The Dead Man's Penny by V E H Masters

 Writing books can be quite a lonely business. In the past few years, post COVID, I've occasionally taken a table at Fairs, along with fellow historical fiction author Margaret Skea, to sell my books and chat to readers, or potential readers – and to other stall holders.

 Recently I found myself at an Antiques Fair – my books are historical fiction so I thought it was roughly a fit to sell them there – and grew curious about some of the memorabilia the neighbouring stall holder was selling.

One particular display drew my attention. 'It's a Dead Man's Penny,' said Neil Watson, the stall holder,  and went on to explain the sad story associated with it.

The official name for the Dead Man's Penny, also known as the Widow's Penny, was the Memorial Plaque. Cast from bronze it was sent to the next of kin of everyone who died serving overseas with the British Empire forces in WWI, along with a scroll and a message from the king. 

This plaque came into being as a way to give the family something tangible in memory of their loved ones. A competition was set up in 1917 and the winning design, by Edward Carter Preston, was chosen from more than 800 entries. Almost inevitably it includes Britannia and a lion although the significance of the dolphins is lost on me and as for the olive branch, which Britannia is extending… perhaps that is a prayer for the future.

In all 1.33 million were sent out, of which 600 were in memory of women who died in service during WW1.

The Dead Man's Penny which I saw was particularly poignant since it came with pictures, medals and the letter notifying his mother of the lad's death. His name was William Towers, which was inscribed on the plaque. None of the pennies had the rank included since it was considered that no life lost was more or less important than another. (The cynic in me also wondered if it saved on the costs to limit engraving.)

William, a soldier in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, was only eighteen years old when he died in April 1918. He had been at the front for four months. The collection associated with William's Dead Man's Penny is for sale because his family line has died out – which likely would not have happened had he survived.

I'm always drawn to war memorials. Here's the one in the very small village where I used to live. There are two things of significance for me about it. Firstly the far greater numbers who died in WW1 as opposed to WW2 and secondly the numbers sharing a surname – which likely meant brothers, father and son, or cousins gone from the same family. I cannot even begin to imagine the grief.

Proportionately Scotland lost more men in WW1 than any other country fighting as part of the British Empire. I've always been curious why.

Field Marshall Douglas Haig, who was in command on the Western Front from 1915 onwards, believed the bravado and tenacity of his Scottish regiments could win the war for him. A Scot himself from Edinburgh, whose family owned the successful whisky distillers, he had little patience for trench warfare and wanted to push through. In the frequent assaults it was often his 'favoured' Scottish regiments that were sent out first. Lauded as a hero at the end of the war this perspective changed in the 1960s when his war record was re-examined and he was given the epithet Butcher Haig.

My grandfather fought on the Western Front from 1915 onwards. On the single occasion as a child when I persuaded him to speak of his war experiences, he told me that he heard a bullet whistle past his ear at the battle of the Somme. Miraculously he survived three years of war uninjured – else I wouldn't be here!

References:

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/first-world-war-next-of-kin-plaque

https://www.thenational.scot/news/17218645.ww1-victory-came-heavy-cost-scotland

V E H Masters is the author of four historical fiction novels following the adventures of the Seton Family as they navigate their way through the perils of 16th century Europe. She is the winner of the Barbara Hammond Trophy and her books are regularly on the Amazon Bestseller lists. She lives in the Scottish Borders.

You can find out more at https://vehmasters.com/

Book Links:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B096SG372X

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B096SG372X

Shot at Dawn. By Judith Allnatt

Private Henry Burden, a Northumberland Fusilier, was shot at 4 a.m. on 21st July 1915 having been found guilty of desertion. He was just seventeen years old.

Like many young men keen for adventure and caught up in the patriotic rush to war, he had lied about his age in order to join up. Once sent overseas, he lost friends at the Battle of Belwaarde Ridge, experienced nerve shattering barrages of shelling and was sent to a military hospital to recover. On the same afternoon that he was discharged, he was sent forward with his battalion to the front line. Burden left his post, he said, to visit a neighbouring battalion to see a friend who he had heard had lost a brother. Two days later he was arrested and two days after that he was tried by a court martial. He had a record of going absent without leave, which went against him and he had no one to defend him as those who could have spoken up for him had all been killed. He wasn't asked about his age and he didn't raise it. He was found guilty, not of the lesser charge of going AWOL, but of desertion, and condemned to death.

