Forest Gate and WW1 - on the 110th anniversary of its outbreak

Over the years, we have published various articles on how Forest Gate was impacted by the First World War. On the 110^th anniversary of its outbreak, this post summarises them, with links to the greater details provided in each.

Troops on the battle fronts

Elliott Taylor and Barney Alston published Up The Hammers to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1. It is available from Newham Bookshops and other reliable book retailers. It is the story of the West Ham Battalion (known as the Hammers Brigade) from its establishment in Forest Gate in December 1914 until its demise and amalgamation with other detachments following severe losses in 1918.

Recruitment poster for Hammers Battalion

We published two articles based on it, featuring the lives of Forest Gate soldiers: here and here. The first covered the period until the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916), and the second covered the period until the battalion's disbandment in January 1918.

A significant local figure in the battalion was William Walter Busby of Sherrard Road, a local Congregationalist and scout leader, who was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry during the Battle of the Somme and who was killed on the fateful night of 26/27  November that year, when over 170 members of the Battalion were killed at the Battle of Ancre.

Forest Gate's William Walter Busby MC

Other Forest Gate soldiers whose roles were recognised by Taylor and Alston and whose stories we relate included: Bernard Page, Leonard and Alan Holthusen, Gilbert Simpson, Arthur Davies, Alfred Sekles, Private EM Wilding, Private Robert Lee, Hubert Ayres, Joseph Sait, Arnold Hone, Cpl Frederick Hunt, Sgt Harold Joseph Morrison, and 2/Lt George Gemmell.

Their stories and their experiences are summarised in the blog articles but well told in Taylor and Alston’s book.

Cover of Taylor and Alston's book

The home front

We have been fortunate to have access to almost a century of the Godwin Road school logbook, including how the war impacted the school, its pupils, and the wider community. We published details of the impact here, in an article and series of diary entries that featured:

·         Deaths of former Godwin pupils during the conflict;

·         Assistance Godwin pupils gave to the war effort;

·         How war-induced fuel and food shortages impacted Forest Gate;

·         Impact of air raids on the district;

·         Attempts to provide "business as usual" in the school; and

·         The impact of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919 on Godwin.

West Ham borough suffered  2,035 civilian and military deaths during World War 1; the exact number of the Forest Gate death toll is not known.

1915 post Lusitania sinking anti-German riots

Contemporary photo of anti-German East End riots

After the onset of war, the biggest upsurge in anti-German feeling locally came nine months after the outbreak of hostilities; and followed the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915. There was a significant amount of rioting and looting of German premises in both Forest Gate and Manor Park by Forest Gate residents, reported by the Stratford Express.

Stratford Express reports the riots

Extensive extracts from the paper identified locations of the rioting and looting; these included:

·         341 Green Street (now the library)

What is now Green St library attacked

·         Manor Park Broadway

What is now Manor Park library attacked

·         Station Road, Manor Park

·         Romford Road

·         Green Street and

·         Sebert Road

Bonheim's the furriers, Sebert Road attacked

We were also able to identify over a dozen local looters and rioters, successfully prosecuted in Stratford Magistrates Court.

The anti-German riots article can be accessed here.

Conscientious Objectors

We accessed several primary sources, secondary reference sites, and books to find considerable details of 48 Forest Gate people who claimed Conscientious Objector (COs) status during WWI and provided details of them here. On a pro-rata basis, given the total number of COs registered nationally, Forest Gate could have expected to have been home to only eight. It is not entirely clear why the local number would appear to have been so disproportionately high.

We found ten local Quaker COs (John Edwin Davies, Alexander Stewart Fryer, Frank George Hobart, Ernest George Mountford, Reginald William Mountford, George Leonard Pratt, William Ronald Read, Frank Augustus Root, Robert Sandy, and George Alfred Weller). 

Twenty other local COs quoted religious objections as grounds for seeking exemption from military service. Some were Jehovah's Witnesses, but others were members of the Church of England (CofE) and its fundamentally pacifist arm, the International Bible Students' Association (IBSA).

Two of the 48 claimed political objections to fighting (Edmund Howarth and Frederick Thompson, the former described as an "Anarchist/Communist/ Athiest" and the latter as a member of the Independent Labour Party). 

There were four local Absolutists who refused to enlist or undertake any work that could be seen as supporting the war effort. They had a totally torrid time. They were Howarth, Thompson (above), Frank Augustus Root, and George Arthur Weller.

Twenty-one of the Forest Gate 48 served prison sentences because of their CO status - some in several prisons. Fifteen - almost a third of local COs spent time in Wormwood Scrubs, four in Winchester, two in Dartmoor, and one each in Maidstone, Pentonville, Newhaven, and Wakefield, while four spent time in unspecified prisons.

The fate of several Forest Gate WW1 war memorials

About twenty varied war memorials were erected after World War 1 in the Forest Gate area.  As far as is possible to tell, about half of them have subsequently been lost or destroyed. The article chronicling their fate can be accessed here.

