“I feel one can say with some conviction that no man should willingly leave his home to fight, wound, maim or kill other men about whom he knows little and whom he certainly does not hate. When all men refuse to commit such follies the foundations of a true civilisation will have only just started to be laid.”
- Sam Sutcliffe, circa 1974 (extracted from his Memoir)

Sunday 28 April 2019

April/May 1919: Sam contemplates leaving the Army soonish – and finds his self-confidence vanishing… Brother Ted‘s back in his old job, but Sam’s pre-war employer’s bust…

Sam’s Memoir(1) – paperback and e-book – and the e-excerpts from it are now available in their third and final editions with added Endnotes and, in the Memoir, added documentation.

For details of how to buy the Memoir or Gallipoli Somme & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books click here plus see reader reviews here and here  and reviews from the Western Front Association and the Gallipoli Association hereFor AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

The war’s over at last – but Sam’s blog, Facebook page and tweets will continue until his Memoir concludes with the Centenary of the July 19, 1919, Peace parade in London…

All proceeds from all versions of Sam’s Memoir will always go to the British Red Cross – and the current running donations total as of April 3, 2019, is £4,078.85 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!).

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week, in the aftermath of the Armistice… One early direct result of agreements at the Paris Peace Conference was rioting in Peking (as was) where 3,000 students were incensed by the news that Germany’s former territories in Shantung on the east coast had been handed over willynilly to Japan; the students sought out the warlord believed to have sold out his country and beat him to death in his home, thereby founding the May The 4th Movement which soon spread to Shanghai and elsewhere (China recovered its lost land three years later). 
    In Germany, left-right fighting continued as 9,000 Weimar Republic troops and Freikorps irregulars took control of Munich, where socialists had set up a Bavarian Soviet (May 2) – the Freikorps executed 700 to reinforce their message.
    To the east, however, the Russian civil war took a turn to the Red, when Bolshevik forces, recovering from their defeat at Orenburg, crushed two White Russian Divisions at Buguruslan, Orenburg Oblast (April 28; 1,220 miles southeast of Moscow), capturing the town six days later and forcing the Whites to retreat 73 miles north to Bugulma, Tatarstan. 
    Other post-World War eruptions ranged widely. The new Emir of Afghanistan, Amanoellah Khan, apparently under Russian influence, declared war on Great Britain (May 3).
    In America a wave of anarchist bombings began (April 30) with 36 bombs mailed to politicians and businessmen, although the only people they injured were servants and a Georgia Senator’s wife. And in Cleveland, Ohio, the May Day Riots saw a trade union and socialist protest against the jailing in April of Eugene V. Debs, already a four-time Socialist Party candidate for the Presidency (he ran again in 1920 from the Atlanta pen); the demonstrators fought police and soldiers in three locations and the riots, noted as the most violent incident of the USA’s first “Red Scare”, left two dead, 40 injured and 116 arrests.
    Finally, way down in Western Australia, the Freemantle Wharf Riot pitted the Waterside Workers’ Federation against the National Waterside Workers Union, noted as strikebreakers during the war and thus preferred for all the work going on the docks. One WWF man died after being clubbed by police.

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. They told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). During this interlude he suffered various illnesses while recovering from trench warfare’s privations. In December, probably, solo, he returned to France – reverting to Private on arrival, I don’t know why – and dogsbodied around Arras until mid-March when he ran into his own Essex 2/7th Battalion. They moved into the trenches near Fampoux just in time for the German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28, 1918, left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW (Blog March 25, 2018). For several months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups doing hard labour, before spending the summer in southern Germany and finally moving westwards to Lorraine – whence, the day after Armistice, his long trek towards the French Front began. He reached safety after tiptoeing through a German minefield (November 15 probably). Then began his recovery from chronic near-starvation – and a brief emotional breakdown – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de factoholiday in Brighton. But then, something completely different… through the spring, Sam and others ex-POWs guard German POWs at a camp in Sussex…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
April-May, 1919, Sussex: Sam continues with his final Army job, in a squad of fellow ex-POWs guarding German war prisoners still detained at a run-down near-stately home in the village of East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel. Transferred to Home Guard forerunner, the Royal Defence Corps, he’s emerged from a short-lived lust for revenge and come to enjoy fraternising with (most of) the enemy – they don’t share much language, but they do have a lot of WW1 front-line experience in common… 
    But while that job trundles on through the spring, he’s starting to think of the life to come, the life aborted by the war in 1914 when he was 16 – and stuck in an unpromising office-boy position anyway. His brother Ted looks well set, mind (bar the terrible gas damage to his lungs, of course)…

