Elise Britten
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Popular History Pieces
The Man Behind the Photo
(August 2016)
A famous photograph from the First World War forms the starting point for a riveting journey into a rich family history, which presents a challenge to how we view our long-lost war heroes.
A still of an unknown soldier from the 1916 war propaganda film 'The Battle of the Somme'
The 'unknown soldier' in this famous image, is not unknown to his family. This still from the 1916 propaganda film The Battle of the Somme depicts a hero of the First World War carrying an injured man on his back whom he saved from ‘no-man’s land.' To the casual observer he stands as an uncomplicated symbol of comradeship. Yet the Britten family sees four generations in the hairline, the set of the eyes and the shape of the face. For them, the story of this image is not so simple; it is one part of the conflicting narrative of their shared past.
Sergeant Henry George Britten was born in Hampshire in 1890 into an unremarkable life. He was the first of seven children of a farm labourer and his wife. His father had drank away the family business, leaving the children with few prospects. No doubt eager to distinguish himself, Henry lied about his age and joined the Royal Marines at just 15, marking the beginning of an impressive military career. By January 1911, Henry was already experiencing the world like he had probably never imagined he could, in South Africa with the Corps of Drums, First Battalion, Wiltshire Regiment.
Henry saw the First World War from start to finish. At the outbreak of war, he eagerly headed off to the Western Front. He took part in the first battle fought by the British Army against the Germans, the Battle of Mons, on the 23rd of August 1914. The campaign was intended to halt the German advance to Paris and although the Allied troops were forced into the Long Retreat from Mons, it was successful in its aims. The German army never did reach Paris.
The next major battle Henry was known to be part of was the First Battle of Ypres from the 19th of October 1914. Ypres erupted at the end of the ‘Race to the Sea’ and saw Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, which aimed to avoid prolonged war on two fronts, thwarted. The battle was a decisive victory for the Allies, but not without great cost. The British suffered over 58,000 casualties and the French up to 85,000. Perhaps, most significantly, Ypres sparked the digging of the trench systems that would guarantee a lengthy ‘war of attrition'; where both sides held on, waiting for the other to run out of men or ammunition.
This initiation could not truly have prepared Henry for the bloodiest battle of the First World War; the five month long Battle of the Somme fought along a 15 mile front from the 1st of July 1916. If there was ever a reason to lose faith in the war, this was it; a drawn-out stalemate which achieved nothing and incurred one million casualties across both sides. It is believed that it was here that Henry rescued the injured solder and carried him through the trenches on his back.
Yet Henry was still not done with the war - he was off to Egypt with the Devonshire Regiment to fight in the battles of Gaza. The first advance was called off on the 27th of March 1917 due to a mistaken belief that the battle was being lost. A second advance was ordered on the 17th of April 1917 after their commander Sir Archibald Murray, trying to save his reputation, reported a clear victory to London and trebled enemy casualties. The British were now at a significant disadvantage, with the enemy forces prepared for them. Because of this they suffered 6,444 casualties. Henry was not around to be part of their eventual success in Gaza because he was one of them…
In fact, Henry George Britten was injured not just once, but three times during the course of the war. His brave perseverance is what definitively sets him apart as a war hero. He was sent home from the First Battle of Ypres after suffering a bayonet thrust into his backside while trying to capture a machine gun post. He copped shrapnel wounds in his thigh. He once even had a bayonet go through his throat, which according to his proud family legend, he unclipped and continued fighting.
He was awarded a number of medals during the war, including the Military Medal in 1917 for his efforts in Gaza. A letter explaining the award applauds him for 'leading your section in a trench raid with courage and devotion although you were already wounded before reaching enemy position.' Even after all the battles Henry had seen and his three injuries, the officer still thought it fitting to write 'hoping you will soon be well again, back with us.'
Timothy Britten, one of Henry George’s many grandsons, has heard these legends many times. Sitting across from him, I can clearly see the family resemblance in their shared M-shaped receding hairline. He stares into the distance, recalling the multitude of stories his father and uncles regaled him with over the years. After all the bloody battles he had seen and the pain he had endured, I wonder how Henry must have felt about the war.
