A Tommy in the Family E-Book

Keith Gregson

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 230

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The First World War was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, and one of the most far-reaching. As a result, almost everyone's family history has a Great War connection. In A Tommy in the Family, family historian Keith Gregson explores the human stories behind the history of the war, from the heartwarming to the tear-jerking. He encounters the mystery of the disappearance of the Norfolks; the story of a French girl's note in a soldier's pocket book; and the tragic tale of a group of morris dancers who paid the ultimate price while serving their country. The investigations that preceded each discovery are explored in detail, offering an insight into how the researcher found and followed up their leads. They reveal a range of chance findings, some meticulous analysis and the keen detective qualities required of a family historian. Full of handy research tips and useful background information, A Tommy in the Family will fascinate anyone with an interest in the First World War and help them to find out more about their ancestors who participated in one of the most troubled conflicts in the history of mankind

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title Page

Introduction

The First World War: A Very Brief Synopsis

1 Fred ‘Pop’ Stephens: A Sapper’s Tale

2 John Stephens: A Prisoner of War’s Tale

3 Lil Stephens: Tale of a POW’s Wife

4 Charles Stephens (1888–1972): Tale from a ‘Forgotten Front’

5 Hal Gregson: ‘Flyer’s Tale’

6 Billy Gregson: Tales from a Raconteur

7 Joe Bentley: A Mysterious Tale

8 Joe Greatorex (1891–1980): A Casualty’s Tale

9 Gert Greatorex: The Tale of a Casualty’s Wife

10 Janet Dawson: The Tale of an Army Nurse

11 William Thomas: Tale of a Trench Raid

12 Ernest Bridge (1896–1915) and Norman Bridge (1897–1918): A Tale of Lost Brothers

13 Fred Monk: A Tale Unravelled

14 Cyril Monk (1899–1917): The Tale of a Precious Son

15 Frederick James Sleath: The Tale of a Sniper Officer

16 Reginald Banyard: A Truly Remarkable Tale

17 Hughie Cairns: A Footballer’s Tale

18 Tom Crawford: An Entertainer’s Tale

19 Artie Watterson: A Submariner’s Tale

20 Wilkinson, Lucas, Tiddy and Butterworth: The Morris Dancers’ Tale

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

When I was a youngster in the late 1950s and early 1960s my father, who was a lay reader in the Church of England, would often take the Remembrance Day service at the local cenotaph. The old men who marched past the memorial proudly and stiffly were mostly veterans of the First World War, or the Great War as it was still known to some, despite a second global conflict. One or two were even survivors of the earlier Boer War. You saw them around the town day in day out. Some, it was said, never talked about their experiences ‘in the trenches’ except when in the company of others who had had a similar experience. Now they are all gone and we are left with memories some of them shared with members of my generation (now approaching old age themselves), and a mass of documentation in public and private hands. The tales which follow draw on these different types of primary evidence.

The main aim of the book is to expose as many ways as poss-ible of discovering ancestral information concerning the First World War. Like one of my previous History Press publications, A Viking In The Family and Other Family Tree Tales, the book draws on a number of case studies put together with the help of family and friends. During my thirty-three years as a classroom teacher of history, the First World War featured large in a number of the courses I taught and I was fortunate enough to become a magnet for primary source material kindly donated by a variety of people. I used this material in the classroom, in most cases in its original form, and it was treated with the utmost respect, even awe, by the pupils. It was quite something for a youngster to handle a battered notebook which had been in the breast pocket of a soldier throughout the Somme campaign.

The author’s father taking Remembrance Day service, Carlisle 1960s.

The main source for this book lies in my own family and here I am in the fairly unique position of having access to the war diaries of three brothers: my maternal grandfather and two great-uncles. The diaries featured briefly in the Viking book and it is a thrilling experience to be able to explore their contents in more detail here. My grandfather, Fred ‘Pop’ Stephens (chapter one), served in the Royal Engineers from 1915–19 and saw active service in Gallipoli; he was also present during a number of other major campaigns which were fought out along the Western Front. His various notebooks were transcribed by ‘Pop’ himself into a single school exercise book immediately on his return. This is in my possession along with his medals and an assortment of other useful and informative memorabilia.

Fred’s older brother John (chapter two) was in the King’s Liverpool Regiment and was captured in the German offensive of 1918. He kept detailed diaries of his experiences as a prisoner of war. These were transcribed by his daughter, the late Joan Shrewsbury (née Stephens). I have seen the originals and have a copy of the transcription as well as other original documents and memorabilia relating to his experiences. Among the documents are many connected to John’s wife Lil (chapter three) and her efforts to discover what had happened to her husband after he was reported missing. It has thus been possible to tell her story too.

