Sam gets to know Marie-Louise and her mother thinks he’s très gentil… but she’s married and he’s keeping his mind on apples and pears.

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… On the Western Front the last few costly blows were struck while the strategists considered that odd business of pitched battle bedding down for winter.

    In the northern part of the Somme Front, the Battle Of Ancre Heights saw the Canadians advance (October 26) and the British attack Beaumont Hamel and Serre with teargas, phosgene and phosgene/chlorine mortar bombs (28) before bad weather (29) stopped the fighting for a couple of weeks. At The Battle Of Transloy, after a British advance (23), the German Army settled into effective defence aimed at holding their ground until winter called a halt.

    But at the First Offensive Battle Of Verdun (the French name for it translated), begun on October 20, the French Army recaptured Fort Douaumont (24), then several other key points, and by the end of the week had begun an artillery bombardment of Fort Vaux (one source notes that all this took them back to the positions they’d occupied in May).

    On the Eastern Front, the Russian Army’s loss of impetus continued as the German Army drove them back from the left bank of the river Narajowka (October 22; Galicia), and across the river Schara, near Minsk (27; now Belarus), although they showed they still had victories in them at Vatra Dornei (25; then Bukovina/Moldova, now in Romania). Similarly, their support for Romania in the Battle Of Transylvania (began August 27) wasn’t going well. The combined Bulgarian-German forces defeated the Romanian Army at the Predeal Pass (23) and Cernavoda (25), but did find themselves on the retreat in the Jiu Valley, Wallachia (27-9).

    The Allies most complicated alliance (Serbian-French-British-Italian-Russian involvement) did rather better in Macedonia as the Monastir Offensive (September 12-December 11) continued to beat back the Bulgarian invaders – who had driven the entire Serbian Army into exile earlier in the year. In the Battle Of Cerna Bend, the Bulgarians abandoned Cerna Voda (October 25), but that part of the conflict remained mainly bogged down causing heavy casualties (Bulgarian-German 26,000, Serbian-French-Russian12,000 before it ended in November).

Meanwhile**, my father, under-age volunteer Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, 18 on July 6, 1916, had fought with the Kensingtons Battalion from mid-May to September, at Gommecourt on the north end of the Somme Front, then around Leuze Wood and Morval to the south. About September 30 he was told his age had been officially noticed, he was still legally too young for the battlefield and he could take a break until his 19th birthday if he wished. He wished all right – though not without a sense of guilt. That same day, he left the Front for the British base camp at Harfleur.

     For Sam, who joined up in September 1914, this followed a ’15-’16 winter at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, with the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers (200 out of 1,000 avoided the lists of shot, shell and disease casualties – Blogs dated September 13, 2015, to January 3, 2016). They’d sailed to France in late April, 1916, where – to their disgust – they were disbanded and transferred to other outfits… Sam to the Kensingtons and the Somme front line – where, on July 1, they’d suffered 59 per cent casualties (see FootSoldierSam’s Blogs dated June 26 and July 3, 2016).

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, Sam decides to go along with his crafty old Royal Fusiliers comrade and caterer Archie Barker’s lie that he had been a grocer pre-war and thus moves into a short, happy career in the Army café business – on the unofficial side as Archie’s establishment seems to be a private enterprise run for the profit of the Captain Quartermaster.

    Second morning in Harfleur, he found himself transported to nearby Le Havre as buyer for Archie’s caff – and, after struggling because of his own limited French and all-round ignorance of his new job, he has the great good luck to meet a young Frenchwoman who runs a grocery with her mother, speaks good English and is willing to help. As he wrote in his Memoir, her name was…

‘Marie-Louise Baudlet; I suppose I can mention her full name now as she was somewhat older than me – I can only estimate 21 or 22 – and she must have passed away long ago.

     She wasn’t pretty, but quite attractive, dressed in severe black with white trimmings. She probably looked older than her years, bright, smiling eyes. She made me welcome. She spoke perfect English and told me that, before the war, she had made several visits to England and stayed with relatives in Richmond, Surrey; my translator, then, ready to hand.

     Her mama was probably nearer 50 than 60. She had no English, but she did me the honour of hinting that I was très gentil and I could only guess why and be suitably flattered. Perhaps gentil represented her hope more than her opinion. Perhaps soldiers in the shop previously had not been gentil…

     I soon had a friendly working arrangement with Marie-Louise. I bought what I could – as much as possible of what they had to offer. But, as Marie said, items of which I needed a large quantity I would have to buy in the market; so, apples, other fruit and fresh vegetables, butter (selling cheaply from a counter run by a Belgian lady) – all luxuries for the soldiers.

     Each morning when we took the wagon to Le Havre, before I went anywhere else I called in at Marie-Louise’s place and asked her to tell me the French words for what we wanted and for the quantities – hence, no further buying difficulties at all! From her place to the central market, the Halles Centrales, was quite a few hundred yards. I had the driver stop the wagon outside. He made himself comfortable in his seat to wait for me.’