“Oh, he loved it,” Timothy snaps out of his trance to explain; “Henry was a medal hunter.”
The Victoria Cross was apparently a potential for his actions in Gaza, but his officer was killed so could not put him forward, as was required.
“He was totally pissed off.”
This love of war and military medals never left him. Henry was very disappointed when he was too old to fight in the Second World War, but he refused to join the ‘Dad’s Army’ on the home front because he had more medals than the commanding officer.
With this extraordinary eagerness for war perhaps we could believe that his wounds were only ever skin deep. As men around him fell, Henry was only injured. He returned to the front each time one of the most experienced; a war-hardened man among fresh blood. Yet this does not mean that the worst horrors of war did not reach him. Henry saw his brother, who was in the artillery, just once during the war. Their battalions were moving past each other and they had just enough time to shake hands. By the time their battalions passed again, his brother was dead.
At the Somme when Henry was struggling trying to make the distance with the soldier upon his back, others were telling him to let him go; they saw the futility of his attempt.
“Put him down, he has no chance,” they said.
“I can’t. He’s my friend!”
The soldier died just half an hour later. Even the most outstanding heroism was not enough to save him.
Henry George Britten was invalided out of the army in 1920 and wasted no time in settling down. On the 22nd of November 1920 he married asylum nurse Florence Louisa Cowdrey. Their marriage entry lists Florence’s age as 24 to Henry’s 30. However, according to records of her birth and death, she was actually only 18 at the time. Timothy believes she may have really been even younger as her sister was always reluctant to talk about her age.
There may be another explanation for this evasiveness about dates though, as Henry and Florence’s first child was born on the 31st May 1921, just six months later. After this, Florence essentially gave birth every year; she had a total of 22 children by 1944. Of these, two were stillborn and two died in infancy. While this would have undoubtedly been painful, it was not unexpected survival rates for the time.
Florence and Henry Britten in 1952, the year before Henry’s death
Looking at this picture we see a smiling couple growing old together, raising a thriving family. They ought to have been happy; this war hero and his loving wife. However, often there is so much more to a story than we can see in a fleeting pose for a camera. Henry may have left the army in 1920, but in some ways he never left the war behind. Upon his marriage, another battle was just beginning; one waged not on an open battlefield, but behind closed doors.
“Out in public he was the kindest person in the world, in private he was the most violent person you could ever hope to meet in your life,” Timothy explains.
Timothy shakes his head slightly, looking upon his own grown son across his garden, still in disbelief of the stories his father had told him. Timothy’s father, Brian, had been sitting in a chair which his youngest brother wanted to sit in. Brian refused to let him. The next thing Brian knew he was on the floor; he had been punched out of the way by Henry.
“He could only have been 7 or 8 years old at the time,” Timothy adds.
Henry George’s love of the war extended to his prize collection of weapons: a couple of bayonets and a Luger pistol, probably captured from an enemy soldier. One day he lined all of his children up outside and held the pistol to each of their heads. This was not a moment a child could ever forget; the time they were a hostage of war in peacetime.
“They all hated him,” Timothy exclaims.
Henry’s children became used to their father’s violent episodes. They would find a place to stay, even if it was just a barn, and be prepared to return home to broken furniture and bullet holes in pots and pans.
The children could at least look forward to the day that they were old enough to leave home and Henry’s violence behind; Florence was the unmoving target who bore the brunt of her husband’s demons. In a culture of silence about domestic violence, Florence must have felt alone in her pain. Abusive relationships were seen to be a problem of the low-class and of the socially degraded; a matter of indiscriminate shame. The police would turn up at the Britten’s home, but leave without doing anything. Yet she was not alone.
It is thought that domestic violence increased in the aftermath of the war, as veterans brought their war trauma home with them. It is hardly surprising that men returning from the most distressing experience of their lives without awareness or treatment of mental illnesses may have continued to struggle. Undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorders, which commonly lead to outbursts of anger and paranoia, may have influenced these men to act violently.
