8.  The Aftermath

         The war ended. They must have felt it would go on for ever, but finally in November 1918, the Armistice was signed. There was no euphoria. Everyone was exhausted. Men started to return, but everyone was changed. Nothing would ever be the same again. The reach of the war was very, very long: through the 1920s and 1930s life was lived under the shadow of that terrible, terrible war.

The bereaved, the wounded & the shell-shocked

         William Housden was one of those who joined the territorial Cambridgeshire Regiment at the start of the war. Probably not surprising. He was in service as head gardener at Trinity House, where his employer was Colonel Hurrell of the Cambridgeshire Regiment. No doubt his employer encouraged him to join up. He served first in the Cambridgeshire Regiment, then the Suffolks. He was 33 when he died.

         His daughter Gladys was seven when the war ended, and though her mother said her father had seen her, she had no memory of him. Nor did she and her mother have a grave to mourn at. He had been blown to pieces and had no grave. Gladys told me a sad tale of standing at the end of Post Office Path, aged about 6, watching their hens being taken away, because now her father was dead, they couldn’t keep them. Her mother received a war pension, and that meant Gladys could stay an extra year at school. But she had lost her father. It meant she had no brothers and sisters, no-one to play with, and that was something she regretted very much.

         One of the great comforts of her later life was making a visit to Tyne Cot cemetery in France. Here she was able to lay a wreath for the father she never knew. She felt that she had touched something of him.

War Graves

         Over the centuries, the battlefield dead have been buried in mass graves. The toll exacted by the First World War was enormous, and mass graves would have been the easy way out. The government decreed early on that the dead would be buried where they fell. More affluent families were prepared to pay for their dead to be returned, but the government put its foot down. One rule for all. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission was set up in 1917, and massive war cemeteries were created. Every soldier’s grave was to be the same, every soldier was to have a memorial. If there was nothing left to bury, then his name would at least appear on a memorial. For families, this was hard to accept – they wanted their body to bury, and so the decision was deeply unpopular. The great war cemeteries are deeply moving, evoke better than anything the scale of the carnage. But they weren’t necessarily kind.

The Psychological casualties of war

         Mental illness, or lunacy, was well recognized and usually treated in asylums. But the Great War spawned a mountain of psychological casualties with a wide range of symptoms, which were lumped together under the term shell-shock.

         Wars always spawn traumatic reaction – we are well acquainted now with the condition of post-traumatic stress disorder, but the Great War was particularly conducive to mental trauma. Feelings of helplessness and lack of control were a strong component of being in the trenches. Long periods of inactivity, then being under fire, being forced to advance, watching comrades die, or be randomly picked off by snipers. The sheer length of the war challenged the notion that it was for something, and tended to bring out feelings of being pointlessly trapped. Recognizing that the enemy soldier was just a poor helpless soldier like yourself and not the despicable Hun also made it harder to function.

         By 1917 15% of soldier discharges were on account of shell shock. Psychiatrists came to recognize the validity of the suffering, and to pioneer the methods of the talking cure, but wider society, and specifically the military, had little sympathy. The military regarded sufferers as malingerers and cowards, and would order them to shape up and snap out of it, face their fear in a manly way.

         It wasn’t just the men who suffered. Wives were left at home, to cope as best they could, and in a constant state of anxiety. The longed-for return wasn’t always the glad scene they imagined. Some were faced with a traumatized husband they hardly recognized as the husband who had marched away, and were completely at a loss to deal with him.

         Mary Hawkins of Sawston was one such. Her husband Henry, a glove-cutter, had been discharged from the army as medically unfit. He had been in a Zeppelin raid, and it had “unhinged” him. Over the months he suffered from “nerve trouble” and was treated by the doctor. He had hallucinations, complaining that the Zeppelins were flying at him. He was frightened to be left alone, and wanted to be taken away, because he felt “he was going silly”. He was afraid he’d harm himself, or his wife and children. His hallucinations got worse and worse, and while his wife waited for him to be admitted to hospital he cut his throat with a cut-throat razor. He died soon after.  (CIP 7 July 1916)

Gas

         The Germans had first used chlorine gas in April 1915. It burned out the inside of your lungs, horrific stuff. Thereafter both sides used gas, and sometimes it was gas from your own side that got you. It left many men debilitated and traumatized by its own particular horror.

