My grandad was a rioter.....

William's family. My Mother is holding Sarah's hand.




 


Unlike my paternal granddad Fred Abbott (previous blog) my maternal grandfather, William Billington, survived WW1. He came home to a wife, Sarah, and four young daughters ranging from 11 to 4 years old. He was a skilled worker in Luton’s hat trade and you would think he would have wanted to enjoy the peace that had come at such enormous cost to him and his friends,  

and just settle down to a quiet life. That’s not how it worked out though.

Although fighting stopped with the armistice in November 1918, the peace treaty wasn’t concluded until 1919 and, to celebrate, Luton Town Council decided to mark the occasion in style. There was to be a day of brass bands, a procession, fireworks and an official Mayor’s Banquet; all paid for from public funds. However invitations to this seem to have been limited to the Mayor, Councillors and their close friends; none of whom had actually served in any of the armed forces! In fact, none of the ex-servicemen or their organisations had been included in the preparations so the Discharged Soldiers and Sailors Federation and the Comrades of the Great War Association withdrew their support. Somewhat frustrated they did try to arrange an alternative celebration of their own in a local park but, unwisely, the Mayor and Council refused permission for this to take place.

July 19, 1919 was a rainy Saturday and, as the somewhat depleted official procession set off through the town, it had to pass the headquarters of the ex-servicemen’s organisation where the men themselves and their families had organised their own contribution to the celebration. The route was lined with disabled ex soldiers and sailors and a banner across the road demanded “Don’t pity us, give us work”. As the procession passed the servicemen tagged on, eventually arriving at the Town Hall  to hear the Mayor, by now the most unpopular man in town, read the official proclamation of peace.

The Town Hall before the riot. The Mayor gave his address from the 1st floor balcony.



 

Sensing the anger as boos and catcalls from thousands of old soldiers drowned out the Mayor’s address, one councillor called for “three cheers for the ex-servicemen”. This brought even more hostility and suddenly the crowd surged forward causing the mayor and his party to beat an undignified retreat into the town hall. The crowd swept aside the police, broke down the doors and entered just in time to see some of the mayor’s followers vanishing through the back door! Inside the decorations for the Grand Banquet were torn down and the contents of the building were thrown out of the windows to the cheers of those still outside. Discovering the mayor was barricaded in his parlour, serious harm was only averted by the arrival of more police and the fighting spilled out into the streets.

As the night wore on the riot spread. Several fires were started, attempts to put them out being met with fierce resistance and the slashing of hoses, forcing the firefighters to retreat, with remaining hoses being used to protect the police rather than put out the fire. A nearby garage was raided for petrol which was added to the now blazing Town Hall. The police were heavily outnumbered by ex –servicemen, many of them in uniform, though they did manage to smuggle the Mayor out disguised as a special constable. One man was struck so hard by a fireman’s jet that he was hurled through the window of Farmers music shop. The crowd that rescued him also pulled out three pianos, upon which my grandfather and others played a spirited rendition of “Keep The Home Fires Burning” Later heavy police reinforcements arrived and, just as the town Hall clock struck one and collapsed into the debris, the crowd began to disperse.  

A contemporary postcard depicting the blaze. The caption top left reads Looton!




 

The Mayor, fearful for his life, left for Sutton on Sea. He returned to Luton just twice; once for the funeral of a friend and once more for his own. William Billington was never arrested and, with Sarah, went on to add two sons to the family.  He died in 1938 at the age of just 58.

Notwithstanding recent events I’m very proud of my granddad William. I wouldn’t recommend arson as a means of protest but I think his generation knew, as did my parents, that some things were worth fighting for. He was born in 1880 and in the century that followed ordinary people achieved extraordinary things. They got the vote for all men and women. They built strong and independent trade unions that made real improvements to millions of lives. They created the building societies that made owning a home a real possibility for ordinary people. They founded and owned the co-operative movement. Full employment and free health care became the cornerstones of a much fairer society. They achieved free and universal access to education to everyone, right up to degree level. They even created an Open University for those who wanted or needed to study from home. It’s worth remembering that none of these were given to us; they all had to be argued over and fought for. The shame of my generation is that my children and grandchildren now face the prospect of having to fight again to defend many of these things. Only recently I saw that a government adviser was seriously suggesting that all employment legislation should be suspended even though this would mean the government breaking the law.

