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St Albans became a garrison town for the first time in centuries, and its 24,000 residents had to adjust to a new kind of life. The city was a busy mix of industries: straw-hat factories, silk mills, printing and clothing manufacture, with sharp contrasts between prosperity and slum housing.
Part 4 of 13 of Lest We Forget, a history of remembrance in Harpenden and St Albans. Read the whole illustrated book.
St Albans became a garrison town for the first time in centuries, and its 24,000 residents had to adjust to a new kind of life. The city was a busy mix of industries: straw-hat factories, silk mills, printing and clothing manufacture, with sharp contrasts between prosperity and slum housing. The war pulled at all of it.
St Albans' tribunal began life as a Local Recruiting Tribunal, which first met on Friday 26 November 1915 with the Mayor and four councillors present. It became the City Military Tribunal when conscription began in 1916, hearing appeals against call-up. Over the next three years it sat 105 times and made 2,192 decisions, hearing 1,050 men's applications.
Most cases were not about conscience. Employers were often the ones asking, because they wanted to keep skilled workers, and some men appeared three or more times as their employers sought another extension. Only about two dozen of the 1,050 were conscientious objectors. Unusually, the registers and minutes of the tribunal survived, which is why historians know so much about the choices St Albans made.
Britain imported more than 60 per cent of its food at the start of the war, and only one loaf in five was baked with home-grown wheat. In St Albans, shortages and rising prices followed quickly. The Herts Advertiser filled its pages with advice on avoiding waste, and one local vicar suggested that food waste should be a criminal offence. He also set up a matching service for wives whose husbands were at the front, pairing them with volunteers who would dig their allotments.
Calls for rationing began early but nothing was done until 1918, when queues became a daily fact of life. Wartime regulations also changed daily habits. The Defence of the Realm Act restricted licensing hours and weakened beer, and 11 of the city's pubs closed, four of them in Fishpool Street alone.
The city's hospitals filled up quickly. A temporary hospital was set up at Bricket House on Bricket Road, mainly staffed by Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, including women from some of the city's most prominent families. Nearby, the Middlesex War Hospital at Napsbury was caring for around 1,600 wounded soldiers, and the vicar of St Peter's appealed for books, magazines and fresh eggs for the most desperate cases.
Women at home knitted for the men at the front, so many that the authorities asked them to restrict the range of garments they made and use only khaki wool. Many other women went into uniform as nurses or military auxiliaries.
The war also came down from the sky. On the night of 2 to 3 September 1916, the airship SL11 arrived near St Albans at 1.10am and dropped explosive and incendiary bombs in the fields around London Colney and South Mimms. It was shot down over Cuffley shortly afterwards by Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, who received the Victoria Cross. A local boy later recalled being told to smear mud on his bicycle lamp so a Zeppelin could not spot it.
The final months of the war brought another danger. The influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 reached a city of about 24,000 people. The army took over the YMCA in St Peter's Street as a hospital for 70 flu patients, and Bricket House was badly hit. Seventeen soldiers died there in the last quarter of 1918 and many of the nurses fell ill. The wife of Canon Glossop, whose daughter was a staff nurse there, worked as a part-time nurse from October 1918.
Among those who lived through all of it was Herbert White, born in Welclose Street in 1893, one of eight children in a poor family. He had been in trouble with the police as a teenager, including a month's hard labour, before enlisting in the Bedfordshire Regiment in 1914. He is remembered today as an unlikely St Albans poet.
Men returning after the war expecting a land fit for heroes were largely disappointed. The cost of the war had hit the national economy, and women who had become used to earning their own living were reluctant to give it up. But before any of that could be settled, the city had a more immediate task: deciding how to remember the men who had not come back.
Previous: ← Harpenden in the Great War: Camp, Hospital and Home Front
Next: The Fallen: The People Behind the Names →
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