On the Western Front of the first world war, "Woodbine Willie" wasn't the nickname of an anatomical disorder but that of Britain's most famous padre, loved by the soldiers for his sympathetic ear, his generosity with cigarettes and, later, for his pacifism.
Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was born in Leeds on June 27 1883, the son and grandson of clergymen, and after university he joined the family trade. In his childhood and early career he lived among people suffering awful poverty, and right from the start it was clear that his sympathies were more with the desperate outside the church walls than with the comfortable within them. He preached in the streets as much as he did from his pulpit.
All the same, when war was declared in 1914 he shared the widespread enthusiasm for a crusade against the Hun's beastly ways and volunteered as an army chaplain. He later described his method of ministry as carrying "a box of fags in your haversack, and a great deal of love in your heart." He learned immediately, or perhaps understood instinctively, that the one thing which kept an ordinary soldier going through bad times was tobacco.
In his poem The Secret, Studdert Kennedy gave voice to a man in the trenches explaining how he and his comrades "sticks it" -
Sticks this blarsted rain and mud,
'Ow it is we keeps on smilin'
When the place runs red wi' blood.
It isn't, he tells us, the tactics (as "the General believes"), nor the training given the troops by their C.O, nor the Sergeant-Major's drilling, nor religion as the padre claims. The secret is simple:
it's the Woodbine Cigarettes.
For the daytime seems more dreary,
And the night-time seems to drag
To eternity of darkness,
When ye ave'nt got a fag.
The Woodbine brand was particularly prized, because it was strong and unfiltered, so wherever Studdert Kennedy went he made sure to take a never-ending supply, which he handed out freely. He is reckoned to have spent a small fortune of his own money on Woodbines, buying something over 800,000 cigarettes. He wasn't a rich man - apart from anything, he had seven brothers and six sisters, so his annual bill for birthday cards alone must have been onerous - but throughout his life he had a reputation for giving away everything he owned to those worse off than him.
It wasn't only the fags, though, that made Woodbine Willie a hero to the men at the front. He was a spellbinding speaker ("women wept and men broke down," said one newspaper of his post-war speeches), who delivered his sermons in the soldiers' own language, complete with swearing. His determination to live as the troops did, sharing their discomforts and dangers, impressed everyone, as did the kindness and easy humour of his interactions with individual soldiers. He wasn't a strong man, his health always poor, but his bravery was legendary; he was awarded the Military Cross in 1917 for tending to the wounded (British and German alike) under heavy fire.
And then, of course, there were the poems. Written largely in dialect, his verses, heartfelt, realistic and often comical, gained great popularity in the trenches and the field hospitals. In 1918 a selection published under the title Rough Rhymes of a Padre sold tens of thousands of copies.
But experience of war changed his view of war, as it so often does. After the armistice, Woodbine Willie was employed as a missioner for the Industrial Christian Fellowship, which meant he could speak freely without worrying about upsetting the Anglican hierarchy. For the rest of his short life he spoke and wrote for pacifism and Christian socialism. His unaffected eloquence had made him a hero to ordinary people in no-man's land, and now made him a hero again to the same people in the factories and shipyards.
His asthmatic lungs finally gave out during a bout of flu during one of his endless speaking tours in 1929; he was forty-five when he died. Studdert Kennedy's politics would strike us today as being rather mild, little more than a belief that the working class should be treated decently and that class war could be ended if only employers would negotiate in good faith with their employees. Despite that, it's generally believed that the only reason this national religious figure wasn't buried in Westminster Abbey, as many thought he should be, was because the Dean wouldn't allow such an honour to "a socialist."
Instead, his funeral took place in Worcester, where thousands of unemployed people and war veterans turned out to pay their respects. As the funeral cortège passed, some threw a final tribute onto it: packets of Woodbine.
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Sources:
History Today 12 December 1986
www.standrewrugby.org.uk/woodbine-willie
www.mylearning.org/stories/woodbine-willie/1208
www.thoresby.org.uk/content/people/kennedyWW.php
https://revpacman.com/2025/03/08/revd-geoffrey-studdert-kennedy-m-c-woodbine-willie/