‘Weeks and months passed until June(2) arrived with warm sunshine and news that a Peace Treaty was soon to be signed. My brother had been demobbed(3); on the first day after he left the Army, he’d started work back in his old job with a City of London paper company, determined to forget all about the recent wasted years and bring himself up to date in everything concerning his chosen trade – which company manufactured every type of paper, where it was warehoused, who the mills’ agents were and where to find them… All the information he’d had at his fingertips before the war, as he described to me in many talks before we went to war and then, lately, whenever I came home on leave from Sussex.
     But Ted’s return to work did bring one difficulty. His boss still thought of him as the lad of five years ago and hoped to pay him accordingly – which meant merely doubling his pre-war salary(4). Ted could just have flown off the handle and told him to stuff the job, yet no such reckless action followed; fuming inwardly, he worked politely and industriously to relearn his trade so that, at the appropriate time, he could demand a reward commensurate with his worth to the firm – eating humble pie, he told me, for a strictly limited period.
     Meanwhile, I felt that, compared with Ted, I had a life of ease. Although I realised some of us must do the necessary chores aimed at winding up the Great War(5) (as it was beginning to be called, for reasons elusive to me), I itched to shed the uniform which five years earlier had so attracted me.
     However, when I faced my situation as it would look from the moment the Army handed me my notice of discharge, the shock was sufficient to destroy all the self-confidence slowly restored since my release from the degradation of living as a war prisoner. The boy who had, without much serious thought for his long-term prospects, gone along to enlist with his brother and two somewhat older fellows and struggled so hard to stay with them when that nasty Quartermaster Sergeant had thrust him aside because he suspected the lad was too young… age-wise, five years on, that kid was about to become a Man…
     After posing as one for so long, I suddenly had to understand that a wartime man and a peacetime man had quite dissimilar problems to cope with… although survival remained the eventual aim of both, I reflected. These realisations shook me. So, while I guarded the prison “camp” and accompanied parties of Germans to their compulsory labours, my thoughts often wandered far from them and their activities.
     Back in the City with his old firm and, therefore, close to the offices of my former employer, Lake & Currie, Ted said he would telephone or call on them to find out about my prospects, if any. But he had become so busy picking up former threads and contacts that I felt too much time was being lost. With thousands of men released from the Forces daily, I might well miss my opportunity.
     So I wrote to the man who, in those far-off days just after I had joined the Army, had treated me so generously with his gold half-sovereigns and the kindly good wishes: Company Secretary F.C. Bull – brusque at times, I recalled, but only when under pressure from one of the partners, particularly the Squire of what-d’you-call-it in Suffolk. Sad to say, though, he did not now work at that address and someone at that building forwarded my letter to a different part of the City, whence I received a reply which killed off all hope of rejoining the old firm.
     Signed by, of all people, the pre-war junior typist, it informed me that Lake & Currie no longer existed; she and the former senior partner (the Squire bloke(6)) now worked in a small office in Broad Street and required no staff. So war had put the skids under such a big and prosperous business. Like many a good soldier, it had gone over the top and vanished.’
 (2) June must be a misremembering because  my father was “disembodied” (demobilised, but for Territorials I gather) on May 6 and discharged on May 30 according to records including the “Casualty Form – Active Service” (page 2) right here, if you can wiggle your way through the scrawl about two-thirds of the way down on the left:


(3) Ted Sutcliffe’s Medal Rolls index card, below, suggests his effective demob date was April 1, 1919, though it’s expressed as transfer to “‘Z’ Res” (see on the right, under "Remarks"); Wikipedia says Class Z Reserve was a contingent “consisting of previously enlisted soldiers, now discharged”, created by Army Order on December 3, 1918, pending potential post-Armistice resumption of hostilities; after post-war treaties secured the peace, the Army disbanded Z Reserve on March 31, 1920. Ian Hook, when curating the Essex Regiment Museum (he moved to the Imperial War Museum), told me he found a record of my father’s ultimate discharge as being on March 12, 1920, so it could well be he too got a final admin. transfer to Z Reserve but barely noticed.