Photo credit: Harry Mitchell [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)] 

In the British Army, discipline was harsh. The offences for which a soldier could be executed were many and various. They included: cowardice, casting away of arms, disobedience, striking an officer and desertion. Falling asleep on sentry duty could also carry the death penalty as it endangered a whole section of the line. Soldiers on duty at night stood with head and shoulders above the parapet, rather than using a periscope, so that they could get a good field of view. (There being less chance of being hit in the dark other than by a random shot). It was therefore very obvious, if a sentry slumped, that he had fallen asleep and those who did so were easily caught. Standing at their posts for hours, dealing with mind-numbing boredom and body-numbing cold, it was all to easy to be overtaken by exhaustion. Fear of the consequences resulted in the practice of using matchsticks to prop their eyes open.

Around 3,000 soldiers were executed for offences such as those listed. There is a strong sense of the authorities using the ultimate punishment to 'set an example', a stark warning to re-assert discipline. Before facing the firing squad, the soldier's General Service buttons were removed from his tunic as a mark of his shame. Blindfolded and manacled, he was led to a stake and a target such as an envelope was pinned to his chest. Often, the firing squad was chosen from the soldier's own unit, presumably to hammer home the lesson that breaches of discipline would not be tolerated. One can barely imagine the horror and mental anguish that this practice must have caused both the man and his comrades. Apparently, the traditional belief that one of the bullets used would be a blank so that each soldier was left with the moral let-out that his shot may not have been the lethal one, is actually untrue. The whole squad were, in fact, given live ammunition.

The man's disgrace often continued after death: there were relations who chose not to talk of the relative who had brought shame on the family and memorials in towns and villages that omitted their names. Not until the 21st Century, when it became clear that many of those found guilty had suffered what we now know as Post traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) , was there any attempt to give them a memorial.

At the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, this shift in understanding and attitude found expression. The memorial Shot at Dawn, by Andy de Comyn, consists of a larger-than-life sized statue of Henry Burden, blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back. Before him, the firing squad is represented by six juniper trees and behind him are an array of wooden stakes representing 309 other victims, each one individually named. These are the men who were posthumously pardoned by the British government in 2006. The pardons were granted not to imply blame for the officers who had acted in line with army regulations and without the understanding of PTSD that we now have, but in a spirit of mercy and in recognition of the battle trauma experienced by many, often very young men, and the suffering of their families. The Director of the Arboretum said that  "over 80 years of medical, psychological and sociological advantage (was) denied those who sat on the court-martial boards that passed sentence."

So, what of Henry Burden? As always, it is the small human details that suddenly pierce the heart. I think of his body taken down from the stake to be prepared for burial and the tattoos discovered upon it of "clasped hands" and "Love Lilly".  I am glad that his statue is placed at the eastern end of the arboretum where the sun's first rays strike.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon 1914

Charles Hamilton Sorley: The Forgotten Poet of WWI by Catherine Hokin

 It Is Easy To Be Dead - Aberdeen Performing Arts

November's commemorations of the end of World War One have had a particular poignancy this year. Not only is it the centenary but the hundreds of acts of remembrance have taken place against a backdrop of Brexit and the break-up of Europe, possibly also the break-up of the Union. This isn't the place to get political but, for those of us with strong connections to our wider European community, there were extra reasons to shed tears this month as we watched the nations coming together to lay their wreathes. It seemed fitting therefore that I got a chance to see Neil McPherson's wonderful play It Is Easy To Be Dead, recently in Glasgow. This tells the story of  forgotten war poet Charles Hamilton Sorley who was born in Aberdeen, educated at Marlborough and killed, aged 20, at the Battle of Loos in October 1915. In his very short life he wrote 38 poems, spurred on, in his own words by his mother's "badgering". Although his name is included on the War Poets' memorial in Westminster Abbey, you'll rarely find him mentioned now, or taught, but at his death the Poet Laureate John Masefield called Sorley "potentially the greatest poet lost to us in that war". 