About half of the memorials we featured were in churches and synagogues; some have been subsequently lost or destroyed as a result of Second World War bomb damage, while others were not saved when churches and a synagogue were demolished.

War memorial: All Saints church

Forest Gate's major cemeteries have Commonwealth War Grave memorials and about 300 individual graves and plots with headstones.

CWGC memorial Woodgrange Park cemetery

There are a small number of other employment or school-specific memorials to the WW1 fallen, including at St Bonaventure school, the Royal Mail Sorting Office, and one recently installed outside Forest Gate police station.

War memorial outside Forest Gate police station, erected during centenary of war

In all war conflicts, some deeply tragic personal stories illustrate the human cost and suffering of the wider story. This blog has featured two very different case studies, both resulting in devastation and death caused by the “War to end all wars.” One was a love affair that ended in death on a battlefield, and the second was a horrific murder case undoubtedly induced by post-traumatic stress disorder.

The diaries of two local lovers whose affair was extinguished on the battlefields

A decade ago, local resident Paul Holloway self-published an account of a romance between his Forest Gate grandmother, May Larby, and a friend she met while travelling to London to college—fellow Forest Gater Jack Richardson. The book was called There Are No Flowers Here. We published a story summary in two articles, here and here.

May Larby

The romance between the couple, who lived within half a mile of each other, only lasted two years, but May lovingly remembered it for the rest of her life through the precious letters they exchanged during its brief duration.

May’s daughter from her later marriage, Elizabeth, kept these letters, and Paul transcribed and published them on her death, in remembrance of the two women and Jack.

The first episode of the series tells how the couple met and how their friendship blossomed until Jack, having enlisted in the City of London Fusiliers, was sent to the front line in France in early 1915.

Jack Richardson

The second episode of the blog records Jack’s experiences in the trenches until his final message to May:

“While the weather lasts, I think on the whole, I would rather be in the trenches than in billets. I scarcely ever sleep comfortably in town because I expect to be called up with an alarm every night I hear the gunfire; here the guns boom all night and one doesn’t notice it.

"My beloved, these days of sunshine make me feel only a matter of weeks or a month or so before I see you again - I dream of it at night."

Sadly, it was not to be. On Sunday, 25 April 1915, Jack was wounded, having been reconnoitering in front of his trench at night with his sergeant. He died of these wounds on Friday, 7 May 1915, aged 22.

Jack's memorial scroll

May later married Richard Williams and had four children. She became a successful mathematician, was awarded a CBE for her contribution to maths in education, and died in 1986, aged 91. But the memory of that brief affair lingered with her till the end - 70 years on; individual testimony to the lasting grief that the 'war to end all wars' brought to so many.

The 1919 Forest Gate Murders – a Post-Traumatic Distress Syndrome case study

Some of the most horrific local civilian deaths resulting from World War 1 came six months after the cessation of hostilities when four members of the Cornish family were murdered in their home, Stockley Road in April 1919.

The murdered Cornish family

Henry Perry, aka Beckett, was executed by hanging at Pentonville jail on 10 July 1919 for the murders - and so became the last person judicially executed for  Forest Gate-related killings.

Case reported

The story of the killings and subsequent trial is a horrific one, covered on the blog here. Perry, a war veteran, pleaded insanity, but this was dismissed. PTSD was not a well-understood condition at the end of World War 1. “Shell shock” was probably as close an understanding of the condition that existed then, but it was not accepted as a defence.

Henry Perry aka Beckett, as a soldier

In a more enlightened time today, it would be widely accepted that the four Cornish family deaths, along with that of the perpetrator Perry, would be accepted as deaths consequential to the traumas and suffering Perry experienced on the battlefields of Europe.

80th anniversary of Dames Road disaster

Location of the Doodlebug hit on 27 July 1944

27th July 2024 marks the 80th anniversary of the Dames Road disaster - the deadliest air raid hit on Forest Gate during World War 11.

We have covered the Doodlebug bombing of the road - close to the Holly Tree - on this site before, notably here, when we were able to publish all the names of the victims of the disaster for the first time, and  here, where we published a detailed first-hand account of the day's events from the standpoint of a 15-year-old victim family member.

This article combines different perspectives from previous postings to provide a comprehensive account of the event to mark this significant local anniversary.

Cyril Demarne, who would later become West Ham's chief fire officer, was called to assist with the aftermath of the bombing. In his 1980 memoirs, he described the event as " the most horrific thing I have ever witnessed."

Contemporary press reports were significantly affected by wartime censorship imposed on newspapers, which was done to avoid adversely impacting civilian morale and to confuse enemy understanding of the outcome and locations of their V1 attacks.

The Stratford Express account of 4 August (see below) did not identify the exact location of the hit, stating that a "passing vehicle" was wrecked and that there were a number of fatalities, but only mentioned four people. None of this was false, but it certainly wasn't comprehensive.

First press report - Stratford Express - 4 August - vague

Other local newspapers took a further six weeks to publish fuller but conflicting accounts.