(4) According to UK inflation calculator http://safalra.com/other/historical-uk-inflation-price-conversion/(may prove hyperlink-resistant)prices exactly doubled between 1914 and 1919, year on year increases being 12.5% 1914-15, 18.1% 1915-16, 25.2% 1916-17, 22% 1917-18, 10.1% 1918-19 – its source credited as a 2004 paper “Consumer Price Inflation Since 1750” (Economic Trends NO. 604) by Jim O’Donoghue, Louise Goulding, and Grahame Allen. Ted’s firm honoured a promise (in writing, mind you) to give him his old job back when (if) he returned from the war, as noted in Chapter 14 of Sam’s Memoir.
(5) One early source of the title was the Canadian magazine, Maclean’s, of October, 1914: “Some wars name themselves. This is the Great War.” It remained so named until World War II came along and demanded a predecessor – I know that doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s commonly offered as the explanation so… feel free to raise an eyebrow and say, Huh? Or… note original “TV historian” AJP Taylor recording that Charles à Court Repington (1858-1925), a former Lieutenant-Colonel who turned war correspondent (for The Times during WW1), named it World War 1 in order to remind future generations that “the history of the world is the history of war” – Taylor says this was in the aftermath of Armistice, and that may be when it gained a certain currency, but his Wikipedia biog reckons he used it first in writing in his personal diary for September 10, 1918.
(6) The “squire bloke” was Lake – subject, in Chapter 11 of the Memoir, of one of Sam’s remarkably detailed descriptions “A big man indeed. The squire of quite a large village up in Norfolk and the possessor of a dwelling in the fashionable Boltons area of Kensington and a flat in one of those small streets at the back of Trafalgar Square.… Unforgettable too, the appearance, manner and behaviour of the senior partner, Mr Lake; he had this tough, grey hair with a military cut, fairly short back, sides and on top, no parting – a style that became generally popular some years later – and a wide forehead above bushy black eyebrows above small eyes set unusually close, and yet between them stood the very high bridge of a thin, pointed nose; below that, the then fashionable, clipped, grey moustache, and small, petulant lips; the jawbones narrowed to a small, pointed chin; bright red cheeks blazed out from an otherwise pale skin.” The far more amiable and less conspicuous partner, Currie, lived in Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam’s first post-war romance – with the little lady from Littlehampton – fizzles via a mixture of old-fashioned morality, a still virginal lad’s overwhelming capacity for embarrassment and awkwardness – and a soupçon of period racism…

(1) In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoir of his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.

Sunday 21 April 2019

Sam “fraternises with the enemy” again – the German POWs he’s guarding in Sussex – including fellow former front-liners Willi and Hans… they all find they’re “too young to hate anybody who did them no harm”

Sam’s Memoir(1) – paperback and e-book – and the e-excerpts from it are now available in their third and final editions with added Endnotes and, in the Memoir, added documentation.

For details of how to buy the Memoir or Gallipoli Somme & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books click here plus see reader reviews here and here  and reviews from the Western Front Association and the Gallipoli Association here.For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

The war’s over at last – but Sam’s blog, Facebook page and tweets will continue until his Memoir concludes with the Centenary of the July 19, 1919, Peace parade in London…

All proceeds from all versions of Sam’s Memoir will always go to the British Red Cross – and the current running donations total as of April 3, 2019, is £4,078.85 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!).

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week, in the aftermath of the Armistice… The big story, the Paris Peace Conference, came up with nothing substantial (until the start of next week), but Europe and beyond remained embroiled in aftermath uproar of various kinds, often indicative of trouble in store.
    Assorted “soviets” (outside Russia) went on springing up and/or collapsing. In Ireland, the Limerick Soviet, created on April 15 during a strike that followed the murder of a policeman/trade unionist by the IRA, briefly produced its own currency and newspaper before peacefully expiring on April 27. In Germany, a socialist leader organised 20,000 “irregulars” of the Freikorp into a force coherent enough to capture the town of Dachau from the local soviet (26)…
    On the multinational capitalist front, power-broking business took shape significantly with the San Remo Oil Agreement (April 24). This divided spoils among the victors – well, just UK and France – with the UK passing to the state-owned French oil company a 25 per cent stake in Turkish Petroleum it had expropriated from Germany in December, 1918, while acquiring 47.5 per cent for British-but-not-state-owned Anglo-Persian oil (April 22).
    While swathes of the Canadian Army disbanded, having served their purpose, Polish head of state Pilsudski unsuccessfully tried to generate union with Lithuania by declaration and the promise of democracy, and the democratic Estonian Constituent Assembly convened its first session in Tallinn… elsewhere shooting proceeded.
    After a short lull in the Russian civil war, the Red Counteroffensive Of The Eastern Front (April 22-July 19) started with the successful three-day defence of Orenburg, about 900 mikes southeast of Moscow, against a White Russian attack. However, in the Battle For The Donbass region (January-May) in eastern Ukraine the Whites drove the Reds into retreat in the Kolpakovo district.
    Meanwhile, in Baku, Azerbaijan, a workers’ uprising overthrew the newish military dictatorship (April 25).

