The NUT

and
The Great War 1914-18
In the NUTs post war publication, War Record 1914-
1919 printed in 1920, 186 members of the NUT North-
ern Region are noted as being killed during hostilities.
Of those who were killed in the First World War some 77
NUT members were enlisted into the Durham Light In-
fantry and a further 30 were members of the Northum-
berland Fusiliers (together these amounted to some 58%
of all those members of the Northern Region who died).
Almost a third of those Northern Region members who
died would have been members of what we regard today
as The Durham Division of the NUT. Viewed from 1914,
the number would have been larger. At that time the
associations of Gateshead, Houghton le Spring, South
Shields and Sunderland were all part of County
Durham.
It appears that no NUT members fought with either the
Tyneside Irish or Scottish Brigades, and it may well be
that these regiments were seen as more the province of
miners and other working class groups with Irish or
Scottish affiliations. In terms of where the teachers are
buried or commemorated, 20 are listed on the Thiepval
Memorial to those whose bodies were never found and
identified at The Somme; 21 are remembered in Ypres at
The Menin Gate, and 6 at the Tyne Cot Cemetery. The
Unions own records provide details of a further 12
members of the Northern Region who were known to
have been killed or died in the war, but so far the loca-
tions and dates of their deaths have proved elusive.
On the 22nd April 1915 at Ypres, the Germans made
their attack. Ypres represented the last remaining major
town held by the Allies in Belgium. That day marked
one of the first extensive and intense uses of chemical
weapons in modern warfare. Thousands of chlorine can-
isters exploded in the French, Algerian and British trenches. Prior to that date the Germans had used
gastear gas, not chlorine- on both the Eastern and Western fronts but only to the extent that it was an
irritant. The French had also made some use of gas grenades. Moral indignation of the effects of the gas
did not prevent the British Generals from demanding that they too were equipped with the gas to use
against the Germans.
By the end of June 1915, the defence of Ypres had cost the British some 60,000 deaths. Some 17 NUT
members of the DLI were killed there between April and June. They were part of the 50
th
Northumbrian
Division which fought at this, the Second Battle of Ypres. Three NUT members in the Northumberland
Fusiliers were killed on the first day of the Somme. Most of the deaths of teachers in the Fusiliers oc-
curred in 1917-1918.
Another member whose final resting place is not currently known to us is the only woman member of the
NUT to die in war service, Miss K E Ogg. Kate Ogg was the daughter of a brass finisher who himself
was born in Walker. She was born in 1887 and baptized at Bath Lane congregational Church in the cen-
tre of Newcastle. The family moved to Heaton but by 1911 they had moved to Elswick living on Havelock
Street. Kate was teaching and still living at home with her family when war broke out. She taught at
Wingrove County School in Newcastle and she joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD). She was
one of four women members who dies in service. In Kates case in was nursing military casualties during
the Spanish flu outbreak of 1919 rather than enemy action that caused her death.
Some 17,500 women teachers were recruited to replace those men teachers who were missing from
their schools due to volunteering or, from 1916, conscription. For some women this meant a return to
teaching. Prior to the First World War almost all local authority employers and indeed the Civil Ser-
vice required women to leave the profession upon marriage. As male teachers volunteered, the au-
thorities were prepared to allow married women to return to the classroom for the remainder of the
war, though the marriage ban itself remained imposed on women teachers and BBC employees till
1944 and to Civil Servants and Local Government Workers until the mid 1950s. Other single women
members left the classroom to work in munitions factories where wages were better than in school.
The 1920 NUT Report states that around 200 women NUT members joined the VAD. If this is cor-
rect then a significant number - just over 20% came from the Northern Region. The largest number
