Men and women who shaped the First World War – on the front line and on the home front – are highlighted in the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, just out.
Four of the 30 new biographies were written by experts at the University of Leeds.
They include the story of Leeds boy soldier Horace Iles. Professor Alison Fell, who leads the Legacies of War centenary project at the University, tells how the blacksmith’s apprentice, from the Woodhouse area of the city, enlisted with the Leeds Pals at 15, claiming he was 18. Iles died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1 1916.
Edward Spiers, Professor of Strategic Studies in the School of History, writes the entry on Charles Foulkes, the clergyman’s son, Olympian and chemical warfare expert who organised the Allies’ gas retaliation at the Battle of Loos in September 1915.
Professor Graeme Gooday, head of Leeds’ School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science, was joined by former colleague Dr Elizabeth Bruton (now of the University of Oxford) in describing how signals officer Algernon Fuller invented the Fullerphone late in 1915, providing a secure means of communication for field operations that remained in use into the Second World War. The Fullerphone is featured in the Imperial War Museum’s History of WWI in 100 objects. LINK
Finally, recent Leeds PhD graduate Dr Christopher Phillips writes about logistical pioneer Sir Francis Dent, the railway manager in charge of troop embarkations from Folkestone – the principal port used by the British army for the Western Front.
The new edition of the dictionary adds the biographies of 112 men and women active between the thirteenth and the early twenty-first century. It is the national record of men and women who’ve shaped all walks of British life, in the UK and overseas, from the Roman occupation to the 21st century.
Other First World War biographies now added to the Oxford DNB include John Brodie, inventor of the ‘Brodie helmet’, which went into production in September 1915 and became a symbol of the 1914-18 war; Flora Murray (1869-1923), physician, and Louisa Garrett Anderson (1873-1943), surgeon, who established and ran London’s Endell Street Military Hospital, in May 1915; it remains the only British military hospital founded and run entirely by women.
Great lives
• Leeds boy soldier Horace Iles (1900-1916) who in 1915 enlisted, aged 15, into the Leeds Pals regiment. He, and 223 others from his regiment, were killed on the first day of the Somme offensive, 1 July 1916. On 9 July Horace’s sister, as yet unaware of her brother’s death, wrote begging him to declare his age in the hope he would be sent home: ‘If you don’t do it now you will come back in bits and we want the whole of you.’ Her letter was returned with the words ‘Killed in Action’. 100 years after he enlisted, Iles’ life features in schools programmes run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. He was one of an estimated 250,000 underage soldiers who volunteered in 1914-15.
• An officer in the Royal Engineers Charles Howard Foulkes (1875-1969) led Britain’s retaliation in response to the German use of poison gas at Ypres in April 1915. Born in India, the son of a missionary and scholar of Indian languages, Foulkes had a background in imperial service in Africa and Ceylon, interrupted by a posting as head of the Ordnance Survey of Scotland, in Edinburgh, where he played football and hockey and competed in the 1908 Olympic games. In May 1915 he was appointed to raise, train, and command the special companies which delivered cylinders of chlorine gas at the battle of Loos on 25 September 1915. Foulkes went on to become director of gas services and in the post-war era he remained a proponent of chemical warfare
• By mid-1915 it was clear that the Germans were able to intercept the communications of the allies on the Western Front. In response, Algernon Clement Fuller (1885-1970), an officer in the Royal Engineers, invented a method of secure communication, which he named the ‘Fullerphone’. Trials began in late 1915 and it went into production early in the following year. By 1917 20,000 Fullerphones were operated by British army; the device continued to be used during the Second World War.
• The logistics of supply, and the demands of wartime munitions production, brought non-military figures to the forefront of the war effort. In 1913 Sir Francis Henry Dent (1866-1955), general manager of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway, was co-opted onto the Railway Executive Committee, established to coordinate the railways in the event of war. His remit covered Folkestone, the main port of embarkation for troops heading for the western front from the spring of 1915, and he ran operations at Boulogne on behalf of the British army, using civilian working methods.