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. They told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). During this interlude he suffered various illnesses while recovering from trench warfare’s privations. In December, probably, solo, he returned to France – reverting to Private on arrival, I don’t know why – and dogsbodied around Arras until mid-March when he ran into his own Essex 2/7th Battalion. They moved into the trenches near Fampoux just in time for the German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28, 1918, left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW (Blog March 25, 2018). For several months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups doing hard labour, before spending the summer in southern Germany and finally moving westwards to Lorraine – whence, the day after Armistice, his long trek towards the French Front began. He reached safety after tiptoeing through a German minefield (November 15 probably). Then began his recovery from chronic near-starvation – and a brief emotional breakdown – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de factoholiday in Brighton. But then, something completely different…Sam as ex-POW guards German POWs…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
April, 1919, Sussex: Sam is continuing with his final Army job, in a squad of fellow ex-POWs guarding German war prisoners still detained at a run-down near-stately home in the village of East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel. 
    Transferred to Home Guard forerunner, the Royal Defence Corps, he’s emerged from a short-lived lust for revenge and come to enjoy fraternising with (most of) the enemy… not to mention a haughty girl in Littlehampton (who hasn’t inveigled him into losing his virginity just yet). This week, he’s in charge of a hard-labour detail with his sort-of new pals – they don’t share much language, but they do have a lot of WW1 front-line experience in common…

‘In spare moments, I still spent the odd half-hour with the mandolin player. His life must have been dull because, as an Unteroffizier(2), he couldn’t go out with working parties – this I assumed, at least, never having seen him outside his room. An engaging bloke, he was, always well-groomed and neatly moustached… I listened mostly, being well aware that he was older, better educated and more worldly-wise. I gained an insight into the Berlin pre-war lifestyle experienced at his level; it included frequent dinings-out and visits to theatres and opera houses.
     Meanwhile, the work of reinforcing the Arun’s banks continued. A repetitive routine. Rifle slung over shoulder on the walk to the station, pack my merry men into a compartment and sit with them, listen and try to understand their conversations, but not often succeed – hoping that most of the Germans knew I had a smattering of their lingo, yet not exactly how much I might comprie(3)… and, at the same time, suspecting that the oddball(4), who resented deeply his captivity, spoke rudely about me or the British in general.
     When Willi Justmann, of ruddy cheek and open smile, happened to be a member of our party, he always helped us enjoy the journey. Hans(5), whose surname I forget, made another good companion. Both spoke as much English as I spoke German. No hatred in them by then – like me, too young to hate anybody who did them no personal harm. I think we youngsters mistrusted the opinions of most older men, chiefly because they felt so certain of their rightness. I’d bet those German lads had many a laugh, before the war, at the prancings of Kaiserimitators with the ugly, carefully moulded moustaches, points upturned, the elaborate uniforms and high-kick marching to and fro.
     Detraining at Arundel(6), we marched to a prearranged rendezvous with a man who supervised our unloading blocks of chalk from a barge on to the riverbank at various points. That task completed, we then rolled the lumps to the river edge and down the bank to settle in the water. Then we built up one block on top of another, and gradually constructed a new, firm riverbank.
     Our boss was a genuine Sussex-by-the-sea man of about 60 years, slow-talking, comfortable, and the sort of bloke for whom people work twice as hard as they will for a bully. He wore a leather strap over his corduroy trousers, just below each knee, to guard his private parts against the marauding habits of small insects and tiny rodents. His lower regions protected and his torso massively garbed in a long poacher’s coat of heavy black cloth, he faced both weather and his fellows with confidence, knew his job well and shared his consequent contentment with those around him, including our German mates. The decent ones, that is, for when I numbered among my party, for one day only, that Prussian-type nut, the foreman soon got his measure and yelled, “Work you! Stop jawing and get on with it!”
     No other Jerry ever had a word of reproof from him in my hearing.
     Up on a hill above the town, I could see Arundel Castle(7) in its extensive grounds and longed to slip away and explore them, but I needlessly feared someone might escape – why should they have done so, with return to Deutschland probably imminent?’
(2) Unteroffizier: equivalent of Sergeant in the German Army – he was introduced in the March 24 Blog.
(3) Comprie: soldierese Frenglish for “understand”, bien sur.
(4) “The oddball” is a back-ref to the one German POW Sam couldn’t get on with, also introduced in the March 24 Blog. As per a few paragraphs down, Sam thought him a “Prussian” – but then he tended to think that of any German he disliked, such as the miserable prison-camp guard in Lorraine, back in autumn 1918, who continued mistreating and harassing the British POWs even after everyone else started celebrating the Armistice (see Blog November 18, 2018).
(5) Hans and Willi were the first German POWs Sam befriended when he got over his vengeful phase (again see Blog March 24).
(6) Area map showing Arundel, East Preston etc at https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/East+Preston/@50.8489064,-0.5554478,12z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x4875a480ae383f65:0x27ad9d21859cd419!8m2!3d50.811152!4d-0.48458 (if this doesn’t click through and you like to see a map of what you’re reading about, do cut and paste it into your favourite search engine).
(7) For a recent photo of Arundel Castle as viewed from the banks of the Arun where Sam and his German POWs were working in 1919 see this local news story https://www.littlehamptongazette.co.uk/news/woman-s-warning-after-toddler-falls-into-stream-near-arundel-castle-1-8706417 Parts of the castle date back as far as 1068 and it has been the family seat of the Dukes of Norfolk for more than 850 years (two of them were beheaded by angry monarchs and the palace was besieged during the Civil War).