Charles or Charlie (chapter four), the youngest of the three brothers, kept the most detailed of the diaries. He was sent to India to ‘defend the Empire’ from attacks from within and without. Although he and his comrades did not see the type of action usually associated with the First World War, all was far from plain sailing, as the diaries reveal.

All three brothers survived the war, as witnessed by a moving photograph taken in the family backyard in Millom, Cumberland in 1919.

My mother recalls that my great-grandmother took the boys’ uniforms, tore them into strips and made a traditional northern ‘clippie’ mat out of them. The mat disintegrated many years ago.

My paternal grandfather, Harold ‘Hal’ Gregson (chapter five), served most of the war in the Royal Flying Corps/Royal Air Force and was nicknamed ‘Flyer’. From the bits and pieces we have gleaned on him has come a tale as amusing as it is informative. His brother ‘Billy’ (chapter six), who featured in the Viking book for reasons other than those concerning the First World War, was a great storyteller and part of the research here has been to see if the truth of his tales can be verified.

Fred, John and Charlie, Devonshire Road, Millom, Cumberland 1919.

My father’s only sibling, Geoff, married in 1952 and died of tuberculosis soon after. His wife, Anne, died in 2011 and left behind a suitcase of photographs connected to her family. Among these was a series of pictures which allowed me to put together the remarkable story of her young great-uncle Joe who, as it turned out, lost his life in an action which for many years after the event provided one of the great mysteries of the war (chapter seven).

One fortunate outcome of my First World War interest was that I was left the First World War material belonging to my paternal grandmother’s brother T.J. ‘Joe’ Greatorex (chapter eight). Joe was a gamekeeper by profession, a crack-shot and, later in life, an internationally respected gun-dog breeder. He saw active service, fell ill on the front and later became a Lewis gun instructor. He kept all his main official war documents as well as letters written from hospital, both at the front and in England. As with the cases of John and Lil Stephens (chapters two and three), these documents enable us to tell the tale of the one who was left at home, in this case Joe’s wife Gert (née Evans) (chapter nine).

Nor do my immediate family case studies stop here. Partly as a consequence of the First World War, my maternal grandfather ‘Pop’ Stephens married twice. My natural grandmother died of cancer in 1932, leaving my grandfather with my mother as a ten-year-old. In the 1930s he married Janet Thomas (née Dawson) (chapter ten), a childhood friend, who was widowed and also had a young daughter. She had nursed and married a South African war hero, William Thomas (chapter eleven). He served in East Africa, was wounded twice on the Western Front and died in the 1920s as a result of weakness caused by his war wounds. Janet was present at one of the great home-based military disasters of the war and also left me all the fascinating material relating to her first husband’s medal-winning war activities. Her individual tale concerning the Gretna Rail Tragedy of 1915 featured in the Viking book and is touched on again briefly here.

As far as I know, all my blood relatives survived the war. This was not the case with my wife’s family. Her paternal grandmother Grace Monk (née Bridge) was one of the six children of an Essex village shopkeeper. There were four girls and two boys in the family. The girls lived to a ripe old age; the boys Ernest and Norman (jointly appearing in chapter twelve) were both killed on the Western Front.

My wife’s paternal grandfather, Fred Monk (chapter thirteen), went late to the war, served briefly on the Italian Front and, like John Stephens (chapter two), was captured on the Western Front during the German advance of 1918. It was said that he never talked of his experiences but I discovered otherwise. His youngest brother Cyril, apple of his mother’s eye and hope of the family in academic terms, went to war as a teenager and was never seen again (chapter fourteen).

Acquaintances of my late father have provided me with further material of use and interest. Material left in the attic of their ‘White Elephant Shop’ in Carlisle included the wartime memorabilia of Reg Banyard (chapter fifteen). He had been a sapper on the Somme and his pocketbook, used for numerous purposes while in the trenches, is a real gem, coming up with one of the most moving pieces of evidence war can throw up. Similarly material relating to a Fred Sleath (chapter sixteen) was discovered in the attic. He had been an officer and responsible, according to his own literature, for setting up one of the first sniping sections on the Western Front. This he did in the early part of the war before moving into Intelligence. He left the typewritten script for a book based on his experiences, which gives a remarkable insight into the ‘art’ of sniping.

