Month: January 2016

At the outbreak of First World War, under the terms of the Alien Registration Act and British Nationality Act, all aliens over the age of 16 were required to register at local police stations and to demonstrate a good character and knowledge of English. This was due in part to a fear of spies. Those registering were required to provide details of name, address, marital status and employment as well as information about their background and origins. Northumberland Archives holds almost 300 ‘aliens files’ amongst the records of Northumberland Constabulary (ref: NC/3/46-48). One of our project volunteers, Hilary Love, has looked at some of the files and written this article about one of the cases recorded.
No, the Archives hasn’t been invaded by little green men! There are numerous files stored at Woodhorn giving details of a wide range of people, from travelling musicians to miners, designated as Aliens in Northumberland during World War One. They give a fascinating glimpse into their nationalities and lives, the bureaucracy and paperwork involved in recording their movements and the mindset and suspicions towards any foreigner, regardless of how long they may have lived in England.
They can also be frustrating as the records only record their lives while they are in Northumberland so, once they have moved out of the County, there is no record of what happened to them.
One example is a file relating to Helene Grundmann, a Governess, who, in September 1914, applied for a permit to travel to Cornhill on Tweed. There was no objection to her residing at the Manse, Crookham and a letter from the Superintendent at Alnwick Police Office explained that she was the sister of the Reverend Moses Forsyth’s wife.
The Alnwick Police Office wrote to the Chief Constable of Northumberland in November 1914 to inform him that they had received a letter from J. Fenwick in Longframlington pointing out that there were Germans at Crookham Manse and that the Vicar of Branxton had declared that he could send messages to Germany through his agent in Holland. The clergy were obviously not above suspicion!
The Superintendent at Alnwick explained that the Reverend Forsyth’s wife was German and that she did not need to register at the time that the Act came into operation. Her sister had come from London and all her papers were in order. He didn’t know anything about the Vicar of Branxton but would make private enquiries and report back to the Chief Constable.
Enquiries were duly made and the report referring to the Vicar of Branxton, the Reverend Charles Ernest Hoyle, gave details of a letter he had read out at one of his meetings in the Reading Room at Branxton on 26th October 1914, which he’d received from a German lady. She had stayed with Reverend Hoyle in the summer but had gone back to Germany when war broke out. The letter stated that “this lady didn’t intend to speak to an Englishman again. England had been the cause of the war.” The Superintendant made it clear that Reverend Hoyle in no way favoured the Germans and no mention had been made of Belgian refugees or of an Agent in Holland.
The War Office then entered the picture and wrote to Fullarton James, Chief Constable, in September 1918, and asked him what he knew of Mrs. Moses Forsyth: “Is she of German origin and is there any truth in the statement that she is exerting a very harmful influence over the minds of the village people by inculcating sentiments of disloyalty and anti-patriotism.”

The reply from the Superintendent, Alnwick Police Office, dated 1st October, 1918, states that Mrs. Forsyth is a German by birth but has been married to Mr. Forsyth for some years. “…. from enquiries made, I am quite certain that there is no truth in the statement that she is exerting a very harmful influence …. I am of the opinion that this complaint comes from the Church of England in the district by Mrs. Florence Neville, (a former Vicar’s wife), now of 8 Manor Head, Oxford, who was at one time resident at Ford, which is in the Crookham district. The district is a very small population and I cannot see what influence she could have over them; it is nothing to my mind but a case of petty spite.”

The final document, dated 23rd January 1923, is addressed to Miss H. Grundmann, returning her passport which had been re-endorsed to enable her to remain in the United Kingdom until 7th May 1923.

This is only one of many cases which are available at Woodhorn. Some contain very little and others contain many documents and give enough detail, covering several years, to piece together a good picture of the life of a registered Alien during the War.

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to Hilary Love for supplying this article for our Northumberland At War Project.