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam contemplates leaving the Army imminently and finds his self-confidence vanishing as he realises he has to build a new, civilian life… As ever, older brother Ted is ahead of him, back in his pre-war job… But Sam finds his own former employer bust and not hiring…

(1) In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoir of his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.

Sunday 14 April 2019

Sam, an ex-POW Gallipoli/Somme veteran guarding German POWs in Sussex, discovers the previously hidden (romantic!) promise of Littlehampton…

Sam’s Memoir(1) – paperback and e-book – and the e-excerpts from it are now available in their third and final editions with added Endnotes and, in the Memoir, added documentation.

For details of how to buy the Memoir or Gallipoli Somme & Arras 1918/POWetc mini-e-books click here plus see reader reviews here and here  and reviews from the Western Front Association and the Gallipoli Association here.For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

The war’s over at last – but Sam’s blog, Facebook page and tweets will continue until his Memoir concludes with the Centenary of the July 19, 1919, Peace parade in London…

All proceeds from all versions of Sam’s Memoir will always go to the British Red Cross – and the current running donations total as of April 3, 2019, is £4,078.85 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!).

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week, in the aftermath of the Armistice… While not much detail was emerging from the Paris Peace Conference, French PM Georges Clemenceau wrote to one of his generals (April 15) that everything was turning out well from his point of view: “In the last three days, we have worked well. All the great issues of concern to France are almost settled. Yesterday, as well as the two treaties giving us the military support of Britain and the United States in case of a German attack, I obtained the occupation of the Rhineland for 15 years, with partial evacuation after five years. If Germany does not fulfil the treaty, there will be no evacuation either partial or definitive. At last I am no longer anxious. I have obtained almost everything I wanted.”
    Years later, UK PM Lloyd George observed of his more-or-less ally against US President Woodrow Wilson’s more moderate approach to punishing Germany’s: “It was part of the real joy of these Conferences to observe Clemenceau's attitude towards Wilson… He listened with eyes and ears lest Wilson should by a phrase commit the Conference to some proposition which weakened the settlement from the French standpoint. If Wilson ended his allocution without doing any perceptible harm, Clemenceau's stern face temporarily relaxed, and he expressed his relief with a deep sigh. But if the President took a flight beyond the azure main, as he was occasionally inclined to do without regard to relevance, Clemenceau would open his great eyes in twinkling wonder, and turn them on me as much as to say: ‘Here he is, off again!’”
    Apart from the jaw-jaw, war-war still proceeded in eastern Europe. While the Red and White Russians’ conflict in the Urals stalled for a few days, Bolshevik forces took a heavy loss in the Battle Of Lida April 16-17), part of the Polish-Soviet War (February 14, 1919-March 18, 1921). Having camped outside the town (in present-day Belarus) since mid-March, the Polish Army attacked the Russians – who’d lately taken it after German occupation – and drove them out, pursuing them eastwards with cavalry. This signalled a strategic shift by the newly independent Poles who decided to stop fighting the Ukrainians and concentrate on their Russian border.
    Much further east, in the Punjab, five days of rioting followed the Massacre Of Amritsar (April 13) – connected to World War I because the Punjab had been the main source of recruitment for the Indian Army which fought at Gallipoli, in the Middle East and on the Western Front.

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, 16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. They told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). During this interlude he suffered various illnesses while recovering from trench warfare’s privations. In December, probably, solo, he returned to France – reverting to Private on arrival, I don’t know why – and dogsbodied around Arras until mid-March when he ran into his own Essex 2/7th Battalion. They moved into the trenches near Fampoux just in time for the German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28, 1918, left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW (Blog March 25, 2018). For several months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups doing hard labour, before spending the summer in southern Germany and finally moving westwards to Lorraine – whence, the day after Armistice, his long trek towards the French Front began. He reached safety after tiptoeing through a German minefield (November 15 probably). Then began his recovery from chronic near-starvation – and a brief emotional breakdown – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de factoholiday in Brighton. But then, something completely different…Sam as ex-POW guards German POWs…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
April, 1919, Sussex: Sam is continuing with his final Army job, guarding German POWs detained at a run-down near-stately home in the village of East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel(2). His fellow guards, like my father, are all ex-POWs transferred from their fighting Regiments to the Royal Defence Corps. They’d been told Winston Churchill conceived this set-up in the belief that it would do them good…
    Last week, Sam ventured into a failed attempt at romance with one of the village schoolteachers – and also took to weekend walks across the fields to Littlehampton, 2.5 miles west. There he enjoyed the usually deserted YMCA – missing its departed GI clientele – for big lunches served up by the underemployed ladies in the café. 
    But now the small seaside resort offers him a different kind of attraction…

