From ‘Bootham Overseas’, Bootham magazine, December 1915
“THOMAS BINNS ROBSON (1858-1860) writes from near Adelaide of the recent experiences of JOHN F. HILLS (1882-1884, Master 1886-1889), who “has been making quite a stir lately owing to his anti-military propaganda, which he has been actively carrying on ever since our ‘Boy Conscription Act’ came into force. The military authorities have looked upon him as opposing enlistment, and have tried to stop him from speaking in Victoria Square on Friday evenings and the park on Sunday afternoons, as has been his custom. The first attempt was a charge of treason, changed to breaking a bye-law for chalking on the roadway where he advertised his meetings and quoted portions of the Sermon on the Mount. This failed, because the bye-law only referred to the footpaths and not the roadway. Then he was brought up before the police court charged with telling the young men not to recruit at a meeting held some two months previously. His lawyer got the case dismissed on the plea that the regulation under which he was charged went beyond the War Precautions Act and was ultra vires…. Probably J. F. Hills will be again charged and have to fight it out on its merits. He says he did not use the expression he is accused of, but after so long a time it will be hard to prove, especially against the military. The last two or three times he has appeared in public he has been mobbed by an organised lot of young fellows in khaki, who joined the mob against the police who were protecting J. F. H. to a place of safety; and the last time the police started the row by setting on to Hills to make him go away before he had done anything. . . The war spirit is rampant and seems to override all other considerations.”
Thanks to Kate, one of the volunteers in the archive, for researching and writing this post.
William Fryer Harvey
William Fryer Harvey was at Bootham from 1898 to 1901. He was born in 1885 into a prosperous West Yorkshire Quaker family. His father and brothers were also at Bootham and his sister a pupil at The Mount. Having studied at Balliol College Oxford, William then took a degree in medicine at Leeds. He joined the Friends Ambulance unit in 1914 and served until 1916. In 1918 whilst serving in the Royal Navy as a surgeon-lieutenant, he was involved in a rescue from the boiler room on board ship. For his bravery he was awarded the Albert Medal for Lifesaving and the full citation can be read in Bootham magazine, Summer 1918. Sadly this incident damaged his lungs and he never again regained full health, dying at the early age of 57. Amongst his many achievements the one for which he was probably most well known during his lifetime was as the published author of “supernatural tales”. One of the most famous was “The Beast with Five Fingers” and this was made into a film with Peter Lorre in 1946.
The archives contain a number of items written by him during his years at school. The collection includes letters to parents and his brothers both from school and whilst on holiday and a beautifully bound exhibition piece entitled “A collection of leaves”. There is also a volume of natural history observations and a two-volume diary of 1899. The handwriting is easy to read and there a number of very good pencil sketches and coloured illustrations of leaves, flowers, plants and the various churches and houses he visited. Reading through these it is interesting to ponder what hints there are in the schoolboy writings for the direction his life took after leaving Bootham. Certainly there is mention of many medical issues – scarlet fever, measles, colds etc are mentioned and in one letter he relates how a fellow scholar “ fell down in a fit during science going black in the face”. Happily after medical assistance, the boy recovered quickly enough to be playing football later in the day! He exhorts one of his brothers, studying in France, not to “catch smallpox from books” there and when his sister is taken ill, he writes to his brother that “her mind has given way probably from her studious habits” and says they should take this as an example “not to overwork themselves for fear of a similar fate befalling us”. However it is obvious that he has not taken this to heart, as prolonged study would have been needed to gain his medical qualifications.
From reading of his later life, his love of church architecture and the natural sciences seem to have been lifelong interests and I hope he kept the enquiring mind, which is illustrated, in the following extracts from the diary, written when he would have been around 13 years old.
Diagram of experiment from W F Harvey’s diary.
