1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [87]
There were some ladies who were keen to do their bit and provide comfort to the troops on a more personal level. One pseudonymous soldier, who published a cri de coeur to a faithless fiancée above a box number, was so inundated by replies that he was forced to expend a further ten shillings on another heartfelt plea, addressed to ladies who were eager to do their bit by consoling him.
KHAKI CLAD, whose message to BROWN EYES appeared here on Tuesday, much regrets that it is impossible for him to answer personally the hundreds of kind people who offer their services in substitution for BROWN EYES.
Some people found even more remarkable ways of doing their bit and Henry Edwards was one of them. He was eighty-five years old, he sported a venerable white beard, and he spent his days waiting outside Lambeth register office. War weddings were the order of the day and business was brisk. This was gratifying to Mr Edwards. Early in the war he had not only seen an opportunity of doing his bit but had spotted the fact that there was a gap in the market.
In many cases, when the soldier-bridegroom expected to be leaving for the front, registry office weddings were hastily arranged, and sometimes with good reason. The licence would be obtained and the ring purchased well in advance, in anticipation of a forty-eight-hour pass, but when the bride and groom appeared for the ceremony itself they frequently forgot to bring along a witness. Henry Edwards, dapper in bowler hat and well-brushed overcoat, a festive flower in his button-hole, was happy to step into the breach and act as best man. Patriotism had its reward. Mr Edwards was not so crass as to demand a fee for his services, but he invariably received a tip ‘commensurate’, as he put it, ‘with the happiness of the bridegroom’. On one occasion this had only amounted to a souvenir fragment of shell from France, but Mr Edwards had not complained. He could afford to be generous for although, on occasion, he received as little as sixpence, he sometimes got as much as ten shillings, and usually not less than five. Since he had done his bit at several hundred military and naval weddings since the war began, he was doing nicely and was as satisfied with his war-work as his grateful clients. It was almost Easter and weddings were all the rage.
CQMS G. Fisher, 1st Bn. Hertfordshire Regt. (TF).
I came home on my first leave and in those days you only got four days and that included getting there and back. When I came home to St Albans they were just beginning to move the 47th London Division Territorials to St Albans for training and they were billeting these chaps in houses in the town. I was going steady with my future wife then, and she was living in a large flat over a shop. There was a regulation that soldiers would not be billeted in the house of the wife of a soldier serving abroad. I said, ‘I think we’d better get married. You won’t have anybody billeted on you then and you’ll get a separation allowance.’ So we decided to get married. We were married in the registry office in St Albans, and I was due to go back to France the next morning. I had to report to Victoria Station at half past four in the morning, so that meant I must be in London the night before, because there was no train from St Albans that early. We were married at three o’clock in the afternoon and in the evening we went up to London.
I had no idea where we could put up for the night. YMCA hostels would take a soldier, but they wouldn’t take a soldier with a lady friend. I was a bit puzzled, so I went up to a policeman outside Victoria