Nanette Lance, Henry’s daughter-in-law, may not share his DNA, but these forces which shaped her dear late husband are part of her story too, and her children are Brittens through and through.
“Henry had what they called in those days ‘brain storms’… but it was really all the pressures that he got in the war that no one really ever understood,” Nanette, a former nurse, is eager to explain.
Nanette retells the story that Florence saw as the start of their marital problems—when she had her first child.
“Florence suddenly picked him up, kissed his bottom and said ‘I love every bit of this baby.’ From then on Henry was jealous—he was jealous of his own kid.”
Oddly, the possible explanation of this jealousy is missing from the family history and common discussion. Henry’s daughter Evelyn Clifford surprises me with the revelation that he was married once before. When he found out his wife had had an affair he divorced her and it seems he even managed to wipe her from the family tree.
Historian Elizabeth Nelson argues that the idealising of male aggression and the range of experiences that personally disempowered men also contributed to this post-war domestic violence. War recruitment drives and propaganda linked the value of a man to his violent abilities and created an ideal of the fearless hero which was impossible to truly live up to. Men returning from war struggled to redefine their roles, when they were suddenly expected to leave it all behind and live mundane, peaceful lives once more. This must have been doubly hard with the awful poverty the Britten family faced. Henry George was a hard-working man, but he was unable to provide luxuries for so many. The children slept top-to-tail, crammed in beds with old army coats for blankets.
Henry George Britten was no doubt psychologically scarred by his war experiences. However, his abuse was not just about fits of stress-related violence. He needed control. Timothy recounts all the little pieces that made up an oppressive whole. Despite his huge family in a small home, he had a room to himself, which no-one else was allowed to enter. The toilet seat was not meant to feel warm. If the newspaper had been opened Florence had to go out and buy him a new one. Perhaps most astoundingly all the children had to be out of the house before he woke up. Timothy explains how Florence would get them up and feed them.
“She had to have them out of the way before my grandfather walked down the stairs in the morning,” he said.
With 14 kids at home at once this was an incredible feat. One of these boys, Douglas, was sent to school with a hessian sack and at three o’clock no matter what, even if school had not finished, he left. He was on a mission to fill it with 40 loaves of bread being sold off cheaper in the afternoon.
One day his teacher told Douglas “you have got to stop going, you can’t keep missing schoolwork.”
Douglas’ reply was simple: “I am more afraid of my father than I am of you. I am going to leave at three o’clock.”
Henry imposed the strictures of military discipline on his family. Perhaps it was the only way he knew how to cope with the enduring memory of the disorder of war. Unlike many violent men, Henry never touched a drop of alcohol, evidently recalling too well the way his father had lost all control.
Henry George must have thought his discipline had paid off when over the years he saw 11 of his sons and three of his daughters serving in the armed forces. Three were old enough to serve in the Second World War and did their father proud. Yet they picked up more skills than Henry had bargained for. When they returned home from the war, to find their 14 year-old brother trying to stand in the way of Henry attacking their mother, they smashed their father’s arms and legs with a hammer. They sent Henry into hospital, to finally give their mother a break from his violence.
Timothy flatly delivers his pragmatic response to the tale: “If they didn’t do it to him, he would have done it to them.”
The family disagree on the effectiveness of this attack. Some believe that the shock of his sons turning on him softened Henry somewhat in his later years. Others remember a man who was violent until his very end.
Henry in uniform for work as a civilian driver for the R.A.F., around the time of the Second World War
The man leering at the camera in this picture, from beneath a cap which casts his eyes in shadows presents a creepy figure. We see in this photo a Henry George Britten that could believably be the violent man these tales reflect. Yet this photograph could not be more different from the others we have seen. So which image is the ‘real’ man: the brave war hero, rescuing a dying comrade; the smiling old man with his arm proudly flung around the love of his life; or the dark figure inciting fear in the hearts of his own family? Surely he is all three.