Early in the twenty-first century, I was asked in my capacity as a musician and singer-songwriter to judge a songwriting competition at a folk-related gathering in Northumberland. One of the winning entries was about a young Northumbrian footballer who had moved to Canada just before the war and had been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. I decided to follow up the story of Hughie Cairns (chapter seventeen) in detail and it proved a very worthwhile exercise. Tom Crawford (chapter eighteen) was a retired music hall and seaside promenade entertainer whom my father met in later life. When Tom died, he left his memorabilia to my father and this included information on his service in the Royal Flying Corps during the war.

Another remarkable tale has come as a result of a marriage into the family. At my nephew’s wedding I engaged in lengthy conversation with the bride’s aunt, Alison Harris. She had done some tremendous research into an ancestor who had served in submarines in the First World War. It is a tale with a tragic ending and one worth the telling (chapter nineteen).

The last story is one I was keen to include for personal reasons. A lifelong love of morris dancing (a much derided pastime) has led me to tell the moving and tragic tale of a group of distinguished dancers who paid the ultimate price while serving their country, the traditions of which they all held dear (chapter twenty).

As to the book’s title, ‘Tommy’ or ‘Tommy Atkins’ was the generic term used for the British soldier. Though some of the case studies in this book are not directly related to true ‘Tommies’, the general title remains attractive enough, while widening the content to include ‘non-Tommies’ ought to provide assistance to those researching family experience in the First World War. Hopefully these case studies, the stories behind them, and the accompanying tips will combine to make A Tommy in the Family both interesting and helpful to such researchers.

My thanks go to my family and all who have supported and helped me in this venture. They will be referred to in detail in the main text although, as ever, the ultimate responsibility for the work is my own.

Keith Gregson

Sunderland

2013

THE FIRST WORLD WAR: A VERY BRIEF SYNOPSIS

After over thirty years at the chalkface of history (and some brief respite thereafter), I find it an interesting not to say challenging exercise to sit back and summarise briefly a topic which occupied so much time and space during those working years. Here then is the result.

It has become easier with the passage of time to look back and appreciate the various causes of the war and also the fact that for years this particular war had been ‘an accident waiting to happen’. Most of the countries involved from the early stages including Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Russia carry some of the blame; all were pushed by the fashion of the times to expand their borders and/or the borders of dependent territories. The war started in July/August 1914 mainly because the timing suited the war plans of the German/Austrian alliance, which were based on the certainty that they would have to fight the other three (France, Russia and Britain) on a variety of fronts. The guns were silenced in November 1918 chiefly on account of the narrow failure of a last German victory push in Western Europe earlier in April. This failure allowed the entry of the relatively fresh and well-armed USA into the war (1917) to be decisive.

The men who served in the British and Commonwealth (Empire) forces between 1914 and 1918 did so as regulars, volunteers and conscripts. They were in the Royal Navy and the army (including its Royal Flying Corps (RFC) which took on its role as a separate third force – the Royal Air Force (RAF) – during this very war). For some, regulars and recruits alike, their war started on the very first day, 4 August 1914. For others, because of age and/or method of ‘joining up’, the war was shorter, in some cases lasting only a matter of weeks or months.

On land, soldiers, airmen and even, on occasion, sailors, served on a number of fronts. The most famous of these was the Western Front, a moveable front which at one point famously stretched from Switzerland to the North Sea. The front lines (still known as ‘The Trenches’ today), were often separated by less than a few hundred yards in places. They settled down where they were in France and Belgium because the initial German push into France had been repelled in 1914 along the River Marne. The retreating Germans had then been ordered to ‘down anchor’ and battle it out (i.e. they were pushed back ‘onto’ the River Marne – not ‘into’ it, as one of my pupils once wrote). These lines moved backwards and forwards over the following four years but in general terms very little ground was gained by either side. Behind these front lines developed a maze of supporting trenches and tunnels and transport systems. This system, developed through stalemate between the two sides, was in place for all but the first few months of the war and naturally features heavily in this book.

There was also an Eastern Front across on the Russian western border but troops from Britain and the Commonwealth had little involvement with campaigns here, although members of the Royal and Merchant Navy did support the Russians in the Baltic. Fighting also took place in the Italian Alps. This involved British and Commonwealth troops at times, sent to support their Italian allies.

Perhaps the best known of the other fronts or sideshows from the British and Commonwealth point of view was the Gallipoli or Dardanelles campaign of 1915. Here the aim, according to Churchill, was to start an attack on the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ by taking the peninsula from the Turkish allies of the Germans. This would allow troops to march north against the weak south of Austria and also for the navy to go through the Dardanelles and communicate with Russian allies by sea to the south. The campaign, which lasted from April 1915 to January 1916 and featured many ANZAC soldiers (from Australia and New Zealand), was a costly failure for a number of reasons. Included in these are a misjudgment of the skill and durability of the enemy and a failure to grasp the difficulty of the terrain being attacked. As a result many of the Allied troops were pinned down on the beaches and in the lower reaches of cliff faces in dreadful heat and suffering from a shortage of rations. One redeeming feature was that the eventual retreat/evacuation was carried out without significant casualties.