The Leytonstone Independent of 15 September reported that 34 people were killed and that the "passing vehicle" was, in fact, a trolley bus.

More accurate newspaper account - seven weeks after the raid, Leytonstone Guardian

The Walthamstow Guardian of the same date devoted a mere 24 words to the worst local bombing of the war when it reported: "At Dames Road, when a bomb fell within a few yards of a trolley bus, 41 people were killed and 24 taken to hospital."

After the conclusion of the war, each borough produced a list of the civilians who had died during the conflict, which was compiled by the Commonwealth Graves Commission. By scrolling through the lists produced by both West Ham and Leytonstone councils (the bomb fell on the borough boundary), we have been able to identify 34 dead - the same number as the Leytonstone Independent had reported - and listed their names, ages, and addresses. 

No similar lists were compiled for casualties, so we have no accurate assessment of how many may have been injured in the attack.

West Ham's book of civilian war deaths

It would appear that the family that was most affected by the disaster was the Blackmans of 323 Billet Road, Walthamstow. Three members were killed: Gladys (aged 34), the wife of Leading Aircraftsman William Blackman, and Jean, aged 10, and Wendy, aged 4, their children.

In October 2020, Sue, the granddaughter of William and Gladys Blackman, contacted us. She said that her grandparents also had two sons, Donald, who survived the attack, and William Jr. (Bill), who was 15 at the time and at work, therefore not in the vicinity of the Doodlebug hit.

Sue sent us an extract from her father, Bill's memoirs (he was 91 at the time) - What a lucky sod I am - which provides a detailed account of the day from his perspective. It can be accessed here.

Bill Blackman aged 15 - around the time of the death of his mother and sisters

Gladys, apparently, was in the habit of taking her children to see their grandmother in Manor Park every Friday afternoon. On the afternoon of 27 July, they were on a trolley bus going home via Forest Gate when the VI missile hit the vehicle on Dames Road.

When he heard the explosion, Bill was working at Wrighton's, a furniture manufacturer near the Crooked Billet roundabout. The firm was beginning to close down for the day, and Bill saw a "huge black mushroom of smoke and debris rising in the sky." Although he was used to the sounds of bombs exploding, he felt particularly uneasy about this blast.

V1 missile, of the knid that hit Dames Road

It was his normal practice to go home on a Friday afternoon and lay the table in preparation for his mum and siblings' return from their family visit.

He did this, as normal, on 27 July but became increasingly uneasy as time went on, and they did not return. After a while, a policeman knocked on the door and asked to speak to one of his parents. Bill explained they were not in the house, so the police left and went to a neighbour. After a while, the neighbour and police officer returned and told Bill that his brother had been injured in a bomb blast and taken to St Mary's hospital in Hackney.

Bill told them that Donald was with his mother and sisters that afternoon. The policeman and neighbour said they would go to the police station to get more details.

15-year-old Bil was left alone in the house for hours until the neighbour returned, ashen-faced. He threw Bill a cigarette and told him to light it to calm down. The neighbour then began to explain the fate of Bill's mother and sisters. "I can remember my brain seemed to shut down momentarily ... I seemed to be in this strange trance-like state for some time before suddenly everything came to life, and I realised what had just happened to me."

Gladys Blackman - Bill's mother, and victim

The neighbours offered Bill a meal and a bed for the night, but he refused both, preferring to sleep in his own bed, alone in the house. They did, however, look after him until his father returned from active service abroad, for which he has always been grateful.

Bill took a month off work, and it was several weeks before his father reached home. Bill describes himself as feeling “comfortably numb” through this time. He spent some of it, accompanied by different adults, travelling the country to explain to relatives the circumstances of the deaths. One of those visits was to his nan, who was in the pub when he called.

Jean Blackman - Bill's sister, and victim

One of Bill’s most painful experiences was having to identify the bodies of his mother and two sisters in the mortuary. He was shown his mother’s face, which only had a few scratches on it, but only some of the clothes of his two sisters.

Bill says he also visited his brother Donald in the hospital, “the only survivor from the bus of 70 passengers.”

Following the funerals of his mother and sisters, Bill described his life as “for probably several weeks just surviving on auto-pilot”. When he eventually returned to work, he was put on “light duties”, working alone in an office essentially as a gatekeeper/receptionist.

When his dad finally arrived home, Bill discovered that he had been misinformed and told that the whole family and their house had been destroyed by a bomb blast. 

This partially explains why it took him so long to return – he thought he was coming home to emptiness. An additional complicating factor, explaining the length of his homecoming, was that he was expected to make his own way and travel arrangements, unaided, in returning from the Egyptian desert.

The War Office made some amends by posting Bill snr locally so that he could return home each evening. Donald was in the hospital for 18 months, recovering from a serious injury before being sent to Switzerland for convalescence. 

91-year old Bill, in 2020

Production at Wrighton’s changed from furniture manufacture to aircraft production until the end of the war. Bill, meanwhile, survived into his 90s, writing a very moving memoir of the dreadful times he experienced after the Dames Road bomb.