The Volunteer Training Corps (VTC)
After war had been declared in August 1914 many hundreds of men flocked to enlist, but there was also very soon a popular demand for a means of service for those men who were over military age or those with business or family commitments which made it difficult for them to volunteer for the armed services. There was also a perceived risk of a German invasion, which resulted in the spontaneous formation of illegal "town guards" and volunteer defence associations around the country, and, on 19 November 1914, a Central Association of Volunteer Training Corps was recognised by the War Office. No weapons or equipment were provided for these volunteers from public funds, (although local Territorial Forces sometimes shared their dummy weapons to help the VTC learn to drill) and so some volunteers purchased their own weapons and ammunition. Membership of the Corps was only open to those who had "genuine reasons" for not enlisting in the regular armed forces although the list of exempted occupations was very wide and interpreted as including those responsible for widowed mothers, unmarried sisters and those running small businesses.
To start with, the volunteers supplemented the work already being carried out by Special Constables and local boy scouts.
On 5th March 1915 a public meeting was held under the presidency of the Archdeacon of Sudbury to discuss the formation of Ely’s own VTC. It was attended by several of the leaders of the community to give weight to the operation: Albert J Pell of Wilburton Manor; Captain John H Mander (chief constable and a captain in the army reserve); Albert Hall (farmer); Mr Cole Ambrose (farmer); Thomas B Granger (fruit grocer and sack merchant); C Edward Ivatt (farmer); William H Saunders (farmer). Just a fortnight later the Suffolk Yeomanary left Ely.
In Ely the VTC met at the Silver Street Barracks formerly used by the Yeomanary. Their Commandant was Mr Roberson and their Sergeant Instructor was Thomas E.T. Woodroffe of the Territorials (who had been discharged as unfit for overseas service).
In Fenland, when regular troops were withdrawn from guarding vulnerable and valuable infrastructure such as bridges, waterworks, gasworks and railway junctions this role was taken on by the members of the VTC. (The troops had been withdrawn in May 1915, and Ely Urban Council had temporarily paid for a guard for Ely High Bridge but withdrawn him on the grounds that “an unarmed man cannot stop a German spy or a zeppelin raid”.) The Ely Standard printed each week the names of those men of the VTC who were bridge guards and this shows that many of the young, and not so young, men who were later to be called up (even die) were members of the Corps. An article written by one of the bridge guards in 1915 appears below.
In December 1915 the VTC heard they were to be placed under military law and in March of 1916 they were at last officially recognised by the government. In May 1916 the Ely VTC had their first church parade in their new uniform of “tunics, knickers and leggings”(sic.). The newspaper commented favourably on their smartness and military bearing.
Once the Ely VTC was formed, other local villages started to form their own platoons - Prickwillow attracted about forty men, chiefly local farmworkers, when they formed up in February 1917. The volunteers were told that the medical examination to qualify was "not very stringent" and promised that they would not be mobilised and taken away from the district unless invasion threatened.
During 1917, P.14 Enfield Rifles began to be issued to the VTC, followed by Hotchkiss Mk I machine guns. The Ely Corps trained in drill at the old Militia Drill Hall in Silver Street, and learnt how to use their rifles. The men did 14 hours of training per month, but once they were regarded as experienced this dropped to 10 hours per month. Training included bayonet practice, physical exercise and bomb throwing. Once they were an "efficient man" the volunteers were paid £2 a year for their work. In April 1918 the Volunteers applied for gas masks and shrapnel helmets - they were slow to come.
If there should be a German invasion, the VTC were tasked with roles such as defending the lines of communication and defending the major towns. Volunteers undertook a wide range of other tasks including; guarding vulnerable points such as bridges and railway lines, digging anti-invasion defence lines, assisting with harvesting, fire fighting and transport for wounded soldiers. They were also on call when planes came down in the Ely area and had to be guarded while they were repaired. In 1918, when there was an acute shortage of manpower because of the German spring offensive, c.7,000 Volunteers from all over the country undertook three-month coastal defence duties in East Anglia.
Once conscription was introduced the average age range of the VTC rose and, like "Dad's Army" in World War Two, there were jokes that the "GR" on their armbands stood for terms such as "(King) George's Wrecks", "Grandpa's Regiment", "Genuine Relics", or "Government Rejects". The VTC, however, certainly regarded themselves as real soldiers, and when their oldest member, 67 year old Henry Sayer, died in February 1917 he was buried with full military honours: his coffin was covered with a Union Jack and his military hat and belt and his special constable's armband were placed on top. Henry was accompanied to the grave by members of the VTC and the police and the last post was sounded at the graveside. (Henry Sayer was an influential local figure, being the Chair of the local Co-operative Society, the Chair of Ely Constitutional Club and a market gardener, as well as a keen volunteer.)