 Charles Hamilton Sorley

That we don't know him as well as we should is a great loss - his poems are unsentimental, compassionate and filled with a concern for humanity that belies his young age. They were first published in 1916, by his parents, together with a collection of his letters written both from the front and during the lengthy period he spent as a student in Germany in 1914. A trip cut short when Britain came into the escalating conflict in the August of that year. It is this experience I think which marks his work out from his better-known contemporaries - it has certainly been cited as the reason why he does not fit well in the war poets' canon. Sorley did not see the war through patriotic eyes and there is none of the jingoistic language in his work that was more commonly found in early WWI poetry. His letters suggest that he identified more strongly with German values than he did with English ones - while this may be no more than the enthusiasm of a young man on his first trip abroad, it certainly gave him a sense of fellow-feeling. He spoke fluent German and was enamoured with the country and its culture - his poem To Germany written on the eve of the war addresses the common bond he shares with the young Germans about to be plunged, like him, into a madness not of their making:

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

But gropers both through fields of thought confined

We stumble and we do not understand.

He was under no illusions about the cost of the coming war in terms of the misery it would bring - the poem's last line reads: "until peace, the storm, the darkness and the thunder and the rain." As his father, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, said of his son in the preface to the volume of letters and poems: ‘He looked on the world with clear eyes and the surface show did not deceive him.’

The title of the play, It Is Easy To Be Dead, comes from perhaps Sorley's best known poem and his last one: When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead. It was written shortly before his death and found with his kit. It is a beautiful poem; that a twenty-year old had learned to be so aware of the reality of war and the ultimate futility of weeping for the dead makes it a heart-breaking one.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead

 Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

 

Say not soft things as other men have said,

 

That you'll remember. For you need not so.

 

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know 

It is not curses heaped on each gashed head? 

Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.

 

Nor honour. It is easy to be dead. Say only this, 'They are dead.'

 

Then add thereto, ‘Yet many a better one has died before.'

 

Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you

 

Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

 

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.

 

Great death has made all his for evermore.

Sorley didn't live to see what came next - as we remember those who died in a frighteningly divided world, let's hope we don't live to regret what's coming next for us.

The Meon Valley Railway - friendly, pleasurable, beautiful by Carolyn Hughes

Last month’s blog looked at the literary and historical associations of the route along which the Meon Valley Railway once ran, many of which associations referred to people and times well before the railway actually existed. This month, I am going to relate a little more about the railway itself, and the purposes it served during its brief half-century lifespan.

Route of the MVR, adapted from
the map in R.A. Stone’s book,
 The Meon Valley Railway, 1983,
Kingfisher Railway Productions.

Agriculture and horticulture

As might be expected in such an agricultural region, a good deal of non-passenger traffic for the Meon Valley Railway (MVR) came from shipping farm produce. In this part of Hampshire, the produce included watercress, fruit (especially strawberries and apples), milk and cattle. The London & South Western Railway (LSWR) put on special market-day trains, with both passenger carriages and livestock cars, that allowed farmers to accompany their livestock. There were local “pick-up/set-down” goods services all along the line, which called at every station to deliver and pick up any waiting goods.

Watercress has been grown in Hampshire for centuries. The area’s geology, with its chalky downlands, cut by clear chalk streams, provides perfect growing conditions. Apparently, in the 1800s, working people often ate watercress sandwiches, collecting the wild leaves themselves from rivers and streams. Watercress had a reputation as a panacea for everything from lethargy to baldness, scurvy and even freckles. Its popularity led to watercress farms being established throughout Hampshire. It was grown in gravel beds over which ran a constant flow of water from the mineral-rich springs fed by rainwater leaching through the chalk.