There were other fronts too, a number of them of little interest to those studying the role of someone in the British and Commonwealth forces, although this does not apply to sideshows in the German-held territories of Africa, in Mesopotamia, Palestine and in India.

The major battles of the war for ‘Tommy’ were on the Western Front and these can be difficult to unravel. Often they were not like the battles of old with defined beginnings and ends and one battle could run almost seamlessly into another. Among the very early battles of the war were Mons and the Marne; later came a number of battles around Ypres, Messines and the modern Passchendaele, Loos, Arras and later Cambrai. The summer of 1916 saw the beginning of the infamously bloody Battle of the Somme, which dragged on in various guises into 1917. The Battle of Verdun was a major attritional encounter between the French and German forces.

At sea there were major encounters in the South Atlantic early in the war followed by the massive if indecisive Battle of Jutland in 1916. Both sides also operated submarine fleets and German attempts to starve Britain by sinking any ship heading there with goods (the ‘Unrestricted Submarine Warfare’ of 1917), is considered the major reason for the USA joining the conflict. At first US entry merely balanced the sides, as Russia departed the war after its revolution of 1917, freeing Germany and her allies from conflict on the Eastern Front. There was also a dramatic naval raid on the Belgian port of Zeebrugge in April 1918.

As noted above (and important to a number of case studies) there was a huge spring offensive headed by German troops in March 1918 which led to many Allied casualties and prisoners of war. Then famously, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent, providing us with a very specific time when we can honour the memories of those who took part in the conflict.

1

FRED ‘POP’ STEPHENS: A SAPPER’S TALE

My maternal grandfather Fred Stephens (1886–1952), known to all as ‘Pop’, died when I was three years old. My earliest memories are of him playing cricket and ‘Cowboys and Indians’ with me in a field beside his cottage in the Lake District. I remember him as a jolly, cheerful man and all that knew him back up this impression. Yet he was present at some of the events of the First World War which have since come to be regarded as the most horrific. While serving as a sapper in the Royal Engineers, he saw action in Gallipoli and later at Ypres, Messines, Passchendaele and Cambrai on the Western Front. He kept a record of his movements and thoughts throughout the war in a number of typical pocketbook diaries. By the time he returned home after the war, these were disintegrating and he transcribed them word for word into an exercise book, writing on every other side until he reached the back. At this point, he turned the book upside-down and headed off in the opposite direction.

Fred and his two brothers (chapters two and four) were born and brought up in the iron mining and manufacturing town of Millom on the Cumbrian coast. The boys’ father, Thomas, had come to the town with his own mother and stepfather. The family’s roots were to be found around the Devon copper mines of the Tamar Valley and, before that, in the villages of the Cornish coast near Truro. The boys’ mother, Jane, had come directly to Millom from a mining village close to St Austell in Cornwall. Like many God-fearing and caring miners of his day, Thomas was determined that his boys should not go underground. When he died (of anthrax) in 1907, two of the boys were settled in shop work and Fred had started behind the counter in the post office at nearby Barrow-in-Furness.

‘Pop’ Stephens’s transcribed diary (1919).

When the war broke out in 1914, Fred was a mature single man in his late twenties. He volunteered immediately but was not taken on, as his work in the post office was considered more important. His offer was finally accepted in January 1915. Clearly the war was not ‘over by Christmas’ 1914 as many had predicted, and more men were needed for the various campaigns being planned. He travelled to Chatham via London with a couple of post office friends – all destined to join the communications section of the Royal Engineers. (The Royal Signals had not yet been formed and many Post Office communications workers went into the Engineers, where most of the communication work was done.) All three stayed with Fred’s maternal aunt, who had a small wool shop in Harlesden High Street – a stone’s throw from the modern Wembley Stadium.