From mid-1916 onwards, as men were being called up, many applied to local tribunals for exemption from service on the basis of work or business needs. For many months the Ely Urban Tribunal exempted some men from service with the forces so long as they joined the VTC. Very soon the Ely Urban Tribunal received a letter from the County Commandant of the VTC, Colonel Harding, to insist that if men were told to become members of the VTC they must be made to enrol properly and take up those duties – not simply turn up for drill, as most were doing! This issue resulted in several men being called back to face the tribunal on a number of occasions.
Ely Standard 17th September 1915 - This is what it was really like......
“Half a dozen dejected citizens, the patrol for the night, assembled on the Market Place at dusk. It was unlighted, deserted, except for a few boys, who, with the boy’s unerring scent for a mystery, gathered round to take stock of us as we waited, our depression lending us rather a hang dog air. To these were added presently some few of our bretheren, whose turn to furnish a bridge guard was not tonight. They fed themselves upon the contemplation of our misery and the remembrance of their own immunity.
“A patrol leader arrives, whom one might expect to give the password and countersign of the night, but he only serves out hurricane lamps and we reflect how sadly the ritual of war has been simplified. Then we are marched off among the “goodnights” of those who are left behind. We reply with what spirit we may, like Roman gladiators uttering their Nos morituri. So through the darkened town to the river lying smoothly and as sleek as oil. There we divide into pairs and go to our respective posts of duty.
“Darkness has fallen black and the outline of the bridge could scarcely be traced. It was an ordinary girder bride, crossing the river in one low span, the whole not fifty yards in length. Considered only from the rather narrow point of view of a bridge-guard it was satisfactory. On many bridges there is too close an intimacy between trains and parapet, so that at times even the slimmest bridge-guard may feel himself de trop. But here there was a generous width of footway. So far so good.
“Near by stood a small hut, built on the model, but lacking the luxuries of a sentry box. A sentry box is draughty in front and cannot be expected to be otherwise, since it belongs to a low stage of development, and its front door is yet to be evolved. But our hut supplied front, rear and lateral draughts impartially; and though at first sight it appeared to go one better than the orthodox sentry box in that it contained two seats, one of those proved to be a delusive amenity, for when a man was sitting on it his legs prevented his partner from sitting on the other.
“Our hut was placed beside the line at the point where the “bottle-neck” of the double track began to bulge out into a wide expanse of sidings and extra ways leading into the station, which was close at hand though invisible in the prevailing gloom. Red-lighted signals were dotted here and there, some dwelling solitary and lone, the confirmed bachelors and the soured spinsters of the station yard, while others, happily wedded, kept house on large “gantries” with their children about them. A dimly lighted window marked the position of a signal box and we stumbled more often than we would over the wires which connected it with the signals.
“We examined our bridge and found nothing to arouse suspicion, no displaced bricks, no sticks of dynamite, no gently ticking infernal machine. “It seems all right,” I said, and was conscious of a feeling of irritation when my partner answered “Yes; and always will be.” For a member of a National Volunteer Training Corps needs for his happiness a liberal endowment of the childish capacity to pretend. We are called upon to do so many things which are not of obvious utility that our reason rebels unless our imagination is strong. I was prepared to pretend that my bridge was in imminent danger of being blown up by some amiable bespectacled Teuton, and that to prevent him there was every necessity for me to substitute a bull’s eye lantern for a bedroom candlestick, and a draughty hut for a well-appointed bedroom, on this particular night of September in the year 1915. Strong in that pretence, I was prepared to go through with this work and enjoy it, and now, here was my partner, at the very beginning of the watch, showing himself a realist instead of an idealist, and cutting the ground from underneath my feet by his unwanted assurance, “Yes, and always will be.” Well perhaps he is wrong.
“I suggested that we should go back to the hut and have some supper. Sandwiches a little restored my faculty of pretence, and leaving him on guard I went to examine adjacent parts of the station yard, projecting my light into shadowed recesses among stacks of coal, piles of timber, huts and sheds. An empty carriage standing on a siding attracted me, I climbed up, opened a door, and approached a corner seat.