The commercial viability of Hampshire watercress received a boost in 1865, when a new railway line was opened between Alton and Winchester, connecting at each end with the existing LSWR line. The new railway was called the Mid-Hants Railway, although in time it became known as the Watercress Line, because it transported so much Hampshire watercress to London’s Covent Garden Market. One of the line’s principal stations was at Alresford, which was essentially the “watercress capital” of Hampshire. But watercress was also grown in the Meon Valley, at Warnford – in beds that are still actively producing watercress – and, when the MVR was built, it connected with the Mid-Hants railway at Alton, providing a fast route to London for the Meon Valley watercress growers. The Watercress Line is now a heritage railway.

Watercress beds at Warnford Photo © Tony Grant / cc-by-sa 2.0

The lower half of the MVR line ran through an extensive market gardening area. Strawberry growing was a very important industry for the area during the late 1800s to mid 1900s. An area just north of the Solent, around Titchfield and Fareham, bounded by the rivers Meon and Hamble, proved ideal for strawberry growing, the rather poor stony soil suiting the shallow-rooted plants, and a warm prevailing wind from the Solent reducing the risk of frost in the critical flowering weeks. In 1889, a LSWR station was built at Swanwick, a little to the north-west of Titchfield, specially to serve the local strawberry industry. In the late 1800s, the area produced as many as 7,000 tons of strawberries each year. During the weeks of the strawberry harvest, Swanwick station became one of the busiest stations on the south coast with the box vans of the “strawberry special” trains heading off to Covent Garden and across the country. But, while Swanwick was perhaps the focal point for the transport of strawberries, “strawberry specials” were also run on the MVR, with whole trains of strawberries being loaded at Mislingford and Wickham.

In the mid 1800s, the owner of the manor of Wickham, which included an area of the Bere Forest, built a settlement of houses for his forestry tenants, each house having an acre of land, at a place that was then, and still is, called Hundred Acres. The tenants found that the area was very suitable for growing fruit, and in particular for the production of early strawberries, and a few years later strawberries began to be grown there commercially. Initially the fruit was taken to Fareham station, six miles away, for onward transport to the London market and elsewhere. But the viability of the enterprise improved even further when the MVR was opened with a station at Wickham, only two miles from Hundred Acres.

It was in the 1960s that competition from imported fruit began to drive many producers out of business, and by the 1980s strawberry-growing as an industry in Hampshire was essentially over.

Strawberry fields in Hampshire

Photo © Enttauscht (cc-by-sa/2.0)

In the early days of the railway, all the MVR stations would have seen farmers bringing their milk in churns by horse and cart for despatch to the dairy at Portsea Island, in special milk vans attached to the normal passenger services. Livestock too travelled frequently on the line, to and from markets at Alton and Fareham. West Meon station was apparently the scene of the livestock of entire farms arriving by rail from such far away places as Cumberland and Northumberland, the farmers having hired special trains for the purpose. This must have been quite a sight!

Wartime use

With each outbreak of the two world wars, for the MVR, as for most railways, traffic increased, with the passage of troop trains bound for the docks and France. A box van was added to all MVR trains to cater for extra parcels and troops’ luggage.

In 1940, the MVR line received some attention from the German bombers. Droxford Station was hit and two railway workers' cottages were demolished. Bombs were dropped either side of the line at Soberton although they missed the track, but West Meon tunnel was also targeted and a stretch of track was damaged. Apparently, desperate telephone calls were made after this attack, in an attempt to stop the train coming down the line from Alton, and what might have been a serious accident was avoided. 

However, the MVR did have an important role in the Second World War. During the build-up to D-Day, men and equipment had to be moved to the south of England, and large numbers of tanks were moved by rail to Mislingford  goods yard, from where they were then dispersed to local lanes and fields for temporary storage. Mislingford was also the site of a temporary wooden platform to serve the large number of Canadian troops who were encamped in the Forest of Bere.

The remains of the Mislingford goods yard.
Public domain.

