Soldiers' football match Salonika Dec 1915 ©IWM Q31576 |
What is less well-known is the plight of soldiers who
returned from the war, unable to ever again join in a game of football. An
estimated 8 million veterans returned home permanently disabled, 750,000 men in
Britain and 1.5 million in Germany. As
historian Deborah Cohen explains,
More than any other group, disabled
veterans symbolized the First World War’s burdens. Long after the Armistice,
the sight of empty sleeves tucked into pockets recalled “sad memories of the
war and its longdrawn suffering.” For the disabled themselves, as one veteran
explained, the Great War “could never be over.”**
In January of 1920, Punch
published a poem by E.W. Pigott that tells of the costs born and the
courage displayed by disabled veterans.
Saturdays
Now has the soljer handed in his
pack,
And
“Peace on earth, goodwill to all” been sung;
I’ve got a pension and my ole job
back—
Me,
with my right leg gawn and half a lung;
But, Lord! I’d give my bit o’ buckshee° pay
And
my gratuity in honest Brads °
To go down to the field nex’
Saturday
And
have a game o’ football with the lads.
It’s Saturdays as does it. In the
week
It’s
not too bad; there’s cinemas and things;
But I gets up against it, so to
speak,
When
half-day-off comes round again and brings
The smell o’ mud an’ grass an’
sweating men
Back
to my mind—there’s no denying it;
There ain’t much comfort tellin’
myself then,
“Thank
Gawd, I went toot sweet° an’ did my
bit!”
Oh, yes, I knows I’m lucky, more or
less;
There’s
some pore blokes back there who played the game
Until they heard the whistle go, I
guess,
For
Time an’ Time eternal. All the same
It makes me proper down at heart and
sick
I’d sell my bloomin’ soul to have a
kick—
But
what’s the good of talkin,’ anyway?
—E.W.
Pigott***
Over 40,000 British veterans of the First World War suffered
the amputation of one or more limbs, while the number of war amputees in
Germany totaled over 67,000.†
In the aftermath of the Great War, the economic plight of disabled
veterans was particularly acute as widespread social unrest spread and unemployment rose.
In Britain, pensions for the disabled were limited to no
more than 40 shillings per week, a sum far below what was needed to support a
man, much less a family (unskilled builders earned 84 shillings/week, coal
miners between 99 – 135 shillings/week††). Disability review boards assessed the extent to which men were disabled and
awarded the full 40 shillings only to those who were determined to experience
100% disability, defined as follows:
Loss of two or more limbs, loss of
an arm and an eye, loss of a leg and an eye, loss of both hands or all fingers
and thumbs, loss of both feet, loss of a hand or a foot, total loss of sight,
total paralysis, lunacy, wounds or disease resulting in a man being permanently
bedridden, wounds to internal organs or head involving total permanent
disability, very severe facial disfigurement.
Those with legs amputated at the hip or with a stump of “not
more than five inches” were assessed as 80% disabled and received 32
shillings/week, while a veteran with a leg amputated “more than 4 inches below
the knee” was determined to be only 50% disabled and entitled to receive a mere
20 shillings per week. †††
As
former Sergeant Thomas Kelly of Dumbartsonshire wrote to his government,
There was not so much red-tape to
go through in August, 1914, when the country was crying for men and I left a
good job to join the soldiers, but now when I am a maimed and not fit for manual
labour, this country has no further use for me. Yet it was to be a country fit
for heroes to live in.††††
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*Read more about the footballers at Loos on the website of the London Irish Rifles Association.
** Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home, Univ. of California Press, 2001, pp. 4, 2.
° buckshee = something extra obtained for free (first known use 1919); Brads = “Between 1914 and 1928 £1 notes were issued that came to be called brads after Sir John Bradbury, Secretary to the Treasury” (David Crystal, Words in Time and Place); toot sweet = French phrase tout suite (immediately, with haste).
** Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home, Univ. of California Press, 2001, pp. 4, 2.
° buckshee = something extra obtained for free (first known use 1919); Brads = “Between 1914 and 1928 £1 notes were issued that came to be called brads after Sir John Bradbury, Secretary to the Treasury” (David Crystal, Words in Time and Place); toot sweet = French phrase tout suite (immediately, with haste).
***While it is nearly impossible to determine the author’s identity with certainty, the Imperial War Museum's Lives of the First World War lists a
Lieutenant Edward
William Pigott, who served with the London and East Lancashire Regiments.
† For Britain, Joanna Bourke’s Dismembering
the Male, Univ. of Chicago, 1996, p.
33; for Germany, Robert Weldon Whalen’s
Bitter Wounds, Cornell UP, 1984, p.
40.
†† “War and Impairment: The Social Consequences of Disablement,” UNITE and UK
Disability History Month, Nov/Dec 2014, https://ukdhm.org/v2/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/UK-Disability-history-month-2014-Broadsheet.pdf,
Accessed 20 Jan. 2019.
††† Thanks to Dr. Jessica Meyer who shared these statistics from Joanna Bourne’s Dismembering the Male in a presentation
at Voices from the Home Fronts, The National
Archives at Kew, 20 Oct. 2018.
†††† Thanks to researcher Louise Bell who shared this letter from The National Archives (LAB 2/1195/TDS2884/1919) in
a presentation at Voices from the Home
Fronts, The National Archives at Kew, 19 Oct. 2018.
Nice to read again, nice post Connie.
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