Goldsmiths War Memorial in the entrance lobby of the Richard Hoggart Main building. It only commemorates the names of staff and students killing during the First World War. Image: Tim Crook.
The wooden panel in the reception area of the Richard Hoggart Main building of Goldsmiths ‘They Died For Freedom and Honour’ commemorates staff and students killed during the Great War of 1914-18.
The University has no memorial with those named as having been killed during the Second World War, who are believed to number about fifty.
The Goldsmiths History Project is researching and intending to publish an online commemoration to remedy this omission.
The original panel commissioned and unveiled in 1920 was specifically for those killed in World War One and used to have a bronze wreath which was set behind a bronze statuette featuring St George killing the Dragon.
The bronze statuette was modelled by the artist and sculptor John Skeaping (1901-1980) who was the first husband of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and became professor of sculpture at the Royal College Art between 1953 and 1959.
The wooden panel was designed by Amor Fenn, the design lecturer and later a headmaster of the Art School of Goldsmiths’ College .
The monument and its bronze accompaniments graced the College’s dining hall up until the outbreak of World War Two in 1939.
Image: Goldsmiths Special Collections.
After the resurrection of the College following all of the blitz bombing and fires of the 1939-45 conflict, the memorial was repurposed.
The wreath and St George and the dragon decorations were removed. ‘To the memory of those of the Goldsmiths College who died in the Great European War 1914-1919’ would be replaced with ‘To the memory of those of Goldsmiths College who died in the two wars 1914-1918 1939-45.’
The bronze commemorations of wreath and St George killing the Dragon statuette modelled by School of Art student John Skeaping which are no longer present with the World War One memorial tablet. Image: Goldsmiths Special Collections.
This posting seeks to ensure those who who died and were killed during active service between 1914-1919 are more than just names carved in wood.
As with the special research undertaken and written about the New Cross Road V2 tragedy of 25th November 1944, the lives of these individuals, their family heritage, and their contribution to human society are to be given more space with the open ended invitation to descendants to contribute any images and information to enhance their biographical profiles.
During the First World War nearly 100 students in the Training Department of Goldsmiths’ College, University of London enlisted before completing their courses.
About 600 Old ‘Smiths were known to be on active service throughout the war. Decorations included 1 D.S.O., 11 Military Crosses, 13 Military Medals, 5 D.C.M.s, 2 Croix de Guerres, and 10 Mentioned in Despatches.
Two members of the Training Department teaching staff, Captain W. Loring and Lieut. W. T. Young, one teacher in the Art School, Leading Seaman S. Dadd, one member of the office staff, W.A. Jolly, 92 Training Department students and 11 from the Evening and Art Department were killed.
No 3 Platoon, A Company, 20th London Regiment. The Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) Goldsmiths’ College, University of London in 1915. All of the young men in this photograph served during the Great War. This photograph includes the faces of many students who would be wounded and killed while on active service. Image: Goldsmiths Special Collections.
Where the information was available at the time of carving, the wooden panel provided a name, year reference to when they were at Goldsmiths as students, and the regiment and armed service they were enlisted with.
This history is based on humanitarian imperatives with the academic discipline of placing the information researched and documents quoted from in terms of their cultural context.
Detailed reading soon elucidates the shocking fact that many of the casualties have no known grave. They are only names carved on memorials all around the world.
This means their bodies were either destroyed or so badly damaged by the modern munitions of war, they could not be and were not identified.
It was the custom for British service people to be buried or commemorated where they died and there was no policy of repatriation.
Every death is associated with profound grieving that moves through generations and in respect of many families still resonates today.
To provide just one example, Edwin and Harriett Brown of 14 Haggard Road Twickenham had two sons – Benjamin William and Walter James – who both studied and trained to be teachers at Goldsmiths’ College and who were both killed while on active service during the Great War conflict.
These facts offer an emotional and humanitarian dimension which provides a powerful and meaningful history beyond the elegant carving of their names on the memorial.
The vast majority of fatal casualties were professional teachers trained at Goldsmiths’ College who went to war and did not come back.
It will become apparent from the developing detailed profiles that unlike World War One memorial lists for Oxford and Cambridge University Colleges, most of the Goldsmiths’ College alumni were serving in what is known as ‘The Other Ranks’ or ‘ORs.’
They were privates or non-commissioned officers such as corporals and sergeants.
They were not officers though certainly their education and professional leadership qualities qualified them. This is most likely a manifestation of the class system in British society at the time.
The commissioning of ‘officers and gentleman’ was biased in favour of the Public Schools such as Eton, Marlborough, Rugby, Wellington etc. (in Britain actually high profile private schools).
Goldsmiths’ College was established primarily to recruit, train and increase the number of qualified teachers for the state education sector; mainly elementary schools teaching pupils up to the age of 13.