“When I reached the hut again a mist was beginning to roll up the river and the air was turning colder. We put on coats and sat on a balk of timber, watching the station lights dimmed and blurred by the thickening vapour. From the telegraph wires above our heads the distilled moisture was slowly falling, the thud of heavy drops sounding mournful and funereal upon the wood. Screech owls began to wail in the poplars beyond the river. There were no other sounds. Even the goods trains, which had been clattering past so frequently, had ceased to run and there had settled upon the station a stillness which was yet that of expectancy rather than rest. One felt subconsciously that something was being awaited. There was an atmosphere of preparation, a suggestion of question and answer deferred.
“Presently it came – the first of the mails. She passed us, shaking the ground under our feet, the jangling discordant din of the engine changing to the steady, roaring monotone of the following vans and coaches, clanked over the points, and curved gracefully to her own particular platform. We watched the receding lights, listened to the diminuendo of sound as the speed grew less, and soon heard the porters shouting the place name as the movement of the train ceased.
“Then for a while we were entertained by the passing of the mails faring along to distant and widely scattered destinations, and when the last of them had gone the goods trains once more took possession and for the rest of the night were hastening by hard upon each other’s heels.
“By day a goods train is apt to appear retiring and shy, the Cinderella of the rails, spending much time on sidings, and when at length allowed to take the line it wears a half-furtive, half-blustering air, like a married man inspecting the nudes in a gallery of art. But by night it swaggers along with an entire lack of self-consciousness. The road is before its feet, and it knows less of stoppages than do many passenger trains which journey in the day.
“The time wore slowly away into the small hours. The patrol leader who had visited us earlier in the night came again. He gave us a drink from his Thermos and we pressed upon him sandwiches which our wives had provided too liberally, for night watching is not hungry work. He went away, and to kill time we made a gratuitous and detailed inspection of our bridge all blanketed now in mist, so that the light of our lanterns could not penetrate to the farther side of the river. As we returned hutwards the first cock sounded, and we looked hopefully at our watches. But there were yet two full hours before daylight.
“So the long night crawls away. If it be warm and dry the bridge guard has no hardships beyond boredom. If it be wet or cold he has something more to suffer, and then he may look towards the sleeping city, and half wish that a German bomb might fall and fright out of their complacency and snug beds some of those who smile at his own poor efforts and seem to do rather less themselves. But that mood, born of discomfort, soon passes, and he thinks instead of the boys in the trenches. It is better here than there, though the rain does drive into the hut and the draughts are very chill.
“Little by little the darkness has thinned and the trees are silhouetted now against the fading blackness of the sky. The cocks are crowing more cheerfully. There is a scent of dawn in the air. Soon the huge tower of the Cathedral appears, spectral and strange in the misty lights. And at last there sounds from far up the line a tramping of feet, and the other patrols come into view, a jaded rather cross little party with their vigil accomplished, and the unpleasant thought in their minds that it is almost time to begin a day’s work. We walk home, to get, if we are lucky, two hours in bed.”
To start with, the volunteers supplemented the work already being carried out by Special Constables and local boy scouts.
On 5th March 1915 a public meeting was held under the presidency of the Archdeacon of Sudbury to discuss the formation of Ely’s own VTC. It was attended by several of the leaders of the community to give weight to the operation: Albert J Pell of Wilburton Manor; Captain John H Mander (chief constable and a captain in the army reserve); Albert Hall (farmer); Mr Cole Ambrose (farmer); Thomas B Granger (fruit grocer and sack merchant); C Edward Ivatt (farmer); William H Saunders (farmer). Just a fortnight later the Suffolk Yeomanary left Ely.
In Ely the VTC met at the Silver Street Barracks formerly used by the Yeomanary. Their Commandant was Mr Roberson and their Sergeant Instructor was Thomas E.T. Woodroffe of the Territorials (who had been discharged as unfit for overseas service).
In Fenland, when regular troops were withdrawn from guarding vulnerable and valuable infrastructure such as bridges, waterworks, gasworks and railway junctions this role was taken on by the members of the VTC. (The troops had been withdrawn in May 1915, and Ely Urban Council had temporarily paid for a guard for Ely High Bridge but withdrawn him on the grounds that “an unarmed man cannot stop a German spy or a zeppelin raid”.) The Ely Standard printed each week the names of those men of the VTC who were bridge guards and this shows that many of the young, and not so young, men who were later to be called up (even die) were members of the Corps. An article written by one of the bridge guards in 1915 appears below.
In December 1915 the VTC heard they were to be placed under military law and in March of 1916 they were at last officially recognised by the government. In May 1916 the Ely VTC had their first church parade in their new uniform of “tunics, knickers and leggings”(sic.). The newspaper commented favourably on their smartness and military bearing.
