huxley, G., Lady Denman (London, 1961), p. 132Google Scholar; Fairweather, L., Balcombe: The Story of a Sussex Village (Balcombe, 1981), p. 28.Google Scholar

62. Whetham, E. H., The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Vol. 8, 1914–39, (Cambridge, 1978), p. 131.Google Scholar

63. WSRO, PAR 34/49/3, Balcombe, Copy of letter, D. Haworth Booth to H. Faure Walker, chairman, 19th October 1923, in the minutes of the parochial council, 25th October 1923.

64. Times, 12th November 1923. See also West Sussex Gazette 15th November 1923Google Scholar; British Library, Add Ms. 52660, f. 23, Sydney Cockerell diary, 10th November 1923.

65. Times, 12th November 1923.

66. Grieves, K., ‘Neville Lytton, the Balcombe Frescoes and the Experience of War, 1908–23Sussex Archaeological Collections 134 (1996), 197211Google Scholar; Lytton mss, Knebworth House, N. Lytton to Victor Lytton, 12th September 1925.

67. Lytton, N., English Country Gentlemen (London, 1919), p. 136.Google Scholar

68. Lytton, N., English Country Gentlemen, p. 102.Google Scholar See also pp. 181, 32, 137, 19, 20, 21.

69. ibid., p. 151. See also Evans, G. Ewart, The Days that We Have Seen (London, 1975), p. 17.Google Scholar

70. Scott, J. Robertson, England's Green and Pleasant land, p. 112.Google Scholar

71. The V.C.A. News 6, December 1924, 4.Google Scholar

72. On ‘Clubbism’ see The Comrades Journal, 1/3, January 1919, 4.Google Scholar

73. WSRO, PAR 176/43/4, Minutes of the meeting of Slinfold war memorial committee on 8th October 1920.

74. WSRO, PAR 176/4/9, Slinfold war memorial committee, Mary Cumming to Mr. Hughes, n.d. [July 1919].

75. See Mackenzie, S. P., Politics and Military Morale (Oxford, 1992), pp. 1220CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the educational training scheme in the British armies in France, and for brief references to canteens and concert parties, but not to hut culture. See also Fuller, J. G., Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 8183, 94110.Google Scholar

76. Birmingham, G., ‘Sweet lavender’ in Yapp, A. K., Told in the Huts: The YMCA Gift Book (London, 1916), p. 20Google Scholar Of YMCA huts in 1916 General Sir John Cowans noted ‘They make their institutions so much brighter and more attractive than we can do, besides providing a place for the men to meet their friends’, Chapman-Huston, D. and Rutter, O.General Sir John Cowans: The Quartermaster-General of the Great War (London, 1924), p. 250.Google Scholar On the homely qualities of the Scottish Church Hut at Montreuil see De Groot, G. J. (ed.), Military Miscellany I, Diary of Rev. George Duncan GHQ 1916–1918 (Stroud, Gloucs. 1997)Google Scholar 11th December 1916, p. 307.

77. Private Owens in Yapp, A. K., Told in the Huts, p. 104.Google Scholar see also ‘Behind the Lines’ by Hon. Mrs. Stuart Wortley, p. 50. See the fund raising advertisements for recreation huts in The Studio, 67, 15th March 1916 and 15th April 1916.

78. West Sussex County Times, 11th November 1916.Google Scholar

79. For example, in the village of Laira near Plymouth Nancy Astor, as benefactor, was informed, ‘The feeling in Laira village is that a public hall for some purposes is badly required, and should be free either from the YMCA or any other particular section, and they were under the impression that you would generously help them in that direction…’ Reading University Library, Astor Ms. 1416/2/21, C. G. Briggs to Mrs. Astor, 27th August 1919.

80. Over the Top, by one of the Church Army Hut Superintendents on the Western Front n.d. [1918], pp. 23.Google Scholar

81. Sussex Daily News, 8th January 1917.Google Scholar

82. Englander, D. and Osborne, J.”Jack, Tommy and Henry Dubb”: The Armed Forces and the Working ClassHistorical Journal, 21, (1978), 619.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

83. H.C. Parl. Deb. Official Report, fifth series, Vol. 120, 3 November 1919Google Scholar, Col. 1275. See also Major Breese, Vol. 113, 17 March 1919, Col. 1716.