came from theUnions Barrow Association closely followed by those from the Sunderland and New-
castle Associations. Many other women members who stayed in school additionally supported the
war effort by undertaking farm work, fruit picking and clerical work during school closure periods.
Others collected for and purchased a variety of equipment including ambulance cars for the wound-
ed, invalid chairs, spinal carriages and other medical goods.
The international trades union bodies had repeatedly passed motions against war in the years prior
to 1914, but following the outbreak of hostilities, the TUC took a line of supporting the war effort and
it promoted a culture of avoiding strife at work. In general teachers, no different from those in other
strands of British society, vol-
unteered. A Board of Trade
Report noted that of the 54,000
male teachers in the labour
force nationally 34% had enlist-
ed by July 1916. Most teachers
were NCOs and privates. Little
detailed evidence is at present
available, but it is clear that
some, including a Northumber-
land headteacher, joined the
ranks as privates.
School headteachers found
themselves in a particularly
difficult position during the
war years. The authorities, lo-
cal communities and parents
expected their schools to stay
open despite limitations on
teaching space, shortages of
qualified teachers and, for
schools within range of enemy
aircraft, frequent air-raid drills
and occasional bombings. Many
headteachers fell within the
age range for military service,
creating personal dilemma and
sometimes community tension
over where their real duty lay.
Some were prevented by their
Governors and Local Tribunals
from enlisting, whilst others
found themselves appealing to
the same tribunals to spare in-
dividual teachers who were
needed to staff the curriculum.
Coming to terms with the death and maiming of Old Boys, reading lists of casualties in school as-
semblies, and trying to make sense of the conflict as it unravelled to the remaining pupils was part
of the headteacher's role in the war.
After the War, in 1919, the NUT reported that members had contributed to various Union support-
ed relief funds. Contributions from members via the NUT to the Prince of Wales Relief fund yielded
16,470. Further sums were collected to support local relief funds. They totalled something short of
100,000. At the outbreak of the War a significant focus was put on the fact that the German attack
was on Belgium a neutral country. Reports came in of German barbarity against the civilian pop-
ulation. The NUT collected funds to support Belgian teachers some in Belgium and others who
fled to England as refugees. In excess of 2,600 was raised around the country (equivalent in 2014 to
some 252,000) and a further 2,000 was raised by London teachers. 10,000 sets of garments were
collected and sent to help Belgian and Serbian children. The NUT also supported a delegation of
Russian teachers which had been in England prior to the start of the war. These teachers were pre-
vented from returning home via the traditional route through France. Funds were used to support
their travel from London to Newcastle and then on to Bergen as a way of returning to their home-
lands.
The NUT created a further fund for the widows of those teachers who were killed and for those
teachers who were disabled during the war. The fund did not just support the families of NUT mem-
bers but also those of any teacher employed in a state aided school. The fund was raised by mem-
bers subscribing and by late 1916, it had reached its target of 100,000 the equivalent of some 9.7
million in 2014. The NUT noted after the war that this sum had been raised alongside members con-
tinuing to make contributions to the Benevolent and Orphan Fund (the modern TBF).
Grants, sometimes monthly, were given to widows and aged mothers; one off grants were used to pay
for sanatorium fees, artificial limbs or mechanical appliances to assist movement.
Following the Armistice in 1918 and the collection of information prior to publication in 1919, the
NUT was not able to list all of the NUT primary teachers who had joined up or to find a final figure
for those who had served. It is estimated that the total number of teachers known to have served
(NUT and non union teachers) was around 23,000. (the Board of Trades figures may also have in-
cluded those working in non state settings.)

