Authors: Flora Johnston
War Classics
FLORA JOHNSTON has a First Class Honours degree in Scottish History and a postgraduate qualification in Museum Studies. She worked for six years for the National Museums of Scotland on the development of their prestigious Museum of Scotland and now researches and writes historical material for publications, interpretation panels and multimedia. Her third book was published in 2012 by the Islands Book Trust,
Faith in a Crisis: Famine, Eviction and the Church in North and South Uist
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I would like to thank the trustees of the Kerr-Fry Bequest for the grant which allowed me time to work on Christina’s manuscript and to carry out research in some of the places which were part of her story.
Archivists and librarians from the schools, universities and towns which featured in Christina’s life have helped me to piece together her story, and I am grateful for help received from the following organisations: Castletown Heritage Society; Caithness Archive Centre, Wick; Edinburgh University Library; St Leonard’s School, St Andrews; Newcastle University Library; Birmingham University Library; St Hilda’s College, Oxford; Newnham College, Cambridge; Dieppe Ville d’Art et d’Histoire; The British School at Rome. I’m also very grateful to my agent, Robert Dudley, for his enduring faith in Christina’s memoir.
The extracts from the diaries of John Wight Duff are reproduced by permission of the librarian, Robinson Library, Newcastle University.
The images from the YMCA collections are reproduced by permission of Special Collections, University of Birmingham and of the YMCA.
The letters of David Barrogill Keith are reproduced by permission of the Highland Archive Service, Caithness Archive Centre.
Particular thanks to my father, Peter Keith Morrison, for starting this whole project off by showing me Christina’s memoir, for giving permission for its publication, and most of all for his many, many stories and reminiscences over the years which have fuelled my interest. I’m also grateful to his sister Joy and cousin Sheila for sharing their memories of the Keith family and of time spent in Thurso. My own family too have had to put up with my obsessions, and so thanks are due to Elizabeth and Alastair, and to David, who only once said as we pulled into another obscure French destination, ‘It’s like going on holiday with Christina!’
But most of all, thank you to Christina for writing all this down in the first place. I hope I have done your memoir justice.
Part 1:
Christina’s Story
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‘An Edinburgh and Newnham girl’
3
‘How fine their sense of duty has been’
4
‘The meeting of mind with mind’
Part 2:
Christina Keith’s Memoir
: A Fool in France
4
France and her welcome – Dieppe
5
Life at a base – who wants to learn?
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Up the line to Amiens – the best days of all
10
The forward areas and Cambrai
12
Closing down
13
L’Envoi
Appendix: David Barrogill Keith
I never knew Christina Keith, but she was my grandmother’s eldest sister. She died in 1963, just a few months after my parents became engaged. In her will she made a gift to my father, her nephew, ‘to help him start off in his married life’.
In our family home there was an exceptionally long bookcase, which caused problems to the removal men each time we moved house. That bookcase had belonged to Christina Keith, or ‘Auntie Tiny’ as she was known within the family. She was one among a host of legendary relatives whose names I knew, an intellectual who was somewhat eccentric and took her tins to the nearby hotel to be opened because she couldn’t use a tin opener.
That was largely the extent of my awareness of Auntie Tiny until November 2011, when my father first showed me her manuscript memoir from 1918 to '19. In this short book Christina, using the pseudonym ‘A Fool in France’, recounts her experiences as a young lecturer to the troops in France at the end of the First World War. It is a story in two parts. In the first she recalls life at the base among men who were desperate to be allowed home, while the second part describes an astonishing journey which she and a female companion took across the devastated battlefields just four months after the Armistice. From the moment I read the memoir I was captivated. I wanted to know more about Christina, her life, her background and the scheme which had taken her to France. Here was a truly fresh insight into life in France as the First World War came to a close.
I am glad that Christina wrote down her experiences. She disguised the identities of those about whom she wrote, which suggests that she always intended her story for wider circulation, and her brother appears to have tried to find a publisher for the book after her death, but without success. Yet now, a century later, Christina’s story is worth telling for a number of reasons. Firstly, despite the fact that the First World War is one of the most-discussed periods in recent history, Christina describes aspects of that time which have never been particularly widely known, saying herself, ‘I suppose we were one of the freak stunts of the War. You have probably never heard of us and would not have believed us true if you had.’
