First world war: record of service

To mark the centenary of the first world war, we look at the experiences of solicitors who served on all fronts. Some of these accounts were previously unpublished.

At 7am on Monday 3 August 1914, the dining room at the First Avenue Hotel, High Holborn, London, filled with khaki-uniformed young men calling for huge fried breakfasts and the latest editions of the morning papers.

The 230 members of the Inns of Court Regiment (‘The Devil’s Own’) had been on the go for 24 hours, after setting off from London the previous morning to Salisbury Plain for their annual training camp, only to be recalled on arrival as the international crisis deepened. Thanks to a rail service we can only envy in the 21st century, the territorial regiment arrived at Addison Road station, Kensington, at 5.30am on the Monday, a bank holiday.

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‘We marched to our headquarters at Lincoln’s Inn, along deserted streets in the beautiful summer morning, and dispersed in search for breakfast,’ commanding officer Lt-Col Francis Errington recalled in the regiment’s official history.

At the First Avenue (whose site is today occupied by the Principal Registry of the Family Division), exuberant part-timers probably called for brandies-and-soda, too. Like so many social innovations, from air travel to the admission of women to the legal profession, the Intoxicating Liquor (Temporary Restriction) Act lay in a future about to be ushered in by the first world war.

The next day, at 11pm London time, Britain was at war and the Inns of Court Regiment was mobilised to begin its wartime job: training gentlemen private soldiers – many with connections to the legal profession – to become officers for Britain’s new armies.

Contrary to later myth, the declaration of war was not treated as a jingoistic national celebration, in the legal world at least. On 8 August, a weekly newspaper, the Solicitors’ Journal and Weekly Reporter , commented: ‘Europe in its madness has determined on a general war, and Great Britain, owing to one compelling fact [Germany’s invasion of Belgium] has become involved.’

The Law Society’s Council, meanwhile, voted to offer the Law Society’s Hall to the British Red Cross Society for use as a hospital. It also agreed to abandon a provincial meeting planned to take place in Hereford in September. It felt necessary to state: ‘The council feel sure that all members of the profession will be anxious to encourage all their clerks of military age at the present serious crisis to join one or other of the defensive forces of the country.’

Such encouragement turned out to be unnecessary. On the first day of hostilities, 20-year-old Henry Peake, articled to his father, HA Peake of Sleaford, Lincolnshire, signed up with the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps (OTC), the first of many. On 10 August the OTC advertised in The Times for 2,000 volunteers. It was inundated.

Over the next four years, thousands of solicitors, articled clerks, barristers and other gentlemen assessed as being officer material – one in 10 of those who applied – passed through the OTC’s ranks before being commissioned, overwhelmingly into infantry battalions. One who answered the call was Guy Clifton Davis, articled to HJ Shepard, of 40 Chancery Lane, who spent the next few months in the OTC’s camp in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, before being commissioned into the Northumberland Fusiliers, the ‘Fighting Fifth’, at the rank of second lieutenant.

However, a commission through the Inns of Court Regiment (which is still active) was by no means the only route by which some 7,000 solicitors and articled clerks found their way into khaki or navy blue. Solicitors are lucky to have a unique account, the Record of Service of Solicitors and Articled Clerks in His Majesty’s Forces, published just after the war. It runs to 630 pages, each listing about 10 names, followed by between two and 12 lines of information, including date of admission or to whom articled, date of joining the forces, unit, rank, and where service took the lawyer.

On a typical page, three or more entries include a terse line about wounds, disease, shell shock or death. A large proportion are identified as ‘articled to’ a solicitor with the same surname, usually their father. Sometimes the surnames recur in poignant combinations.

Solicitors joined at all ages. While a majority were in their early 20s, Henry Auty of Auty & Sons, Sheffield, served as a lieutenant despite being admitted in May 1879. His near contemporary, Charles Greenwood, admitted in 1878 and member of Greenwood & Greenwood, Temple, was mobilised as paymaster, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. This City gent, well into his 50s, ‘accompanied the Troops’ on Winston Churchill’s quixotic 1914 expedition to save Antwerp from the German advance.

Alexander Arnold Hannay, admitted in November 1881, and practising at 5 Albemarle St, served with the French Red Cross, winning the Croix de Guerre aschef adjoint, Convois d’automobiles. (An 1896 portrait, by James McNeill Whistler, hangs in the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.) His firm is now City firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain.

They served in all ranks: the highest proportion of solicitors became junior officers, starting as second lieutenants leading a platoon of 30 or 40 riflemen. Statistically, this was the most dangerous rank, and casualties were correspondingly high. Overall, of the 17 ‘gentlemen applying to be admitted as solicitors of the Supreme Court’ in August 1914, nine were to go into the army and three to die on active service. This compares with the overall death rate of 8% of British servicemen in the war.

I felt that I had been kicked by an elephant. Before losing consciousness I felt a bullet graze the palm of my hand and a piece of grenade pierce an eyelid

Henry Lawson, who survived and became a president of the Law Society in the 1960s

Many, however, signed up at the humblest rank. Gloucester solicitor Frederick William Harvey joined the Gloucestershire Regiment as a private on 8 August 1914. A few days later, Wilfred Thomas de Berdewelle Barwell, evidently a gentleman with his own Seaford firm, joined as a private in the Royal Fusiliers. Frank Howard Butcher, admitted in 1910, of ‘Slaughter & May [sic], 18 Austin Friars EC’, served as an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy.  

On the other hand, St Barbe Russell Sladen, admitted in 1895 and mobilised in August 1914 as a major in the Royal West Surrey Regiment, was killed at Passchendaele in 1918 while acting as a brigadier general in charge of some 4,000 men. Cecil Henry Whittington, admitted in April 1901, and practising at Queen Anne’s Chambers, rose to the same rank in the Royal Flying Corps.  

