1: WAR
When Sybil Andrews came home to Bury St Edmunds in late 1918 the town was not quite the same. But then neither was she. Bury felt small after Bristol, where she had been welding aircraft parts. The smell of malt and hops still wafted over the streets from the Greene King brewery. She could still look up at the ironmongers, Andrews and Plumpton, in Guildhall Street, and see the window of the room where she was born, walk down to 117 Northgate Street where she had lived since she was seven and past the cathedral and the abbey ruins, to the rivers Linnet and Lark, meeting and flowing on to join the Ouse, running through the wetlands to the Wash and the grey North Sea. Yet though much was familiar, Bury had been marked by the war.
The Suffolk Regiment served in all major battles on the Western Front, and in Macedonia and at Gallipoli. Sybil’s elder brother Geoffrey, a twenty-year-old engineer in 1914, fought in France and Belgium until a hunt for men with experience of motors led to a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916. He came home, wounded, after the Armistice, swathed in bandages and causing a stir in St Mary’s Church. But many boys never returned. Others were maimed, gassed or shocked. ‘It can seem very personal,’ Sybil said, ‘one’s friends going away, coming back mutilated or not coming back at all.’ She kept some relics all her life, like the sheet music marked ‘sent from the trenches, from Billy Harvey’, a setting for ‘A Perfect Day’ (‘Le Jour Divin’) with its poignant ending:
Quand le crépuscule touche à sa fin,
Et l’ami rend son dernier baiser!
* * *
War had always seemed near, yet unreal. At two Sybil had seen her uncle Henry Gardener Andrews in his Suffolk Yeomanry uniform with its bright yellow frogging, when he came to say goodbye to her mother before setting off to fight in the Boer War. (Henry stayed in South Africa, married and had children.) At six, in 1904 in the Butter Market, she watched the unveiling of the statue to the fallen in that war. In September 1912, when she was fourteen, a huge training exercise took place around Thetford, twelve miles away over the Norfolk border, drawing observers from across the world, from Germany to Argentina and Siam. Local papers reported that ten thousand people turned out to see the planes.
That was entertainment. Real war was not. Yet it felt exciting, in the baking summer of 1914. Boys Sybil knew were billeted in tents among the lakes and ponds, oaks and beeches of Hardwick on the edge of the town. They came to the Andrews’ house for meals or a bath and it amazed her that ‘here were all these men with aeroplanes and the latest equipment practicing manoeuvres on the Buttes, the place where they practiced with bows and arrows in earliest times’. Her bedroom window looked over stable yards, and she could hear the cavalry coming, ‘the clip of the horses hooves and the sharp commands of the officers – going off to the Station and to war.’ Sybil organised dances at the Angel Hotel with a schoolfriend, Dorothy Jarman, daughter of the town photographer, who ‘met and married a young man right off’ – not Sybil’s style . ‘How sad dance music has sounded ever since the war began,’ as Rebecca West wrote.
Townsfolk grew used to soldiers in the streets, coming in from nearby training camps: the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in their kilts, and men on their bikes from the local Cyclist Corps. In 1916, on the great Elveden estate in the heaths and forests of the Brecklands, north of Bury, men were trained to use the first tanks, to be shipped to the Somme that September. The noise of mock battles boomed across country, yet the Elveden Explosives Area became known as ‘the most secret place on earth’. Meanwhile, streams of wounded were sent back from the front. Four doors from Sybil’s home a house at 113 Northgate Street became a Red Cross hospital, and many women volunteered. Sybil had a photo of her mother Beatrice, serious in her nurse’s uniform, hands in the pockets of her starched skirt, her narrow waist cinched by a belt, hair tucked beneath cap, watch pinned to chest.
