Neat14: Mud, Munitions and Memorials

10th Battalion Sherwood Foresters

I hope someone somewhere decides to film the story of the German Great Escape from Sutton Bonington College in 1917. German prisoners of war tunnelled their way out of the camp with the help of handmade compasses and scattered to the winds. Some tried to get to Hull, others went to Trent Bridge! (A few overs after a period of confinement sounds just the thing, who can blame them?) All were recaptured and their belongings examined. An inventory of the suitcases that accompanied them on their escape included: four packets of prunes, some wurst and several handkerchiefs. Personal hygiene when sneezing is important, even when on the run.

Stories like these were among the tales told by Chris Weir in his WWI talk, Mud, Munitions and Memorials. Part of the NEAT festival, with its theme of ‘Europe Then and Now’, the talk was hosted in Bromley House Library and was a fitting precursor to their commemorative series "A Nottingham Library Remembers: BHL and the First World War". This will see a series of exhibitions, lectures, readings and talks given in the library from June to December this year.

Chris Weir is a local historian and author but like so many, his interest in the First World War has a personal connection and his passion for the subject was clear to see. He commenced by talking about his grandfather, who served in the war and survived, and who lives on as a striking photograph in a locket Chris inherited from his mother. Artefacts like these formed part of the talk, as he brought forth small details of the men and women from Nottinghamshire who all contributed to the British war effort from 1914.

Wilfred Dolby Fuller

Many Notts readers will be familiar with Albert Ball, Nottingham’s flying ace, but Chris’s talk also spoke of Wilfred Dolby Fuller, a young man from Greasley who won a VC for extreme bravery after leaping into what he thought was an empty communication trench only to find it full of Germans. He shot several, dispatched grenades to others and arrested the rest. On being presented with a gold watch at a celebratory service in front of the recruiting office in Mansfield he merely stated that he longed to be back at the front doing his duty. He ended his days married to a nurse he met after he returned to war and was wounded in battle.

And there were other stories – of women, like Ethel Hutchinson, a nurse on the front line who offered comfort and relief to wounded soldiers, or Lieutenant Glynne Morris from West Bridgford whose letters survive in Nottinghamshire’s archives and are full of gung ho bravery in the face of the enemy. Morris was shot in the stomach and never recovered from his wounds.

And Chris brought the home front to life too. We forget the technological advances made during the war would have affected those at home and can only imagine the fear and disbelief at the sight of Zeppelin balloons over Nottingham – bombs from these hit The Meadows and Broadmarsh areas. Nottingham helped supply the war effort. The camp at Clipstone trained up 22,000 men while the munitions factories at Chilwell and Kings Meadow supplied shells for the field guns used in heavy artillery barrages. The memorial at Chilwell commemorates the 139 workers who were killed in an explosion at the factory in 1918.

Chris delivered his talk with a quiet humour, despite the subject matter, but perhaps the most eloquent comment on Nottingham’s war effort comes from Joseph Bodill, a Hucknall man who kept a (forbidden) diary during his work driving ammunition to supply the frontlines. On arriving in Ypres, he felt the ground rising up around his with each shell and deplored the attacks on “the prettiest town in Belgium”, stating that it had now become a wilderness. He called for the commanders of the war to stand where he stood, for then surely there would be no war.

Neat14 website

For details of Bromley House Library’s First World War events please email the library on enquiries@bromleyhouse.org. Or call on 0115 9473134