A family’s letters that reveal the wounds of wartime

PAUL Elmhirst remembers his father Pom ((his official name was Octavius, the eighth of eight sons), discussing the First World War with his gregarious, storytelling brothers. There was one subject the men – now deceased, as are their sister and their spouses – did not mention, probably because the found it too painful to discuss even in advanced age. It was the fact that two of their dear brothers, Christie and Willie, had died in the Dardanelles and at the Somme. Time could not soften the edges of their grief, it seems.

Born at their father’s vicarage in Laxton, East Yorkshire, but mostly brought up on the family farm in Barnsley, there were nine children in this particular branch of the dynasty. One son, Edward, died in infancy, and the survivors were Willie, born in 1892, followed in swift succession by Leonard, Christie, Tommy, Vic, Richie, Pom and Irene Rachel. They were a sociable, close family who enjoyed sport and the outdoors.

The vicar and his wife found the money to send their children to public schools, but in spite of lengthy term-time separations and the 10-year age difference between eldest and youngest, they maintained a strong bond.

This was why, at the outbreak of a war which would divide the siblings further and for an indeterminate period, Leonard suggested a series of round robin letters called The Family Budget as a way of brothers and sister keeping in touch without each having to write seven letters at a time. The Family Budget was a term used by their father, meaning a bag or sack and its contents.

Paul Elmhirst, now a retired solicitor living near York, was brought up on stories of the family’s early days in Barnsley and beyond. After war was declared in 1914, Willie became a captain in the 8th Batallion East Yorks Regiment and was posted to France only to be killed at the age of 24 at the Battle of the Somme.

Leonard was passed as unfit for military service and sent to India and Mesopotamia as a representative of the YMCA, organising relief for soldiers and citizens. Christie, as a second lieutenant in the 8th Duke of Wellington’s, was dispatched to Gallipoli in 1915, where he died in action at the age of 20. Tommy, who’d always intended to make his career in the Navy, spent the early war years as a midshipman on board HMS Indomitable. Later on he hunted U-boats in an R-100 airship. Vic, after leaving Marlborough, went to Sandhurst and was posted as a second lieutenant to Mesopotamia with the York and Lancasters. When Richie left Rugby at the end of the war he was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards. Paul’s father, Pom, spent the whole war being schooled at Winchester College, and Irene Rachel was also still at school when hostilities ceased.

Whether sitting in a school dorm, on a warship, in a trench or enduring weeks of drill marching in preparation for battles ahead, each member of the family looked forward to receiving and played their part in adding to and passing on the “FB”, every few weeks throughout the war. Nearly 100 years on, Paul Elmhirst has found 70 of the letters in various boxes, files and the Sheffield Archive, and published them with family photographs to preserve this important collection. Important not because it examines the whys and wherefores of war, but because it reflects the massively contrasting experience within one family of a period that was called “the war to end all wars”.

While older brothers were enduring rat-infested quagmires in the trenches or insufferable heat and dust in the Eastern Mediterranean, the teenagers in the family were enjoying cricket, croquet or tennis and spending holidays in Scotland shooting and fishing. While Leonard was in India with servants on hand and leopards in the garden, Irene Rachel gave reports of her pet ferrets, chickens and horses. In the early days, before he was despatched to the Front where he eventually led his men to their doom, Willie reported from York that the first 300 recruits there were “...a poor lot, mainly Hull loafers or dockhands...” and the second lot were Durham miners: “...very thick in the head and very childlike, but keen as mustard...” Young Vic was the self-appointed censor, unilaterally scrubbing out comments he didn’t like or writing critical comments in the margin.

Later, on October 1916, Willie was to report from “Somewhere in France” that he was in a wood a couple of miles behind the line “in an unhealthy spot”, road clearing and draining but “going to the trenches for 48 hours”. He was never to return from that outing. Tommy reported “poor food and little exercise” in the Dardanelles and later seemed to find his time back in Blighty flying airships from Howden frustrating. But he was to survive the war and continue his military career, ending the Second World War as an air commodore. At retirement he was Governor of Guernsey.

Leonard, who before “the Kaiser War” (as Pom called it) claimed two of his brothers, had been destined to take holy orders, later rejected the idea and decided that modern agricultural practices would help poor areas of the world more than God. After the war he studied agriculture at Cornell University in the US, married a wealthy older woman and returned to the UK, where they bought the Dartington Hall Estate in Devon, which was to become the centre of an experiment in rural reconstruction.

The Family Budget came to a close in 1919. “Although they don’t bring themselves to say anything in the Family Budget, the two deaths had a devastating effect on all of the others,” says Paul Elmhirst. “I remember that my own father certainly didn’t like going abroad and had a problem dealing with Germans, even though he knew later that times had changed. Leonard does go so far as to say in other letters that he could not express how he felt about the loss, and described how long the war dragged on as “madness”.

“Yet the letters also show a great deal of light-heartedness, which is quite a shock to us these days, when we question the motives for war more. The brothers were cheerful, accepting and even enthusiastic about doing their duty.

In among the reports of business as usual at home and school, Richie wrote that there had been a memorial service at Rugby for 52 old boys who had been killed during the previous two months. That’s quite a statistic. Everyone concerned seems to have been unquestioning. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind except a few pacifists, and the banter between the brothers and sister was jolly, with Irene Rachel switching between news of ferrets to ‘keep off the mines’. We can’t imagine how brothers and sister would cope these days with losing two members in a war.”

Mr Elmhirst says it was not as though anyone laboured under misapprehension about the risks involved; it was simply a matter of getting on with it. He feels the added perspective lent by the fact that his own son Marcus has served as a major with the Scots Guards in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“There’s a public perception that soldiers are gung-ho, but in Iraq many soldiers were just as horrified as anyone else when politicians came up with strange decisions which they then had to act on.”

Paul Elmhirst has consolidated an important chapter of family history for the future. It has, he feels, also allowed him to appreciate a much more rounded picture of his father, uncles and aunt, as has reading other letters the family wrote to each individually and to their parents. “I feel I’ve got to know them all better and realise that they had a much stronger influence on each other than their parents had on them. They were extraordinarily close.”

[email protected]

The Family Budget 1914-1919, published by ElmyrstePress at £12.99, is available from York Publishing Services, 64, Hallfield Road, Layerthorpe, York YO33 7ZQ. Tel 01904 431213 or email [email protected]