On the night of 29 April 1915, a Zeppelin crossed the East Anglian coast, pounding Yarmouth and Ipswich before heading for Bury. First a looming shadow appeared against bright moonlight, then booms and thuds, the clatter of roof tiles and roar of flames. All the street lights were on, despite the Lighting Act, and more light flooded out as people opened windows to see what was happening. One incendiary narrowly missed the Andrews’ ironmongers, which escaped burning only because the east wind blew the flames away. A year later, on 31 March 1916, a second Zeppelin attack killed seven people, including a young mother and two of her four children. The horse-drawn funeral procession weaved past pavements packed with soldiers, small boys in caps and women pushing prams. When the War Memorial was put up in 1921, it bore the names of 427 Bury men who died overseas, and the seven who perished at home.
* * *
Sybil was quick and clever. When she left Thetford Grammar School in the summer of 1915, aged seventeen, she worked for five months for a land agent in Daventry in Northamptonshire, leaving with a glowing testimonial to her typing and shorthand and keeping of rentals and wage-books. But then, as she said, she was ‘pitchforked into war’.
In Bury, the garage of Thomas Nice & Co. in Abbeygate Street became a small munitions factory where women made shells, and the engineering firm of Robert Boby was subcontracted to Vickers, to make armaments. In July 1915 Boby’s appealed to the Women’s Social and Political Union (who turned from suffrage to a nationalistic war effort) for women who could work lathes and drills. Sybil could work a lathe: she had spent her childhood running in and out of the family ironmongers, and in 1916 she enrolled in the Women’s Welding School at Notting Hill. The first of its kind, the school was run by Miss E. C. Woodward, ‘a metal worker of long standing’, squat and smiling in her overalls and leather apron. The first thing Sybil learned was how to use the low-pressure acetylene torch, her eyes protected by black goggles, her hair under her cap, aiming at ‘metal so welded you feel it is impossible it ever could have been two pieces’. From London Sybil went to the Standard Motor Works in Coventry, welding parts for biplanes like the Sopwith Camel, clocking in at six thirty in the morning and off at eight at night. The next stop was Bristol, working on the first all-metal planes. The legendary ‘Bristol Fighter’, the F2B with its Rolls-Royce engine, made its maiden flight in September 1916: within eighteen months the factories at Brislington and Filton, where Sybil worked, were producing over two thousand aircraft a year. The atmosphere was intense: the flashing sparks, the foot-long yellow flame flaring from the nozzle of the blowpipe, the smell of oil and hot metal, the shouts and quips and songs. She could always work furiously under pressure and she joked about the dangers in a poem, ‘Ten Little Welder Girls’:
Ten little welder girls sitting in a line.
One blew up her safety valve,
Then there were nine.
She remained inspired by the power and dynamism of industry and labour. In her linocut Sledgehammers (1933), men swing hammers at a central forge, its glow lighting their arms and faces. She based this on a scene remembered from the war. At Coventry the women welders only used the smaller blowpipes, but one day there was a call from the blacksmith’s shop to bring a large blowpipe to tackle something awkward that they couldn’t deal with in the furnaces. As all the men were busy, she was sent, forced to handle a huge blowpipe that she had never used before. ‘It frightened the life out of me,’ she said, adding briskly, ‘most exciting’:
There were five men waiting in the Blacksmiths Shop with sledgehammers – the dark shop – just the glow from the furnace. They were stripped to the waist and heavily tattooed and made a wonderful picture and together with the rhythm of the sledge strikes, for me, unforgettable. 1 Stroke 2 Stroke 3 Stroke 4 Stroke 5 Stroke Crash-Crash – and the sparks flying and the glow from the red-hot metal – it was like something out of time, old time.
When the Armistice was declared on 11 November 1918, the Filton factory closed for three days’ holiday. Two weeks later the Ministry of Munitions ended all contracts for Bristol Fighters. Like hundreds of others, Sybil went home.
She kept a photograph taken in Bristol, in a serious pose, wearing pearls and black muslin sleeves, her thick brown hair swept to one side. This was not the Sybil her friends knew. In other pictures she is slim and gangly and slightly awkward, with a chopped-off fringe, broad face and grin. But the photo held a certain truth, for her war work also showed her serious side. When she fell ill with pneumonia in Coventry, a friend took her to a Christian Scientist healer, a connection she returned to later. And if physical sickness could be healed, emotional pain could be thrust down too. ‘I’m so sorry, old thing, that years back you had trouble,’ wrote one of Sybil’s friends, ‘G’, who had been jilted. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about it & let me try to help when you were in Cov.? Still you evidently are braver than I … However, my dear, you are happy again now & I am awfully glad. You always were wonderfully cheery.’
