A Rawlings Job and the Bantam Battalions

Elaine Pritchard has made a surprise discovery, thanks to an audience member at a talk she gave. She has also been investigating whether Vale, at just 4ft 11ins tall, should have been conscripted into the British Army under the rules that applied between 1916-1918.

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I love the opportunity to talk about Vale Rawlings. It’s always a thrill to see people surprised and engaged by a powerful story that they are usually hearing for the first time. But I also enjoy guest speaker slots because I invariably learn something from the audience too.

That certainly happened at a talk I gave recently. I had taken along pictures, documents and the postcards we have had reprinted, with the permission of Vale’s descendants, to raise money for our community interest company.

One of these postcards shows a policeman reluctant to intervene in a vicious scrap between a couple of villains. He is saying to the people trying to push him forward:

“Not ------ likely. This ain’t no Rawlings job." This postcard shows how well-known Vale's court case was in 1914. The joke depends on people knowing that ‘a Rawlings job’ meant an undersized man who was no physical match for a big policeman. Vale was 4ft 11ins and frail while the police inspector he was accused of striking in his controversial court case that year was well-built and six feet tall. It was David versus Goliath, as a trade union colleague of Vale’s commented at the time.

A member of the audience bought a set of postcards from me after my talk and told me that when she’d worked in the criminal justice system, she’d heard people use the phrase ’a Rawlings job’ and didn’t know where it came from. Now she realised it must have come from Vale’s story. I shall do more investigating.

'Don't push, flea'

I enjoy finding newspaper accounts of Vale’s court case and the protest meetings that were held around the Midlands in its wake. One of my favourite reports describes the scene on Sunday June 28, 1914, when colleagues and supporters of Vale Rawlings gathered outside Derby Gaol where he was imprisoned at the time. They sang songs, accompanied by a brass band, and gave speeches. One of those who spoke was Burton man Austin Smith, a close friend of Vale’s and a fellow campaigner for the Workers’ Union. He told the crowd that the allegation against Vale reminded him of the elephant going into the ark, turning round to the flea and saying ‘Don’t push’.

Vale’s spell in Derby Gaol in 1914 was not his only appearance behind bars. In 1917 he spent time on remand in Wormwood Scrubs before he was sentenced to two years with hard labour in Dartmoor Prison as a conscientious objector. It seemed strange to me that Vale was ever called up for Army service in World War One, given that he was 4ft 11ins and suffered from a congenital heart defect, So, I’ve been looking at the minimum requirements for men to enlist as soldiers in the war. At the start of the conflict, men had to be 5 ft 8 ins to secure a place in the Army. By October 1914, they had to be 5 ft 5ins and a month later it was down to 5 ft 3ins.

Yet it appears that this reduction in standards was not all down to desperation to enlist more soldiers. In the early months of the war, men and boys full of enthusiasm and patriotic fervour were falling over each other to do their duty for King and Country. Being rejected by the Army would have been a major blow to their pride and it would have caused public outrage at a time when the country needed to be united more than ever before.

The rise of the Bantams

My good friend, ex-journalism colleague and now World War One author Vic Piuk pointed me in the direction of an excellent BBC article about the Bantam Battalions set up by the British Army for able-bodied men who were between 5ft and 5ft 3ins in height.

As the war dragged on and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed and wounded, volunteers alone could not keep pace with the Army’s demands. In July 1915 the minimum height restriction dropped again to 5ft 2ins and soon conscription was introduced compelling men to serve.

Some of the later Bantams, the BBC article tells us, were undernourished and/or underage. It was easy for boys to pretend to be small men and recruiters were happy to turn a blind eye. It’s heartbreaking to read that in the last week of 1916, 26 Bantams in the 19th Durhams were sentenced to death for cowardice or leaving their posts. How many of these, I wonder, were underage boys who had not known the horror that awaited them after they enlisted? Eventually, three were executed and the others had their sentences commuted.

Vic also told me about Australian Frank Clifford Wittman, 4ft 4ins tall. The Western Front Association calls him the shortest man to ever enlist in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and serve in the British Army.

He was six inches too short to even join a Bantam Battalion, but when the AIF refused to allow him to go on overseas service, he obtained a discharge and paid his own passage to England to join the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1917.

Fighting for working class families

But while all this shows that men shorter than 5ft 3ins were allowed to join up, it does not explain why a man of 4ft 11ins would be conscripted against his will and in the face of apparently compelling medical evidence.

The image below, used by kind permission of the Vale Rawlings family, shows Vale on the extreme left in a line-up of local councillors, businesspeople and their families and clearly shows his height in comparison to others. The picture is believed to have been taken in association with the 1929 visit of Edward, Prince of Wales, to Burton-on-Trent and the Branston Artificial Silk Factory.

By 1917, when Vale received his call-up papers, the British Army needed more men. But I do have to wonder if Vale’s activities before and during the war singled him out for special treatment.

He spent the early years of the war fighting with dogged determination to ensure that working class families in Burton got the military allowances to which they were entitled once the breadwinners of the family went to fight. The money wives needed to pay their rent and feed their children at a time of massive inflation could be late or incomplete due to clerical errors and Vale was among those fighting to get them paid in full and on time.

He also helped men who were seeking exemptions from conscription, on moral, religious or hardship grounds, to make their cases before Burton’s appeal tribunals. Absolute exemptions were rarely if ever granted, but Vale was a regular presence at these tribunals. His face and his name would have been painfully familiar to those sitting in judgement at these tribunals because of the infamous 1914 court case. His small stature must have served as a constant reminder of the publicity his case had generated, which did not cast Burton magistrates or the town's police force in the most flattering light.

Hero to zero?

Conscientious objectors were vilified as traitors and cowards by many of the public and it's likely that many Burtonians who had cheered Vale's release from prison in 1914 denounced him when he fought for his own exemption in 1917.

We learn through his statements to appeal tribunals, still in the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Archive Service, that Vale was raising money for injured servicemen, specifically those at St Dunstan’s Hostel for blinded soldiers and sailors. These statements give Vale's moral objections to killing and – as he saw it - helping others to kill through working with the non-combatant corps. He makes passing reference to his height and his health. He mentions that the doctor who had treated his heart condition since childhood declared him ‘no earthly use to the Army whatever’.

Vale lost every military tribunal he fought. After being forcibly enlisted he refused to obey orders, was court-martialled and finally sentenced to two years’ hard labour. His case was raised again in Parliament by MPs Charles Duncan and Philip Snowden who had been contacted by Vale’s sister Edith and his wife Ellen as both felt he would die in Dartmoor Prison. He was released as a result of his deteriorating health later in the year.

Interestingly, his 1917 discharge papers give his height as 5ft 4ins.