Remembrance for Jericho

Liz Wade is speaking at Virtual My Jericho on Wednesday November 11 at 5.30 pm....

——————————————————————————————————————————————————

I’ve been asked to talk about some of the men who joined up, and whose names are recorded on the St Margaret’s War Memorial, but I thought I’d start with looking at the world these men came from.

From the middle of the 19th century, country people began to move into Oxford to take up new and better-paid jobs in the gas works, the railways, Oxford University Press, Lucy’s Iron Works. St Ebbes, St Thomas’s, and of course Jericho, all flourished.

The streets of Jericho were of course well-established by the 1860s, but that’s when the building of the raw red-brick suburb of North Oxford started. This meant the arrival of a whole new suburban class – people retiring from the Indian army and civil service, academic families, people attracted to life in a university city, people who wanted to reinvent themselves in an anonymous new suburb.

For Jericho people this provided new jobs – for morning boys, cooks, domestic servants, mostly women – there was the advantage over colleges that their employment didn’t close down during vacations.

The pre-war years of the early 20th century saw even more development:

Life was opening up as Jericho residents had more money in their pockets: a landmark was the opening of the cinema on Walton St in March 2013. It adjoined the Jericho House pub but it promised something quite different – a place where for 4d you could saunter past the uniformed commissionaire, buy expensive chocolates, wonder at the musical soda fountain, entertain your best girl in a lounge decked with long red curtains and potted palms, and then enjoy an 8-film programme – best of all for some would be the musical interlude for community singing with words put up on the screen.

So in August 2014, when war was announced, young men from Jericho didn’t hold back. The cinema had given them a glimpse of a wider, more exciting world. With their mates, they queued at the recruitment centre set up in the wild beast museum in St Giles – still there but sadly without the stuffed animals – to take the King’s shilling.

It was going to be over by Christmas, and unless they got out to Flanders quickly, they’d miss out on the action – and of course it was an escape from everyday life.