She travelled to France as part of the army’s education scheme, which was implemented by the YMCA. Based in Dieppe, she observed at first hand the workings of the ‘Lines of Communication’, the immense logistical infrastructure which existed behind the front line during the four years of conflict. The fighting armies needed to be supplied with weaponry, clothing, food and equipment, which involved drivers, engineers, bakers and clerks among many others. The Remount Service supplied and cared for the horses which were still an intrinsic part of the army during this conflict. The tremendous feat of organisation involved in the Lines of Communication contributed hugely to the British Army’s ability to sustain and ultimately prevail in such a prolonged conflict, yet the role played by tens of thousands of men and women behind the lines has generally been overlooked in favour of the more dramatic, glorious and tragic stories from the front line.
Christina set out for this world of base soldiers, rest camps and service huts in October 1918, just in time to participate in the newly launched education scheme. There had been educational provision for the men throughout the war, although not on the scale of this new scheme. The YMCA had played a significant role in caring for the physical, spiritual and emotional needs of the men since the outbreak of war. From officers’ rest clubs in French towns to huts in army camps where female volunteers served tea and provisions to the men, from reading rooms and organised sports to the provision of accommodation near hospitals for the relatives of wounded soldiers, the YMCA’s contribution to boosting morale touched men right across the army, and yet is little remembered today.
1
We are familiar with accounts of the trenches, but Christina’s narrative sheds light on a parallel existence which was taking place only a few miles from the front line. Most soldiers moved between these two interdependent scenes, two parts of the same whole which made up the British soldier’s experience of northern France in the First World War.
And yet Christina’s story is more than simply a picture of life behind the lines. In March 1919, with four days’ leave, she and a female companion (known only as ‘the Hut Lady’) managed to negotiate permission to travel by train into the War Zone. Her ambition was to ‘see where my brothers have been and all the things they’ve never told me of these weary years’. This remarkable journey of two British women across a devastated landscape provides a vivid and compelling eyewitness account of a world which can only have existed in that form for a very short time.
The names of the places they visited – Arras, Vimy Ridge, Thiepval, Cambrai – are today still synonymous with slaughter. French refugees were living in abandoned army dugouts. Tanks, clothing and weaponry lay littered across the battlefield. The war graves were not grassy fields with neat white lines of stones, but groups of rough wooden crosses stuck in yellow mud and water. The sense is of a land which, now that the guns had fallen silent, was stunned by what had happened to it.
Few women had reached these parts, a fact emphasised by the surprise and delight with which Christina and her friend were met by soldiers at every turn. They knew they were privileged to pass through the army zone before much of the debris had been cleaned up – ‘while it is like this and before the tourists come’, said the Hut Lady. Christina described those four days as ‘a dream-world, where everything happened after the heart’s desire on a background of infinite horror’.
Christina’s manuscript thus draws our attention to people, places and events which are half-forgotten, but what is even more remarkable is the perspective from which this narrative is written. There are many first-hand accounts of different facets of the First World War – the rise of general literacy levels ensured that this conflict was documented on a personal level to an extent that had never happened before. However the majority of diaries, letters and memoirs are, naturally, by men. There are several vivid accounts by nurses working in clearing stations and base hospitals, but Christina was a very different woman to these – and would probably have made a terrible nurse! Christina was an intellectual, a high-flying academic from a generation which was breaking down barriers in women’s education. She had spent most of her adult life in the cloistered, middle-class environment of academia, living in all-female residences, and was accustomed to teaching university-level students. In 1918 she found herself in the male-dominated world of the army, meeting, working with and teaching men of all abilities and all classes, with a keen eye to observe all that went on around her. Hers is a truly fresh perspective on the events of the period.
Christina’s perspective and her frankness give us an insight into the attitudes held by those of her background at that time, and some of those attitudes can surprise us and even make us feel rather uncomfortable today. Christina came from a class and a generation which were still strongly tied to the Victorian values of the era into which she had been born. Thus, although she was a woman who clearly had no intention of letting her gender limit her academic potential, she was not a feminist as we might see it today. She took a pride in not conforming to what might be expected of a woman, referring to herself as ‘a bluestocking who had never cooked a dinner in her life’, yet she still expected men to treat her in a particular way, and was offended when they did not – as for example with the American soldiers who did not move their belongings to make more space for her on the train. She was perfectly willing to adopt the persona of a helpless female if she felt it would help her get her way.
Early twentieth-century society was very clearly divided along class lines, and perhaps nowhere was that emphasised more explicitly than in the army, with the division between officers and other ranks. Throughout her narrative Christina wrote with warmth and respect about the ordinary British soldier, and there is no doubting the admiration she had for the men she met – but equally there is no missing the paternalistic tone, and the breadth of the chasm which existed between her own world and the lower classes. At a time when the Russian Revolution was frighteningly recent and the military powers were constantly watchful for signs of mutiny in the ranks, those in authority were expected to reinforce social hierarchies, and Christina’s colleague who dared to give secret lectures on socialism was quickly removed.