Two events focus on history and consequences of the Great War

The project is supporting the Third Tynemouth (Ritson’s Own) Scout group Open Day from 1-5 pm on Saturday 17^th May, 2014 at their base on Billy Mill Lane near Tynemouth Squash Club and the former Cannon Inn on the Coast Road – access from Lynn Road.

The day will have a focus on Fred Greenacre, who died as a POW in Germany in July, 1918 but who had previously been a significant figure in the establishment of the Scout movement in North Shields. The day will feature the role of Fred and Colonel Ritson, a family owner of the Preston Colliery, who was Lieutenant Colonel of the 16^th Northumberland Fusiliers. This battalion of the regiment was raised in on Tyneside by the Newcastle and Gateshead Incorporated Chamber of Commerce and is one of the battalions commemorated on the famous Response war memorial, which stands in the Haymarket in Newcastle in the grounds of St Thomas the Martyr Church – one of the finest memorials of the First World War. That memorial was funded by the Renwick family, another of the important families on Tyneside, who along with the Ritson family were to play a great part in stimulating and organising the upsurge of local support and recruitment of volunteers for the war. The Ritson family owned three collieries in the North East; at Pontop and Burnhope in the Consett area, as well as the Preston Colliery in North Shields. The miners’ families of Preston colliery paid a heavy price for their sons and fathers and husbands enthusiasm to follow their owner to war - 61 miners from Preston were to die in the war.

The final lecture in our highly acclaimed series, organised in conjunction with the University of Northumbria was delivered by Professor Joanna Bourke of Birkbeck College, London University on Tuesday evening 13^th May, on the subject of Armistice and disability. Professor Bourke’s lecture was a thought-provoking and saddening exposition of the reality of the experience of those who survived the fighting but returned broken in body and/or mind, and who, despite the grand promises of the wartime years, found that they were to be reduced to an inconvenient and burdensome expense in the eyes of governments over the next fifty years. The case history of one North east veteran, Lt. Francis Hopkinson, a son of the Vicar of Whitburn , from a comfortable family of the established middle class was a sobering story of one man’s struggle to receive fair treatment and recognition of the extent of his disability, as he lived out a further 57 years of his life with a severe amputation of his leg, which required three unsuccessful amputations leaving him in mental distress and chronic and daily pain for more than half a century. His case involved numerous unsuccessful attempts to convince the military and pension authorities of the true extent of his disability including shell shock. For Hopkinson and many thousands of others the war never ended up to the day of their deaths, often decades after the war had been reduced in the minds of most people to an episode of early 20^th century history.

The reports just days ago of the rapidly rising numbers of referrals of soldiers who have served recently in Afghanistan or Iraq, for counselling and support for the mental distress and effects of service places a duty upon us today to ensure that those men and women do not suffer the neglect and callous treatment of the more than 80,000 cases of mental disability, related by Professor Bourke in her outstanding presentation, who were still recognised in the 1930s but seen then as an uncomfortable burden for the Exchequer rather than a responsibility to make proper provision for the men and women who had in reality ‘lost their lives’ even if they lived on broken in spirit unable to resume a normal life outside mental institutions. Let us ensure that today we do not fall into the same uncaring indifference to the enduring consequences of the horrific experiences of those young men and women who have been sent to carry out the directions of our governments in the recent past.