The current all too familiar response is that “They’re all the same” and “There’s nothing we can do”. I’m really, really glad and proud that my parents and grandparents, and probably yours too, didn’t believe that. Because I know they would have said “No, they’re not” and “Yes, you can” Unless we really want to see those achievements undermined or put beyond the reach of ordinary people I think we will, sooner or later, have to fight to save them.

and after all....If not us, then who? If not now, then when?


* A full account of the riot is the subject of the book "Where They Burnt The Town Hall Down, Luton, The First World War and The Peace Day Riots of July 1919" by David Craddock. Material is also held and on display at Luton Museum.

It's about much more than poppies.

Fred, my granddad, died in the First World War. He was 32. He died of war wounds on January 2^nd 1918 which was the day after his son's, my father's, 3^rd birthday. So when I went to Bruges last week it seemed the perfect opportunity to see for myself the scenes of some of the battles I'd heard about, Passchendaele, Hill 60, the Messine ridge, and Ypres itself where my granddad was killed.



  grenades and  shells at a farm gate



I thought I knew a little bit about the war but I was still shocked. Firstly because, even 100 years later, Belgian farmers are still digging up weapons and ammunition. They call it “The Iron Harvest” and every day they leave these unexploded bombs and grenades by the side of the road to be collected by the army. The day we were there we heard 3 loud explosions as the latest crop were safely detonated.







Even more surprising to me was the small area being fought over on this part of the Westen Front. The Ypres Salient was a bulge in the front line where British, Irish, Australian, Canadian and South African soldiers fought to prevent the Central Powers (Germany/Austria-Hungary) getting access to the ports of Calais and Boulogne just across the border in France. In this bulge, this piece of land smaller than Kent, every day for 4 years hundreds of men died, and on bad days thousands of men died. They were shot, blown to bits by artillery shells and tens of thousands drowned in the mud and the shell craters and just vanished. So many bodies are simply missing that two memorials to them, at Tyne Cot and the Menin Gate, record the names of, respectively, 34,888 and 54,896 men who have no known grave.

Most harrowing of all, even on a sunny August day, are the cemeteries themselves, 160 of them, where the other 130,000+ Commonwealth dead are buried in identified graves. Some are small, others like this one at Hooge Crater have almost 6,000 simple headstones recording the name, age and unit of each man. You would need a heart of stone to be unaffected by death on such a scale; every man someone’s son, brother, husband, father, grandfather.

Hooge Crater cemetery

I am not qualified to comment on the decisions that led to this slaughter; and anyway it no longer matters. Sufficient to say that there was no real victory, just an armistice as, with around 9,000,000 (yes, nine million) soldiers dead, the combatant nations fought each other to a standstill and signed a peace treaty which almost guaranteed another World War just 21 years later.

The final place I visited was a relatively new memorial dedicated to all the soldiers from the island of Ireland who died in the Ypres Salient. It is a very simple and moving place, with views across the fields to the city of Ypres and the battlefields, the only markers being stone slabs engraved with words and poems written by the soldiers themselves.



Memorial to Canadian Soldiers

“So the curtain fell over that tortured country of unmarked graves and unburied fragments of men. Murder and massacre. The innocent slaughtered for the guilty, the poor man for the sake of the creed of the already rich.
The man of no authority made the victim of the man who had gathered importance and wished to keep it”

David Starret. 9^th Royal Irish Rifles

Obviously I never knew my granddad. More importantly my dad never knew his own father and, although he was a good and kind man and I loved him dearly, I am sure that this left its mark and influenced his own relationships throughout his life. Multiply that 9 million times and, even after almost a hundred years, it’s still about much more than poppies.





Utoya island

If we hate Muslims, this is how it ends;

if we hate Jews, this is how it ends;

if we hate Catholics, this is how it ends;

if we hate Protestants, this is how it ends;

if we hate black people, this is how it ends;

if we hate white people, this is how it ends;

if we hate immigrants, this is how it ends;

if we hate asylum seekers, this is how it ends;

if we hate gays, this is how it ends;

if we hate travellers, this is how it ends.

When we hate anyone because they seem different; this is how it ends.

Auschwitz, Beslan, Kosovo, London, Manhattan, Rwanda, Utoya island.....

When we hate this is how it ends.

"You told me you were 46!"

When a slightly mischievous (and very much younger, female) friend said this in a stage whisper in a shop recently, just after I’d told the elderly male shop assistant that I had retired a few years ago, it did make me smile; and it certainly made the shop assistant do a quick double take on the situation! But as Eric Morecombe might have said, “They’re the right numbers, they’re just in the wrong order” According to government figures 11 million people that are alive today in this country will reach the age of 100; so even 64 can hardly be classed as genuinely old can it? However maybe it is old enough to glance back; after all, there’s a lot to look back at!

