Sunday 10 November 2013

Silent Night in Headingley...

Photo by Sally Bavage
... which, for the denizens of Headingley, a quiet Friday night would be rare.  However, this was a Silent Night of an altogether different category.  A combination of original music and lyrics, with a script The Narrator performed whilst familiar images of World War 1 played across the screen and in our mind’s eyes too.  The stark images, however, segued into the portrait pictures of the many writers of letters used to create the script and the lyrics.

“I wake from a dream into a dream
Half in heaven, Half in hell.”
Thus the wonderful voice of Julie Lloyd begins to tell us the stories of life away from Blighty from the perspectives of the lonely soldier and lonely partner at home.  With the rest of the group iFive – Charlie Burman, Dave Bowie, Steve Jones and Tony Hall, who created this splendid performance as well as partnering Julie in the songs – The Narrator Les Staves, drafted in for the occasion, unfolded the story bit by bit.

The night before Christmas 1914 had no shelling, no noise; it was indeed silent. Men slept despite the biting cold and the clogging mud.  Then the refrains of ‘Stille Nacht or ‘Silent Night’ came to them from the German trenches and … well, we know about the football game with a tin of bully beef in No Man’s Land, the exchange of small tokens (buttons, cigarettes), the proud display of family photographs, the handshakes, the sharing of drink, the camaraderie of those who had volunteered to fight an enemy and found themselves looking at mirror images.  They even buried their dead together.

The Narrator told us poignantly of letters between lovers, amazement at the turn of events; complemented by a range of songs that echoed the loneliness, longing and loss of the men whose Christmas dinner treat was bacon dip.  It couldn’t last, of course.  Friendship was again transformed by word of command into hate.  But the performance was done with a light touch and never became maudlin or miserable, much more a testament to the humanity of man.


The packed audience at the New Headingley Club sat in their own silence, rapt in a familiar  story written by real people, real words, real emotion.  “A really moving event”, “so very professional” and “thank you so much for this opportunity” were just some of the many words of praise for this premiere performance for LitFest.  It will be performed again; catch it if you can.

Sally Bavage

Wednesday 30 October 2013

Beckett's Park Hospital - the performance

Richard Wilcocks writes:
Five students from the Performing Arts course at Leeds Metropolitan University have now stepped forward to participate in the 'Wartime Hospital' performance, which will take place in March next year. It will be based on the research which has been done into the Beckett's Park Hospital in the First World War, the buildings for which were finished in 1913, just before it was taken over by the army medical services the following year. It is wonderful that Leeds Met students are taking part so enthusiastically in this project, for the simple reason that LMU uses the same site. 

Some of the true stories that have been collected from descendants of patients, nurses and members of the RAMC (Royal Army Medical Corps) are extraordinary. They are not all about victims of poison gas, amputations and shell shock, though there's plenty of that of course. This drawing was done by a patient for the VAD nurse in charge of his ward in 1917. It comes from her autograph book.

See www.headingleyhospital.org

Thursday 24 October 2013

Our next Between the Lines event


Young Local Poets. Very Young Local Poets

Working with three local primary schools to encourage ten year-olds to appreciate and write their own poetry has been something that Headingley LitFest has been working on since our main programme in March 2013.  Using the skills of acclaimed local writer James Nash, and working with some friends from Older Wiser Local Seniors (OWLS), James has worked in Weetwood, Shire Oak and Spring Bank schools over the past few months. 

Using a range of stimulus material, he has managed to get around 100 local youngsters to find their inner poet.  As one young girl from Weetwood said, “They were fabulous sessions, and I enjoyed every second!  And a young lad also commented, “I particularly liked the way we got inspiration from the book and the two pictures.  I think that the event would be better if it was longer but the rest was brilliant!

James himself comments, “Working at Shire Oak school, and writing poetry based on sporting and physical activity, showed me that with the great support  of staff and OWLS, and fitting into current curriculum projects of a school, we can enhance the writing abilities of all pupils and make writing relevant and fun for everybody.”

After funding from the Arts Council enabled us to develop our poetry work with local primary schools, it is now thanks to support from local councillors through the Area Management committee, Leeds City Council community funding and Wade’s charity, we have funding to be able to continue this work over the coming months and beyond our 2014 LitFest, themed ‘Surviving’.  Watch this space.

Friday 27 September 2013

Robert Barnard 1936 - 2013

Winner of the Crime Writers' Association 2003 Cartier Diamond Dagger Award
A staunch friend of the LitFest, Robert Barnard, died last week in the Grove Court Nursing Home on Cardigan Road. He spoke on the Brontës and on crime fiction for us, very entertainingly and without using notes, and apologised for not being able to make it to any of the events during the last two or three years because of his rapidly deteriorating health. He was a professor, a scholar, a great opera lover and an award-winning author as well as a personal friend, who will be greatly missed. (Richard Wilcocks)

Guardian Obituary

Yorkshire Post Obituary


Telegraph Obituary

New York Times Obituary

Independent Obituary

Black Mask Obituary

Crime writer Martin Edwards remembers

Thursday 12 September 2013

Wounded by Emily Mayhew

Richard Wilcocks writes

Wounded is a homage to the heroic men and women who cared for the wounded in the Great War, described by her as “an undiscovered, somehow silenced group”. Using a remarkable collection of letters and diaries, and rooted in wide reading and original research, Emily Mayhew has produced a startlingly vivid and engaging account of the way the wounded (almost every other British soldier could expect to become a casualty) were rescued, treated and cared for by bearers, Regimental Medical Officers, surgeons, nurses, VADs, orderlies, chaplains, ambulance drivers and others during a conflagration which was sparked by a symbolic act of terrorism in Sarajevo, rolled on like a mad machine for four years, and which led to the crumbling away of empires and the destruction of countless lives. A modern conflict.


