Voices and choices

Caroline Westgate writes about an exhibition that demonstrates the enduring value of ‘letting lives speak’

In 2015 local Friends in Hexham organised an exhibition entitled ‘WW1 Voices and Choices’. It told the story of decisions made by individual men and women in Hexham, and its twin towns in France and Germany, in response to the first world war.

The exhibition represented the development of a distinctive Quaker concern, from an initial ‘still small voice’ in the mind of a Friend in Hexham Meeting over three years ago, through the joint endeavour of a support group that helped translate the vision into reality, to its ultimate fulfilment in reaching an international audience.

The exhibition ran for a fortnight in Hexham in November 2015. Since then, with help from our respective town-twinning groups, it was staged in Metzingen, near Stuttgart in Germany, in November 2016. It is currently on display in Noyon, Picardy, in France, where it will remain for the next several weeks. From one Friend’s initial leading, we trusted in Quaker processes to show us how the idea might be developed. It was very rewarding to see the project through to its eventual presentation in three different countries. We are immensely grateful to the many people and organisations that shared this trust and helped secure the necessary funding.

We started from a belief that it would be easier for our audience to connect with the experience of individuals rather than with the broad sweep of military history. So, we collected stories of Tyne Valley men and women caught up in the first world war. We also researched corresponding stories from Noyon and Metzingen. This led us into some exceptionally interesting territory. It was territory that, at first, we scarcely suspected existed.

Choices

‘WW1 Voices and Choices’ re-tells the stories of some of those who took up arms, but also includes the experiences of civilians and conscientious objectors. We wanted to show that, even in wartime, people still have choices. These are portrayed neutrally, with neither endorsement nor criticism. We discovered a rich source of material in the archives of our local paper, the Hexham Courant. The recipients forwarded letters written home by men at the front for publication. Written in a straightforward style, the letters are so vivid they almost leap off the page. The early letters reflect a sense that these young men felt they were on a great adventure.

In November 1914, trooper William Robson wrote: ‘We are alright here. It is a very nice country to live in but the war has made it into a terrible condition. The people in the towns are very clean and very kind, they will give you anything you want. We are well fed. We see some pitiable sights. We have been in some tight places. It is fine sport shooting Germans. It is better than shooting rabbits.’

Six months later private Hogarth described his experience of going ‘over the top’ in markedly contrasting terms: ‘The bullets were coming round me like a swarm of bees and I could not move. We had to advance again and now we got under machine-gun fire and rifle fire. You have to get down pretty smart when they turn the machine-gun on you. It was more like a harvest day, reaping men instead of corn.’

One particularly poignant letter came from trooper William Metcalf. He reassured his parents that he was ‘keeping in the best of health’, but by the time the letter was published the young writer was already dead, killed when a shell hit the stable where he was sleeping.

Treasured documents

The families of two local first world war diarists loaned us their treasured documents. In one, a colonel Cruddas explains that he is keeping his journal: ‘In case my children become so enamoured of the light side of war that they want to have one too.’ In the other, Robert Renwick, a non-commissioned officer, writes: ‘You deal with rats in the trenches by putting a bit of cheese on the point of your bayonet. That way you can hardly miss them when you fire.’

The catastrophic losses in the first two years of the war led to conscription with the 1916 Military Service Act. Most men between eighteen and forty-one were liable to be called up. A clause in the Act allowed some exemptions including, thanks to two Quaker MPs, a proven ‘conscientious objection to the undertaking of combat’. Friends House Library traced local conscientious objectors for us. One of them, Arthur Henderson, served with the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) throughout the war. FAU personnel were often in the thick of battle, and Arthur was lucky to survive when his ambulance was destroyed by shellfire.

The exhibition also explores the choices made by women. The Hexham Courant carried articles about Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurses working ‘ceaselessly and unsparingly’; women knitting and sewing and packing hampers of ‘comforts for the troops’; and appeals for women to volunteer for the Land Army. Advertisements placed by Hexham businesses urged people to boycott German products: ‘Every woman in Hexham can help by insisting that the necessities she buys are British made by British Labour.’ As a further appeal to patriotism a special reduction was offered on corsets made in Portsmouth.

A Hexham resident loaned us a poignant collection of personal items that had belonged to his grandfather. These had been returned to his widow in a brown paper parcel after his death in the trenches: his pipe, penknife, indelible pencil and two packets of Woodbines. The choice she made was to raise her four children on her own, refusing offers to have them adopted.

Noyon was the nearest point the Germans got to Paris and was occupied for three of the four years of the first world war. For evidence of choices made by the Noyonnais, we drew on two contemporary diaries, one written by a nun and the other by the wife of a village blacksmith, and an account of his experiences written by Noyon’s mayor. Civilians were in a position of almost total powerlessness, so contemporary accounts of their bravery are particularly moving.

The true horror of war

The material from Metzingen also includes a diary, written by a lieutenant, who fought his war in a cool, professional manner, and dined well even in the midst of action. By contrast, a private revealed the true horror of the war: though it was forbidden to record such images, he photographed a pile of dead French and German soldiers awaiting their burial in a common grave. On the back he wrote: ‘Strictly not to be shown to anyone.’

The ‘WW1 Voices and Choices’ project has ‘let lives speak’ – not only from a previous century but in our own time too. The final panel of the exhibition is headlined ‘True Remembrance Connects the Past to the Future’. It features a photograph of three soldiers – one British, one French and one German – walking to a casualty clearing station. Under this powerful image there is a space for people to add their comments. One message left in response to the original exhibition in Hexham might sum up the entire project: ‘We always have a choice: whether to add to the violence in the world, or to try to reduce it.’

A comprehensive, full-colour, thirty-page brochure of the exhibition is available free of charge on request. Please send an A4 SAE with a ‘large letter’ stamp to: Caroline Westgate, 9 Quatre Bras, Hexham, NE46 3JY.

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