Sam’s Fusiliers in Malta: the strange case of the boxing glove in the night

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Dear all

A hundred years ago… today the First Battle Of Woëvre began (April 5-May 5, in Lorraine) – a French Army attempt to recover ground lost to the German Army the previous autumn and restore rail and road links to Verdun. Beyond the bloody to and fro on the Western Front, down in the Eastern Mediterranean the two warring alliances continued sparring three weeks before the Allies’ strategists threw their neon-lit telegraphed punch and landed at Gallipoli: a section of the Indian Expeditionary Force sailed for the Dardanelles from Egypt (7th); the Allies offered Turkish Smyrna and its hinterland to Greece if they would join in (12th); the French Government assured Russia they recognised its claim to Constantinople (12th – the Ottoman Empire may not have been consulted on that one).

      Meanwhile, the then Great War’s global creep proceeded with the Battle of Shaiba, Mesopotamia (12th, British and Indian forces successfully defending Basra against Ottoman recapture; total casualties about 4,000 men), and a Congo-based Belgian advance on Yaunde, Cameroons, a German colony since 1884 (12th again, busy day).

      Over in Malta, though, lodged comfortably enough at St George's Barracks, north of Valletta, my father Private Sam Sutcliffe’s 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, was feeling lucky. A thousand volunteers, including 16-year-old Sam’s brother Ted, 18, and their two mates from Edmonton, north London, Len Winns and Harold Mellow, hardly any of them had ever been abroad before and here they were settling into this lovely island, sun, sea… when, on the day they’d sailed from Southampton, they’d expected to be manning a Western Front trench within hours.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

In last week’s excerpt, Sam wrote about his recurring fears that his age would be revealed, resulting in, at best, sending home and separation from his brother (who was his hero too), at worst prosecution and imprisonment for swearing a false oath. But soon he started to feel that even those who regarded him with suspicion had come to accept him. This Fusiliers, as you might guess, expressed their approval by making him the first victim of a spate of practical jokes – at least he gladly took it that way. (NB new readers, in this first part of the Memoir Sam wrote in the third person and called himself “Tommy”.) As my father recalled:

‘It happened one night, after lights out. Some talking went on for a while, followed by comparative silence with the occasional bump, grunt, or snore. Tired Tommy slept… until something he could not identify woke him with pulse racing and a sense of shock, eyes wide open, but the room black dark. He did not yell or speak, just lay there trying to decide what had disturbed him. Smack! Something struck him in the face and he shouted in protest. Responses varied from “What’s up, mate?” to “Go to sleep!” and “Shut up!” So he told them something or someone had hit him. Accused of having bad dreams, he said no more. But when another light blow landed on him, someone laughed.

     Wide enough awake to judge from which part of the room it came, Tommy said nothing, feigned sleep, and for some time all was well. Then the joker struck once more, but the lad grabbed at the offending object and found himself holding what, from the feel of it, he guessed was a boxing glove… attached to a thread. Tommy snapped it with a smart jerk and flung the glove in the direction from which the laughter had come. As this elicited a loud curse and some threats, he lay doggo, feeling he had not come out of the lark too badly.

     Daylight revealed a strong, black thread passing over a bracket supporting the shelf above him and stretching over other brackets to a bed at the end of the row. Private Willis had been the joker, raising and releasing the glove.

     Interested blokes wracked their brains in devising further funny tortures with which to enliven the first hour or so after lights out each night. Grown men these, but in many cases sharing a large dormitory with other males for the first time; they perhaps felt impelled to behave like boys they had read about in The Magnet and The Gem weeklies*.

     One man discovered that the beds could be taken to pieces; so if the legs were detached and re-placed in position so that it looked normal, of course, it collapsed as soon as the occupant sat down on it too forcefully or rolled over in his sleep. One evening, while others lingered in the canteen or perhaps, having avoided detection, sampled the wines in some drink shop down the road, our funny men faked about half the beds. Those who came home first had their crashes and either laughed or cursed as they considered appropriate, Tommy among them. But two or three who returned after lights-out were landed with wrecked beds in pitch darkness, and their boozy efforts to reconstruct them kept the other men amused for some time, until the victims settled for sleeping at floor level.