“June 26th. I performed the following experiment to show that flowers on respiring produce carbon di oxide; by respiring I mean the taking in of oxygen. I took a number of common garden flowers such as marigold, blue corncockle, rose and placed them in a flask, being kept in position by a plug of cotton wool. I placed the flask in an inverted retort stand and placed a cork in the neck of the flask through which a glass was put open at both ends; one end of glass tube dipped in mercury on the top of which floated a solution of potassium hydrate. This solution absorbed the carbon di oxide given out by the flowers and the mercury rose about half an inch and a half.
I took some petals of a red rose and boiled in water; after some minutes the petals completely lost their colour and the water was coloured green and still possessed to a slight degree the scent of the rose.
July 1st – 6th. When removing the flask containing the flowers used in the experiment, a drop of acid happened to touch the blue flower of the corncockle and at once it turned a bright crimson red. I tried putting some more of the acid (sulphuric) on the flowers again and in each case obtained the same result. I then took some red GERANIUM and blue CRANESBILL and placed a few drops of ammonium hydrate on the red geranium and some dilute acid on the blue cranesbill. The colours of the flowers were reversed, the geranium becoming a bright blue though the change was not so quickly accomplished as in the case of the cranesbill.
It appears that certain flowers have the property of acting as an indicator of acids and bases in the same manner as litmus.
When the coloured petals were boiled in water until colourless, the water was slightly coloured blue and red.
On one drop of acid and ammonia being added to each, the colours changed and when acid and ammonia were added in the reverse order, the coloured water went back to its original colour.
The flower of a FUCHIA I examined had two sorts of petals; -the outer being red, the inner purple. But where the base of the inner purple petals touched the red ones, it was streaked with red. These purple and red petals acted in the way as those of the geranium and cranesbill. Perhaps the nearness and greater acidity of the red petals had something to do with the reddening of the base of the purple petals”
Painting of Fuchsia flower from diary of W F Harvey.
In January 2015 I did a talk as part of the Thursday lunchtime recital room series. It was entitled ‘Memories from the Archives’ and I talked about a number of memories from Old Scholars. I’ll share the photographs and text from the talk in several parts on the blog. Below is the final part of the talk. Read the previous part here. On Thursday 25th February I will be doing another talk as part of the Thursday lunchtime recital room series, see here for the full programme of talks (the talk starts at 1.05pm, entry via the front door of No.45 Bootham).
The new swimming baths, opened in 1914
Henry Kenneth Fisher was at Bootham between 1909 and 1914, and remembers the then-new swimming baths. They were opened in 1914, so it was the centenary of the baths two years ago. “Then in my last year came the cutting down of the trees to provide for the building of the long awaited swimming bath. The teams of magnificent horses that dragged away the tree were the subject of my first photographs and I still have them. What a joy that splendid new bath was after the horrors of the old open-air Marygate Baths where the water was covered with leaves, soot and algae, and the surrounding slabs were so slimy as to constitute a veritable ‘death-trap’ to the unwary.”
The old Lodge (on Portland Street) after the bombing raid in 1942.
Moving a little further forward, Douglas Stewart Jackson, who was at Bootham between 1939 and 1943, recalled his time at school during the Second World War. He remembered that: “I don’t think life at school was affected to any great extent by the war. The school staff may have had different feelings about the situation, some were called up for service in the forces and some pupils got involved in routine jobs that could be handled safely by those with a limited knowledge of the work and necessary safety precautions. A couple of us became ‘school electricians’ and having learnt the skill required to change lightbulbs, moved on to mending fuses and attempting to find and repair the cause of the problem. I do not recall either of us receiving an electric shock, but I am sure we did many minor jobs that would have been considered far too dangerous by the modern ‘Health and Safety Executive’.” He goes on to remember the air raid on York in 1942. It happened while the school was closed for the Easter holidays, and the main damage to school buildings was the destruction of the old ‘Lodge’ (the Bootham term for the health centre) at the school end of Portland Street. Douglas says that “At about this time there was discussion regarding ways in which pupils could become involved in activities which could help the people of York to overcome some of the adverse affects of the war. This was looked upon as a Quaker equivalent to the Officer Cadet Training Corps run by most boys schools. It started off with a series of practical training classes in bricklaying, cement and concrete manufacture and on a more basic level an attempt to salvage a high proportion of the undamaged bricks on the site of the Lodge. I thoroughly enjoyed this training and I think it was some of the most useful skills learnt at Bootham.”