84. The V.C.A. News, ‘The Aims and Objects of the Village Clubs Association’, Rew, Sir Henry, 6, December 1924, 34.Google Scholar

85. The V.C.A. News, 4, February 1924, 2Google Scholar; Times, 17th January 1924.

86. The V.C.A. News, 5, May 1924, 4.Google Scholar

87. The V.C.A. News, 6, December 1924, 4.Google Scholar

88. The Comrades Journal 1/1, November 1918, 1.Google Scholar

89. Wootton, G., The Politics of Influence: British Ex-Servicemen, Cabinet Decisions and Cultural Change (1917–57) (London, 1963), p. 169.Google Scholar

90. The Comrades Journal 2/8, June 1920, 5.Google Scholar

91. The Comrades Journal 2/8, June 1920, 12.Google Scholar

92. The Comrades Journal 2/8, June 1920, 1516.Google Scholar

93. The Comrades Journal 2/8, June 1920, 5.Google Scholar

94. On the formation of the British Legion as a buttress of social order see Degroot, G. J., Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (London, 1996), pp. 268–70Google Scholar and Barr, N., ‘The British Legion after the Great War: Its identity and Character” in Taithe, B. and Thornton, T. (eds), War (Stroud, Gloucs., 1998), pp. 217219.Google Scholar

95. Williams, J., Byng of Vimy: General and Governor General (Leo Cooper, 1983), p. 264Google Scholar; Chapman-Huston, D. and Rutter, O., General Sir John Cowans Vol. 2, p. 269Google Scholar; Wootton, G., The Politics of Influence, pp. 90–63Google Scholar; The Comrades Journal 1/12 (October 1919)Google Scholar, 9 and 2/1, (November 1919), 5.

96. Williams, J., Byng of Vimy, p. 265.Google Scholar

97. ESRO, PAR 235/10/5/2, Minutes of Barcombe war memorial general committee, 28th May 1921.

98. WSRO, PAR 142/4/5, North Chapel war memorial committee, Printed circular, Grant from United Services Fund for the erection of village halls or clubs, R. Henry Rew, G. Denman and E. Bethune, representing the Village Clubs Association, Federation of Women's Institutes and Soldier's Clubs Association, n.d. [December 1919].

99. Howkins, A., Reshaping Rural England: A Social History (London, 1991), pp. 289290.Google Scholar

100. This work has benefited from the conceptual exploration of moral economy in Snell, K. D. M., Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 99100, 102, 113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

101. Although the context is different, the phrase is apposite, see Bushaway, R. W., ‘Rite, Legitimation and Community in Southern England 1700–1850: The Ideology of Culture”, in Stapleton, B. (ed.), Conflict and Community in Southern England: Essays in the Social History of Rural and Urban Labour from Medieval to Modern Times (Stroud, Gloucs., 1992), pp. 117, 123.Google Scholar

102. This composite description is based on Scott, J. R. Robertson, England's Green and Pleasant Land, pp. 126127Google Scholar; Times, 17th January 1924, leading article ‘The revival of village life’; Sellers, E., ‘Self-Supporting village clubs’, pp. 163, 156, 159Google Scholar; The V.C.A. News No. 1, August 1922, 4Google Scholar, No. 3 January 1923, 3; National Council of Social Service, Village Halls, passimGoogle Scholar; Weaver, L., Village Halls and Clubs, pp. 725.Google Scholar

103. Scott, J. R. Robertson, England's Green and Pleasant Land, p. 25.Google Scholar

104. Jekyll, G., Old English Household Life (London, 1925), p. 5.Google Scholar

105. Masterman, C. F. G., England after War, p. 155.Google Scholar

106. The VGA conference on 11th March 1924 was informed that 60,000 regular agricultural labourers lost their employment during the period June 1921–1923. The V.C.A. News, 5, May 1924, 2.Google Scholar

107. Bensusan, S. L., Latter Day Rural England (London, 1928), p. 12.Google Scholar

108. Scott, J. Robertson, England's Green and Pleasant Land, p. 130, 91Google Scholar; Brown, J., Agriculture in England: A Survey of Farming 1870–1947 (Manchester, 1987), pp. 7686.Google Scholar

109. Evening Standard, 11th June 1998.Google Scholar

110. List of Capital projects supported by the Millenium Commission by area and country, statement of Key Points, The Millenium Map and Milestones, Issue 11, (Spring 1998).Google Scholar These documents were produced by the Millennium Commission and published in 1998.