More than once, when I wandered into Littlehampton, I found myself walking behind a girl quietly dressed in a calf-length, Navy-blue overcoat. She usually turned right, as I did, into the High Street, at the far end of which stood the YMCA. Then, every time, she would walk straight past the building and I would climb the steps… beginning to feel curious about her and where she was going.
     Everything about her suggested a degree of respectability which would preclude interruptions to her progress from a poor soldier such as myself. As she walked, her bearing regal, she looked neither right nor left. Her right arm swung sort of diagonally, finishing behind her back. Her left hand held a large handbag carried with arm fully extended and rigid. A Captain maybe could make an advance of some kind, or even a Lieutenant, but me, no. Till late one afternoon…
     She must have despaired of anything coming of the haughty act and this time when I followed her along the High Street – by chance as ever – she stopped in her tracks, turned round, confronted me and smiled. “You’re not going to duck into that dump again, are you?” she asked. Of course, I quickly adjusted my thinking and promised never again to do that if she was likely to be available.
     Nothing exciting came of it, but we met often, walked around the district and usually called at a country inn for a couple of drinks… Something different, then, to make the fairly long walk to Littlehampton worthwhile.
     I treated her with the respect due to one of her obviously high moral standards. But when, on one of our pub visits, she told me she enjoyed my company best when I’d got a couple of whiskies under my belt, I wondered if I was perhaps overdoing the gallantry(3).

Resting one day on my mattress in my little room just below the roof of the old mansion, I heard a knock on the door and in came our Sergeant – a boozy-faced old twit, I thought – accompanied by a tall lad. “Hope you won’t mind sharing with this young man,” said the gaffer and, of course, I made him welcome. I said, “Come in, George, very glad to have you for a mate after all these years!” – expecting, as I did so, a sign of recognition from him… Marvelling at the strange coincidence of it all, I was staggered when he said it was great I called him by his proper name before he’d introduced himself; at which, I realised this was a stock joke of his – he thought I’d called him George because, in the Army, everyone called you George if they didn’t know your proper name.
     It shook me for, as a pre-war youngster, this lad had worked, just over Southwark Bridge from Lake & Currie’s offices, in the laboratory which assayed mineral samples sent in by our firm’s mining engineers. General dogsbody George(4) trotted over to the City with the results and took back anything that needed testing. I often chatted with him while he waited in the outer office I occupied with the old “Sergeant” commissionaire; I knew him well, even knew about a kidney complaint which caused him to become drowsy and fall asleep regardless of where he happened to be. He had told me he lived in a block of flats and had to climb several flights of stairs and sometimes sat down on a step and dozed off. Unusual for a boy of 15 or so, but that was about the only result of his complaint that bothered him.
     I knew all this, yet he didn’t appear to remember me. Feeling sure he would suddenly recall our earlier acquaintance, I waited with pleasant anticipation for his day of awakening. It never came. At meals, we often sat together and, when duties permitted, we’d withdraw to the small room up top and chat before dozing off. Most days, I tried to say things which should have made him question me. But it just didn’t happen. Quiet, kindly George would occasionally talk about his boyhood times, but I had no place in them.’
(2) Area map at https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.8359756,-0.5158142,13z 
(3) While Sam here seems to be struggling with the girl’s apparent propriety, I’ll note again that he’d emerged from the war still a virgin and carrying his own burden(?) of restraint inculcated by the mentor of his early teens back in Edmonton, the Rev Mr Frusher, who instructed the lads in his charge, as choir- and scoutmaster, that they had a bounden duty to accept responsibility and ensure that nothing occurred, when the girl was in his care, which he could not freely reveal to her parents. The final word had a memorable simplicity to it: chivalry.”
(4) I can’t give you a back-reference here because George didn’t get a mention in the section about Sam’s two years working for Lake & Currie. Even allowing for my father’s appearance having changed somewhat between 1912-14 and 1919, ages 14 to 20, with added impact from his war experience, no doubt this odd episode mostly reflects my father’s extraordinary memory encountering a very bad one.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam “fraternises with the enemy” again; the mandolin-playing Unteroffizier and – while rebuilding the Arundel river bank – fellow former front-liners Willi and Hans… “too young to hate anybody who did them now harm”.