Back Home

         Everyone was exhausted. Demobilization and the return of prisoners of war were slow. Men returned and were not the same as when they had left. Wives who had barely seen husbands over the war years now had to adjust to this new situation. Children had grown beyond recognition while their fathers were away. Just as the war ended, there was an epidemic of flu (actually a pandemic). The particular strain of flu disproportionately killed healthy young adults, and the death rate was 10-20% of those infected. A true pandemic, it came in waves, the first in summer 1918, the second later in the year. It hit very fast, and then died down very quickly (the Black Death of the 14th century behaved in the same way). The Medical Officer of Health’s report for 1918 shows there were a total of 49 deaths in the Chesterton district from flu in 1918. Five were from Great Shelford.  It was not, however, the only killer. The old epidemic diseases held sway. Phthisis (tuberculosis of the lungs) claimed 32 lives, and other tuberculous diseases 5 more. Scarlet fever, diptheria, enteric fever, measles and german measles were all prevalent. There was much to be done to improve the health of the nation.

The War memorial

         Those who had served in the war and survived felt a reverence for and loyalty to those comrades they’d lost. In December 1919 a war memorial committee was formed. They wanted to build a memorial to the dead, but also remember them in a more living way. The village had no permanent recreation ground, so they agreed to raise £250 for both a war memorial and a village recreation ground. They sent letters round the village, and representatives were appointed. They raised £487.

         Mr Sindall of the Elms gave a piece of land for the memorial. The two fields off Woollards Lane, which belonged to Southernwood, were bought at auction for £995. The memorial cost £250, so after other expenses had been paid, the parish council had to raise a loan of £900 to fund the rec.

         The committee members were Josiah Austin (a builder), Freddie Dyne (a bootmaker), Bert Freestone of the Cambridgeshires (now a baker again), J F Gaskell (a university physiologist, resident at Uplands), Ernest Pearce (the miller), Charles Smith (the headmaster), who was the honorary secretary and Peter Grain (farmer). They co-opted members of the Societies (Friendly Societies) and Unions who would fundraise among the working families: Messrs Farrow, F. Smith, Doggett and Ellum, while committee members concentrated their efforts on fundraising among the middle-class villagers.

Unveiling the War memorials

         War memorials sprang up all across the county, and indeed the country. Several were unveiled every week. The ceremony at Great Shelford took place on January 2 1921, when the weather was, no doubt, appropriately bleak. The Lord Lieutenant presided, with ex-servicemen, VADs and the girl guides forming three sides of the triangle. The format should be familiar to us. It is pretty much what we do every Remembrance Day. The vicar led prayers of dedication, the names of the fallen were read. The difference, though, was that it would have been intensely personal and raw - everyone would have known who they were. A company of buglers from Duxford played the Last Post, and the Pastor of the Free Church concluded. Many floral tributes were laid around the memorial.

         I remember going with Mother to the first Armistice service at the newly erected War Memorial in Shelford.  I was only 10 so it did not make much impression on me but I did know that two of our neighbours had lost whole families.  One lost all three boys and another lost their only adopted son.  There were others in the road who went to the war but they came back.

From the Recollections of Mary Wilsdon

         One thing I am often asked is how they decided whose names to include on the war memorial. I have seen nothing which gives any clue to this. However, it is clear that not everyone named on the memorial was actually living in Great Shelford at the time of the war, or had family there. But they had lived here at some point. I think that it was all done in a very informal, word-of-mouth way. Most of the names for inclusion were obvious: people who had been living in the village. But then someone would suggest a name: someone they remembered who had previously lived in the village, with whom, perhaps, they’d been at school, and said, Shouldn’t we include him too? No-one was going to refuse. In the section on the War memorial you will see a couple of clear cases of this.

Sources

Gladys Housden, interviewed by Great Shelford Oral History group (and also personal communication).

MOH Interim Report 1918, Chesterton Rural District Council, available at the Cambridgeshire Collection.

Minutes of the War Memorial Committee, Great Shelford, ref. CRO/P137/add.

Unveiling the War Memorial, newspaper reports: CC 5 Jan 1921 (also several pictures), CIP 7 Jan 1921.

The Aftermath of the First World War in Cambridgeshire: People and Monuments c1918 to c1920, Michael Coles, 2002, available at the Cambridgeshire Collection.

v1 © Helen Harwood, uploaded February 2025