NUT members and Durham teachers James and Percy Cook:
(from material supplied by Durham County Record Office)
The Durham County Hall War Memorial lists the names of 179 County Council employees who died
during the First World War. In total some 122 men died between 1914-18.
Many of the men listed on the memorial were teachers. In World War One the 1,134 employees who
joined up for war service included 823 teachers and 311 employees from Health, Surveyors, Clerks,
Accountants and other County Council departments.
One such teacher was James Edward Cook, born on 12 January 1891 at Thornley in East Durham.
He was baptised on 29 January at home (a possible indication that he was a sickly baby), and the
baptism is recorded in the Thornley Wesleyan Methodist Circuit baptism register. He was the sec-
ond son of John George Cook and his wife, Ann (or Annie) Sarah Cook. John kept a greengrocers and
fruit shop at Hartlepool Street, Thornley, and had done so from the early 1880s.
James had attended a Pupil Teacher Training Centre at Henry Smith School in Hartlepool and had
worked as a Pupil Teacher at Wheatley Hill Council School.
In the summer of 1909 he applied to Bede College in Durham City, with references from the head
teacher in Hartlepool and the vicar of Thornley, Rev. Ernest Biggs.
Given his Methodist baptism and his close ties with the Wesleyan Church in Thornley, it is perhaps
surprising that he applied to Bede College, a Church of England Mens Training College.
Although he passed the qualifying examination he did not attend Bede College, but instead went to
Sunderland Training College in September 1909 for a two-year training course.
James appears in the 1911 Census as a Student (Teaching Profession), since at the time of the cen-
sus he was still at Sunderland College. However, later in that year he was appointed as a Certifi-
cated Assistant at Thornley Council School (Boys Department), and the school log book notes that he
commenced his duties on 14 August one of three fully-trained teachers in a staff of five. His time at
Thornley School appears to have been uneventful, in that his name only appears in the log book
once, noting an absence through illness on 2 and 3 March 1914.
James was later described as a young man who had obtained in a remarkable degree the good
word of everyone with whom he came in contact. He was deeply involved with the Thornley Wesley-
an Methodist Society and read papers to the debating society which were all marked by earnestness
and high intelligence.
On 10 September 1914, one month after the outbreak of war, the log book notes that James left
school for War Service, following one of the other Certificated Assistants, Alfred Turner, who had
joined-up 17 August. Permission for him to enlist was formally given by the Education Committee on
30 September.
He joined B Company of the 1/7th battalion of the Durham Light Infantry, which, after seven
months training, landed in France on 19 April 1915. Within a week the battalion was in action at
the second battle of Ypres, which began when poison gas was released into the Allied lines north of
Ypres, the first time that gas had been used in the war. The effects of the gas and the strength of the
German attack forced a British withdrawal to a shorter defensive line. James was killed, aged 24,
five weeks after landing in France, on 26 May 1915 (Whit Monday), having written what became his
last letter to his parents on the day before.
According to the Durham Advertiser report (which refers to him as John) his parents had not been
informed officially of his death by the end of July, but received the news in a letter from a soldier in
a Lancashire regiment who had found James body on 3 July and had buried him. The soldier said
he had found James watch, diary and a photograph, but apparently had not signed the letter. A me-
morial service was held at Thornley Wesleyan Methodist Church on 18 July.
James had written to the boys at the school while he was at the front, thanking them for the ciga-
rettes which they had sent, and said that although his thoughts were often with the school, he pre-
ferred to be out in France than walking about Thornley in civilian clothes We are all happy here
because we know this is the place where we ought to be.
James Cook has no known burial place, but is commemorated on the Menin Gate memorial at Ieper
(Ypres), with 54,000 other British soldiers whose graves are unknown. The Menin Gate memorial
was designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield and is one of four memorials to the missing of Flanders - its
site was chosen because the original gate was known to thousands of British soldiers who marched
through it on their way to the Ypres Salient front.
James younger brother, Percy, was also an NUT member. Percy attended Henry Smith School in
Hartlepool for four years and he too was a Student Teacher at Wheatley Hill Council School. He left
Wheatley Hill in 1913 to begin a teacher training course at Westminster College. The college had
been founded in Horseferry Road, London, in 1851 to train teachers for Methodist schools (and
moved to Oxford in 1959). On the completion of his training in 1915 he returned to County Durham
and to a post as a Certificated Assistant teacher at Thornley Council School (Boys Department), the
same school in which his older brother, James, had taught until joining-up in September 1914.
Percys obituary in the Durham Advertiser notes that he intentionally shortened his course at West-
minster College since he had been anxious to enlist (and in his service records his occupation is giv-
en as student, and his religion as C of E). Percy Cooks arrival at the school is not mentioned in the
school log book, nor is his departure on war service. However he joined-up at Durham on 3 April
1915 (although formal permission to enlist from the Education Committee is only recorded in Sep-
tember 1915). In fact, there is only one mention of Percy Cook in the school log book a note, on 22
August 1916, that news had been received of his death on 27 July.
Percy was posted to the 18th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry, the Durham Pals. 18 DLI
was one of the Kitcheners Army battalions, raised from the enthusiastic flood of volunteers in the
first months of the war, and it was unique in that the expenses for raising it were paid for entirely
by the County of Durham. The battalion was formed and trained at Cocken Hall, and became part of
the 93rd Infantry Brigade and the 31st Division.