True, Sybil was cheery, glad to be back with her family. But she was also restless. After an independent life it was hard to settle back.
* * *
Some of the planes that Sybil Andrews worked on were sent to the airfields on the Kent coast, like the one at Lympne, high on an escarpment looking down over the town of Hythe, where Second Lieutenant Cyril Edward Power – CEP as he often signed himself – was in charge of aircraft repair. A few miles away, in Folkestone, thousands of refugees had arrived from Belgium in 1914, and the small resort soon became the main embarkation point for France. During the war over ten million soldiers sailed back and forth – going out, coming home on leave and returning to the front.
When war began Cyril, an architect and historian of medieval buildings, had been married to his wife Dorothy (‘Dolly’) for ten years and had two sons and a daughter. He was forty-two, too old to fight, but in 1916 he volunteered for a commission in the Royal Flying Corps and trained as an equipment officer and administrator. Practical and enthusiastic with a dry sense of humour, he was good at getting on with people, organising the ground crew, sending out planes, arranging repairs and modifications in response to urgent suggestions from pilots. Ships and aircraft had always fascinated him. A comic sketch from 1909 showed ‘An architect’s flying machine, not remarkable for gaining great altitude’, with the airman in his goggles sitting in front of a gas canister labelled ‘reserve of ideas’ and absurd captions for different parts. In London, Cyril had watched the balloon and aeroplane races round the capital with his small children: at nine or ten the eldest, Toby, became obsessed with flying, subscribing to the weekly magazine Flight, which, he said, ‘enabled me to confound young pilots that I met at my father’s aerodrome’. Many of those young pilots would die in the air, their planes crashing into the mud of the trenches or plunging into the sea. At the start of the war, aircraft were fragile biplanes, unarmed and used only for reconnaissance, ‘eyes in the sky’. The pilots took guns with them and grenades in their pockets to ward off attacks, and soon machine guns were added, to make primitive fighter planes, and bomb racks so that bombs did not have to be dropped by hand – but they still had no navigational aids except unreliable compasses and basic maps.
Sybil in Bristol, 1918; Cyril in Bristol, 1916
Lympne started life in November 1915 as an airfield for the Machine Gun School at Hythe, but in March 1916 work began on a new site, an emergency landing field for the Royal Flying Corps. When Cyril arrived the team were making do with tents and temporary wood and canvas hangars, but by October 1916 they had six brick sheds for repairs. Lympne became the ‘No 8. Aircraft Acceptance Park’, a hub for aircraft going to France or being sent back for repair. Rapid design improvements and increasingly powerful engines brought waves of new planes, each more sophisticated, a marvel to those who flew them. Much later, in 1930, combining two of his passions, Power wrote:
No sooner do we evolve and perfect something than by the laws of progress it is superseded and scrapped in favour of something which proves better and more efficient. If you want a historic example of this, take the evolution of medieval building structure as manifested in the scientific experimental development in French cathedrals. Or, if you prefer a modern example, the rapid progress of Aircraft design during the Great War.
While ultra-modern planes absorbed his mind, Cyril loved Lympne as a place ‘steeped in history’, Sybil remembered – the ancient Portus Lemanis, a shore fort at the end of the Roman ‘Stone Street’. Time present and time past flowed together.