In September 2014, I heard that Northumberland Archives needed volunteers to delve into the experience of the First World War. As an amateur archaeologist I am interested in history and thought this would be a fascinating project to get involved in, and as I do freelance work, I would be able to do it when I was not working.
I went along to the training days which were very interesting. I was already familiar with the family history section of the archives at Woodhorn as we have been researching my husband’s family, the Lindsays of Alnwick. On completion of the training days we were each given a project to undertake and mine was to transcribe the diary of an ‘unknown’ First World War soldier which had been handed in to the Archives.
I found this to be utterly fascinating. The diary is very well written, full of humorous stories, heart breaking and vivid accounts of the writer’s experience of death and war, drawings, and even a theatrical programme! I actually found it a privilege to be one of very few people to read this diary since it was written. Some of his accounts moved me to tears and brought the whole experience of the war very close to me, and as a mother, I couldn’t help but be mindful that each account of a soldier dying such an awful and lonely death was somebody’s son. I was privilege to details of their deaths that their mothers probably never knew. The author reveals a loyalty to his country, respect for superiors and acceptance of ‘doing one’s duty’ which is rare today.

I became so interested in this man’s stories that I really wanted to find out who he was. He gave some clues along the way, such as the fact that he knew a lot about sheep and farming. A German steamer had run aground near Cheswick Burn ‘to the south of our land’, and his brother had been in command of the coastguard at Berwick. From this it was clear that he had some connection with farming in an area I am very familiar with in Northumberland, and I thought that it would be easy using the internet to find out the name of his brother. I had no luck and emailed the RNLI and other organisations such as the website of the London Scottish, his regiment, but had no replies. I took my husband along to have a look at the diary and we read on further. The words jumped out from the page when we read that his ‘dear brother Cecil’ was killed whilst in command of the cruiser H.M.S. Bayano on 12th March 1915. This was an enormous clue. We went home and spent the evening in pursuit of our soldier and found him.
Using Google we found that his brother was called Henry Cecil Carr who was 43 when he went down with his ship. From this, I had his birth year so I then looked at census records and found Cecil in the 1881 census when he was 8, along with his father John Carr who was a Merchant and Justice of the Peace, five sisters and 4 brothers, Reginald E, George, Hubert and John E. Which one was our soldier? The census showed that they had all been born in Gosforth and were living at Roseworth Cottage, Coxlodge. I then found Cecil in the 1911 census living in Rochester, Kent, with his occupation as ‘Royal Navy Commander’ so I knew we had the right family.
With these clues, I googled and found that Reginald E was the coastguard, so that narrowed our unknown soldier down to George, Hubert or John E. Remembering that our soldier had mentioned ‘our land’, I decided to look at Kelly’s Trade Directory for 1914 for Berwick, and found one John Evelyn Carr on page 21 as Manager of Scremerston Coal Company, coal owners and merchants, brick and tile manufacturers and farmers. I strongly suspected we had our man! (It was midnight by this time).
I was about to do some double checking to make sure this was our soldier and decided just to put his name into Google to see if there was any more information on the net about him. I got a shock! Up popped an entry for Northumberland Archives about one John Evelyn Carr who had written 4 war diaries, and who had had a special study on him done by Emily Meritt in 2014. I read her work about the soldier and recognised from the information about him that my soldier and hers were one and the same person! There was even a photo of him, which I found fascinating I could now put a face to the person behind the diary. His words had also featured in a book called ‘Tommy at War 1914-18, the Soldiers’ own Stories’ by John Sadler, and I found another photograph and information that he had been a sheep breeder on ‘Historypin’. The mystery was solved but I was a tiny bit disappointed that my soldier had already been known about, and his diary wasn’t unique. He seems to have been a prolific writer! We have still to find out if my diary is part of the four already known about, or separate.

I found out that he had been married in 1900 at St Andrew’s, Newcastle to one Gertrude Isabella Moncriff Blair (obviously not a scullery maid). He had worked after the war as Managing Director of the Scremerston Coal Company and lived at Heathery Tops Scremerston and Spittal, where he died in 1958. I have recently found out that there is a farmer whose surname is Carr who farms at Scremerston today and am minded to get in touch with him to see if he is a relative. It would be interesting to know how the diary came to be in the Archives and not cherished by John Carr’s family as a precious heirloom.

I feel that I know this man. I think he descends from The Carrs of Etal who once owned Barmoor Castle where our family have a holiday home today. It is odd that he was born and brought up about half a mile from where I live, and that he lived and worked in an area I know well and love. I even know the road where he lived in Spittal. It was meant to be that I got to transcribe his diary, and I hope I can do justice to his bravery and brilliant storytelling, so that other people can experience the immediacy, humour and sorrow that I have felt while transcribing it.
We would like to express our sincere appreciation to Carole McKenzie for supplying this article for our Northumberland At War Project.