I have mentioned this before, in a previous History Girls post, but I will repeat a little anecdote about Mislingford. The old loading gauge at Mislingford still stands (if nowadays much hidden by vegetation) on what is now the Meon Valley Railway trail (which follows the old railway from West Meon to Wickham), so you can pass by it as you walk the trail. I’m not really a particularly mystical person, but I have occasionally sensed a “something” at this spot… The ghosts perhaps of those D-Day soldiers disembarking from the trains? The clanking of those tanks being unloaded from the trains? There is actually a timber yard close by, so maybe it has only ever been the rumble of machinery and the sound of workmen’s voices that I’ve heard…? Or maybe not…

But the railway’s most famous wartime role came in June 1944, when the War Cabinet met Allied leaders in a special train parked at a heavily guarded Droxford station. When the train arrived, in it were just the British prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, and the prime minister of South Africa, General Jan Smuts. Next day they were joined by Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, and Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, who arrived by car. And, the following day, the prime ministers of Canada, New Zealand, and Rhodesia came too, and Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the United States, drove across from his nearby base at Southwick House. They were there to discuss the D-Day invasion.

Although the meeting was officially kept secret from Droxford residents, it seems that Churchill had chosen the station because it was near the coast and to the Allied command centre at Southwick. But there was also some speculation that the site was thought particularly secure because the train could be largely hidden by overshadowing beech trees, and there was a deep cutting into which it could be shunted if it came under attack.

Anyway, in the evening of the final day of their meeting, the 5th June, Churchill’s train pulled out of Droxford station and returned to London. And, shortly after midnight the following morning, Allied troops attacked Pegasus Bridge and, soon thereafter, the American airborne landings in Normandy began.

Droxford Railway Station in 1968 By Lamberhurst
[cc-by-sa/4.0] from Wikimedia Commons

Decline and death of the railway

With all the early excitement and anticipation of what the MVR might bring to the region, and despite its obvious value to the local agricultural and horticultural community, the line never fulfilled its initial promise.

As early as the years following the First World War, there seemed to be little or no demand for passenger traffic. The hoped-for London through-traffic never materialised, and after only a few years the London to Gosport services were cut back. During the summer months, Sunday excursion trains to the sea ran down the line, originating from Ascot and Farnham, but, without sufficient normal, daily passenger traffic, the line never really prospered, becoming only a rural branch line and a Hampshire railway backwater. The tourist traffic to the resort area of Stokes Bay (near Gosport) also failed to grow, with steamers preferring the more established ports at Portsmouth and Southampton. From then on the MVR only handled regular traffic between Fareham and Alton, and it wasn’t long before it became clear that there was no need for a frequent train service. Cutbacks were already being made by 1922.

It does seem that insufficient effort was made to promote the railway's services, with cheap fares, convenient schedules and more publicity. But, as early as the 1920s, there was also increasing competition from road traffic, with more and more commercial vehicles making serious inroads into railway revenue by competing for the carriage of goods. This applied to all railways, not just the MVR: rail passenger travel, as well as freight traffic, declined everywhere. And all railways began to make cuts.

Yet there did remain a demand for the MVR from local farmers: sometime in the 1920s, the parishes of Corhampton and Meonstoke asked LSWR to provide a halt in Meonstoke to “assist the local farmers in the transport of milk etc to the towns”. The potential site of such a siding was marked by a short piece of rail set into the ground, but the siding was never built. However, though the section of rail remained in place until 1960, when it was discovered by a farmer cutting hay, and damaged his machinery. The rail was then presumably pulled up!

But the MVR was an early candidate for closure and, in 1955, passenger traffic was withdrawn completely and freight traffic reduced. Local people protested, but to no avail. However, when the National Farmers Union made a strong objection to the closure on the grounds that the line was much used during the busy sugar beet season, an enquiry was at least launched into their case. But the closure proceeded nonetheless.

And so, in February 1955, a mere 52 years after the MVR had opened, the Hampshire Chronicle reported its final day:

“On Saturday last, February 5th, the Meon Valley Railway closed, and the last public trains left Alton to travel “down” at 4.30pm and Fareham to do the “up” journey at 7.46pm.”

Passenger numbers rocketed in the final weeks of operation, as people took their final ride on the railway. That very last train was apparently full of people, many of them, the paper asserted, people who often “attended the last rites of dying railways”. Many local people also watched the train’s final journey from the fields beside the track and from the stations’ platforms.

