S
we have seen, Neville Bradshaw broke off his
studies at Birmingham University in December 1915 to enlist in
the Worcestershire Regiment. He had not been a cadet at school
but had recently been having some part-time military training at
the university.
Unfortunately we know very few details about subsequent events. It is unfortunate that records of army officers in the Great War, their postings, their promotions and other details were destroyed in the 1941 Blitz and are lost forever. Some records of the Worcesters are held elsewhere but have not yet been examined, but are unlikely to contain details that would shed much light on NRB's activities.
It is clear from references in various publications that he was marked out as officer material and rose rapidly through the ranks and was commissioned by late 1916. Where he was posted and what he did is not known with any accuracy but his son believes that he was initially stationed at Gosport but was soon sent to Dublin to help put down the Irish troubles. He was then posted to France. It is said that on the rail journey to Dover he smoked his first pipe, presumably to bolster his courage and soothe his nerves for the ordeal ahead. Unfortunately this first encounter with the wicked weed and the ensuing choppy channel crossing was such a dreadful experience he thought that nothing in France could possibly be as bad. At the peak of his nausea he probably felt that death would be a happy release. One can imagine his state on arrival.
The Worcesters had already suffered considerable losses in the early battles of the war and were destined to lose many more. It seems that Neville Bradshaw was not deemed to be fit enough to be in the front-line because his eyesight was poor. Without strong glasses he was almost helpless. For that reason he spent his years in France behind the lines in various support units. In a record of one part of his army service written after the war he described his service as Acting Captain and Adjutant of the 74th Labour Group, Labour Corps. In another he says that at one stage he was Acting Lieut-Col. though the detail is not given. His substantive rank at the end of the war was Captain.
So it would seem that although he was in France for about two years and may well have been close to the front line and have seen the conditions under which men were living and dying, he himself was not a front-line officer - through no fault of his own. Nevertheless he would have seen the carnage and horror of the slaughter of young men of his age and this must have stayed with him for many years and have been in his mind twenty-five years later when he saw his pupils going off to die in yet another war.
There were other experiences in the army that played a major part in defining his outlook and future life. Until he left school he had lived in a world defined by his family, his home in the Black Country and his school. He would have interacted only with boys of his own social class. His only knowledge of the privileged world of the public schools, Oxbridge, and the middle-classes would have been by reading stories in magazines. As we saw in the Memorial to Mr Dickinson, he was once taken on a trip to Oxford as a schoolboy and it made a deep impression.
Now he had been pitched into the army as a junior officer and would have come into direct contact with young men of his own age from the public schools. This would have come, I suspect, as a considerable culture shock. The officers' mess would have been full of such men and would have been suffused with public school attitudes. Neville Bradshaw would have been impressed with the self-confidence, the manners and speech of his fellow young officers and would no doubt have heard much about happenings at public schools. He must have reflected on the privileged lifestyle of these men and compared it with his own struggles in a harsher world.
Bearing in mind his family background and the social status of the children at his first school it is certain that he originally spoke with a Black Country accent (not to be confused with the Birmingham accent) in much the same way as so many of the boys at LCGS spoke with Sussex accents. His grammar school may have tempered this to some degree but it would have been the officers' mess that would have had the biggest effect. Surrounded by public school men with their distinctive accents he would quickly have lost his native speech and taken his first step up the class ladder. In those days accent was the most distinctive indicator of class origin.
Some of his fellow officers would have been ex-public school boys who had been at Oxbridge before they enlisted and he would have learned something about life at these universities. He would no doubt have compared accounts of life at Oxbridge with life as a non-resident student at Birmingham. For an ambitious fellow like Neville it would have been obvious that these public school Oxbridge men had all the advantages that middle-class status could confer. Whether he was resentful we cannot tell but as the war progressed this must have given him much food for thought as to how he could advance his career and social standing when the war finished.
By a cruel irony, the war that was destroying the lives of some many young men on the front line was working to Neville Bradshaw's advantage. Literally thousands of young public school boys of his age were killed at the front line. These young officers were leading their platoons over the top into German machine-gun fire in senseless attempts to break through enemy lines. A substantial proportion of the country's finest young men of that generation were wiped out.
The future impact of this on the intake of new students at the major universities after the war was recognised at an early stage. So many public school boys destined for Oxbridge were already dead and more were being killed every day. So the colleges realised that they would need to broaden their horizons and recruit the post-war intake from a wider social mix. This would not have gone unnoticed by Neville Bradshaw and others in his situation. At some point he must have sent an application to Merton College stating his academic and war record, and been accepted.
How Neville Bradshaw financed his three years at Merton College is something of a mystery. He did not win an open scholarship at Merton and it is unlikely there were any State Scholarships or Local Education Authority awards available at that time - though we would be happy to be corrected on that point. In the absence of any other information one can only conclude that his fees and living expenses were financed by his family or some other charitable organisation. Perhaps his grandparents had recently passed on and the Bradshaws had had a legacy.
So in 1919 he went up to Oxford for his first term. He would have been highly relieved and thankful to have survived the war and to have the opportunity to better his position in life by making a transition across class and professional boundaries. He would have realised that this was a golden opportunity not to be squandered.