The First and Second World Wars had a huge impact on British society. The dislocation and anxiety of the wars allowed people new freedoms and loosened moral attitudes. For many Cumbrians, war took them away from home for the first time, often to remote locations among foreign cultures and under life-threatening conditions. Those left behind were thrown into new work in factories or on the land. Strangers became more familiar in Cumbria: servicemen at the county’s military bases, evacuees, prisoners of war, even Danish fishermen who moved to Whitehaven in WWII.
The Adventures of Elsie Butler
When WWI broke out in 1914 Elsie Butler, a teacher who had been raised in Barrow, was desperate to do her bit. She joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse, only to be recalled to her academic work shortly after. Having twice been accused of espionage — once during a break in Suffolk when an angry mob of villagers believed her school friend, Alice Strickland (“tall, handsome, with short black hair”), was a man in disguise — and tiring of “the fearful strain of living under the cloud of war as a useless civilian,” Elsie signed up to the Scottish Women’s Hospital in 1917.
On the basis that she could speak passable Russian she was tasked with leading four nurses more than 2,500 miles through Scandinavia and Russia to a field hospital in Reni, on the border between Ukraine and Romania. There she spent the happiest time of her life as an interpreter and general dogsbody, later put in charge of provisioning the hospital from stores in Odessa, before the Russian Revolution forced the hospital to move south to the Balkans. She returned home to Barrow in December 1918, having survived the war and malaria, and narrowly avoided being left behind for a winter in Archangel.
Elsie had been at school in Germany before the war and had watched with horror as nationalist sentiment took hold there. As a scholar of German she returned there regularly during the 1920s and 30s, often with her life partner Isaline Horner, seeing first-hand the impact of war and the inflation crisis of 1923, and watching again as nationalism and anti-Semitism took hold. In 1935 she wrote about the dangers of Germany idealising Ancient Greece, which was banned by Hitler’s Nazi government.
By the Second World War, Elsie had become disillusioned with teaching German, sickened by the thought that it was the language on the lips of the Luftwaffe as they dropped their bombs on England. She instead turned her attentions to ritual and magic
Clifford Last’s War
Clifford Last was a British-Australian modernist sculptor and the younger son of Barrow writer Nella Last (together below), whose diaries provide a fascinating insight into local life in World War II and after. They also provide a rare personal glimpse into the relationship between a mother and her queer son in this period.
Born just weeks after the end of the First World War, Clifford was the perfect age for service at the start of the Second and joined the Cheshire Regiment in 1939. While serving, he met a scientist from the Fleet Air Arm named George.
In August 1941 George was in Belfast “and hoped, if he could get a seat in a plane coming over, to be able to wangle a few days with Cliff,” while he was on leave at home in Barrow. Nella seemed suspicious of George from the outset and complained that “Each night, we have had to be back for Cliff to book a call at eight to George in Belfast — without result. George may be a perfectly nice fellow, but this week I’ve grown to detest his name.” But she quickly warmed to him when they met that November. Over the coming months, he visited when he could and they went on adventures in the Lakes together, planning their future of travelling after the war.1
When George was killed over Gibraltar the following spring, Nella reflected on her son’s loss:
Never in his whole twenty-three years have I seen Cliff so adore anyone — or take lectures so meekly, or take so much notice of anyone. George to him was a god. His ceaseless talk of ‘George did this — or that’, ‘George thinks so-and-so’, ‘George says so-and-so’ often amused me — and irritated me at times. The money they spent on phone calls was a joke — along with the seemingly fatuous conversation; and Cliff’s beaming satisfaction after getting them was a mystery. I dis-liked George before I met him; but when he came, he was ‘just another of my boys’, and his clear blue eyes and sun-bleached hair and happy grin will always be a memory. — Thursday, 19th March 19422
When Cliff returned home after the news, he spoke to Nella about his grief:
I never knew death before — did I? — that dreadful ‘nevermore’ feeling, I mean. So much has gone. I cannot linger round a bookshop, or wonder what I could choose — either book or record — for George, or listen ever again for a phone call. Sometimes I find myself in an ordinary routine and forgetting George, and post-time comes and I eagerly think, ‘I wonder if there will be a letter from Gib[raltar]. Or I’ll be in the canteen, or the pictures, and a tune will be played — and behind it there is a deadness of ‘never again together’. I’ve never cared for anyone as much as George, somehow. We belonged, and our friendship was one of mutual likes and dislikes, which made for laughter and interest. — Wednesday, 1st April 19423
The time that George and Cliff spent together may have convinced Nella of her son’s romantic preferences. Musing about the end of the war, she imagined that her eldest son “Arthur will bring a dear little wife,” while Cliff would remain more devoted to her. She thought wistfully “of my little hope that Cliff would have been attracted to” their neighbour Margaret.4 Later, she makes her understanding clearer:
If Cliff knew how clearly I saw things, his way of thinking and acting, the worthlessness of so many of his ‘friendships’, I feel something would go. It’s better I should let him think I’m sweet and dumb, seeing and understanding only what he thinks fit, knowing nothing but what he thinks fit to tell me. He forgets — or ignores — that talk and gossip filters through. — Saturday, 27th October 19455
She was surprised when he proposed to a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer after the war, saying “I felt it would be an answer to prayer,” although it came to nothing. In 1946 Nella accepted that “Cliff is an odd one. A wife doesn’t seem to enter into his scheme of things at all,” and he later told her that he “was never the marrying type”. Long after, he admitted to his nephew “that his family had always found it hard to accept his sexuality.”6
The Memories of Dickie Buckle
Clifford’s contemporary, Richard Buckle, who was born and sometimes lived in Warcop, gives us further insight into attitudes to sexuality in the mid-20th century through his extensive autobiography. He describes himself as a mixture of his beloved “passionate, earthy, literary grandmother,” Lily Buckle, and his “aesthetic, indolent, snobbish and homosexual great-uncle Caryl Craven”.7
When young Richard had told Lily of his infatuations for other boys, she “had brushed this aside as something quite normal” for his age, and even admitted to having schoolgirl crushes on two of her mistresses herself. He later wondered if “she might have suspected that I was in danger of being stuck for life in a homosexual rut.” It was a common belief that same-sex attraction was permissible as a folly of youth but not an acceptable course for life.
Richard, who went on to become a ballet critic and writer, tells us of his first crush on “C.M.” (a future Labour minister) at the age of 10, the allure of handsome film stars of the ’20s, and of his discoveries of art, literature, history and ballet. Moving to Paris for a spell in 1938 he enjoyed more freedom, dancing in “queer night-clubs”, falling in love and catching “an appropriate disease” which earned him a week in hospital.
The war seemed to provide him similar freedom despite active service (right). He snook off to gay club Le Boeuf sur le Toit whilst off duty in London, “was entertained by the first of several Salvatores and Gennaros (‘600 lire’),” in Naples, one of which gave him “an inconvenient disease”, and even seems to have found action in Cairo.
He wasn’t always popular with his comrades, who often suspected him of being queer, and he wasn’t necessarily careful about hiding his sexuality, even if it could land him in a court martial. On one occasion he returned from training to discover that two copies of nude males by the artist Bernard Meninsky, which were hung in his bedroom, had been tarred and feathered by his messmates. But they were more forgiving of his queerness when he entertained them with bawdy songs in drag.