This MVR closure was long before the “Beeching Axe” of the 1960s, when many well-used yet still “uneconomic” railways were closed. Although goods services did continue for a few more years on the MVR, with a once-a-day service from Fareham as far as Droxford, and a similar service from Alton as far as Farringdon, by 1968 both services had ended.

There does seem little doubt that, when the Meon Valley Railway was closed to passenger traffic, it had been shown quite clearly to be unsustainable as a passenger railway. Yet it was nonetheless held in some affection.

When, on 5th February, that final train arrived back at Alton station, the Hampshire Chronicle reported that:

“…the final obsequies are observed. The Meon Valley Railway – friendly, pleasurable, beautiful – had come to its end.” 

Trackbed of the Meon Valley Railway, Chawton, Hampshire,

looking towards the south. Next stop along this line would

have been the halt at Farringdon. cc-by-sa/2.0

© Peter Trimming /geograph.org.uk/p/1417985

For detailed information about the old railway in the Meon Valley, see The Meon Valley Railway by R.A. Stone, 1983, Kingfisher Railway Productions.

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them” by Rowena House

At the start of the centenary of the 1914-18 war I had a notion that we would by now, as a nation, have found some sort of collective closure on the individual suffering of the dead of the Great War, and be ready to move on, to toss their bones in the air as it were, and free the spirits of the fallen to join with our distant ancestors.

As a writer, I agreed with Pat Barker’s comment that World War I had “come to stand in for other wars … it’s come to stand for the pain of all wars.” Our stories might be about that particular conflict, but the larger subject was war itself.

"Voie Sacrée" supply line to the militarized French region of Verdun

Researching and writing my own First World War novel, The Goose Road, dented that conviction. Wherever I looked, the power of individual suffering endured and the personal stories were endlessly shocking, intimate and enthralling.

I fell under their spell time and again while listening to the first-hand accounts of veterans of the Western Front, their scratchy voices forever locked in a sound archive, or when reading a collection of letters home, or interviews granted to earlier researchers. I’d suddenly be caught unawares by a moment of humanity or courage, or dark gallows’ humour.

Occasionally an old soldier would admit to cruelty. More often they shared memories of the drudgery of the trenches, punctuated by terror. To walk those trenches – or at least one of the few fragments that remain, in Beaumont Hamel, say, zig-zagging through a meadow – is to walk in a haunted place.

Near Verdun, there’s a hill called Mort Homme. The name isn’t connected to the 1914-18 war, although the WW1 artillery battles fought there between the French and the Germans were so fierce that engineers found afterward that meters of the entire hilltop had been blown off. Local farmers still aren’t allowed to plough its soil because of the human remains.

The French memorial to the fallen of Mort Homme: “They did not pass”

When researching closer to home I found that WW1 objects as well as places had the power to take my breath away. Once I was in the Royal Artillery Museum in Woolwich Arsenal, investigating a particular week in October 1916 and a specific section of the Western Front near the occupied French town of Peronne. The archivist bought me out a trolley laden with original material from that time and that place, on top of which was a small moleskin notebook, written in pencil by an English major, the pages still stained with the mud of the Somme. I sat and stared at it for ages, feeling as if the battle itself was within touching distance.

Poppies and cornflowers planted by the local council on the road to Pozières in remembrance of Australian, Allied and German troops who died during fighting in the immediate area

Just before I returned for the second of four research visits to France, my mother died unexpectedly. It was a release: she’d been ill for a long time. Among the heirlooms she left to me was a forget-me-not locket with a photograph of her father, Frederick Clarke, in his WW1 uniform. A stern old lady stares out of the locket’s other frame – my great-grandmother, Selena, I believe.

My great-grandmother (I think) and her younger son, Frederick

Mum also left me a heart-shaped locket, which I think must have belonged to Selena as it contained the pictures of two uniformed soldiers, her sons. One is Frederick, who served in the 10^th (Irish) Division as a medical clerk and stretcher bearer in the Dardanelles in 1916 and later in Salonika. The other is Frederick’s older brother, Thomas Clarke, a private in the 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment, killed in action on the Somme, on July 30^th, 1916.