This photo of Les Halles market, Le Havre, probably from the 1920s, is on the wall of the present market, pictured below. My pix from when I was in France this summer (2016) to attend the Somme100 commemoration.

‘Back at the canteen, Archie taught me to make thin, very tasty sandwiches. Tinned salmon was favourite. I’d empty a can into a large bowl, beat it up adding salt, pepper and vinegar and tasting it from time to time until I got it just so, that slightly salty mouth-watering flavour to make the ideal sandwich. We sold dozens of them. He taught me to build them up in pyramids — placed out of reach of the troops, that was important, but visible and tempting. On the evenings the lads were in the money, the two of us often had difficulty coping with the great rush of trade.

     More money became available to buy fresh vegetables, and I bought apples and sometimes pears on a bigger scale too.

     The whole business reminded me very much of pre-war days when sometimes, to order a lunch for the partners at Lake & Currie, I’d go to Sweetings*** or Binns, famous restaurants, where they displayed their sandwiches stacked in pyramids and the clients ate them with a pint of beer, then threw some money down on the counter and left. Even the aroma in our canteen — the various sandwiches we served, and perhaps coffee as well as tea – could sometimes recall those grander establishments.

     I did no Army work, parades or drills. Barker and I appeared to live in a world apart from the masses there. As far as I was concerned, that could go on forever.

     I never failed to call in on Marie-Louise, first thing in the morning. I never saw her except in the shop, at the counter or the cash desk; I sat on a box and she on a stool — Mama occasionally somewhere in the background. Speaking no English, she couldn’t join in the conversation, but she kept a maternal eye on us, so nothing else could go on. Not that it was likely to because Marie-Louise seemed the absolute soul of propriety. Moreover, she had a fiancé, a French officer who was away at the Front.’

*** This fond memory of one of his more pleasant tasks as a pre-war office boy at tin-mining company Lake & Currie’s City HQ Sam evokes fully in a chapter from the childhood section of his Memoir – when he was still writing in the third person and calling himself “Tommy”. Coming from a poor family, he relished the chance to snap up the leftovers from the feats he fetched in for the bosses as follows: “The company regularly held meetings with business associates and others, and when the partners considered those attending worth entertaining fairly well, a lunch would be laid on, bought in from nearby caterers. If a small, intimate group were invited, they would gather in the senior partner’s office. A day or so beforehand, Tommy had to visit the supplier to hand over the order – often at a famous restaurant and bar over in Cheapside called Sweetings*, where he observed really prosperous City businessmen, bosses all, who wouldn’t even spare the time to sit down to have their lunch. These toffs, as Cockneys called them, clad in fine morning suits, lined the long counter, munching, and drinking their ale or whatever they favoured. The smell of all these delicious foods pleased Tommy; he loved to stand there and look and breathe it in. White-hatted waiters dressed up as chefs carved succulent slices of beef or ham… In addition to the special drinks and foods the restaurant supplied, Tommy had to buy certain cheeses and a special type of coffee. This task took him to a shop of the old style where soft cream cheeses hung from the ceiling in muslin bags… Fortunately, in due course, Tommy would get the chance to do more than look at all this enticing provender.”

All the best – FSS

Next week: Sam gets a new partner on his trips into Le Havre… which leads to problems involving Cockney rhyming slang (“Wormwood Scrubs” anyone?), the local licensed prostitute and Marie-Louise heading off a minor international incident.

* 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.

** Just noting here an incident my father had no knowledge of, but which connected with his first experience of sailing abroad. On October 28, 1916, a mine wrecked the British hospital ship Galeka off Le Havre (no patients abroad, 19 RAMC personnel killed). When, earlier the war, she had served as a troopship, she conveyed my father’s 2/1st Royal Fusiliers from Southampton to Malta via an infernal storm in the Bay Of Biscay – see Sam’s Blog dated February 8, 2015.

Goodbye to all that — Sam tells his boss he's off to be a soldier

Dear all

A hundred years ago this month… like tens of thousands of young British men, my father Sam Sutcliffe, 16, a working lad from Edmonton, north London, had volunteered to join the Army and was just starting to learn the basics of soldiering. At the same time, joining up involved a whole lot of goodbye to all that — “all that” being the ordinary life of “nobody of any importance” as Sam described himself in the opening paragraph of his World War 1 Memoir.

    Meanwhile, the war both spread and intensified. Doing modest research as my late father’s editor, I keep coming across events I knew nothing of via history at school or media documentaries or “folk memory”.

    For example, I’d had the impression that the German Army completely overran “little Belgium” in the first few weeks, encountering hardly any resistance. Not true at all. Tomorrow is the centenary of one key battle starting: the Siege of Antwerp — the Belgian Army defending their second city, with French and British support. They surrendered on October 10 (63,000 Belgians captured and/or interned, 2,300 Brits captured), but fell back to the River Yser where they held the line and never took another backward step, ensuring that the western part of Belgium remained unoccupied until 1918, when it became the basis for their push to recover their country.