(1) In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoir of his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.

Sunday 7 April 2019

Sam, the 14-18 front-line survivor, now ex-POW guarding POWs, takes a hesitant step back in the direction of romance, but… no go. Speaking of which, he finds himself in Littlehampton…

Sam’s Memoir(1) – paperback and e-book – and the e-excerpts from it are now available in their third and final editions with added Endnotes and, in the Memoir, added documentation.

For details of how to buy the Memoiror Gallipoli Somme& Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books click here plus see reader reviews here and here and reviews from the Western Front Association and the Gallipoli Association hereFor AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

The war’s over at last – but Sam’s blog, Facebook page and tweets will continue until his Memoir concludes with the Centenary of the July 19, 1919, Peace parade in London…

All proceeds from all versions of Sam’s Memoir will always go to the British Red Cross – and the current running donations total as of April 3, 2019, is £4,078.85 (I can't update it in the Donations box below because the "edit" tool has vanished!).

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week, in the aftermath of the Armistice… The Paris Peace Conference produced one if its earliest and most substantial creations, the International Labour Organisation/ILO (founded April 11 and still going, with 187 nation members currently). The previous day, the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference, which had run in parallel to the Peace Conference since February 10, delivered its final resolutions concentrating on the trafficking and sale of women, voting rights, inclusion in education and human rights generally. Much of this was initially set aside by the Peace Conference participants, but it is reckoned to be the first time women (aside from the odd monarch, I presume) took part in an international treaty negotiation – officially recognised, albeit meeting away from the main chambers of debate and decision-making.
    Away from the Peace Conference, the other stories of the week largely involved fighting. In Russia, the Bolshevik forces had good and bad days. In the White v Red battles in the Urals – the Armies numbering about 100,000 on each side – the Whites took Belebey (April 7; 800 miles east of Moscow in Bashkortostan) and Bugulma (10; 80 miles northwest of Belebey) forcing the Reds to withdraw and regroup. But down south, Bolshevik troops entered the Crimea (8) and occupied Yalta (12; 925 miles due south of Moscow). Meanwhile, the dire situation of the White-supporting Allied forces around Archangel (765 miles north of Moscow) provoked the British to send a relief force (9).
    Territorial and political disputes and skirmishes continued in many parts of Europe, but the historic event for Great Britain and for India, whose troops had so recently fought alongside one another on the Western Front and elsewhere, was the notorious Massacre Of Amritsar (April 13). In the northern Punjab, heart of Indian recruitment for WW1, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer ordered 50 British and Gurkha troops to open fire on unarmed 20,000 people – apparently a mixture of religious pilgrims and political protesters – gathered in Amritsar’s main square. In 10 minutes deaths totalled between 379 (British account) and 1,000 (the figure from an enquiry initiated by Matama Gandhi). Initially lauded, Dyer was was forced to quit the Army the following year by vote in the House Of Commons. The Massacre fuelled the burgeoning Indian independence movement, especially Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent protest.

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London,16-year-old underage volunteer in September, 1914, fought at Gallipoli with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016), then on the Somme Front with his second outfit, the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom spotted his real age – 18, legally too young for the battlefield. They told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He accepted, though with an enduring sense of guilt. December, 1916, saw him posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated to the Essex Regiment Battalion (Blogs November 27, 2016, to November 11, 2017). During this interlude he suffered various illnesses while recovering from trench warfare’s privations. In December, probably, solo, he returned to France – reverting to Private on arrival, I don’t know why – and dogsbodied around Arras until mid-March when he ran into his own Essex 2/7th Battalion. They moved into the trenches near Fampoux just in time for the German Spring Offensive. A last stand by the Battalion on March 28, 1918, left 80 alive and “fit” out of the 520 who started the day – the 440 in between being dead, wounded or, like Sam, “missing” and, in his case, a POW (Blog March 25, 2018). For several months he wandered occupied France in randomly-assembled half-starved POW groups doing hard labour, before spending the summer in southern Germany and finally moving westwards to Lorraine – whence, the day after Armistice, his long trek towards the French Front began. He reached safety after tiptoeing through a German minefield (November 15 probably). Then began his recovery from chronic near-starvation – and a brief emotional breakdown – until, finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before reuniting with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Civilian life offered Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back - though only to a “Dad’s Army” unit. Meaning, at first, a few weeks de factoholiday in Brighton. But now, something completely different… Sam as ex-POW guards German POWs, while taking tentative steps back into "normal" life… ]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
April, 1919, Sussex: Sam and his group of fellow ex-POWs had been sent to a small village called East Preston, about five miles southeast of Arundel where, to their considerable surprise, they were deployed to guard German POWs detained in Preston Place, the local sometime semi-stately home. 
    This Winston Churchill wheeze – as Secretary Of State For War at the time – was intended to defuse any vestigial lust for vengeance on their recent enemies and jailors. In Sam’s case it only just worked (see Blog March 17, 2019), but in a few days he recovered his equilibrium.
    Last week, he found himself an onlooker to a terrible post-war story as two newly arrived ex-POW/guards, who had suffered not just the usual privations but vilely cruel torture, went berserk and attacked the German prisoners. They did little actual harm, but both had to return to the psychiatric hospital whence they had lately been released, allegedly “cured”.
    Now, what Sam did at the weekends in rural Sussex. Romance?! Hijinks?! Well… he tried…

