CHAPTER XIV
BRITISH SUCCESS AT ROYSTON
Arrests of alleged spies were reported from Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, and other large towns. Most of the prisoners were, however, able to prove themselves naturalised British subjects; but several men in Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield were detained pending investigation and examination of correspondence found at their homes. In Manchester, where there are always a number of Germans, it is known that many slipped away on Sunday night after the publication of the news of the invasion. Several houses in Eccles and Patricroft, outside Manchester, a house in Brown Street in the City itself, one in Gough Street, Birmingham, and another in Sandon Place, Sheffield, were all searched, and from the reports received by Scotland Yard it was believed that certain important correspondence had been seized, correspondence which had betrayed a widespread system of German espionage in this country. Details were wanting, as the police authorities withheld the truth, for fear, it was supposed, of increasing the public alarm. At the house in Sheffield, where lived a young German who had come to England ostensibly as pupil at one of the large steelworks, an accumulation of newspaper cuttings was discovered, together with a quantity of topographical information concerning the country over which the enemy was now advancing from Goole.
In most of the larger Midland towns notices had been issued by the mayors deprecating hostility towards residents of foreign origin, and stating that all suspicious cases were already receiving the attention of the police.
In Stafford the boot factories were idle, and thousands of despairing men were lounging about in Greengate, Eastgate, and other thoroughfares. In the Potteries all work was at a standstill. At Stoke-on-Trent, at Hanley, at Burslem, Tunstall, and Congleton all was chaos. Minton’s, Copeland’s, Doulton’s, and Brown Westhead’s were closed, and thousands upon thousands were already wanting bread. The silk-thread industry at Leek was ruined, so was the silk industry at Macclesfield; the great breweries at Burton were idle, while the hosiery factories of Leicester and the boot factories of Northampton were all shut.
With the German troops threatening Sheffield, Nottingham was in a state of intense alarm. The lace and hosiery factories had with one accord closed on Tuesday, and the great Market Place was now filled day and night by thousands upon thousands of unemployed mill-hands of both sexes. On Friday, however, came the news of how Sheffield had built barricades against the enemy, and there ensued a frantic attempt at defence on the part of thousands of terrified and hungry men and women. In their frenzy they sacked houses in order to obtain material to construct the barricades, which were, however, built just where the fancy took the crowd. One was constructed in Clumber Street, near the Lion Hotel; another at Lister Gate; and a third, a much larger one, in Radford Road. Near the Carrington Station, on the road to Arnold, a huge structure soon rose, another at Basford, while the road in from Carlton and the bridges leading in from West Bridgford and Wilford were also effectually blocked.
The white, interminable North Road, that runs so straight from London through York and Berwick to Edinburgh, was, with its by-roads in the Midlands, now being patrolled by British cavalry, and here and there telegraphists around a telegraph post showed that those many wires at the roadside were being used for military communication.
At several points along the road between Wansford Bridge and Retford the wires had been cut and tangled by the enemy’s agents, but by Friday all had been restored again. In one spot, between Weston and Sutton-on-Trent, eight miles south of Newark, a trench had actually been dug during the night, the tube containing the subterranean telegraph lines discovered, and the whole system to the North disorganised. Similar damage had been done by German spies to the line between London and Birmingham, two miles south of Shipston-on-Stour, and again the line between Loughborough and Nottingham had been similarly destroyed.
The Post Office linesmen had, however, quickly made good the damage everywhere in the country not already occupied by the enemy, and telegraph and telephone communication North and South was now practically again in its normal state.
Through Lincolnshire the enemy’s advance patrols had spread South over every road between the Humber and the Wash, and in the city of Lincoln itself a tremendous sensation was caused when on Wednesday, market-day, several bodies of German motor-cyclists swept into the Stonebow and dismounted at the Saracen’s Head amid the crowd of farmers and dealers who had assembled there, not, alas! to do business, but to discuss the situation. In a moment the city was panic-stricken. From mouth to mouth the dread truth spread that the Germans were upon them, and people ran indoors and barricaded themselves within their houses.
A body of Uhlans came galloping proudly through the Stonebow a quarter of an hour later, and halted in High Street, opposite Wyatt’s clothing shop, as though awaiting orders. Then in rapid succession troops seemed to arrive from all quarters, many halting in the Cathedral Close and by Exchequer Gate, and others riding through the streets in order to terrify the inhabitants.