* * *
Ancient history and modern wizardry meant little to others on the coast. When the wind was in the east they could hear the guns booming from France. On the Somme there were over a million casualties between 1 July and 18 November, with the deaths of 125,000 British troops – each a separate tragedy to those who mourned the ‘undone years’, in Wilfred Owen’s words. The horror filled the poetry of Owen and his peers, making the trenches nightmarishly present. In Britain the price of food doubled. Thousands of men and horses had been sent to the front, reducing production; the wheat harvest was poor, the potato harvest failed, and German U-boats attacked supply ships. While hunger grew, the home front faced a new threat. On 25 May 1917, twenty-three Gotha G.IV bombers launched a daylight raid on London – the first air raid by planes rather than airships – and when dense cloud forced them to turn back, they attacked the Channel ports and army camps. It was early evening, around six o’clock. In Folkestone, people squinted skywards as the planes approached, saying later that they looked like a swarm of insects with the evening sun glinting on their wings. It was Whitsun Bank Holiday: children were playing in the streets and women were queuing outside a grocery shop, where a new load of potatoes had been delivered. The bomb that landed on the queue killed forty-four people instantly and seventeen more died later.
No British planes could climb high enough to stop the German aircraft: at Lympne they dropped nineteen bombs on the airfield. Power’s 1917 sketchbook shows a litter of wrecked aircraft. He was appalled by the destruction and loss of life, yet captivated by the power of the machines themselves, a dual response expressed in his vertiginous linocut Air Raid of the mid-1930s. Memories of war stayed with him, imparting a darkness to his work. At Lympne the grimness was amplified by the bizarre doings almost next door, where the flamboyant Sir Philip Sassoon, who had succeeded his father as MP for Hythe and was aide to Field Marshal Haig, commander-in-chief of the British forces, was building a house, splashing out the Sassoon inheritance and the Rothschild fortune from his mother. His house, Belcaire, looked out across Romney Marsh to the sea, and when the war ended the designer Philip Tilden was hired to make it ‘the epitome of all things conducive to luxurious relaxation after the strenuousness of war. It was to be a challenge to the world, showing people that a new culture had risen from the sick-bed of the old, with new aspirations, eyes upon a new aspect, mind turned to a new burst of imagination.’ Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power would also see their art as part of an innovative post-war culture, ‘a challenge to the world’, with new imaginative visions. But theirs was not Sassoon’s world, with its Rex Whistler murals and Italian gardens.
In April 1918, when the RFC and the Royal Naval Air Service merged to become the RAF, Lympne gained full status as a First Class Landing Ground, the base for 120 Squadron. After the Armistice squadrons coming home waited here to be disbanded, but soon the RAF left and the base was closed. Cyril, like so many others, had to start civilian life again. He went back, not to London, but to his wife’s home town, Bury St Edmunds. On leave he had visited his family here while they lived with Dolly’s parents, George and Alice Nunn, in Berril House, set in its long garden running down to the River Lark, with pear trees trained against the wall. For Dolly’s father, bedridden after a stroke, Cyril made an illuminated chart showing where the five Nunn sons were serving – the eldest, George, had emigrated to Australia and was a lieutenant with the ANZAC forces; Gerald, who had gone to Canada, fought with the Canadian infantry like Sybil’s brother Geoffrey, and died at Amiens in September 1918; the third, Sidney, was with the Suffolk Regiment at Ypres and in the Balkans; and the youngest two, Hugh and Ernest, were also with the Suffolks in the trenches. This was just one Bury family, looking at the maps, following the war overseas.
The losses of the war were unbearable – over seven hundred thousand men had died and a million and a half were injured – and up to 230,000 men, women and children died in the flu epidemic of 1918–19. Lloyd George had promised ‘a country fit for heroes’ but a short post-war boom was followed by a slump and unemployment rose as state-run industries like shipbuilding or aircraft manufacture were handed back to their owners. There were protests and marches and fears of unrest in the wake of revolution in Russia – 120,000 troops were sent to Glasgow to deal with the riots in ‘red Clydeside’ – and blotches were appearing on the pink map of Empire, with trouble in India and the protectorates of the Middle East. Idealists pinned their hopes for world peace to the League of Nations, founded in January 1920 after the Paris Peace Conference. But in Bury St Edmunds, where Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews were facing a peacetime life, the townsfolk’s main concern was to re-establish their old commercial and social patterns – to make the world, not new, but as close as they could to what had gone before.