‘On the railway platform one morning(2), I awaited a train which took my party to Arundel for one of our regular jobs, repairing the banks of the River Arun. A lady, whom I guessed to be my senior by several years, smiled at me. Thus encouraged, I wished her “Good morning” and learned that she was a schoolteacher. Soon she offered me a ticket, price sixpence, which would admit me to a whist drive in the village hall; she took my tanner(3) and hoped we would meet there on Saturday.
     That convivial affair made me several civilian friends and paved the way to several people inviting me into their homes. My teacher friend proved a happy person, though strictly correct in behaviour. She asked me to bring a pal, and call at the house next to the Roman Catholic village school around teatime the following Saturday. We didn’t take out prisoner working parties at the weekend, so I could easily arrange to be free.
     I found a chap of the right sort, as I judged, and he did, in fact, get on extremely well with the teacher. She taught at a Church of England school, but shared the house with a Roman Catholic colleague. As you might guess, the Catholic teacher was Irish and I’ve usually found Irish eyes off-putting… But a good tea preceded settling down to some general conversation, the girls having insisted that we males occupy the armchairs.
     Lumbered, as I felt, with the one I assumed – being RC – was strictly religious, I applied a degree of restraint in my manner which forbade any kind of fun and games. But, surprisingly, the girls seated themselves on the arms of our large chairs. So, to converse with my Irish beauty, I had to put my head back and look upwards – thus acquiring a crick in the neck. All in all, I wasn’t enjoying myself, and a tentative arm placed round her waist when she appeared to be slipping off her perch brought forth a lack of response which reminded me of her calling.
     More conversation rounded off that exhilarating evening.

When free of guard duties, I began to enjoy walking along lanes and across fields. Usually, I found myself in Littlehampton(4) and making a beeline for the YMCA – opened a couple of years previously, the staff told me, to cater for the growing number of troops in the area. But the Armistice had quickly reduced the number of Servicemen using the place, especially the Americans, who seemed to vanish overnight, they said.
     The good ladies who gave their time freely to run the canteen had grown noticeably cool about everything coming to a halt so suddenly. So, when the occasional Tommy like me turned up, their enthusiasm revived, they lavished much smashing grub on us – and Britishers once more became of some account, the wealthy Yanks having deserted the local birds without warning. By way of earning my corn I would sit at the piano and tinkle a two- or maybe three-fingered rendering of The Long, Long Trail or some such tearjerker, the notes of which would echo through the now deserted building and, I hoped, bring back memories of livelier, happier days, when war kept things going at a rattling good pace.’
(2) That’s Angmering station (a short walk from East Preston) whence they’d travel to Arundel (five miles northwest of East Preston). Area map at https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.8359756,-0.5158142,13z
(3) Does anyone under 50 know what a “tanner”/sixpence was? So, six old pre-decimalisation pennies in one little silver-coloured coin which, I just learned, became a “tanner” in nationwide slang because John Sigismund Tanner designed it for the Royal Mint during George II’s reign (1727-1760).
(4) Littlehampton: perhaps 2.5 miles west of East Preston via the lanes and fields route; a seaside resort in Arun district of Sussex, the settlement dating back to the Domesday Book of 1086. Its repute and population grew through the 19th century as poets and artists took a shine to it (Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Constable) and then the railway with linking cross-channel ferry to Honfleur brought other holidaymakers. Also, despite its location, it became a Cockney rhyming slang rude joke deriving from the original deployment of Hampton Wick – ergo “Hampton” = “prick” so… You get the picture I’m sure.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam recovers from the schoolteacher fiasco and discovers the previously hidden promise of Littlehampton… and acquires a new roommate who turns out to be an old pre-war workmate, except he doesn’t recognise Sam at all… very strange.

(1) In his 70s, Sam Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance, a Memoir of his life from childhood through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919 Peace parade.