This has just been a few snippets from the memories of a few people about their time at Bootham, but I hope that it has given you an idea of the extra detail and insight that can be gained from people’s memories, particularly if you then integrate that with other records.
Henry Edwin Bown, Private, Royal Fusiliers, 23rd Battalion, fell in action on January 24th 1916. He was born at Boston Spa in 1882 and came to Bootham between 1896 and 1899.
Joseph Thorp Waite, Lieutenant, The Buffs (East Kent Regiment), fell in action outside Kut, January 21st 1916. He was part of the relief force trying to get to Colonel Townshend at Kut (in modern-day Iraq) during the Mesopotamian campaign.
He was born in Halifax in 1870 and came to Bootham between 1883 and 1886.
“J. G. BRAITHWAITE [Bootham 1907-14] wrote in November, 1915, that he had had a touch of rheumatism and had been sent from Gallipoli to a hospital in Malta. Since then he has been reported as a spotter in the Suez Canal. At the end of the November letter he writes : “Just walked into the arms of Sid. Faraday [Bootham 1908-10], to our mutual astonishment. He was wounded in Flanders in March and is now bound for the Balkans, and was ashore for a few hours off the trooper. We had dinner together.””
From ‘Across the Months’, Bootham Magazine, December 1915
RONALD M. PRIESTMAN (Bootham 1907-1911) writes on July 13th from No. 7 Casualty Clearing Station, B.E.F. [British Expeditionary Force]: “I must send you a line to say how absolutely delighted and really quite touched I was to get the postcard with so many old friends’ names on it. I have been out here without a glimpse of home since November 1st; so you have really no idea how I have appreciated the message—wordless though it is…. The kind of work we are doing is very much the same as that of the F.A.U., though up to the present we have been fortunate enough to have escaped being shelled…. Our duties are to receive, nurse (operate if necessary), feed, and otherwise look after and care for the patients sent down to us by the Field Ambulances until they are well enough to be sent either (1) back to duty (2) to a convalescent depot, or (3) to the base hospitals. I myself am fortunate in not having to be forever in the presence of pain and sickness, as I am in the more or less responsible position of corporal in charge of the stores. That includes all the food both for staff and patients, and all the clothing and hospital equipment. The food all has to be weighed and issued according to the scale laid down in the official army book, so you may imagine we are kept pretty busy.”
From “Bootham Oversea” in Dec 1915 issue of Bootham magazine
Edmund Yerbury Priestman, Second Lieutenant, 6th York and Lancaster Regiment, fell in action in Gallipoli, November 19th 1915. He was born in Sheffield in 1890 and came to Bootham between 1903 and 1906.
Below is an extract (published in Bootham magazine December 1915 as part of an obituary) from “Night in No Man’s Land” by Edmund Y. Priestman, which gives a picture of his life in the Gallipoli Peninsula
“If No Man’s Land is unpromising by day, when it echoes to the rattle of the rifle, it is possibly oven more sinister when, after nightfall, it becomes a silent and menacing sea of shadows, the haunt of the nightbird, seeking who knows what?—and filled with vague rustlings, now and then dispelled by the sharp roar of a chance shot, which rattles and dies away among the echoes of the hills, to leave the land to sombre silence again.
Out into this eerie tract of lurking horrors it has been the lot of six, under the alleged “leadership” of the writer of these chronicles, to creep for the purpose of laying barbed wire entanglements to hinder the progress of the agile Turk, should he be tempted to pay calls. Lifting each foot carefully like a stalking burglar, the little party advanced with the stealth of Red Indians, making if anything slightly less noise than a herd of camels, and convinced that every step as it crashed and echoed into the night could be heard in every corner of the Peninsula.