At this point we may wonder, why did Florence stay with a man who treated her this way? Perhaps as a nurse she had seen the effects of war trauma first-hand, so in some ways understood the physical and psychological pain he might be acting out of. Perhaps her somewhat early pregnancy forced her hand, tying her to Henry for respectability and financial support. Perhaps he showed a care and love that the children did not see, particularly during the stillbirths and infant deaths that they faced together. Perhaps the answer is simple. She stayed for the same reason, so many women still do.
“She loved him,” Timothy explains with a gentle shrug, “in their time, no matter how much he beat her up, he was still her husband.”
Sergeant Henry George Britten suffered a stroke and passed away at the age of 63 on ‘Cup Final Day,’ the 2nd of May 1953. He was buried as patriotically as he had lived, draped in a Union Jack. His youngest child was still only 12 years-old. His funeral had a large attendance and showed no sign of the troubled relationship he had with his family. Funeral flowers were sent with all the usual touching messages:
With love to Daddy, from all the children at home.
In loving memory of darling Daddy.
With deepest sympathy to a loving Daddy.
While these messages may partly be acts in keeping with convention, they probably also reflect the way grief brings out emotions from the depths. Nanette recalls how Florence never stopped loving her late husband. Gently sipping her tea, Nanette reflects on the pain of the woman she remembers so fondly.
“Every Cup Final Day, at the time Henry had died, Florence would go off to the bedroom and we all would know she was crying… Then she’d come back down and carry on,” she recounts.
When Florence too suffered a stroke in 1962 she was buried in the same plot as the love of her life. In among the crumbling headstones of Pewsey Cemetery you can find their shared gravestone. The inscription finishes with a simple, but poignant statement.
Re-united
Gravestone of Henry and Florence Britten in Pewsey Cemetery, 2016
While Henry and Florence may be resting peacefully at last, they certainly left behind their mark. From their 18 children who lived past childhood they have 73 grandchildren. Within Pewsey for many years the family was notorious.
“Bloody Brittens” was a common refrain.
Yet Henry George used to say: “you don’t need friends, you need family.”
His children took this to heart, creating a tight-knit community. Repulsed as they were by the violence of their father, their upbringing no doubt influenced them for their family block was based on might. Timothy recalls being in a pub in Pewsey years ago and seeing a member of his family get punched. Immediately he stood up to help. He remembers clearly 30 other members of his family also standing up.
“I didn’t even know they were there,” Timothy explains… “You cannot leave. You have to help your family. That’s what my grandfather instilled in our family.”
It is impossible to miss the irony of a man who abused his family leaving behind such a legacy of mutual protection.
Today this violence has largely dissipated. A dispersing family is more linked through Facebook than pub fights. Those Henry George left behind have learnt to season their dark stories with humour, chuckling over the time they painted their brother’s bottom green so Henry would not notice his trousers had ripped.
Nanette giggles as she remembers what her cheeky late husband used to say: “They had so many children, because they made up all of their rows by having babies.”
Evidently, with 22 children, it was never a very permanent solution.
Still, a certain pride remains, to be part of such a large family descended from a war hero. Looking upon the famous photo of Henry in the First World War triggers many personal responses from his extensive family:
Crikey, talk about strong genes
We are very proud to call him our Grandad x
That explains a lot :(
The Britten family are absolutely convinced that the man in the rescue shot from The Battle of the Somme, the starting point of this story, is their family member. Yet they are not alone. Over thirty possible identifications have been suggested to the Imperial War Museum for this one still. All of these families have been convinced that the man in the photo is the spitting image of their deceased relative.
Peter Smither from the Imperial War Museum explains the draw of claiming the photograph as one’s own: "There is obvious appeal in an image of warfare suggesting an act of strength, courage and initiative which is nonetheless unambiguously devoted to an attempt to save life, not to the taking of it."
The photo is likely to forever be a mystery. There is not enough surviving information about the image to either prove or disprove nearly any claim to it. For the Britten family the hero is Henry George Britten, and it is obvious why they may need this artefact to counter other darker remnants of their past. Yet the photo not only harbours many conflicting stories about Henry; his tale is just one of the many that begin by looking upon this unknown soldier.