The military medical services hardly knew what had hit them at first, just like the British Expeditionary Force itself, which was nearly wiped out at Mons and the Marne in 1914. Veteran nurses and doctors were at the front at that time, possibly with Boer War experience, but dealing with ghastly shrapnel wounds on a large scale was very different to dealing with relatively straightforward bullet holes on the warm, dry South African veldt. In Flanders, the fields tended to be wet and heavily manured, and most of the tetanus and gas gangrene cases which resulted from just slight scratches as well as mangled limbs were destined to die horribly.  The up-to-date cylindro-conical bullets were fast, hit hard and took tiny fragments of dirty uniform and other contaminants deep into bodies. The medics learned as fast as they could, and coped with almost impossible situations over and over again, a fact made clear through a collection of true stories about the ones who were there.

Take the story of Regimental Medical Officer William Kelsey Fry of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, who, after heavy losses taking a small town from the Germans, went out onto the battlefield himself to retrieve casualties.  “Time after time he cleaned the mud off his glasses, braced himself and joined the fighting soldiers, oblivious to all but the cries of the man he was trying to find in the middle of the chaos. When he found him, Kelsey Fry hoisted him up onto his back and ran as fast as he could. During one of these trips, he was shot in both legs. The wounds weren’t serious, but he was lucky to make it back to the medical post with his patient.” It was his duty to look after the water supply as well, making sure it was fresh, and supervised the digging of latrines. His reputation for unflappability and efficiency caused the upper ranks of the Royal Army Medical Corps to offer him a promotion away from the dirt and gunfire of the front line, but he preferred to stay. During a battle in 1916 he had so little time that a proper medical post could not be set up, so with his bearers he dug a hole as deep as time and the enemy would allow and put a tarpaulin over it, “It filled with casualties almost immediately, like rain collecting in a puddle. As in every aid post on the line, they worked so hard that they stopped hearing the shellfire and didn’t notice as it crept closer and closer…” Siegfried Sassoon, who knew him well, was one of many who was shocked when he heard of his death.

Or the story of surgeon Norman Pritchard, who found himself responsible for  a ward of recently captured German prisoners. “When Pritchard first set eyes on them, in their special ward, he almost turned round and walked out again. The POWs were in a dreadful state. Most had been hiding for days, lying in abandoned trenches and shell holes, hoping that their side would retake the ground. They were fetid with infections and starved, many of them on the brink of death. It was difficult to know where to start. Pritchard had no German, and so a kind, firm tone would have to do…”

Or the story of Nurse Winifred Kenyon, who “never considered going anywhere else but a casualty clearing station. She wanted to be as close to the war as possible, to share in the adventure and excitement and to make her contribution”… “Perhaps the most unexpected thing Kenyon learned inside the ward tents was how much was left up to the nurses themselves. There were several wards that they ran without doctors, and they taught their new skills to the new arrivals like Kenyon. ‘Resus’ was one of them. The men were too weak to raise their heads, let alone be operated on, and it was the nurses who brought them back from the brink. Kenyon learned to administer the magic mixtures of hot saline, brandy and coffee, and that you could never have too many hot water bottles. Sometimes you put ten or twelve around a man close to death from hypothermia and gradually watched him come back to life. Men came in grey and went back pink.”

Or the story of Nurse Morgan, whose home was the No 3 Ambulance Train, 300 yards long, with a supposed maximum capacity of 440 and equipped with iron stands and straps where cots or stretchers were hung. “During the Somme offensive the pushload of 440 or more became the norm, as No 3 struggled to keep up. Carefully planned entraining and detraining routines simply went to pieces in the face of the sheer numbers of casualties at the railheads, and within a week of the Somme the whole system of transit simply broke down”… “Morgan tried to calm her patients, while all around them they could hear the moaning of men in agony, the train an island in a sea of human desolation.”

Most of the material in Wounded is new, from previously unused archival sources, and it is presented not in a cold, detached way, but with genuine warmth and engagement, because Mayhew has the skills of a novelist, the ability to empathise, to stand in the shoes of those who were so committed to saving lives a century ago. The reader is invited to engage with the senses, to smell the gas still clinging to the uniforms of those arriving at London’s Victoria Station on ambulance trains, to recoil from appalling injuries, to gasp at the madness of it all.

Published by Bodley Head     ISBN 9781847922618

UPDATE - website for published book Stories from the War Hospital is at www.firstworldwarhospital.co.uk

* Emily Mayhew will be a guest of Headingley LitFest on Tuesday 18 March 2014