A stray shot from the Turkish trench rang out. Private Smith dropped the coil of wire he was carrying with a deafening rattle, and the party stood still and thought of their individual misdeeds, and the new lives they would lead, if by some miracle the Turks omitted to turn all their machine guns on them. Moment succeeded breathless moment, and no devastating blast of fire swept them to sudden doom. The officer, whose duty may be summed up as being to fortify the men by feigning valour he didn’t possess, gulped once, and by some superhuman agency got his rigid muscles into working order again. . . . But when, the wiring party had been collected once more and complete, the explorers returned to the shelter of the friendly parapet, each of them swelled with a manly pride in dangerous work well done, and felt richer in confidence in his own nerves under new stresses. In short, all felt themselves not a little heroic, and it was not until daylight brought with it obvious considerations that the danger was really slight and that the work done was less than that carried through daily and nightly by a thousand of our fellow men, that we came down to earth again, and seeing things in their right proportion, vowed to continue our work next night with less melodrama, and to be quite frank in writing home upon what might have become a very richly coloured topic.”
Ellis Reginald Midgley (Bootham 1905-08). Killed in action, November 16th 1915. Second Lieut. Born in Leeds, 1891.
From Bootham magazine, December 1915:
He had joined the Leeds “Pals” Battalion on its formation and received a commission in the 2/5th Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry six months before his death. Soon after leaving school he became an enthusiastic member of the Leeds Boys’ Rifle Brigade, and in more recent times he was a keen worker for the Y.M.C.A. His “Bene Decessit” speaks of him as archaeologist and football player. He kept both characteristics to the end. His last letter to the Headmaster was from the Colsterdale Camp on some archaeological point; he was secretary of the Northern Foxes F.C., and was no infrequent visitor playing against the School. He left Leeds on October 16th, having married a few weeks earlier.
He sent letters to “various members of the family almost daily, all bright and cheery, making light of the hardships and never a gloomy word.” In his first letter from the front he wrote:
We left Southampton Tuesday morning, October 19th, at 6.30, reached Havre (our base) at 1.30, left Havre 4 p.m. Wednesday, and had about 24 hours in the train. Thursday night we slept at the farm where our transports are, away behind the line 5 or 6 miles. It was there where I first heard the guns. Friday morning we reported, and I was sent out to “C” along a communication trench about a mile long, called “Halifax Road.” The firing line is about three-quarters of a mile in front of us. There was a very furious artillery duel on when I arrived which lasted till dusk; shells of all kinds and sires were dropping around, but none fell really near. The shells did very little damage. Bullets from rifles and machine guns are pretty plentiful, but do very little harm. I have a champion little dug-out, but we are not allowed any kit here, only what we wear and one blanket, so it was jolly cold last night . . . I cannot say where we are, but it is “somewhere in Belgium”.. . I passed through a fair-sized town coming here yesterday, and I don’t think there was one undamaged house; the churches, etc., were in ruins. . . . It is not so bad out here; it is cold at nights and very uncivilised, and after a bit I should think the strain will be a bit of a nuisance, but taking things all round it might be heaps worse.
His last letter, dated November 13th, written to a younger brother:
The front line is in an awful state for water, well over knee deep; we all have to wear long rubber boots like fishermen’s waders, right to the top of your legs, to get along at all. Supplies, etc., have to come over the open, bullet-swept ground by night, as the communication trench is waist deep in water and liquid mud, and is impassable except for very small parties without any load. We had no rations sent up for two days; the first day we had breakfast, dinner and tea of bread and butter, tea and jam. We knocked off dinner at night! . . . We never move without our smoke helmets in case of gas, and are never supposed to move singly, always at least two. You might have an extra bath for me; we can’t even get a wash, shave or anything here; it means going about like tramps all the time you are in the front line. I haven’t washed for four days, and have quite a beard now! It is fearfully funny. I must look a sight judging from the others; but we have not a looking-glass fortunately! . . . . We simply yell with laughter when we look at each other.