After arriving at Chatham the following day, and a week of ‘drilling and plenty of fatigue work’, Fred headed to Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain and thence to Brookwood near Woking. Here he undertook courses in signalling, horse-riding (in some cases on mules) and musketry. The final shooting trial was held at Bisley, still famous today for its shooting competitions and currently advertising itself as ‘Europe’s premier shooting school’. In March 1915, his unit was inspected by George V and Queen Mary while the following weeks were spent in tents and in going through numerous war exercises. On 20 April, his unit was inspected by the General Officer Commanding before setting out from camp: ‘20,000 troops, 7½ miles in length, G S wagons and everything was out for this inspection.’ Five days later the first landings at Gallipoli took place but Fred was still involved in manoeuvres on the plains. In early May they were inspected once again ‘for war mobilisation’ but continued with ‘various schemes again all over Surrey’. This continued into June with trips into local towns and the occasional catch-up with friends from back home being the only icing on the cake.

In the middle of June 1915, some of his friends left ‘for the Dardanelles’ and, as he put it, he ‘had a good time with our mob the night before they departed – a real soldier’s night out.’ Fred, however, was kept back as part of the reserve and, after a few restless days, he and his unit moved to Avonmouth where they boarded the SS Franconia. The vessel left England on 1 July, travelled via Gibraltar and Malta, and landed at Alexandria in Egypt on 11 July. The troops from the ship moved down to Cairo for just over a week. On 20 July they boarded the tramp boat Seang-Bee. After three days on the ship (‘food rotten and all the boys in a bad condition’) they joined a flotilla off Lemnos.

On 27 July 1915, Fred saw active service for the first time as he landed on the coast of Gallipoli. At 5 a.m. he disembarked from a ship called the Snaefell into a barge and it took him three hours to reach the shore at Cape Helles where the original Gallipoli landing had taken place. ‘Heavily shelled by the Turks on the hill – shrapnel hovering around us all the time,’ he noted. By evening he and his companion signallers had reached base camp at Krithia and had dug themselves in. He covered himself with a groundsheet and when he awoke in the morning discovered that two bullets had penetrated the sheet and were lodged in the corner of the dugout. By 30 July all the 13th Division signallers were back in Lemnos via barge and ship. The first few days of active service had taken its toll; many of the men were ill and Fred described himself as ‘almost a human skeleton’.

Over the next few days, Fred was to become embroiled in one of the most debated actions of the war, an action brought to the forefront by Australian film-makers in the late twentieth-century feature film Gallipoli. On 3 August 1915 he landed at Anzac Cove, mainly inhabited by New Zealand and Australian forces pinned down on the beach and in dugouts at the base of high cliffs. He was part of the 39th Brigade and it is clear that his job was to try to keep communications going. Just after landing, he saw his first fatality:

Four of us went to the jetty for fresh water and had a good crack with an officer and just as we left him he got caught by a bullet and was killed. It was like Hell.

Early in August 1915, he and a party of engineers crawled up the cliffs for 1½ miles under constant fire. On their return they saw thousands of troops marching in preparation for ‘a big attack on Anzac’. The aim, according to historians, was to engage the enemy while British forces landed further north at Suvla Bay in an attempt to cut off the Gallipoli peninsula. The British could then roll up and destroy the Turks in a classic pincer movement. The ANZAC attacks uphill towards the Nek and Lone Pine, with bayonets and no loaded rifles, have gone down as part of one of the most valiant and wasteful projects in warfare. Fred’s description of the days surrounding these attacks is worth reproducing in full:

Cruisers were lying outside. The 38th Brigade and Australian troops attacked the Turks at dawn and there was great shouting and heavy firing – saw quite a lot of prisoners brought in a few hours after the attack – later my officer and two of us went a mile and a half through the gulleys and it was strewed with wounded and killed. Had a very narrow escape – snipers – managed to get a few hours’ sleep on my return on the 8th – almost dead beat? Our brigade went out – heavy firing and still on top of the ridge – 39th brigade falling back. 38th brigade lost heavily on the 10th and 11th August. Some of us returned to headquarters – saw spies brought in by the Australians. On the 13th ordered again to our Brigade. It was hellish. Saw Sandy and he was a physical wreck – almost brought tears to my eyes. Will never forget the sight [sic] he was in.

At the time, it was believed that the bombardment from ‘the cruisers’ would force the Turks out of the trenches at the top of the cliffs. This was not the case and a combination of confusion over timing and shattered communication wires meant that those ascending the cliffs were met by a fully prepared opposition. This led to the carnage described in the diary, the film and history books.

With little achieved in terms of progress, it was a case of stalemate with troops unable to move inland from Anzac Cove or Suvla Bay. More than three weeks after the attack at Anzac, Fred was transferred to the Bay exhausted ‘for want of sleep and rest’. At this point in the diary and with no explanation he wrote, ‘the S.M. was a coward’. On 6 September, he noted, ‘first night’s sleep and rest since 12 August’.