2: SYBIL
Sybil Andrews was an artist of the machine age but she was also a girl from a Suffolk town, formed by its life and traditions. ‘From my earliest recollections’, she wrote, ‘Bury St Edmunds has been the centre of my life.’ She saw her linocut Market Day (1936) as typifying ‘the whole life of an agricultural town like Bury St Edmunds’, since without the market ‘there would be no reason for its existence’.
Market day was very important to the whole community. There came the fresh fruits, vegetables and meats, the farm wives in their best clothes came into town for their day off, and, afterwards, the men came and swept up the cabbage leaves from the vegetable stalls. And what would the country be if, all over, there were not similar communities who grew up, as we did, around the Abbey?
Others in this abbey community found it tight-knit and dull, with tension between labourers, pushy tradesmen and smart gentry. In an earlier generation the novelist Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé), who was born in Bury, wrote the town off, disguised as Cantitborough, as an old maid dressed for a party, ‘the slowest and dreariest of boroughs’, where ‘the inhabitants are driven to ring their own door-bells lest they rust from disuse’. But the Andrews family had no need to ring doorbells. Sybil’s grandfather Frederick Charles bought the ironmonger’s business in Guildhall Street in 1862, two years after Ouida’s sneer, advertising it as ‘a furnishing ironmonger, bell-hanging, whitesmith and iron-foundry, and stockists of plough shares, knife machines, iron bedsteads’ and ‘maggot and sheep-dipping lotions’. The business flourished and in 1884 Frederick became Mayor of Bury, re-elected three years later. When his son Charles married Beatrice Martha Trigg in 1893, they moved into the rooms above the shop: Sybil was born here, on 19 April 1898. She was the third child, after Geoffrey, born in 1894 and Joyce (‘Joy’) in 1895. In photographs the family grows around her: Sybil as a baby in Beatrice’s arms; a two-year-old on the arm of her mother’s chair, with Joyce and Geoffrey behind; aged four, in a frilled dress, the group now including Margaret (‘Mike’), born in 1902; aged five, with neat fringe and lurking smile, a year before the youngest child, Henry (‘Hal’), was born.
Sybil, Joyce, Margaret and Geoff Andrews, c. 1903
Charles Andrews was a gentle man, much loved by his younger sisters, a naturalist and artist, producing memorable studies of plants and birds, the odd one out among the mechanical, practical Andrews men. The Andrewses looked forward, selling modern tools: Beatrice’s family, the Triggs, looked back. Beatrice’s father Henry (who changed his name to Trigg from Prigg, a name already changed, understandably, from Prick) lived on the edge of town at Babwell Friary by the River Lark, in a sixteenth-century house with a smart Georgian front, built among the ruined walls and fishponds of a Franciscan friary. A keen antiquarian, Henry resigned from the National Provincial Bank to be curator of the Museum of Antiquities for the Suffolk Archaeological Society, becoming known as ‘one of the leading lights of the Suffolk Institute, more truly an archaeologist in the modern sense than others of his generation’. His pride was his dig around the village of Icklingham, nine miles away, where he proved the existence of a Roman villa and cemetery. Beatrice helped him, and after he died in 1894 she and her sisters gave some of his finds to the Bury Athenaeum, the town’s main library; these formed the core of the collection when Moyse’s Hall, a twelfth-century merchant’s house, became the town museum in 1899. Two years later Beatrice published her father’s findings, with manorial documents and wills, in the Icklingham Papers.
That year, when Sybil was three, the family moved from the shop to the sixteenth-century ‘Greyfriars’ at 60 Whiting Street, five minutes away: this was the house that she called ‘my childhood home’. Beatrice was friends with the leading local historians, one of whom, the pioneering archivist Lilian Burroughs, remembered Sybil as a small girl ‘shepherding Margaret in a white pinafore, while Henry was a baby, tucked under one of his mother’s arms, so that she could practise scales with the other hand’. Music was always important to them, and Sybil remembered her mother ‘rippling up and down the piano’.
Copyright © 2021 by Jenny Uglow
