Page 4 - Armistice 100: A Yorkshire Post Picture Past Special

YORKSHIRE POST NOSTALGIA TUESDAY NOVEMBER 06 2018
Armistice 100
COMMEMORATING THE CENTENARY OF THE END OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Rifle drill for the Bradford Pals in Manningham Park, 1914.
Leeds Pals at Colsterdale.
PALS WHO
ANSWERED
CALL TO ARMS
WORDS BY DAVID BEHRENS
The decorated tram which attracted recruits for the Leeds Pals in the First World War.
THE YORKSHIRE POST 4 PICTURE PAST SPECIAL
It was an age in which disobedience meant dishonour. The recruitment campaigns that gathered pace in every corner of the British Isles after the onset of the First World War left little room for dissent.
“Who’s absent?” demanded a John Bull figure in top hat and Union Jack waistcoat, pointing from the centre of one of the Government’s posters. “Is it you?”
The implication was clear. Those who demurred were to be considered unpatriotic pariahs.
The pressure came not only from above. To serve King and Country was an expectation, an honour even, among peer groups.
That was the climate, clinging to Victorian subservience, that gave rise to the uniquely British phenomenon of the Pals battalions which sprang up across Yorkshire and beyond.
In a wave of patriotic fervour, fuelled
by the realisation that Britain’s 700,000 professional soldiers would be outnumbered fivefold by the German war machine, men volunteered in their thousands for Lord Kitchener’s new armies. They came not just as individuals but in the company of their friends, relatives and workmates.