Percy joined the battalion on 8 April 1916 following its redeployment from Egypt to France. He
trained as a bomber (responsible for clearing enemy trenches and dugouts after an attack) and was
initially attached to the 3rd Entrenching Battalion (from which drafts were sent to line battalions).
Percy was killed on 27 July 1916, age 21, only four months after landing in France. As part of the
Battle of the Somme, 18 DLI were holding the front line at Neuve Chapelle and were subject to inten-
sive artillery and trench mortar fire. In a German raid on the night of 27/28 July they suffered 79
casualties, including Percy.
His parents received the news in a letter from Rev. C.R. Chappell, chaplain to the 18th DLI, I buried
him in the military cemetery just near the lines where his grave will be looked after and a cross
erected. Later on, I hope to tell you the exact spot where he rests. He is buried in St. Vaast Post
Cemetery Richebourg-L'avoue, north-east of Bethune.
Official confirmation of Percys death did not arrive until early September, and a special service was
held at Thornley Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in memory of Percy Cook on 5 November 1916.

In the spring of 2014 members of the NUTs Northern Region retraced the steps of some of those
members who had travelled to Flanders and who had not returned. They visited the site at Ypres of
the monument to the 50th Northumberland Division which had included members such as James
Cook and his comrades in the Durham Light Infantry. They also visited Passchendaele, where a
number of NUT members in the Northumberland Fusiliers had died in 1917. The teachers laid a
wreath at the Menin Gate in commemoration of all of those teachers from the Northern Region who
had lost their lives in the war. The visit was organised as apart of a conference on Peace Education
which also included Queens University Belfast and the International Trust for Peace Education.
Whilst Professor Lawrence Kirkpatrick of Queens University talked of changing patterns leading to
something more of a common history in Ireland, the NUT expressed its concerns over the dogmatic
approach taken by the current Secretary of State for Education branding all of those who denied
his interpretation of the First World War. He alleged that those who opposed him of peddling
misunderstandings, and misrepresentations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this
country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as pat-
riotism, honour and courage. History teachers might well disagree and consider his remarks as
something which might have sounded familiar and almost sectarian to some teachers in Irish schools
in Ulster in the 1930s. They were yet another of his gross attacks on the profession today.





Below are a couple of photographs, the first of which is of a grave in The Tyne Cot Cemetery at Ypres.
This belongs not to an NUT member but to a soldier whose parents chose what was a rare inscription
for the times, but one which has a lasting resonance today. To the right is the monument at the Na-
tional Arboretum in Staffordshire to those 306 British servicemen who were executed for cowardice
or desertion The statue is modelled on a 17 year old member of the Northumberland Fusiliers, Her-
bert Burden. He lied to join up at the age of 16 two years below the minimum age for volunteering.
Ten months later he was court martialled for desertion after leaving his post to comfort a recently-
bereaved friend stationed nearby, having seen many other friends killed at the Battle of Bellwarde
Ridge.
The officers considering Pte Burden's case heard his unit had been issued orders to make for the front
just before he went missing. By the time he faced the firing squad on 21 July 1915, Pte Burden was
17 - still too young to even officially be in his regiment.



















The poster on the following page was circulating throughout County Durham in the months after the
Second Battle of Ypres. It acknowledges the deaths of the Northumbrian Division and the gaps in
numbers this had caused. It uses this information to put pressure on others to join up. This is a tactic
that we might recognise today: death in war must be justified; others must join up to complete the
task; the deaths of those who have gone before must not be in vain, and so the cycle continues until
people decide that they are no longer prepared to accept these premises.
The years 1916-17 saw the widespread desertion of Italian troops fighting Austro Hungary and of
Russian troops from the Eastern Front culminating in the revolution of 1917; 1918 saw mutinies in
Germany most notably at Kiel and revolutionary risings elsewhere in Berlin, Bavaria, Dusseldorf,
Stuttgart, Leipzig and Cologne. In France there were also large scale mutinies during 1917. 50 years
later the war in Vietnam ceased to be sustainable amongst the American public and the US effective-
ly exited the war in South East Asia.
Material for teachers of primary secondary and post 16 students on Peace Education and opposition
to the First World War is available from the Peace Museum in Bradford. Further details available at
http://choicesthenandnow.co.uk/

NATIONAL UNION OF TEACHERS NORTHERN REGION
3 McMillan Close Saltwell Business Park Gateshead NE9 5BF
Telephone 0191 482 7700 Fax 0191 482 7720
Email northern@nut.org.uk
www.teachers.org.uk