Beyond ‘Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes’
Thinking about the 1950s immediately conjures up an image of a stay-at-home mother in a frilly apron holding baked goods. She may be simply happy or harried, but she is the oppressed housewife nonetheless. Is this really the full story?
Elise Britten 24 November 2016
(Image from Newsweek.)
Popular books about the 1950s, such as Virginia Nicholson’s Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes, tell us a familiar story where ‘for a generation of women—and men—marriage and home were the twin pinnacles of aspiration.’ After the drastic upheaval of the Second World War, focussing on families and gender roles was a clear attempt to return to ‘normalcy.’ Keeping a perfect home and hearth was no easy task, Nicholson recounts how her mother ‘exclusively shopped, cooked, cleaned, mended, scrubbed, laundered and baby-minded with very little help’ and without any of the modern labour-saving devices we take for granted now. Nicholson’s book is also full of accounts of the extreme gender inequality of the 1950s. Liz Jones recalled being advised by a suitor that he could not marry her unless she toned down what he perceived to be an excessive social life: “I was so besotted with him I just gave up doing all the things I liked.”
There was a lot of pressure on women to remain within the home in the 1950s, with the burgeoning field of popular psychology arguing that children were damaged by disrupted care from their mothers. Family sitcoms dominated early television. In the 1956 Father Knows Best episode ‘Betty, Girl Engineer,’ the teenage daughter signs up for work experience as a surveyor. She is strongly discouraged by her parents and faces outright hostility on the placement. By the end of the episode, she changes into a girly dress in response to a love interest’s complaint: ‘if the nice pretty girls are going to be out there in the dust too who are the guys going to come home to?’ The episode is a thinly-veiled moral lesson, aimed at curbing young female ambition.
The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, and the emerging study of gender history, sought to free this oppressed housewife. Historian Gerda Lerner argues that “to be without history is to be trapped in a present where oppressive social relations appear natural and inevitable.” As such, studying gender roles of the past can be used to argue how they can be changed in the present. Famous feminists in the 1960s and 70s heavily used the image of the housewife for this purpose. Germaine Greer, in her landmark 1970 book The Female Eunuch, argued fervently that 1950s women were “the most oppressed class of life-contracted unpaid workers, for whom slaves is not too melodramatic a description.’
The domesticity of the 1950s is often seen as a return to tradition after the temporary disruption of war. However long-term marriage and birth rates increased dramatically beyond the usual expected post-war surge and the age women were married dropped by three to four years. Although we may not think of it now, this trend was not lost on activists of the 1960s. Betty Friedan’s influential book The Feminine Mystique focussed on how women of the era ‘learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights—the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for.’ Many women identified with these books and felt relieved to realise that they were not alone in their discontent. Yet is this narrative really the complete story for all women of the 1950s?
Despite nostalgia for ‘simpler’ times when mothers didn’t have to work, this was never the case for everyone. Lorraine G., a working class African American woman, dismissed The Feminine Mystique as about “white women [who] had the luxury of being bored with their middle class, full-time homemaker role, a role that most working women would cherish.” The number of women working actually increased during the 1950s. In America in 1950, 28.3 percent of women with children between six and 17 years old worked, increasing to 39.8 percent by the end of the decade. Despite early television being dominated by domestic dramas, other popular media did show that women valued themselves as more than just wives and mothers. Historian Joanne Meyerowitz sampled 489 articles about women in popular women’s magazines and found that 60 percent of them celebrated individual achievement, particularly unusual talents and careers.
Women also had a strong influence on the political landscape of the 1950s, with President Eisenhower particularly targeting women in his campaigns, such as the 1956 television advertisement ‘Women Voters.’ Females were key supporters of Eisenhower, with 61 percent supporting him, compared with 55 percent of men. Walter Davenport argued in Collier’s Weekly in 1956 that ‘nowadays it's often the woman of the house who keeps her tired businessman posted on campaign issues.’
The housewife label itself, was sometimes used as a political identity. Australian housewives’ associations campaigned for issues that affected them specifically, such as free kindergartens and nurseries. We would also be negligent to forget that the ‘era of the housewife’ was simultaneously the heyday of the civil rights movement with many female leaders, such as Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates.
