Home Front stars on putting together First World War play

It was an enormous undertaking; to unearth, examine and then devise a play from Oxford residents’ recorded First World War experiences and then stage it in the Town Hall.

And yet, once the project was under way, it took on a life of its own. A wealth of hitherto unseen memoirs, unveiled through determined workshops and canvassing, meant that the project gathered increasing momentum, Called While They’re Away, the resulting play by UnderConstruction Theatre has involved an enormous amount of painstaking research and local input; with fascinating results.

“We didn’t want to tick boxes,” Museum of Oxford’s Antonia Harland-Lang explains. “We wanted to include a cross-section of people and include stories with interesting angles to them. There was a large contingent of Belgian refugees in Oxford, for instance.

“People came from all over the world to work here, or as patients, because Oxford was a First World War hospital city. Oxford’s academic bubble was opened out.

”We didn’t even know that the Town Hall was used as a wartime hospital. It was our volunteer guides who first uncovered the fact that it was part of the 3rd Southern General Hospital during the war.”

As a result, UnderConstruction playwright Jeremy Allen ended up with a wide and varied list of local people to include in his new script. Besides tape recordings and books, Jeremy also had fascinating boxes of letters to work through.

“Two of the other main characters in the play are from the Slater family. Local writer Margaret Bonfiglioli found a trunk full of family correspondence about 30 years ago, including letters from her father who was in the Royal Engineers at the Front. Margaret’s grandmother, Violet Slater, was a pacifist, so there was an interesting contrast there.”

Another find is Pleasance Walker, who grew up in Norham Gardens and went to Belgium as a Red Cross nurse.

“We have been given some incredibly vivid, very moving letters that she sent back to her family in Oxford. They describe her experiences treating wounded soldiers. Sometimes they’re quite distressing. She got into trouble with the authorities by going to risky places that she wasn’t supposed to visit as part of her work.”

Henry Jupp, a soldier, left Oxford for the Front, but didn’t tape his memories until he was an old man.

“He worked at Oxford University Press as an apprentice in the type composing room,” Jeremy relates. “He told a very good story about the fact that there were so many volunteers wanting to join up that the authorities couldn’t handle them.

“There were people sleeping under hedges and overflowing into the streets. So they had to procure Oxford colleges to provide lodgings for this influx of people.

“Jupp tells how he and his friends went to St Giles’ Fair one lunchtime and were lulled in by the sense of serving one’s country. There was a famous recruiting sergeant patrolling the fair, Colour Sergeant Surman, and he was instrumental in securing more than 2,000 signatures.

“Jupp and his friends took the King’s Shilling and announced to their superiors at OUP that they were going off to fight. OUP did have a policy of being very favourable towards people signing on, but worried about the consequences. ‘What are we going to do now? We’ve got a new dictionary to print’, they asked.

“But Jupp records that he and his friends had no real conception of what they were embarking on when they signed up; they saw it as a long holiday from work.”

Jupp was wounded in 1917 at Passchendaele and fell into a shell hole half filled with water, mixing with the bodies of soldiers who had died the week before.

“We’re juxtaposing snippets of Jupp’s story in the play,” Jeremy says, “switching between him convalescing in hospital in Oxford and remembering what he’s been through; a living nightmare sequence.

“But there’s also a humorous scene, when he recounts that the recruits went down to Port Meadow for a bit of drill and marching. They’re wearing what they called their ‘one and onlys’; basically their Sunday best. They knew Port Meadow well. It had been raining for three days and they knew that there were trenches and gullies where the water would collect.

“The colonel, on his horse, ordered them to march across the Meadow and they knew there was this particularly big ditch coming up, which would soak their best trousers. Their mums would kill them. So, at the last minute, they broke ranks, despite the colonel’s orders to march through the water. The colonel saw the funny side in retrospect, at future reunions.”

The play is part of a project called The Lost Voices of Oxford’s Great War, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, for the First World War centenary.

“We had to make some difficult decisions,” Jeremy admits. “There is so much material about some of the better known characters that we’ve had to decide what to leave out. But elsewhere we’ve had to embellish through imaginative reconstruction.

“We had very little material on nurse Grace Mitchell, who worked in the Town Hall hospital. She documented her time there with a Box Brownie camera. Beyond that, we had to imagine what was going on. She left for the Front in 1917.”

At Garsington Manor, a very different attitude prevailed.

“My starting point was a series of books called The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker. That’s where I learnt about poet Siegfried Sassoon and his meetings with several prominent pacifists, which reinforced his growing disillusionment with the war.

“There’s mention in the books that he had been encouraged by the Garsington Set, as the residents of Garsington Manor were then called, to send his famous declaration to his commanding officer entitled.

“He was back from the Western Front, convalescing in Oxford at Somerville College, and that’s when he got to know the Garsington Set. Lady Ottoline Morrell and her husband Philip owned the Manor and they turned it into a haven for bohemians, writers and pacifists.

“Garsington was a refuge for people who wanted to talk freely, especially about the peace movement.

“If you chose not to fight, you were seen as a member of the White Feather movement; you were a shirker and a coward. Lady Ottoline was seen as a champion for this movement and her husband, who was an MP and a lawyer, defended many conscientious objectors in court.

“Asquith, the Prime Minister, was a frequent visitor. He had known Lady Ottoline since she was a young girl. There’s a scene which I’ve pulled from her memoirs: at a party, when she leads Asquith into the drawing room and pleads the case for conscientious objectors. He’s quite sympathetic, but his hands are bound. I found it very interesting that the man who had declared war on Germany could have this amicable conversation.”

While They’re Away
Old Museum, Oxford Town Hall
Until Saturday
Tickets: 01865 305305 or oxfordplayhouse.com