    Well, as ever, that’s the big picture. This is how one London boy muddled on through the nuts and bolts of “doing his bit”…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Sam, his older brother Ted, and their pals Len and Harold all had jobs in the Liverpool Street station area - they travelled in every morning by train from Edmonton Green. But when they all decided to join up they just didn’t turn in to work for the first couple of days and they knew they had to tell their employers what they were up to. A personal appearance was the only way; poor-to-modest homes like theirs didn’t have telephones in those days and the iconic British red public phone boxes didn’t come to the streets of London until 1920.

    Worrying constantly that his signed-and-attested lie about being 19 could be exposed at any moment, Sam decided he had to pay his duty call on Lake & Currie, the mining company for whom he’d worked as a junior office boy since soon after leaving school at 14. This is how it went — noting for newcomers that Sam, in this first part of his Memoir, wrote in the third person and called himself “Tommy”:

“Having parted with his brother by Garlick Hill in Queen Victoria Street, Tommy strolled into Cannon Street. Already this familiar area seemed to have finished with him. From belonging there — he really had come to like the old City — he now felt rejected. Not working there, he had no business to be there.

    He turned off by the pub on the corner and walked downhill, towards the river, glancing left and right at the familiar brass nameplates of the firms occupying the old buildings. And so into the small square and the building where he had so recently worked. ‘Had worked’, past tense already. Up the old stairs and into the office, carried along speedily by excitement born of fear about what might happen and a desire to face it all and have done with it. Just a few words from the Company Secretary to the Battalion commander about Tommy’s true age and he’d be in sore trouble…

    ‘Ah, there you are. Don’t tell me — you’ve got another job. Well, so have I. Do you remember I told you about the War Office work I’d been booked for if war was declared. Well, I start on that next Monday. What’s your news?’ So spake the Sergeant [Army veteran turned Commissionaire/greeter in charge of reception and Tommy/Sam’s direct boss], full of his coming change of work, but pausing just long enough for Tommy to tell of his enlistment in the Army. ‘What as? Drummer boy or something?’ ‘No, ordinary Private.’ ‘But…’

    Here Tommy interrupted to tell of his sudden increase in years and to beg the Sergeant not to speak of this to others in the firm. Whatever his view of such a deception in ordinary times, the Sergeant entirely reassured him now, perhaps because he simply had no interest in anything but his own preparations for leaving.

    ‘Go and see [Company Secretary i.e. top executive] F.C. Bull,’ he said. ‘Tell him what you’re up to. I’m sure he won’t mind. Big changes are coming here. Most of us will be shoving off before the year is out. War breaks up most peacetime arrangements.’

    So, along to the Secretary’s office. The customary tap on the door and the call to come in. The bustling little businessman, always signing something, phoning somebody, or hurrying from one office to another, sat quietly and listened to the boy’s story. He said something like, ‘Well, I hope you’ve done the right thing. Strange times these. Who knows what we’ll be doing in a month or a year hence? If the war ends soon, all will be well. If not, this business for one will be finished. I wish you all the luck in the world.’

    He gave Tommy a gold half-sovereign. A little overcome, Tommy had difficulty thanking him, but when that surprisingly friendly man said, ‘Now you must come along and tell our Scottish director [Currie] about this,’ he felt scared.

    That man was huge and powerful. ‘He will make me look silly,’ thought Tommy. He was very relieved when the big man listened gravely to the Secretary’s account of Tommy’s enlistment. The boisterousness which Tommy feared did break through briefly as the six foot odd of tough, engineer manhood sprang from his chair, raised a mighty hand and brought it down on Tommy’s back in hearty congratulation.

    Then, when FCB shook his hand, the Secretary insisted that he should visit the office again before leaving London. Previously, Tommy had felt that few at Lake & Currie knew of his existence, yet now he encountered this great kindness from the top. Saying his goodbyes to the old Sergeant and others, he began to feel regretful that this part of his young life was over. As he walked up the hill again towards the station, the smells drifting up from warehouses and factories along the Thames below seemed almost sweet, homely — qualities they had lacked when working among them was compulsory.

    When he got home, he handed his mother the gold coin, worth 10 shillings. Very pleasantly surprised by this, she returned him three shillings for fares and so on. ‘There’ll be more money soon I understand,’ Tommy told her. She looked happier than she had done for many a day.”

Sam/Tommy had his droll way of observing his mother’s interest in money when her son was about to go to war…

    That evening, older brother Ted reported rather different reactions to news of his departure – both angrier and more positive – at the paper company where he worked:

“Ted’s employer thought he had acted unreasonably, without warning or consultation. However, he valued Ted’s services and committed to paper a letter stating that he would re-employ him when released by the Army authorities. To this generosity he added the gift of several pounds, expressing his personal view that the war would be over by Christmas or soon afterwards…

    All this made Tommy reflect again on the differences in their situations. Clever, persevering and full of self-confidence, Ted had a guaranteed future should he survive the war. Tommy had only the near certainty, as related by F.C. Bull, that his employer’s business would soon disintegrate because of the war.”

All the best — FSS

Next week: Sam/Tommy says goodbye to his Scoutmaster-choirmaster-piano teacher — the mentor who shaped his youthful character.