Children could leave school at the age of 12 if local by-laws permitted this as the school-leaving age was not increased to 14 until the 1918 ‘Fisher’ Education Act.
The 1902 Education Act meant that local authorities were substantially taking over the role of funding, running and managing schools in towns, cities and rural areas.
Most of the Goldsmiths’ College students for the ‘Training Department’ were drawn from the working and lower middle classes.
They were being sponsored by County Councils who needed qualified teachers for the schools they were now opening and running.
Many had been ‘pupil teachers’ effectively working as assistant schoolteachers and being paid between the ages of 13 and 18 because of their academic prowess. Consequently, it will be apparent that mature and well-educated young men graduating from Goldsmiths’ College served in the armed forces in the lower ranks, and this even included a Head Teacher of a school in the Midlands.
In the early years of Goldsmiths’ College, and this included those who served and lived through the First World War, many students with working-class backgrounds had to be given special dental and optical treatment because of their poor health.
The College matron and doctor also observed the effects of malnutrition from their childhood.
It will also be apparent that Goldsmiths’ College maintained records of the war service of their men students only.
They did not do so for their women students; some of whom it can be assumed volunteered for the military nursing services.
It is also possible that Goldsmiths women alumni could have been working in munitions, intelligence and many associated war-related employment fields.
There is no evidence that any Goldsmiths’ College women students died as a direct result of the First World War, but the possibility cannot be excluded.
The Goldsmiths’ College Old Students Association, however, did pay tribute to alumni Dora Emma Gardiner who qualified as a teacher having completed the two year course between 1907 and 1909.
By 1911 she was working as a Teacher Matron in the Walker Memorial Home Orphanage in Chepstow Monmouthshire.
Dora was born in Richmond, Surrey 1st April 1888 and was the daughter of a solicitor.
Dora had a distinguished service in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Corps working in hospitals on the Western Front during the First World War.
Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nurses circa 1914. Image: National Army Museum. Public domain.
As a nursing Sister she had the equivalent rank of Lieutenant and in 1916-17 was stationed at the Anglo-French Hospital, Chateau D’Annel, Longueil D’Annel, Oise, in France which provided care and treatment to soldiers with acute battlefield wounds and injuries.
The Anglo-French Hospital in Chateau D’Annel, Longueil D’Annel, Oise during the First World War. CC BY-SA 4.0
Dora received the British War Medal, Victory Medal and Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Badge and would continue her nursing career for the rest of her life.
She passed away in 1967 at the age of 78.
There was a First World War Blitz in London and other parts of Britain from Zeppelins and the first Gotha long-range bombers though the casualties were less than two thousand.
The final death toll for the war reached 1,413, according to official statistics published in January 1919.
It is not widely known that by the autumn of 1917, 86 London Underground stations had been made available as public shelters. At one time the number of civilians taking shelter in the Tube reached a peak of 300,000.
The Underworld: Taking cover in a Tube Station during a London air raid in 1918 (Art.IWM ART 935) image: A scene of civilians, predominantly women and children, sheltering in Elephant and Castle tube station. Some civilians sit on the platform seating, whilst others sit or lie on the platform itself. On the wall behind are a few C R W Nevinson posters. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source.
There is certainly one dramatic account of a German Zeppelin dropping low over the playing fields behind the Goldsmiths main building and woman Vice-President Caroline Graveson shouting to her students gathering to marvel at the sight to take cover.
Evocative British World War One recruitment poster illustrating the menace and terror of Zeppelin air-raids on London. Image: US Library of Congress. No known restrictions and public domain.
The Goldsmiths’ College grounds were allocated for allotment and market gardening purposes and there is evidence that Goldsmiths women students did form and participate in a Great War Land Army group.
Kathleen Porter did teacher training at Goldsmiths’ College between 1917 and 1919 and kept a scrapbook with photographs of her time there. She and her family donated it to the University’s Special Collections.
It contains a remarkable image of women students residing at Clyde Hostel in Lewisham and how they prepared for air-raid nights in the basement of the building between 1917-18.
Air Raid Take Cover. Photograph in scrapbook kept by Goldsmiths’ alumni Kathleen Porter. Image: Goldsmiths Special Collections.
Kathleen annotated this photograph with the words: ‘Air Raid! Take Cover!! “Oh memories that bless and burn.” Basement nights! Shrapnel shrieks!! Impromptu Concerts!!! Somnolent snores amid sonorous sound!!!! Hot Tom and Mary Biscuits! Crackers and curls!! Bursting bombs and language that just missed being Lurid!!!!!!!!!!! All Clear.’