They came from far and wide. Many, such as Harry Colin Clarke, admitted in 1903, returned home from Canada in 1914 (he was killed in 1916). Leo Burton Feeny, of Boston, Massachusetts, admitted in 1901, served with the McGill University Overseas Corps. John Hellard, admitted in 1906, was practising in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) when he joined the Somerset Light Infantry in 1915. He was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. John Leslie Thomson, admitted in 1911, was with the Royal Indemnity Co in New York but joined the Canadian Army. He seems to have survived being ‘shot by sniper’ in 1916.

Bomb damage from 1917 is still visible at Stone Buildings, Lincoln’s Inn

Kinsmen and colleagues joined together. Three members and articled clerks of the Newcastle upon Tyne firm Gibson, Pybus & Pybus joined up; one was killed in a motorcycle accident at home after being wounded in Flanders. Two members of Raley & Sons of Barnsley served: William Emsley Raley, qualified in 1881, was mobilised in August 1914 as a major in the 13th Battalion, Yorks & Lancs Regiment (see below). His managing clerk and son, William Henry George Raley, was mobilised in the regiment’s third battalion and killed at Givenchy, France, in 1915.

While the infantry had the greatest need of men, solicitors served in all arms. Despite the appalling casualty rate, many young lawyers were attracted to the Royal Flying Corps. The Record of Service includes some colourful details of their fates: ‘Crashed after collision in mid-air Easter Sunday 1917’ …  ‘Attacked by several enemy aircraft and forced to the ground in the German lines’ … ‘Shot down out of control’.

Rowland Wynne Frazier, admitted in 1912, survived being shot down in his Henri Farman biplane off the coast of Bulgaria in 1916 but Edgar Henry Collison ‘died from the results of a flying accident’ in Norfolk, in the same year. Maurice Pulliblank, admitted in 1905 and practising in Merthyr Tydfil, joined the Royal Flying Corps as a ‘3rd air-mechanic’. He evidently showed an aptitude – he was eventually promoted to 1st air-mechanic and after the war rated as leading aircraftsman in the newly formed Royal Air Force.

Some lawyers’ stories seem to come straight out of the works of John Buchan. Jack Valentine Hay, articled in Bloomsbury, who joined the intelligence corps on 5 August 1914, was a despatch rider at the Battle of the Marne and picked up the Legion d’Honneur for ‘contre espionage’ work for the French before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps.

James Harris, articled to his father in Winchester, was mobilised in August 1914, went to France and Mesopotamia (Iraq) where he was ‘taken prisoner by Turks at Fall of Kut el-Amara April 29, 1916, escaped from prisoners’ camp in Asia Minor 7 Aug. 7, 1918. Trekked 350 miles to coast of Asia Minor, captured Turkish tug (motor) and crossed to Cyprus 100 miles, arrived there Sept. 13, 1918’.

The Great War was a war like none before – few were prepared for what it would bring. By November 1918 the world mourned the loss of over 10.5 million soldiers and almost 5 million civilians. It was a watershed moment. For one of the first times in history, ordinary people called for a set of international laws to stave the threat of invasion, protect civilians from the horrors of war and bring a semblance of morality to the battlefield.

World leaders responded and, following the Treaty of Paris in 1919, the League of Nations was established. Its purpose was to seek to prevent conflict through collective security, disarmament and by dispute resolution in the newly established Permanent Court of International Justice. Max Huber, a Swiss lawyer, became the court’s first judge. Sixty countries signed up but there were three notable absences: the US, Russia and Germany. The first two chose not to join, the latter was told it could not do so.

This initially showed some promise. In 1919 Poland and Czechoslovakia were in dispute in respect of Teschen, a coal-rich area. In 1920 the league heard the case and decided to split the land in question. While neither country was pleased, they accepted the decision. The provision of a clear and fair legal remedy proved a useful tool in dampening the flame of potential conflict.  

In 1925 a treaty prohibiting the use of  biological and chemical warfare was agreed. It was registered by the league in 1929 alongside the third Geneva Convention which promised prisoners of war a minimum quality of treatment, as well as protection for aircraft and ships carrying medical supplies.

The world seemed to have entered an age of peace. History, however, teaches us that it was just an illusion. The league’s close connection to the Treaty of Versailles meant Germany treated it with suspicion. Although Germany became a member of the League of Nations in 1926 it left in 1933, claiming that disarmament was being used as a tool to prevent it obtaining military parity with other powers.

As tensions grew between western Europe, Germany and its allies, it became increasingly clear that the dispute was not going to be resolved in the courts. By December 1939 the league had ceased to exist in all but a legal sense as the world entered six more dark years with the second world war. It had failed its raison d’être and the guillotine finally fell in 1946 when it was replaced by the United Nations.

Despite the failure, the creation of the League of Nations was an important first step in institutionalising international affairs and promoting arbitration over war. It is now clear that it took one world war to make us realise we needed international dispute resolution, but a second to make the much needed progress.

The Great War touched every family – mine is no exception. My paternal grandfather was in the Royal Engineers. Fortunately he carried out much of his service in India. He survived, but one of his sons, Arthur Caplen, died in the 1939-1945 war.

The Law Society’s library records that in excess of 7,000 solicitors and articled clerks served during the conflict. In the Reading Room at Chancery Lane, London, a war memorial lists the names of the 565 solicitors and 341 clerks who gave their lives. One of those names is Cecil Harold Sewell, an articled clerk and the only member of the Law Society to be awarded a Victoria Cross in the war.

We must never forget those who gave their lives. And ensure that we learn the lessons from the past.