I’d never seen Thomas Clarke’s picture before I inherited this locket. Mum thought he’d died near Ypres, and as far as I know, until my husband tracked down his regiment’s military records, no one in the family knew the details of his last day. The official War Diary and Intelligence Summary of that engagement is chilling:

“29/7/16 battle position in the MALTZ HORN TRENCH.

30/7/16 BATTLE began. Zero hour 4.45 am. The Battalion reached its objective, but suffered heavy losses, and had to evacuate its position owing to no reinforcements. At 12 noon the roll call was 7 officers and 43 men.

Total casualties were: Lieutenant-Colonel G. Rollo wounded.

KILLED. [Six officers named]

WOUNDED. [One officer named.]

WOUNDED AND MISSING. [Three officers named.]

Total casualties in Other Ranks: 425, of which 76 were killed, 172 wounded, 177 missing.”

Barry Cuttell’s account of that morning in 148 Days on the Somme is more detailed: “Morning mist prevented communication by visual signals, and almost all underground cables had been damaged. The only way of relaying messages to divisional headquarters was by runner, which would be a dangerous task once the fog had lifted as the runners had to cross the open ground between Guillemont and Trone’s Wood, over which German machine guns … enjoyed an excellent field of fire.

“While waiting for zero hour, 19/King’s Liverpool were subject to High Explosives and gas (shelling) … The 19/King’s in the centre was also badly hit by enemy fire, only a few men reaching the road. A little further north, a company of the 19/King’s succeeded in getting forward towards the south-eastern entry to Guillemont.” But later that morning, “Under the impression they were cut off, the 19/King’s withdrew from the edge of Guillemont.”

Thus out of 486 soldiers of the 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment who advanced at dawn on that summer’s morning, north and east from the Maltz Horn Trench towards the German artillery and machine guns, only fifty remained standing seven hours later. The rest were wounded, dead or “missing”, that is, their bodies were either too badly mutilated for individual identification or otherwise unrecoverable from the battlefield.

The rolling fields where Thomas Clarke fell were bronzed with ripening wheat when I saw them, flanked by the once devastated trees of Trone’s Wood. My husband, a former Royal Marine, returned there on July 30^th, 2016, to pay our respects, both on the battlefield and at his graveside in the Bernafay Wood cemetery. Perhaps his locket – the brother to the forget-me-not one I inherited – is buried there with him.

Bernafay Wood cemetery

Rowena House’s debut novel, The Goose Road, a coming-of-age quest set in France in 1916, will be published by Walker Books on April 5^th. Website: rowenahouse.com

Thanks, Rowena, for your timely post. (Celia Rees will be back on 18th April)

History is written by the winners by Sally Nicholls

Our September guest is Sally Nicholls. She was born in Stockton, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. Her novels for children and young adults include Ways to Live Forever and An Island of Our Own and have been shortlisted for the Costa Children's Book Award and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, and won the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize. She lives in Oxford with her husband and small son.
www.sallynicholls.com

Women's march, London, January 2017

History is written by the winners. It’s a truism I’d never really given much thought to, except to vaguely suppose that most victors think that the wars they won were just wars, and propaganda is a thing, and Richard III didn’t actually kill the Princes in the Tower.

It’s something I’ve come face-to-face with recently though, as I’ve been researching my YA Suffragette novel, Things A Bright Girl Can Do, which is set in the First World War. I thought I knew broadly what life was like on the Home Front – everyone was very patriotic and joined up immediately, expecting the war to be over by Christmas. Women knitted socks. Nobody had any idea how awful the trenches were, and if your son joined up, he probably wasn’t ever going to come back.

I thought I knew about the Suffragettes too. They were mostly militants, who broke windows 

and went on hunger strike. When the war came along, they all stopped being Suffragettes and went off to be nurses and bus conductors. The vote was given to them as a thank-you present, and because people suddenly realised that women were just as capable as men, more or less.

It turns out … that’s not exactly true.

Not everyone was particularly patriotic, for a start – although plenty of people were. Saying so is a bit like saying ‘anti-Muslim feeling was running high in twenty-first century Britain’ - I mean, it is, but it’s by no means universal. There’s a wonderful description in one of the books I read about the crowds in London on the day war is declared. The streets are full of celebration and cheering – but in Trafalgar Square, there are two demonstrations going on. One is pro-war, and the other is anti. The day before war was declared, the Labour party had also been in Trafalgar Square, holding an anti-war demonstration.