While the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s rejected the role of housewife whole-heartedly, contemporary feminism has focused on a more nuanced debate about personal choice and balancing conflicting ideals of work, family and personal development. The use of 1950s idealism and aesthetics has surged in domestic blogs and nostalgic television. Historian Anna Hunt argues that this is an ‘idealisation that relies on its status as fantasy.’ However, is this not problematic when women still disproportionately face the burden of housework and child-rearing today? Holly, the president of the youngest branch of the Women’s Institute, does not see it this way, speaking to The Guardian Holly explained that she feels empowered by being a ‘domestic goddess’: “it's got nothing to do with being married, […] it can be seen as quite subversive because you're doing it as a single woman.”
According to 2013 ABS statistics, 41 percent of Australian children under 14 still have stay-at-home mothers. Of those who are employed, 63 percent of mothers work part-time. It seems that the 1950s housewife may be less distant than some would like to believe. How we think of her can have more to do with our own view of the present, than our understanding of the past.
Books such as Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes are still valuable works to read. They let us hear the voices of many women of the 1950s. However we should keep in mind that they can never speak for all women.
(Image from Amazon.)
Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s, by Virginia Nicholson, published by Random House, is available from $6.50 on Amazon.
See also the full academic version.
A Miracle Baby
July 2016
On the 25th of July 1978, just a couple of minutes before midnight, a little girl was born. She looked like any other British baby. Her normal weight, blue eyes and blond hair did not reflect how special she was. Yet the police officers lining the corridor outside her ward told a different story. A frenzy of reporters surrounded Oldham General Hospital, hoping to catch a glimpse of what the world was calling the first ever “test-tube baby.
Considering how normalised the procedure has become, it is striking that it was just 38 years ago that Louise Joy Brown became the first child to be born through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). Lesley and John Brown had been trying to conceive for ten years—a decade of heartbreak in which they floated from one doctor to another, hoping for a miracle. When being referred to Dr Patrick Steptoe and Dr Robert Edwards, who pioneered this method of conception, the Browns were warned that their chances were “one in a million.”
Steptoe and Edwards had been experimenting since 1966 and had made about 80 attempts at IVF, none of which produced a foetus that survived for more than a few weeks. There was no guarantee that Lesley Brown’s experience would be any different. The doctors followed their usual procedure of extracting an egg from Lesley and mixing it with John’s sperm, before incubating the egg while it began to divide. However, they placed the fertilised egg back into Lesley’s uterus just two and a half days later, rather than the four or five they had previously waited.
As the months passed and Lesley continued to have a pregnancy without complications, the case began to attract global interest. Experts, religious figures and the media all began to debate the implications of this ground-breaking procedure. The world waited with baited breath to see if the baby would be born healthy and without birth defects. Journalists became so desperate for a scoop that one rang the hospital a few days before Lesley was due to give birth with a false bomb scare.
When Louise was born and declared to be a “normal baby,” the world largely celebrated the miracle that scientific endeavour had facilitated. Yet intervening in the process of human conception unsurprisingly aroused some passionate opinions and fears. Obstetrician Sir John Stallworthy declared that IVF babies might cause “the worst problems since the invention of nuclear weapons.” Religious groups protested against “playing God,” while others feared women being exploited as “baby-farms” or that fascist eugenics may re-emerge. Many did not approve of the technology which could enable gay couples to have children. Lesley Brown was sent some horrible hate mail, including a broken vial, with a plastic foetus and fake blood-splattered letters. Yet she also received kind letters from women all over the world, who shared the struggle of infertility and were inspired by her story of hope.
Over time many of the concerns about IVF have been mitigated, as adverse effects have failed to materialise and equality movements have increased the rights of LGBT people. Today, it is believed close to six million babies have been born using IVF, thanks to the extraordinary dedication of medical professionals such as Dr Steptoe and Dr Edwards and the bravery of women like Lesley Brown.
See also Napalm Girl in creative non-fiction and The Night of a Thousand Lights in historical fiction.