The things that will be told against this trade when all the truth is
known will break the heart of those who read. It is well for us that we
cannot know the full truth now; the burden would be too grievous to be
borne in days like these. But if you will go into your street, or will
talk of these things with the next man you meet from one of our pitiful
slums, or will pick up one of those local papers that still have space
to print the truth, you will find the evidence close about you.
We are the guardians of our soldiers’ homes; we are the trustees of the
hope and happiness of their little children; but we let this drink
trade, that takes our people’s food out of their cupboards, turn that
food into the means of death, and sow ruin and destruction through the
land.
But we will call the witnesses to these drink-ruined soldiers’ homes,
these homes that the enemy worse than Germany has shattered and broken
while our men have been fighting for your home and mine. We will call a
few here and there, knowing that for every one called are hundreds more
that can be called, and that beyond all these that are known there is in
this little land a countless host of tragedies as secret as the grave.
A Tooting soldier whose wife had sent him loving letters to the
trenches came back to surprise her after 18 months. He found another
man in possession of his home and a new baby; and, overcome by the
discovery, he gave way to drink and killed himself.
_Records of Balham Coroner, March 1916_
A soldier who had left a comfortable home behind returned from the
Front to find it ruined, with not a bed to lie on, his children
never sent to school, his wife all the time in publichouses. “I wish
I had been shot in the trenches,” he said when he arrived.
_Facts in “Cork Constitution,” December 10, 1915_
Outside a publichouse in Liverpool a man was dragging home his
drunken wife, the mother of eleven children. They rolled over and
over on the ground, the drunken women violently resisting the
maddened man. Then came up the eldest son, home from the Front, with
five wounds in his body.
_Facts in “Liverpool Post,” March 2, 1917_
A soldier came back to his home in London to find his wife drinking
his money away, harbouring another man; one of his children cruelly
neglected and the other in its grave, perished from neglect; and a
drunken carman’s baby about to be born in his home.
_Facts in Shaftesbury Society Report_
A Lance-Corporal heard in the trenches of his wife’s misconduct. His
commanding officer wrote to make inquiries, and the soldier wrote to
the Chief Constable a pitiful letter: “What have I to look forward
to at the end of the war?” he said. “Nothing, only sorrow. I never
get a letter to know how my loving son is getting on; I think it
will drive me mad.”
He came home, opened the door of his house, threw his kit on the
floor, and declared that he would kill his wife. He put a razor on
the table, and his little boy hid it in a cupboard, but a week later
this boy of 12 went home and found his father and mother lying on
the floor, the father drunk, the mother dead. The soldier, drowning
his misery in drink, had strangled his wife. Rousing himself beside
her, he said, as the police found them, “Kiss me, Sally. Aye, but
tha are poorly.”
He had been the best of fathers, said the little boy; the best of
soldiers, said his commanding officer; and the judge declared that
such a man, with such a character, ought not to be with criminals.
_Record of Huddersfield Assizes, Autumn 1916_
A soldier asked a London magistrate if he could draw the allowance
instead of his wife, who was in prison for drunkenness and was
neglecting his four children. The magistrate said the only thing was
to send the children to the workhouse.
The Soldier: “So I am to be a soldier for my King and country while
my children go to the workhouse?” The Magistrate: “That is so,
because you have a drunken wife. I am sorry for you.”
_Facts in “Sunday Herald,” June 1916_
A seaman gunner, who had been torpedoed and had fought in the
trenches, arrived home to find his wife, in his own words, “filthy
drunk,” and his children utterly deplorable. He reclothed them, but
his wife pawned the clothes, though she had £7 a month. He took his
children away, but a crowd of women interfered with him, and the
police were powerless against the mob.
_Facts in “Western Daily Mercury,” July 23, 1915_
A soldier just back from the Front was found in the street weeping
bitterly on discovering that his wife was in gaol through drink, and
his child, through her neglect, had been burned.
_Statement by Marchioness of Waterford_
A soldier came home from the Front to find that drink had ruined his
home, and his children were being cared for by Glasgow Parish
Council. “Hour after hour we sit on this council,” says the
chairman, “listening to case after case, and the cause is
drunkenness, drunkenness, drunkenness. There are 2300 children under
the council, and two thousand of them have parents living.” “Our raw
material is the finished product of the public-house,” says one of
these workers.
_Facts from Glasgow Councillors_
A motor mechanic at the Front, hearing that his wife, hitherto a
sober woman, had given way to drink, obtained leave to come home. He
found his wife, very drunk, struggling home with the help of the
railings in the street, and neighbours described her horrible life
with other soldiers. The husband obtained a separation for the sake
of his children, and went back to France.
_Full facts in “Kent Messenger,” July 31, 1915_
A young soldier came from the trenches to spend Christmas in his
home in Sheffield—a teetotal home before the war. He found that his
wife had given way to drink, had deserted one child and disappeared
with the other, and that a baby was to be born which was not his.
_Facts known to the Author_
A miner fighting at the Front came home to find his wife at a
publichouse, his home filthy, and his children cruelly neglected. He
was heartbroken. His young wife frequently left the house from
tea-time till midnight, and in order to keep the children from the
fire she had burned them severely with a piece of iron. A
respectable-looking woman, the mother pleaded for a chance, and was
led from the dock sobbing bitterly.
_Facts in “Sheffield Independent,” February 21, 1917_
A young Yorkshire miner enlisted and left his wife, hitherto sober,
with three children. She took to drink, neglected the home, and is
now a dipsomaniac, with two children not her husband’s.
_Facts known to the Author_
A soldier came home ill from France, hurried from Waterloo to his
home, and found the door locked. He knocked, and his little boy’s
voice came—“Is that you, mother, and are you drunk?” Hearing his
father’s voice the excited lad opened the door. “Where’s mother?”
asked his father. “Mother?” said the boy; “she’s drinking. She comes
home drunk night after night now and knocks the kids about. She
daren’t hit _me_; I’m fair strong, dad; but the other.... And as for
baby, she never does nothing for her. I and Freddy takes turns, but
I dunno what to give her to eat sometimes.”
Midnight passed before the mother appeared, helplessly drunk. “Did
you expect me to sit at home weeping for you?” she said. The next
morning, broken with tears, she promised to mend her ways. The
soldier went into hospital, and there he had a letter from his boy.
This is part of it:
“Dear Dad, I write to let you know mother is going on awful. She has
took all Fred and Timmy’s clothes to the pawnshop, and she hit
Selina on Saturday with the toasterfork and cut her face. She cried
all night, it hurt her so. She is drunk every night and some nights
dussent come back at all. She daren’t hit me, but I am getting
afraid about baby. We are all very hungry and miserable.”
The soldier got leave, found his wife had disappeared, and, finding
charity for his four little ones, he left his ruined home and went
back to the hospital.
_Facts in possession of the Author_
A working-man at Gravesend went to the Front, leaving behind a wife
and three children, the baby lately born. His wife started drinking
away her allowance, neglected her home, and, full of remorse and
shame for the disgrace she had brought on the man who was in the
trenches, she hanged herself. The man came home to find waiting for
him three motherless children, and one of the most pathetic letters
a man has ever had to read.
_Records of Gravesend Coroner, 1916_