Not everyone joined up immediately either, although plenty did – between 4^th August and 12^th of September 1914, 478,893 men joined the army. However, these were disproportionately upper and middle class men. The situation was very different for working-class men. Understandably, half a million new recruits joining up made life very difficult for the army. They had to uniform, feed and arm all the non-commissioned men, and paying them a wage was way down the list of priorities. Non-commissioned men could send home half of their salary, but in most cases this was nowhere near as much as they’d been earning in their previous employments, meaning that most working-class families simply couldn’t afford for their father to join up.

Sylvia Pankhurst

One of the books I read as research for Things a Bright Girl Can Do was Sylvia Pankhurst’s The Home Front. In it, she talks about families whose father was a reservist, and how difficult it was when he was called up. Many factories also closed, partly due to lack of demand – the loss of the German market or the market for peacetime goods – partly due to lack of workforce. Prices rose. This created crippling economic hardship. Nobody ever taught me about this in school.

And yes, people did know the trenches were awful, and yes, most of the men in them came home.

The history books’ view of the Suffragettes were similarly biased. There were far more non-militant suffragists than there were militant Suffragettes: the non-militant NUWSS had a membership of around 50,000, while the militant WSPU only ever had around 2,000 members. Though Suffrage campaigning did mostly stop when the war happened, some still went on, and many of the suffragists were opposed to the war and used their time to continue to campaign for women’s issues and peace issues.

It was generally understood that the fight for votes had more-or-less been won in 1914; that the government would have to capitulate once they could find a politic way to do so. The war – and their story that the vote was a thank you for being good girls – provided that. It was a story which infuriated many suffragists. And while, yes, many men and women did realise women’s potential when they suddenly had to become mechanics and omnibus-drivers, many, many women were already frustrated by their limited opportunities before the war. One reason for this may have been universal education and the fact that the average marriage age was increasing; women who fifty years ago were educated solely for marriage, suddenly found that they had the potential to achieve much more; but not the opportunity.

So, history. Still written by the winners. I’m proud to be doing my small part to redress the balance.

 

Loss and tragedy in Northern France

by Marie-Louise Jensen

Wherever you go in Northern France, there are memories of the first and second world wars. Even away from the main battlegrounds and cemeteries of the Somme, Verdun and Etaples, one still stumbles across scenes of battles and memorials. These are less infamous, but for those who fought and died, for the countless families that lost sons, brothers, fathers, they were significant tragedies.

My sons and I like to visit Dieppe; a charming little fishing port, easily reachable with the ferry from Newhaven. But this spot and neighbouring Pourville has seen its share of death in battle.
On August 19th , 1942, almost exactly 74 years ago, if I can trust my arithmetic, 4,963 brave Canadian soldiers set out for France. The allied forces looked forward to liberating France swiftly, but had miscalculated the German defences grievously, to the heavy cost of Canada. In a short battle, 807 Canadians perished and nearly 2,000 were taken prisoner. I can't even imagine the despair of those that survived, to have lost so many.
The map below shows the three points of attack at Dieppe, Pourville and Puys:

There are numerous plaques and testimonies to the fallen for those who take the time to linger on that beautiful coast and remember it was once the scene of dreadful slaughter and loss.

There is also a beautiful memorial garden for the Canadians who were lost, tucked just behind the sea front and below the chateau: 

I imagine many Canadian families came to visit in the aftermath of the Second World War which ran on for another three tragic years after this battle.

Today, aside from the memorials, the sea front is a happy, peaceful place, bustling with holiday makers, children, families and anyone else who enjoys a stroll along the promenades. We spent much of our own holiday at the beach at Pourville, which we love, and even experienced our own small loss and grief when the result of the EU referendum reached us. We were deeply touched that day to know that there were those in Pourville who were also grieving: enough to take down the French and Canadian flags that normally fly alongside the British flag and to lower ours to half mast: