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That Was the Year That Was – 1916

Monarch – George V

Prime Minister – H. H. Asquith (Coalition) (until 5 December), David Lloyd George (Coalition) (starting 6 December)

The Battle of the Somme: 141 days of horror

Battle of the Somme: More than one million soldiers die; with 57,470 British Empire casualties on the first day, 19,240 of them killed, the British Army’s bloodiest day; the Accrington Pals battalion is effectively wiped out in the first few minutes. The immediate result is tactically inconclusive.

The Battle of the Somme, fought in northern France, was one of the bloodiest of World War One. For five months the British and French armies fought the Germans in a brutal battle of attrition on a 15-mile front.

The aims of the battle were to relieve the French Army fighting at Verdun and to weaken the German Army. However, the Allies were unable to break through German lines. In total, there were over one million dead and wounded on all sides.

The Allies bombarded German trenches for seven days and then sent 100,000 men over the top to attack the German lines.

The day was a disaster for the British. The Germans weathered the artillery fire in deep trenches and came up fighting. As the British soldiers advanced, they were mown down by machine gun and rifle fire. In total, 19,240 British soldiers lost their lives. It was the bloodiest day in the history of the British army. However, the French had more success and inflicted big losses on German troops. In spite of heavy British losses, Douglas Haig, the British general, agreed to continue the attack.

The home towns which provided the volunteers for General Kitchener’s “Pal’s battalions” were hit hardest. The 11th East Lancashire battalion was known as the Accrington Pals. Of the 720 men who went into action on 1 July, 584 became casualties. Although they were still behind the war effort, people at home wore black arm bands to commemorate those who had lost their lives.

UK Conscription: the First World War

Your Country Needs You

Within a year of Great Britain declaring war on Germany in August 1914, it had become obvious that it was not possible to continue fighting by relying on voluntary recruits.

Lord Kitchener’s campaign – promoted by his famous "Your Country Needs You" poster – had encouraged over one million men to enlist by January 1915. But this was not enough to keep pace with mounting casualties.

Conscription introduced

The government saw no alternative but to increase numbers by conscription – compulsory active service. Parliament was deeply divided but recognised that because of the imminent collapse of the morale of the French army, immediate action was essential.

In January 1916 the Military Service Act was passed. This imposed conscription on all single men aged between 18 and 41, but exempted the medically unfit, clergymen, teachers and certain classes of industrial worker.

Conscientious objectors – men who objected to fighting on moral grounds– were also exempted, and were in most cases given civilian jobs or non-fighting roles at the front.

A second Act passed in May 1916 extended conscription to married men.

Conscription was not applied to Ireland because of the 1916 Easter Rising, although in fact many Irishmen volunteered to fight.

Effects of conscription

Conscription was not popular and in April 1916 over 200,000 demonstrated against it in Trafalgar Square. Although many men failed to respond to the call-up, in the first year 1.1 million enlisted.

In 1918 during the last months of the war, the Military Service (No. 2) Act raised the age limit to 51.

Conscription was extended until 1920 to enable the army to deal with continuing trouble spots in the Empire and parts of Europe.

During the whole of the war conscription had raised some 2.5 million men.

munitions factory explosion at Uplees near Faversham, Kent, kills 108 men

That morning, Major Aston Cooper-Key, His Majesty’s Inspector of Explosives, travelled to Kent to make an inspection of the privately owned factory at Uplees, which was then working flat-out in the wake of the shell crisis of 1915. The complex, so the inspector noted, was in “a very congested state”, the Ministry of Munitions having sent supplies “much in excess of the requirements of the works”. Of special concern were the quantities of TNT and ammonium nitrate – these were combined at the plant to produce amatol, for use in shells and bombs – packed into magazines or, when the buildings were full, left out in the open and protected with tarpaulins of green canvas. Still, such congestion was to be expected, and at least the Explosives Loading Company, which ran the plant, was not shirking out here on the marshes. Cooper-Key declared himself satisfied with the general condition of the factory, and left to file his report.

It seems the major had not noticed, in the course of his inspection, the pile of empty TNT bags tucked against the north wall of building no 833: a brick-and-timber structure filled with 150 tonnes of high explosive. In the early hours of Sunday 2 April, soldiers and civilian guards made their usual rounds of darkened sheds and silent machinery, and came across an incipient fire between the TNT store and a nearby boiler house. It had been caused by sparks from a chimney fitted with an inadequate arrester. The fire was put out, and around seven o’clock the working day began. We must assume the unseen arc and fall of another spark occurred late in the morning, in bright sunshine, and this time it reached the pile of bags, impregnated with TNT dust. It was shortly after noon when the foreman of a local contractor, having spotted the first flames, put his head in at the door of the canteen and said: “You are sitting here enjoying yourselves, but if you don’t look out you will have one of your buildings alight.”

The manager George Evetts had left the factory at noon for his home in Uplees, and was sitting down to his midday meal when the news reached him. He started back at once along the lane to the main gate, and called for the fire brigade to be sent. At building 833, 30 or 40 men were engaged with buckets and chemical extinguishers. Their efforts were having little or no effect. At half past 12 a fire engine arrived, but the nearest hydrant was 700 yards away; the firemen would have to wait for an additional hose.

In the meantime the most urgent task was to remove as much explosive as possible from 833 and surrounding buildings, and to drench with buckets what could not be moved. Sparks had begun to fall on another storehouse; a soldier, Private Wiltshire, clambered on to the roof to extinguish them, flinging himself flat to avoid heat and smoke from 833. A young firefighter, Steve Epps, recalled: “The stuff inside the shed was already alight … One old chap – he could see I was a bit nervy – he said: ‘That won’t go off unless it’s detonated, old chap.’ I said: ‘Right, I feel safe enough.’” Some of the workers present later reported they had noticed now some change in the nature and appearance of the fire; Evetts, standing 40 yards away, thought he saw a puff of dense black smoke as he turned in the direction of 833. Epps was closer to the heart of things: “We’d just got the water on it, and up she went.”

The explosion at Uplees, which killed 108 people and injured many more, was not the first nor the last such disaster at a munitions factory during the war. Nor was it even a unique occurrence that year on the outskirts of Faversham, though it was certainly the most deadly. (In the autumn of 1916, four women were killed at an adjacent factory. Only men had been present on 2 April – the “canary girls” had Sundays off.) Accounts of the day’s events, and the aftermath, survive in Cooper-Key’s report to the Home Office, and in oral histories recorded decades later. In writing about the explosion and its radiance or ramification in the land and in memory, I have tried to stay close to this minute-by-minute testimony. But I have had to reckon also with the half-mythic and evanescent nature of such an event; at times the story has seemed as porous as the landscape in which it happened.

The description of explosions is really a matter of before and after, it proving so difficult to inhabit the appalling moment itself, though there are notable exceptions, such as Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford. There exists, for example, a minor literature regarding gunpowder and munitions factories, with accounts of such places appearing in Victorian magazines such as Dickens’s Household Words. During the first world war, Arthur Conan Doyle and Rebecca West were invited to report on the Ministry of Munitions factory (unnamed in their articles) at Gretna. West, who is keen to note the diligence, grace and bravery of the women workers, also remarks that such a secret place, devoted to nothing but death, “has the disordered and fantastic quality of a dream”. In the case of Kent, the most resonant treatment of the county’s centuries-long romance with the chemistry of death came later, and in fiction. In Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker, with its demotic Joycean dialect, post-apocalyptic Kent is in thrall to the ghost of an awful energy once loosed upon the land: “that cleverness what made us crookit”.

In the aftermath of 2 April 1916, men plunged into drainage dykes to retrieve the dying and the dead; they threw timbers from ruined buildings across the sea of mud surrounding the crater, and pulled their comrades, or what was left of them, from the ooze. Some stood up within the circle of destruction to find they were naked and almost unharmed, but the men beside them blown to pieces. Others had died 100 yards away, victims of flying debris or the blast wave’s capriciousness.

Epps, blown into a dyke and half-buried under shattered timbers, was the only survivor of his group of seven firemen. Evetts also lived; deafened and with most of his clothes blown off, he climbed with another manager on to the roof of a burning magazine building, and soldiers passed them up buckets till the fire was out. In his report, Cooper-Key notes with absurd sobriety: “Their gallantry is much to be commended.” The number of dead was first put at 106. Most were buried in a mass grave at Faversham cemetery, the Archbishop of Canterbury presiding. A week later, another body was discovered in a ditch. An ambulance driver who had helped gather the dead returned home to the village of Doddington, lay awake all night, then rose on Monday morning and hanged himself.

The explosion had been heard on the French coast. Dinner tables shook on the outskirts of London, and plate-glass windows shattered on the seafronts of Essex. The cross was said to have fallen from the altar at St Peter’s church, Shoebury. From the seed of a small agitation of the air, here at the darkened edge of England, destruction and the news of destruction hurried over the flat land. If you walk this summer through the nature reserve surrounding the place where building 833 stood – nothing there but a shallow declivity of the ground – you will find the dykes are filled with weed, so they look almost solid. And if you crouch towards the water, clouds of pond skaters teem on the surface, which remains unmoved till you stand and cast a shadow on the ditch, causing the insects to panic, sending countless ripples through the water, speeding across the flat green plain.

English civilian ferry captain Charles Fryatt is executed at Bruges

Charles Fryatt: The man executed for ramming a U-Boat?

The name Charles Fryatt is memorialised from New Zealand to Canada. Yet he was tried, convicted and executed as a "terrorist". A century on, Captain Fryatt’s case is still debated by legal experts. But why would a merchant ship’s commander ever try ramming a U-boat?

"I don’t think he set out to be a hero," says Louise Gill. "I think he set out to look after his crew, his men and women, and trying to avoid capture."

Gill is the great-granddaughter of Fryatt who, in March 1915, attempted to ram a prowling German U-boat with his 1902-built passenger ferry, the Great Eastern Railway-owned SS Brussels.

Ordered to stop by submarine U-33 near the Maas lightvessel off the Dutch coast, Fryatt – born in Southampton and raised in Harwich – saw the German U-boat surface.

It was his third such encounter with a U-boat that month.

Believing it was being readied to torpedo his ship, Fryatt ordered full steam ahead and tried to ram the U-boat head on, forcing it to crash-dive. The SS Brussels managed to escape and Fryatt was awarded a gold watch by the Admiralty.

But 15 months later his ship was cornered by five German destroyers shortly after setting sail from the Hook of Holland. Fryatt, his crew and passengers were taken to an internment camp near Berlin.

Fryatt was then taken away to Bruges to stand trial on charges of being franc-tireur – a civilian engaged in hostile military activity.

His gold watch from the Admiralty was used as evidence against him and he was accused of sinking the German submarine – despite U-33 still being in active service.

The hearing, sentence and execution by firing squad all took place on the same day, 27 July.

Fryatt had earlier told his captors he had done his duty to protect his crew but, according to press reports at the time, was not allowed to speak at his trial.

His death was to have propaganda value for both sides, says Mark Baker, a Fryatt memorabilia collector who is organising an exhibition commemorating the centenary of his execution.

For the Germans, the execution of Fryatt was a case of justice served.

For the British, says Baker, Fryatt’s execution was both an outrage and a useful springboard for recruitment and swaying international opinion against Germany.

"In 1916," he says, "people were starting to become a bit war weary and recruitment had become conscription.

"His death came at the right time for the government which used the case of Fryatt to show how ghastly the ‘Hun’ were."

The name "Fryatt" was also written on shells fired at the Germans.

The Fryatt case was also seized upon by Irish nationalists who accused the British government of hypocrisy.

If the British government was outraged at the execution of a civilian committing an act of war, the nationalists argued, how could they condone such executions in Ireland?

Mr Baker, whose exhibition takes place at the Masonic Hall in Harwich (where Fryatt himself was once a member), said: "I find the story itself fascinating,

"Though sometimes the way it is told on websites is as if he was the only person who had ever rammed a U-boat.

"U-boat ramming was actually common practice following an instruction from the Admiralty that crews should attempt to ram U-boats.

"The objective, however, wasn’t to actually hit the U-boats," says Baker, "because merchant ships were usually fairly fragile.

"The actual objective was to make the submarines dive."

"It is still very, very controversial," said Baker. "It’s a case that has exercised legal minds ever since.

"Merchant mariners’ rights to defend themselves in open water is still very much a grey area."

World War One: Hereford theatre fire killed eight at fundraiser

During World War One there were thousands of appeals and fundraising events to support soldiers serving at the front. One such event at a theatre in Hereford ended in "a ghastly tragedy" when eight children died after their cotton wool costumes caught fire. It led to accusations a smoker had caused their deaths.

Like many English cities Hereford has close ties to its local regiment and the soldiers serving in it.

By 1916, the vast army of Kitchener volunteers were in France preparing for the Battle of The Somme, and most families knew someone serving at the front.

The two concerts at the Garrick Theatre in Hereford, in April 1916, were advertised in the Hereford Times as "a grand variety entertainment – for the benefit of the Herefords and Shropshires".

More than 40 children were involved in the amateur show. But, just as the first performance was coming to an end, fire broke out.

As the newspaper reported, "in the space of three minutes what had been a highly successful performance was transformed into a ghastly tragedy".

Thirteen children had just left the stage after performing what the reporter described as "an exceedingly pretty dance and snow scene", complete with paper snow.

Their white costumes, which so caught the reporter’s eye, were made of highly-flammable cotton wool.

"By some means yet unexplained, the cotton wool garments of one of them had become ignited and in an instant a dozen children were literally in flames," the paper reported.

"The little mites’ clothes blazed up in pillars of fire, defying control before they had been terribly burnt.

"Bright happy little youngsters, only a few minutes before in snow white costumes, were now charred and blacked, some beyond recognition."

In the auditorium, "the large audience rose en masse" and there was "an immediate rush for exits with anguished cries", their correspondent reported.

Parents who were backstage, including "Mrs Lilly Roden… in the garb of Britannia", tried to beat out the flames "with the utmost heroism".

A man from the audience jumped the orchestra pit to help and "without fear, fought the flames with his hands", the reporter observed.

Six of the 13 children died that night from their burns – another two later died in hospital.

An inquest was held against the backdrop of rumours in the city the fire had been caused by a smoker.

Faith Mailes, who organised the concert and was mother to one of those who died, had no doubt a smoker was to blame.

She told the inquest jury Ivy Illman, sister of one of the victims, told her "she had seen a man smoking who threw his match down".

"I should like to find the one who dropped the match," Mrs Mailes testified.

Theatre staff and other people backstage strenuously denied this.

Reginald Maddox, theatre manager, told the jury there were notices in the dressing rooms and on stage banning smoking.

Staff working backstage and an agent who was there on the night all denied smoking.

Mr Maddox also told the inquest he had no idea the children would be wearing cotton wool costumes – its use was banned in theatres because of the fire risk. Mrs Mailes confirmed she had not told Mr Maddox cotton wool was used, "not thinking it was necessary".

The inquest ruled the deaths of the children were accidental and there was no evidence of what started the fire.

The city came to a halt when the funeral service for five of the victims were held at Hereford Cathedral.

People lined Broad Street ten deep in places as one by one the funeral corteges, each with an escort of soldiers to act as pall bearers, passed.

The letters page of the paper was filled with calls for a lasting memorial to the children who died.

In September, a meeting at the town hall decided to raise "£500 with which to endow a cot in the Children’s Ward of Herefordshire General Hospital as a suitable memorial of the sad incident".

The appeal beat its target, raising just over £540 and the cot and a memorial plaque were unveiled at the general hospital in April 1917.

That hospital building and the Garrick are long gone, but the terrible fire that claimed the lives of eight girls is commemorated by a plaque on the wall of the car park that stands where the theatre once did.

daylight saving time introduced

The Daylight Saving Act of 1917 was enacted by the Dominion of Newfoundland to adopt daylight saving time (DST), thus making it one of the first jurisdictions in North America to do so, only a year after the United Kingdom on May 21, 1916. DST was not instituted in the United States until March 31, 1918.

While living in Paris in 1784, Benjamin Franklin wrote a satirical essay, in which he suggested that Parisians get up earlier in the morning. Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson in 1895. William Willett, a London building contractor, independently invented DST and pitched it to the British Parliament in 1907. In that same year Willett spoke with John Anderson, who was on a business trip in Britain, and explained to him the benefits of adopting DST and its economic benefits. Germany and its allies were the first European countries to adopt DST in 1916, followed quickly by the United Kingdom and many other western European countries, all in an effort to save fuel during the First World War.

Upon his return to Newfoundland, Anderson became a strong proponent of daylight saving time and three times introduced a bill to the Legislative Council for its adoption. The first two attempts, in 1909 and 1910, failed. In 1917, spurred on perhaps by the recent adoptions of DST in Europe, Anderson introduced a third bill which passed on June 17, 1917. The new law stated that at nine o’clock in the evening of the second Sunday in June clocks would be put ahead to ten o’clock and would not be turned back until the last Sunday in September. It is not clear exactly when clocks were put ahead in 1917, as the bill became law one week after DST was scheduled to take effect. In St. John’s DST was first applied on April 8, 1917, by virtue of a local ordinance. DST in Newfoundland came to be known as "Anderson’s Time", at least in the years immediately following its adoption.

Daylight-saving time remained a provincial jurisdiction in Newfoundland since 1949. In 1952, the timing was changed such that it began just after midnight of the last Sunday in April and ended at midnight of the last Sunday in September. In 1970, it was extended to the midnight of the last Sunday in October.

1916 UK news events

The British Admiralty invites bids for aircraft catapults for the first time, asking for electric, hydraulic, and compressed air catapults. It does not pursue electric or hydraulic types, but two compressed-air types are produced.

Spring – British officials order one million rounds of .303-caliber (7.7-mm) explosive and incendiary ammunition for use by aircraft against German airships. The ammunition will be issued to Royal Flying Corps home air defense squadrons during the summer.

On a single evening, 10 of the 16 Royal Flying Corps aircraft which take off to defend England against German air attack crash, killing three pilots. By May, RFC night flying skills will have improved to the point that 10 aircraft that take off on a single evening all land safely.

1 January – the Royal Army Medical Corps carries out the first successful blood transfusion using blood that has been stored and cooled.

9 January – World War I: Battle of Gallipoli: last British troops evacuated from Gallipoli, as the Ottoman Empire prevails over a joint British and French operation to capture Istanbul.

27 January – conscription introduced by the Military Service Act; applies to unmarried men aged 18–41 from 2 March and to married men in the same age bracket from April/May; it does not extend to Ireland.

1 February – night-long German Zeppelin raid on the West Midlands of England, claiming at least 35 lives; Tipton suffers the heaviest losses, with 14 fatalities.

1 March – transfer of the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth into its purpose-built premises is completed.

4 March – third war budget raises income tax to five shillings in the pound.

10 March – Sir Hubert Parry writes the choral setting of William Blake’s poem "And did those feet in ancient time", which becomes known as "Jerusalem" (first performed 28 March at the Queen’s Hall, London).

22 March – marriage of J. R. R. Tolkien and Edith Bratt at St. Mary Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Warwick. They will serve as the inspiration for the fictional characters Beren and Lúthien.

25 March – Military Medal instituted as a military decoration for personnel of the British Army and other services below commissioned rank, for bravery in battle on land.

1/2–5/6 April – nightly German Navy airship raids on England.

2 April – munitions factory explosion at Uplees near Faversham, Kent, kills 108 men.

7 April – Garrick Theatre fire, Hereford: 8 young girls appearing in an amateur benefit evening performance for soldiers are killed when their costumes catch fire.

9 April – The Libau sets sail from Germany with a cargo of 20,000 rifles to assist Irish republicans; Captain Karl Spindler changes the name of the vessel to the Aud to avoid British detection . 24–30 April – Easter Rising in Ireland: Members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood proclaim an Irish Republic and the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army occupy the General Post Office and other buildings in Dublin before surrendering to the British Army.

24 April–19 May – Voyage of the James Caird, an open boat journey from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands to South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean (800 nautical miles (1,500 km; 920 mi)) undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton and five companions to obtain rescue for the main body of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (left under command of Frank Wild) following the loss of its ship Endurance.

25 April – German battlecruisers and Zeppelins bombard Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth.

27 April – Gas attack at Hulluch in France: 47th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division, decimated in one of the most heavily concentrated gas attacks of the war.

29 April – Siege of Kut ends with the surrender of British forces to the Ottoman Empire at Kut-al-Amara on the Tigris in Basra Vilayet during the Mesopotamian campaign.

2 May – eight German Zeppelins raid the east coast of England.

16 May – the UK and France conclude the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement, which is to divide Arab areas of the Ottoman Empire, following the conclusion of the war, into French and British spheres of influence.

21 May – daylight saving time introduced.

31 May–1 June – Battle of Jutland between the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet in the North Sea, World War I’s only large-scale clash of battleships. The result is tactically inconclusive but British dominance of the North Sea is maintained. Prince Albert is present as an officer.

5 June – HMS Hampshire sinks having hit a mine off Orkney with Lord Kitchener aboard. 737 lives, including Kitchener, were lost.

12 June – Whit Monday bank holiday abandoned.

First day on the Somme opens

1 July–18 November – Battle of the Somme: More than one million soldiers die; with 57,470 British Empire casualties on the first day, 19,240 of them killed, the British Army’s bloodiest day; the Accrington Pals battalion is effectively wiped out in the first few minutes. The immediate result is tactically inconclusive.

25 July – North of Scotland Special Military Area declared, restricting access by non-residents to everywhere north of the Great Glen. Other areas so designated this year are the Isle of Sheppey (7 September), Newhaven (22 September), Harwich (27 September), Dover (6 October) and Spurn.

27 July – English civilian ferry captain Charles Fryatt is executed at Bruges after a German court-martial condemns him for attempting to ram a U-boat in 1915.

3 August – the musical comedy Chu Chin Chow, written, produced, directed and starring Oscar Asche, with music by Frederic Norton, premières at His Majesty’s Theatre in London. It will run for five years and a total of 2,238 performances (more than twice as many as any previous musical), a record that will stand for nearly forty years.

7 August – August bank holiday abandoned.

10 August – the official documentary propaganda film The Battle of the Somme is premièred in London. In the first six weeks of general release (from 20 August) 20 million people view it.

21–24 August – Low Moor Explosion: A series of explosions at a munitions factory in Bradford kills 40 people and injures over 100.

2 September – William Leefe-Robinson becomes the first pilot to shoot down a German airship over Britain.

15–22 September – Battle of Flers–Courcelette in France: British advance. The battle is significant for the first use of the tank in warfare. The Prime Minister’s son, Raymond Asquith, is killed in action.

24 September – following a bombing raid on east London, German Zeppelin LZ76 carrying military number L 33 makes a forced landing at Little Wigborough in Essex; its crew are the only armed enemy personnel to set foot in England during the War.

6 October – a British Army Order removes the requirement for soldiers to wear moustaches.

27 October – life-boat William and Emma from Salcombe Lifeboat Station capsizes on service off the south Devon coast with the loss of all 13 crew.

21 November – hospital ship HMHS Britannic, designed as the third Olympic-class ocean liner for White Star Line, sinks in the Kea Channel of the Aegean Sea after hitting a mine. 30 lives are lost and, at 48,158 gross register tons, she is the largest ship lost during the War.

28 November – first bombing of central London by a fixed-wing aircraft when a German LVG C.II biplane drops 6 bombs near Victoria station.

5 December – Asquith resigns; on 6 December Lloyd George is invited to succeed him as Prime Minister, which he does on 7 December.

11 December – Lloyd George establishes a War Cabinet; Lord Derby succeeds him as War Minister; Ministry of Labour formed.

22 December – the Sopwith Camel biplane fighter aircraft makes its maiden flight at Brooklands.

31 December – Douglas Haig promoted to Field marshal.

The Kent village of Hampton-on-Sea is abandoned due to coastal erosion. Hampton-on-Sea was a drowned and abandoned village in what is now the Hampton area of Herne Bay, Kent. It grew from a tiny fishing hamlet in 1864 at the hands of an oyster fishery company, was developed from 1879 by land agents, abandoned in 1916 and finally drowned due to coastal erosion by 1921.

Mary Hare School is founded as Dene Hollow School for the Deaf, originally in Burgess Hill.

Gustav Holst completes composition of his orchestral suite The Planets, Opus 32.

White-tailed sea eagle last breeds in the UK, on Skye (prior to reintroduction).

The 1915–16 season was the first season of special wartime football in England during the First World War.

Britain proclaims Gilbert & Ellice Islands as a colony in Pacific.

Posted by brizzle born and bred on 2019-03-16 12:39:31

Tagged: , That Was the Year That Was – 1916 , 1916 UK news headlines , British , UK , Britain , United Kingdom

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