This film comes from a small collection donated to the YFA by the York & Lancaster Regimental Museum, based in Rotherham.  No background information came with the film so we can only speculate who filmed it.  It was possibly one of the early filmmakers in Sheffield at that time, such as the Frank Mottershaw’s Sheffield Photo Company, who had ceased making fictional films in 1909, but continued making local documentary type films (although there is no record of these films).  The film came...

This film comes from a small collection donated to the YFA by the York & Lancaster Regimental Museum, based in Rotherham.  No background information came with the film so we can only speculate who filmed it.  It was possibly one of the early filmmakers in Sheffield at that time, such as the Frank Mottershaw’s Sheffield Photo Company, who had ceased making fictional films in 1909, but continued making local documentary type films (although there is no record of these films).  The film came from the York & Lancaster Regimental Collection, who also made a film of their Regiment in 1922, and so they may have made the film themselves. The collection also includes another march of soldiers through the streets of Sheffield around the time of the Second World War.

Surprisingly, there are in fact very few films of soldiers on parade through the streets of Britain during the First World War (unlike the Second).  A search of the catalogues of the BFI, the IWM and all the regional film archives turns up only a handful (out of 2,000 plus); in fact Yorkshire, with just three, has the most!  Not surprisingly the newsreels of the time, such as Pathe Animated Gazette, Gaumont and Topical News tend to focus on what is happening on the front or have good news stories from home.  In the first year or two of the war soldiers often paraded through cities, presumably to boost morale and encourage more to join up before subscription was introduced.  It is possible that there more film around, hidden by the remaining deficiencies of the catalogues and the existing search methods.

The film that the YFA has from around that time period was used in a recent project to mark the 100th anniversary of the First World War titled, Filmed and not Forgotten, which includes similar footage, and which can be viewed as an exhibition on the Google Cultural Institute.

The Hallamshire Battalion was a territorial infantry volunteer regiment formed after a meeting in Sheffield Town Hall in 1859, with headquarters in Eyre Street.  Their website provides a useful history of the Regiment from its early days, reproduced with additions on the website dedicated to a former member from York, John Crook (References).   In 188I they became part of the York and Lancaster Regiment and were retitled the Hallamshire Rifles as 1st (Hallamshire) Volunteer Battalion.   In 1909 they become the 4th (Hallamshire) Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment Territorial Force, no longer volunteers.

Watching the soldiers march past, many of whom would lose their lives in the war, it is difficult not to reflect on the causes of a war that famously broke out after the assassination of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian military conspirators on 28 July, 1914.  Shortly after there was the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia, Germany invaded Belgium, Luxembourg and France, following which Russia declared war on Germany and Britain doing likewise on 4th August.   There had been a long protracted build up to war, with a convoluted series of treaties, which many saw as indications of an impending conflict.  The causes of the war remain hotly disputed, but there is large agreement that struggle over colonial territory and markets were at the heart of it. 

There are many intriguing, and possibly still vital, ways of seeing “the Great War”, and what followed it into the Second World War and beyond.  One such is that of Modris Ekstein, in his book Rites of Spring, which argues that the conflict represented a cultural clash between a German spirit of transformation, as evidenced in Modernism, and a British spirit of stability.  It might be objected that it was in the economic interests of each to promote these respective values; but the clash between a seemingly never ending ‘progress’ and a desire to re-establish older values has been a persistent theme since 1914.

Whatever the disputes over what caused the war though, there can be no doubt as to the fate of many of those seen marching through the streets of Sheffield.  With war in the air, the 4th Battalion was ordered home after a week of their annual camp at Whitby in July 1914. 

At the time of this film, November 3rd, the first Battle of Ypres in Flanders was already well underway.  But it wasn’t until April 1915 that the battalion moved to France to fight in the second battle of Ypres when Germany was the first to use chemical warfare, using chlorine as a poison gas.  They remained there, in and out of the trenches, for six months, losing 94 killed and 401 injured.  This was followed by being subjected to the first use of mustard gas at Nieuport in of July 1917 with some 288 casualties.   They suffered further heavy casualties in the German spring offensive of 1918, and again in the final Allied Advance to Victory, the Hallamshires lost a further 360 men when ordered on 13 October to reach the supposedly undefended line of the River Selle, but which was in fact heavily defended. 

It is unclear what the total losses of the regiment were, or how many were injured, but it must have been a very sizeable number of the 1,000 or so soldiers (at a rough calculation) that march past in the 3 minutes on the film.  Au Revoir would hardly have been an appropriate farewell for these.  Many, indeed, were buried in unmarked graves, with some 80,000 British casualties whose remains have never been found (with a similar figure for German soldiers): represented by the tomb of The Unknown Warrior buried in Westminster Abbey, on 11 November 1920.  In 1924 the 4th Battalion were renamed as simply The Hallamshire Battalion.

References

John Bourne, ‘The British Working Man in Arms’, in Hugh Cecil and Peter Liddle, Facing Armageddon: The First World War Experienced, Pen & Sword, 1996.

Modris Ekstein, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Bantam Books, 1989.

‘Sources for the Study of World War One’, Sheffield Libraries Archives and Information, 2003

John Crook, the York and Lancasters

The Hallamshire Battalion, The York & Lancaster Regiment (TA)

Further information can be found at https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/filmed-and-not-forgotten/gROAZXoq