Shell Shocked
Tens of thousands of British soldiers returned from the First World War with shell shock, testing their loved ones and the medical establishment as never before, says Jacqueline Wadsworth
Jacqueline Wadsworth explores how veterans and their families coped with life following the First World War
One summer day in 1921, 27-year-old Leslie Hancock rode to some woods near his Leicestershire home, parked his motorcycle in a lane and walked over to an old, flooded slate quarry. Sitting on an overhanging rock, he tied a large piece of lead around his neck. Then he jumped.
It took three days for the body to be found, embedded in mud deep below the water. When an inquest was held, Hancock’s father described his son as lovable – as a man who loved to serve others. But he was mentally fragile. During the First World War he was invalided home with shell shock, said Mr Hancock, and recently he had worried that his son was losing his mind.
The coroner’s verdict was that Leslie Hancock “committed suicide during temporary insanity, while suffering from neurasthenia [a nervous condition] brought on by shell shock”.
It was a harrowing story, but sadly one that was not uncommon during the 1920s. For while ordinary people put the war behind them and moved on with their lives, men like Leslie Hancock remained grounded in the past, their minds blighted by the horrors they had experienced.
During 1914–1918 the British Army dealt with 80,000 cases of shell shock – which today is known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – and by the end of the conflict an estimated 20,000 were still suffering from it. “Nervous wrecks” is how the Aberdeen Daily Journal described them in an editorial of August 1922. “Many thousands of them have died, but many thousands more are still, unhappily for themselves, physically alive in a mental blankness that is worse than death.”
Battlefield trauma had been known about since the time of the ancient Greeks but it wasn’t formally recognised until the First World War, when the huge number of soldiers affected couldn’t be ignored.
Terrible Ordeal
Deafening artillery bombardment, fear of imminent death, horrific scenes as fellow soldiers were blown to bits… all would have contributed to mental breakdown. Accounts by veterans describing how shell shock affected their comrades can be found on the website of the Imperial War Museum (IWM). William Collins of the Royal Army Medical Corps said, “I saw them when their nerves had broken and given way. I mean, they were just laying, gibbering idiots”, while a stretcher-bearer named James Brady reported, “I saw a strange object sitting on a boulder at the entrance to the marquee. He was caked with the brown mud or
clay from head to feet and he was silent and he wasn’t moving… he was dumb with shock and he couldn’t speak to me.”
The term ‘shell shock’ came into common use after Charles Myers, an English psychologist, used it in a paper on the subject published in 1915. Initially it was thought that the condition was caused by physical injury to the nerves, but as the war progressed it became apparent that many suffered mental breakdown despite never having been near explosions. As a result, experts began examining psychological factors too.
Symptoms varied hugely. Some men were completely disabled by mutism and paralysis; others went blind or deaf. Some developed stutters and tics, or experienced nightmares, depression and disorientation. Others were overwhelmed by anxiety.
During the war military authorities had often been reluctant to acknowledge shell shock, accusing those who broke down of malingering or cowardice. But as doctors sought to understand what caused the condition, a more enlightened attitude began to develop at home. Whereas once sufferers may have found themselves consigned to lunatic asylums, such places were now a last resort – to be used only if nowhere else could be found.
Hospitals specialising in the treatment of shell shock were set up, the best-known of which was Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. It was here that Dr WHR Rivers – inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis – encouraged men to talk about what they had been through. Patients famously included the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen who, encouraged by his doctor, wrote his two most celebrated poems there, Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem for Doomed Youth. Treatments for shell shock were as many and varied as the symptoms themselves, ranging from hypnotism to occupational therapy, and from cutting-edge electrotherapy to good oldfashioned music which helped restore speech. However, not everyone could be healed. Three years after the war had ended, some 65,000 men were still receiving disability pensions because of shell shock so disabling that it prevented them resuming normal life.
It was the wives who often carried the burden at home
‘Mothers had to steel themselves when sons returned home mentally broken’
– just as they had shouldered responsibility for their families during the war – and many a marriage must have come under strain. In a poignant recollection recorded for the IWM, shell shock victim Thomas Olive recalled: “I used to have little breakdowns now and then and my wife used to be very frightened. It more or less used to happen at night, when I was in bed. I used to spring up off the bed... it used to frighten her. My daughter, incidentally, is terribly nervous, she’s terribly nervous. My wife says it’s all my fault. Well I had shell shock…
I got blown up, you see, and it affected my whole system.”
Fear For The Future
Mothers, too, had to steel themselves when sons returned home mentally broken. A letter in Bristol Archives was written by Margaret Watson-Williams whose son, Guthrie, was admitted to Craiglockhart in 1917. She journeyed up to Scotland to bring him home, and her fear for the future is palpable in the words she wrote to her daughter: “When I arrived he could talk but only with an awful stutter. He is still like that, quite jolly but looks awful, years older and so white with an awful hunted look… We leave here at 9am, and reach Bristol at 8.11, awful journey, I dread it as he is very knocked over.”
Elsewhere in Bristol, Ellen Brake had watched her son Ernest march off to war in 1914, only
to see him return as dependent as a child, suffering from shell shock from which he would not recover (see box, page 72).
The sad plight of men like these brought gloom to a country already weighed down by unemployment, strikes, and cuts in public spending that were brought in to curb inflation. Petty crime, too, was rife, and a scroll through the British Newspaper Archive website ( britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) reveals just how often shell shock was blamed for changing respectable men into petty criminals (or worse): thieves, vagrants – even bigamists.
However, not everyone was convinced. In 1924 a Glasgow court sheriff presided over the case of a 26-year-old man accused of stealing £17 from a Salvation Army hostel. “It was thought the accused’s turning to crime was caused by shell shock,” the court was told. But the sheriff believed otherwise. “In passing sentence of six months, with hard labour, Sheriff Blair said he had never discovered that shell shock made a man a thief,” reported the Dundee Courier.
Some court cases were more disturbing. In November 1919 Joseph Hutty stood in the dock at Liverpool Assizes accused of murdering nurse Alice Jones with a revolver after she ended their relationship. “I could not stop firing,” he admitted through tears.
Hutty had met Jones while being treated for shell shock in hospital. He had already collapsed twice during the trial. The jury took pity on him when returning their verdict: “Guilty… but with the strong recommendation to mercy on the ground that he had suffered from an acute form of shell shock.” The judge disagreed, and sentenced him to death.
Days before his execution Hutty won a last-minute reprieve, and his sentence was commuted to life with penal servitude. However, in January 1922 he hanged himself at Maidenhead Prison.
British society had to cope with the effects of shell shock for years after the fighting ended. Then, just as the mental scars were beginning to heal, another global conflict claimed a new generation.
But during these sombre times, some found comfort in the words of a doctor who had served at the Western Front in the First World War. In the book A Physician in France (1919), which is available for free from the Internet Archive at bit.ly/phys-france, Major-General Sir Wilmot Herringham wrote: “The real wonder is not that so many men gave way to fear, but that the great majority did not… The circumstances of war are far more awful than they ever were before.”
‘Shell shock was blamed for turning men into criminals’