WITH Armistice Day almost upon us, it seems an appropriate time to remember the impact that the Great War -– what came later to be known as the First World War – had on the lives of people in York.

And what better way than to dip once again into York-based retired social history lecturer David Rubinstein’s excellent War Comes To York: Summer 1914.

In the run-up to war, there were plenty of voices calling for restraint, David writes.

They included the Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, a man of peace; Councillor JB Morrell; and the city’s Liberal MP, Arnold Rowntree, a nephew of Joseph Rowntree, who said it was the “absolute paramount duty of everyone to… prevent the people of England being run into any war”.

Once war was declared, however, such voices were rapidly drowned out in a tide of patriotism. The war would be bloody, the Yorkshire Evening Press said on August 11, but the cause was just. “Across the Channel in the fair fields of France and Belgium, death awaits the many, but a death easier to face and sweeter to experience because of the knowledge that the cause of civilisation is being consecrated in blood.”

The archbishop, who had previously proclaimed his love of peace, now justified the decision to go to war. He preached the need to “fulfil a solemn international obligation and observe the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed”.

He wasn't the only clergyman in York to support the cause. The Yorkshire Herald visited a number of church services on August 16, the second Sunday of British involvement in the war, David notes. “So far as it can be ascertained,” the newspaper commented, “the pulpit declarations held the war to be justified.”

Canon John Watson, preaching at the Minster, was clearly in no doubt. “A German victory would mean the bondage of the civilised world,” he proclaimed. “We stand in this war for justice and liberty.” Few realised, however, in these early weeks of the war, just how protracted and bloody it would be, and just how much it would change the shape of the world for ever.

It was, of course, the young men who went to the trenches who paid the heaviest price. Our photographs today come from the City of York Council’s Imagine York website. They show soldiers on horseback at what is thought to be Strensall barracks; and two soldiers, named as “Messrs Freedman and Angus”, at the Lodge in Strensall, in 1918 or 1919. Most poignant of all, however, is the postcard, part of a series produced during the war, to commemorate those who died.

One remembers the men of the Fulford Road district who were killed: Private J Thornton, Private J Addy, Battalion Sgt Major W Lee, Lieutenant RA Hope, Sergeant CE Hutton, Private W Wortley, Private E Shepherd, Rifleman W Trendall, Master Gunner V Newby and Private AE Friend. It is these men, and the countless others like them who gave their lives for their country, that we will remember on November 11.

• Images reproduced courtesy of the City of York Council's Imagine York website, imagineyork.co.uk

War Comes To York: Summer 1914 by David Rubinstein is published by Quack Books, priced £3. It is available on Amazon, or from Quack Books, 7 Grape Lane, York