It was inevitable that there would be more women students at Goldsmiths during the Great War years. Student hostels previously provided for men would be occupied by women. This was the case with Grove Hostel in Greenwich.
There is some poignancy in the image of ‘Juniors’ and ‘Seniors’ or first and second year women students, below at Grove Hostel in 1917. Some of them appear to be wearing what can be identified as ‘Sweetheart brooches.’
These could include miniature replicas of the badges of military regiments, naval units, the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF. They were called sweetheart brooches because they were often given as romantic keepsakes by members of the armed forces to their wives, sisters and girlfriends before they left for the front.
They were received as gifts, love tokens or symbols to display the message that a relative and loved one was ‘doing their bit.’ They were also worn as badges and symbols of mourning.
Image: Goldsmiths Special Collections. Seniors and Juniors in July 1917 at Grove Hostel where the warden was Mrs White, the wife of music lecturer Dr. White. Their shaggy dog is lying on the ground far left.
Detailed army records for all of the Goldsmiths’ College casualties are not available for historical research because most were destroyed when a government building in Walworth was bombed and caught fire during the Second World War Blitz of 1940.
However, some have survived and the paperwork can be most poignant when, for example, it reveals a grieving mother only realised that her son was entitled to the 1914-15 star which she receives in 1947 after writing to the War Office.
On another occasion the Colonel of a Lancashire Regiment in Preston writes a letter of apology to a grieving father because they had inadvertently sent the family the belongings and effects of another dead soldier by mistake.
It is not clear if they ever located those belonging to the Goldsmiths alumni who had fallen in battle.
[This posting is work in progress and each entry will be developed and added to with more research and the contribution of information by families and relatives.]
One of the challenges in the research is that early records of male students in the teacher Training Department have not survived and no records of enrolment in the Art School were archived.
The custom of the time for people to be addressed by the initials of their forenames limits effective triangulation for identification.
Consequently, the identity of I or F Spencer 1912-13 is still being researched; largely because there were multiple casualties for these names and initials during the First World War.
Those keeping records at the time were as prone to human error as people are today.
One Goldsmiths’ College student was recorded and commemorated as having been killed in action when this certainly was not the case. Lieutenant Kingsley Fox Veasey married, became a head teacher and lived for 77 years until 1967.
And there are a few officers listed as affiliated to Goldsmiths’ College on the University of London Roll of Honour for 1914-19 who are missing from the panel. They include science graduate Second Lieutenant Frederick George Benjamin Gardner who was killed on the Somme 25th-26th July 1916, Second Lieutenant Frederick Hogben, killed at Le Trans-loy in France on 23rd October 1916, and Second Lieutenant Richard Howard Webb who died from his wounds in France on 10th October 1916.
Their biographies and profile are being developed and included.
Where there are student records surviving, the information can be prosaic and intriguing.
Data protection law nowadays would not allow historians of one hundred years or more into the future to learn that a ‘War Hero’ was poor at maths or history when passing their first year exams.
Where will future historians ever learn that a student teacher from Leicestershire, far from home in the world of 1912 to 1914, had boarded with a Mrs Packham in Brockley during his time studying at New Cross?
All this information was written down in copper-plated hand and fountain pen in a large cloth-bound book.
We are able to see the house as it is today. A three storey Victorian terrace with basement, and really not looking that much different on the outside to what it was like 112 years ago.
We can even determine that the Goldsmiths’ College student, Arthur Emmerson, who would die in 1917 as an artillery plane spotter for the Royal Flying Corps when his rickety single engined biplane made of string, wire and wood was shot down on the Western Front in France, had been looked after by Mrs Harriet Packham.
She was 49 years old and married to Mr George D’Arey Packham who was a head porter at the Post Office.
Arthur was staying with a large family, for the Packhams had five daughters.
There was 25 year old Florence who was working as a telephonist at the Post Office, 20 year old Gladys who did not appear to be in work at the time of the 1911 census, and 18 year old Kathleen D’Arey who was working as a shop assistant.
Winifred Charlotte D’Arey Packham was 14 years old and still at school, which means she must have been good at her studies, and Dorothy D’Arey Packham who was 11 and also still at school.
The Packham family must have been so sad and grieving in their own way if and when they had heard of the death of the young man who had been staying with them in one of the rooms of 29 Endwell Road in 1914.
He was there on 11th February 1914 because that was when the College clerk had checked the accommodation arrangements and term-time address.
Perhaps we can surmise that the board and lodgings provided to Goldsmiths’ College students was one of the ways the Packham family made ends meet, or perhaps contributed to paying off the mortgage on the house.
This is the minutiae of social history and a humanitarian history which brings to life and makes tangible the lives of those Goldsmiths’ College staff and students from that time who had been teaching and learning in the same buildings and grounds used today.