I have been very lucky. I have never been unemployed. I have rarely been ill. I have always had supportive family and friends. There have been difficult times of course. Recessions aren’t new; I must have lived through at least four. Sometimes, when mortgage interest rates were in double figures, I had to do two jobs. Balancing a family with two young children, treble shift work, a second part time job, being a union rep and studying for an OU degree was never going to be other than exhausting. Looking back I’m not sure how we survived, but we did and we kept a roof over our heads. With the benefit of hindsight, would I do exactly the same again? The answer is that I don’t know. I would like to have been a better father, a better partner, a better friend, a better student. But as Kierkegaard said “Life only makes sense in retrospect, but we have to live it going forwards” You make your decisions as best you can at the time and you live with the consequences.

And so, suddenly I arrived at a kind of middle age. In a different job, infinitely more interesting, more rewarding in all kinds of ways but also more stressful; new friends and colleagues, new problems, new skills and the time flies and the years pass... and my children graduate and are adults.... and parents become frail and pass away. In this my life is doubtless the same as countless others, time passes, life moves on. And then, just when I think I am beginning to get this life thing sorted, some fool of a consultant tells me that I have cancer. “Don’t be daft I feel fine” “Well you won’t feel fine if you don’t get it treated” And so you do and it’s all OK again and then your job looks like transferring to London and the same genius of a consultant says “Don’t do it, that really won’t do you any good!”

So I retire early and that’s about where I am now, 5 or 6 years later. And it’s been a blast and it still is. I volunteer for a couple of conservation charities and in those years I’ve been frozen, sunburnt, soaked and bitten by unpronounceable insects in unmentionable places. I’ve broken an arm, cut my head open and fell in a moat and I wouldn’t have missed any of it for the world. I have a wonderful family and fantastic friends and, OK if just occasionally, I think I would give everything I have to be thirty years younger, I know that life, just as it is, is very good indeed.

Little Green Men.....

Wherever I go recently I seem to keep bumping into little Green Men! They aren’t hard to find. It may be best known as a pub name but, in fact, if you visit a medieval church you’re quite likely to see one or two gazing down at you from the roof or doorways as a piece of mysterious carving. Grotesque, leering, and sometimes quite frightening, there are over a thousand in Britain’s churches and they are still being discovered. Typically it will be a man’s face either surrounded by leaves, or with branches spewing from his mouth, or his eyes, ears and nose.

Why are they in so many of our churches? The truth is that no one really knows, but many of the traditions, images and practises of the early church were probably borrowed from pre-existing Pagan ritual. The candles, bells and holy water inside and yew trees outside our churches were all revered by pre Christian worshippers. Many Christian festivals, for example Easter, are on or close to Pagan feast days and religious festivals. This probably means that, like the empire building Romans, the new religion incorporated existing cultural traditions wherever it reasonably could. Rather than waste energy and goodwill trying to suppress them it brought them into the churches and made them safe and respectable.

It’s a little easier to make a guess at what they represent and why they were so important to people that they needed to be accommodated. If you can imagine a world without electricity and all our modern comforts, the winters would be cold and bleak and the one thing everyone would really, really look forward to would be Spring! Warmer weather, new plants growing, new animals born, fresh food! It’s not difficult to imagine that this would be a cause for huge celebration. The Green Man festival that I bumped into in Shropshire is always held on May Day, Beltane in the Pagan calendar, and the central event is the Green Man defeating the Ice Queen in battle and then, with help of the new May Queen, declaring winter ended. Only then can the feasting, the drinking and the dancing begin!

It would be strange if these festivals were the only examples of pre-Christian ritual to actually survive alive, as opposed to those spooky wooden carvings hidden in the dark corners of old churches. But of course they’re not. The Green Man has many other manifestations such as Jack of the Green, who dances in front of many May Day processions, John Barleycorn in song, Shakespeare’s Puck in theatre, and maybe even Robin Hood; all are bringers of liberation and celebration, mischief and misrule. There will always be more questions than answers about something as odd and as old the Green Men. But one thing seems certain, a symbol that is as widespread and long lasting is neither trivial nor merely decorative. So next time you visit a church why not have a good look at the roof bosses and the doorways and the pew ends; see if you can find him (occasionally her) and if you do find one, or even if you don’t, have a drink and toast his health at the nearest (Green Man) pub.