I’ve been working up at the Athenaeum for one morning a week cataloguing their historic book collection, and last Friday I catalogued some books written by Ursula Bloom.

There seemed to be rather a lot of books by Ms Bloom, she was obviously very popular with the users of the Athenaeum in the 1950s, so out of curiosity, I typed her name into wikipedia, and found a rather more interesting story than I imagined – I’d sort of envisaged her as a 1950s equivalent to Jilly Cooper but with less sex but just as many straining jodhpurs and heaving bosoms.

And that doesn’t seem to be an unfair characterisation of much of her work, but as often happens, if you scratch beneath the surface, you find a much more interesting person.

At the start of world war one she was working as a cinema pianist – her parents had separated and she was living in genteel poverty along with her mother in St Albans. (A cinema pianist was the person who played the musical accompaniment to silent movies – in itself quite interesting as it shows the sort of jobs open to middle class young women, and probably not quite what her piano teacher had envisaged)

She later wrote an autobiography describing life on the home front in world war one, rationing, zeppelin raids and the general atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion.

In her description of the start of world war one, she mentions the rumour that there were secret trains ferrying Russian reinforcements to support the British Expeditionary Force at Mons, where things were not going terribly well for the British – pushed back by the German army after an initial advance into Belgium, the British army attempted to stop the German advance at Mons.

They didn’t. They both suffered and inflicted heavy casualties, but the British army did slow the German advance enough to allow the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force to withdraw towards the French border.

The first Battle of Mons is also significant in that it was the first time in seventy years that a British army had fought anything other than a colonial war.

While the wars in South Africa had shown that there were deficiencies in British tactics in dealing with what were essentially guerilla forces, it was not until Mons that there was any real inkling that things might be different this time around and it might not be the glorious adventure that war was sometimes portrayed as in the popular literature of the time.

In the wake of the near disaster at Mons, there were widespread rumours that Russian reinforcements had been sent all the way from Siberia by way of Archangel in the north of Russia, and then by ship to the north of Scotland, bypassing neutral Norway. They had apparently been seen with snow still in the fur of their hats, and numbered up to ten thousand men.

The authorities were sufficiently worried to try to downplay the story, planting articles in the newspapers that what people had seen were Gaelic speaking soldiers from Ross-shire in Scotland – it might even have been more or less true, but looking at the newspapers of the time there was clearly a widespread belief that Russian reinforcements had come to the aid of British forces in Belgium.

It is almost certainly a case of mistaken identity – I doubt if the inhabitants of the south of England at the end of the Edwardian era, were familiar with the sound of spoken Gaelic, but what is interesting is that people quite clearly wanted to believe that the near disaster at Mons would turn out all right, and given that the newspapers of the time were trumpeting Russian successes in the east, particularly against Austria-Hungary, it’s perhaps natural that the Russians would be seen as potential saviours of what Kaiser Wilhelm allegedly described as ‘a contemptible little army‘.