Once the Ely VTC was formed, other local villages started to form their own platoons - Prickwillow attracted about forty men, chiefly local farmworkers, when they formed up in February 1917. The volunteers were told that the medical examination to qualify was "not very stringent" and promised that they would not be mobilised and taken away from the district unless invasion threatened.
During 1917, P.14 Enfield Rifles began to be issued to the VTC, followed by Hotchkiss Mk I machine guns. The Ely Corps trained in drill at the old Militia Drill Hall in Silver Street, and learnt how to use their rifles. The men did 14 hours of training per month, but once they were regarded as experienced this dropped to 10 hours per month. Training included bayonet practice, physical exercise and bomb throwing. Once they were an "efficient man" the volunteers were paid £2 a year for their work. In April 1918 the Volunteers applied for gas masks and shrapnel helmets - they were slow to come.
If there should be a German invasion, the VTC were tasked with roles such as defending the lines of communication and defending the major towns. Volunteers undertook a wide range of other tasks including; guarding vulnerable points such as bridges and railway lines, digging anti-invasion defence lines, assisting with harvesting, fire fighting and transport for wounded soldiers. They were also on call when planes came down in the Ely area and had to be guarded while they were repaired. In 1918, when there was an acute shortage of manpower because of the German spring offensive, c.7,000 Volunteers from all over the country undertook three-month coastal defence duties in East Anglia.
Once conscription was introduced the average age range of the VTC rose and, like "Dad's Army" in World War Two, there were jokes that the "GR" on their armbands stood for terms such as "(King) George's Wrecks", "Grandpa's Regiment", "Genuine Relics", or "Government Rejects". The VTC, however, certainly regarded themselves as real soldiers, and when their oldest member, 67 year old Henry Sayer, died in February 1917 he was buried with full military honours: his coffin was covered with a Union Jack and his military hat and belt and his special constable's armband were placed on top. Henry was accompanied to the grave by members of the VTC and the police and the last post was sounded at the graveside. (Henry Sayer was an influential local figure, being the Chair of the local Co-operative Society, the Chair of Ely Constitutional Club and a market gardener, as well as a keen volunteer.)
From mid-1916 onwards, as men were being called up, many applied to local tribunals for exemption from service on the basis of work or business needs. For many months the Ely Urban Tribunal exempted some men from service with the forces so long as they joined the VTC. Very soon the Ely Urban Tribunal received a letter from the County Commandant of the VTC, Colonel Harding, to insist that if men were told to become members of the VTC they must be made to enrol properly and take up those duties – not simply turn up for drill, as most were doing! This issue resulted in several men being called back to face the tribunal on a number of occasions.
Ely Standard 17th September 1915 - This is what it was really like......
“Half a dozen dejected citizens, the patrol for the night, assembled on the Market Place at dusk. It was unlighted, deserted, except for a few boys, who, with the boy’s unerring scent for a mystery, gathered round to take stock of us as we waited, our depression lending us rather a hang dog air. To these were added presently some few of our bretheren, whose turn to furnish a bridge guard was not tonight. They fed themselves upon the contemplation of our misery and the remembrance of their own immunity.
“A patrol leader arrives, whom one might expect to give the password and countersign of the night, but he only serves out hurricane lamps and we reflect how sadly the ritual of war has been simplified. Then we are marched off among the “goodnights” of those who are left behind. We reply with what spirit we may, like Roman gladiators uttering their Nos morituri. So through the darkened town to the river lying smoothly and as sleek as oil. There we divide into pairs and go to our respective posts of duty.
“Darkness has fallen black and the outline of the bridge could scarcely be traced. It was an ordinary girder bride, crossing the river in one low span, the whole not fifty yards in length. Considered only from the rather narrow point of view of a bridge-guard it was satisfactory. On many bridges there is too close an intimacy between trains and parapet, so that at times even the slimmest bridge-guard may feel himself de trop. But here there was a generous width of footway. So far so good.
“Near by stood a small hut, built on the model, but lacking the luxuries of a sentry box. A sentry box is draughty in front and cannot be expected to be otherwise, since it belongs to a low stage of development, and its front door is yet to be evolved. But our hut supplied front, rear and lateral draughts impartially; and though at first sight it appeared to go one better than the orthodox sentry box in that it contained two seats, one of those proved to be a delusive amenity, for when a man was sitting on it his legs prevented his partner from sitting on the other.
“Our hut was placed beside the line at the point where the “bottle-neck” of the double track began to bulge out into a wide expanse of sidings and extra ways leading into the station, which was close at hand though invisible in the prevailing gloom. Red-lighted signals were dotted here and there, some dwelling solitary and lone, the confirmed bachelors and the soured spinsters of the station yard, while others, happily wedded, kept house on large “gantries” with their children about them. A dimly lighted window marked the position of a signal box and we stumbled more often than we would over the wires which connected it with the signals.
“We examined our bridge and found nothing to arouse suspicion, no displaced bricks, no sticks of dynamite, no gently ticking infernal machine. “It seems all right,” I said, and was conscious of a feeling of irritation when my partner answered “Yes; and always will be.” For a member of a National Volunteer Training Corps needs for his happiness a liberal endowment of the childish capacity to pretend. We are called upon to do so many things which are not of obvious utility that our reason rebels unless our imagination is strong. I was prepared to pretend that my bridge was in imminent danger of being blown up by some amiable bespectacled Teuton, and that to prevent him there was every necessity for me to substitute a bull’s eye lantern for a bedroom candlestick, and a draughty hut for a well-appointed bedroom, on this particular night of September in the year 1915. Strong in that pretence, I was prepared to go through with this work and enjoy it, and now, here was my partner, at the very beginning of the watch, showing himself a realist instead of an idealist, and cutting the ground from underneath my feet by his unwanted assurance, “Yes, and always will be.” Well perhaps he is wrong.
“I suggested that we should go back to the hut and have some supper. Sandwiches a little restored my faculty of pretence, and leaving him on guard I went to examine adjacent parts of the station yard, projecting my light into shadowed recesses among stacks of coal, piles of timber, huts and sheds. An empty carriage standing on a siding attracted me, I climbed up, opened a door, and approached a corner seat.
“When I reached the hut again a mist was beginning to roll up the river and the air was turning colder. We put on coats and sat on a balk of timber, watching the station lights dimmed and blurred by the thickening vapour. From the telegraph wires above our heads the distilled moisture was slowly falling, the thud of heavy drops sounding mournful and funereal upon the wood. Screech owls began to wail in the poplars beyond the river. There were no other sounds. Even the goods trains, which had been clattering past so frequently, had ceased to run and there had settled upon the station a stillness which was yet that of expectancy rather than rest. One felt subconsciously that something was being awaited. There was an atmosphere of preparation, a suggestion of question and answer deferred.
“Presently it came – the first of the mails. She passed us, shaking the ground under our feet, the jangling discordant din of the engine changing to the steady, roaring monotone of the following vans and coaches, clanked over the points, and curved gracefully to her own particular platform. We watched the receding lights, listened to the diminuendo of sound as the speed grew less, and soon heard the porters shouting the place name as the movement of the train ceased.
“Then for a while we were entertained by the passing of the mails faring along to distant and widely scattered destinations, and when the last of them had gone the goods trains once more took possession and for the rest of the night were hastening by hard upon each other’s heels.
“By day a goods train is apt to appear retiring and shy, the Cinderella of the rails, spending much time on sidings, and when at length allowed to take the line it wears a half-furtive, half-blustering air, like a married man inspecting the nudes in a gallery of art. But by night it swaggers along with an entire lack of self-consciousness. The road is before its feet, and it knows less of stoppages than do many passenger trains which journey in the day.
“The time wore slowly away into the small hours. The patrol leader who had visited us earlier in the night came again. He gave us a drink from his Thermos and we pressed upon him sandwiches which our wives had provided too liberally, for night watching is not hungry work. He went away, and to kill time we made a gratuitous and detailed inspection of our bridge all blanketed now in mist, so that the light of our lanterns could not penetrate to the farther side of the river. As we returned hutwards the first cock sounded, and we looked hopefully at our watches. But there were yet two full hours before daylight.
“So the long night crawls away. If it be warm and dry the bridge guard has no hardships beyond boredom. If it be wet or cold he has something more to suffer, and then he may look towards the sleeping city, and half wish that a German bomb might fall and fright out of their complacency and snug beds some of those who smile at his own poor efforts and seem to do rather less themselves. But that mood, born of discomfort, soon passes, and he thinks instead of the boys in the trenches. It is better here than there, though the rain does drive into the hut and the draughts are very chill.
“Little by little the darkness has thinned and the trees are silhouetted now against the fading blackness of the sky. The cocks are crowing more cheerfully. There is a scent of dawn in the air. Soon the huge tower of the Cathedral appears, spectral and strange in the misty lights. And at last there sounds from far up the line a tramping of feet, and the other patrols come into view, a jaded rather cross little party with their vigil accomplished, and the unpleasant thought in their minds that it is almost time to begin a day’s work. We walk home, to get, if we are lucky, two hours in bed.”