     No harm done, but the less ebullient of the roommates complained about this childish conduct. A conference next day decided that they’d all had sufficient of these larks and bed-wrecking was out. All settled down quietly that night… until, around midnight, a crash broke their slumbers. Striking of matches revealed three beds with front legs collapsed. Because the back legs hadn’t been tampered with, the beds stood for some time then, a little after lights-out, someone crept about passing a rope round each unsecured leg, then pulled hard. Real anger erupted, and nobody admitted responsibility.

     That was almost the end of comedy japes and men once more became as adults. With one exception, that is. The Orderly Sergeant doing his rounds, rousing men at 6.30 one morning realised just how unpopular he was when someone (well, there must have been two of them) tipped the piss-tub over him from the balcony high above.

     No one confessed so the innocent suffered with the guilty when Captain Boden ordered H Company confined to barracks for several days and had them march up and down the square during the mid-day hours when they would have been resting. Thereafter, Tommy’s comrades lived the high life, if any, outside the barrack room. Within, they just rested or ate their meals. Happy day.’

* The Magnet, a weekly “story book”, ran from 1908 to 1940, carrying the Greyfriars School stories featuring Billy Bunter, written by Frank Richards (real name Charles Hamilton, 1876-1961); The Gem was published from 1907 to 1939, its main story about another public school, St Jim’s, its hero Tom Merry, the author again Hamilton, here nom-de-plumed Martin Clifford; Amalgamated Press published both weeklies and, according to Wikipedia, World War II killed them off, because of paper shortages.

All the best – FSS

Next week: At last the Fusiliers drop their woolly long johns, get tropical gear – and visit their tailors…

Sam’s first march on foreign soil – sweating in English woollen underwear, relishing every sight and smell…

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Dear all

A hundred years ago… while the Western Front slaughterously ground along as the two sides got used to the unwanted reality of almost stationary trench warfare, on March 4 the Russian Army retook Austro-Hungarian Stanislau (now in Ukraine), the Austrian Navy bombarded Antivari (Montenegro), and the British Navy started a blockade of German East Africa (Burundi, Rwanda, mainland Tanzania).

      More directly pertinent to the future of Private Sam Sutcliffe’s 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, lately landed at Malta, the British Navy’s shelling of Turkish/Ottoman Empire fortifications around Gallipoli/the Dardanelles continued sporadically (Smyrna from March 5th) – while, before any clear Allied plan had emerged, the operation became a matter of political dispute. FootSoldierSam’s blog stakes no claim to historical understanding of these events, during this week a century ago, but… The French Government decided to send a force to the Dardanelles (March 4th); the Russian Government sent a telegram to its Allies laying claim to Constantinople (now Turkish capital Istanbul, 4th); then the Greek Premier offered his country’s naval and military assistance to the Allies (5th), the King of Greece disagreed and the Premier resigned (6th), and the new Greek Government asked the British for an explanation of their “occupation” of Lemnos (7th) as a jumping-off point for the Dardanelles attacks – despite apparent previous assent. That campaign, it seemed, had begun chaotically…

      Naturally, my father, Sam, still 16, and his brother, Ted, 18, both under-age volunteers from Edmonton, north London, and their thousand comrades in the Battalion knew nothing of this.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, we left them on the dockside in Marsamxett harbour, Valletta, after finally disembarking from the Galena, the lumbering tub which they left with unfond memories of interminable seasickness and befouled quarters way below decks.

      Standing about while the officers got organised, Sam started to look around and relish his surroundings in the wonderfully curious way which, I suspect, laid the foundations for the deatiled memory – external and internal – he later deployed during his seventies when writing his Memoir, all 250,000 words of it. New readers be aware, at this stage my father was still writing in the third person and calling himself “Tommy”:

‘During the long wait which followed, Tommy, thrilling to every new sensation, scanned the long waterfront: buildings all of the light-coloured stone he found so pleasing, among them one or two shops, the names above their windows emphasising the exciting foreignness of the place – “Mateoti*,” for instance, what did that mean?; next door to that a homely touch, The Seamen’s Mission; a cab with curtained windows clattered by, drawn by a skinny horse, its bones too prominent, the sallow-faced driver wearing a floppy hat, a dark red shirt and very old trousers, his feet bare…

     On this occasion, the Battalion had lined up behind Tommy’s H Company, the last in alphabetical order, so he could see A Company way back in the far distance; what an anonymous mass of men it was compared to, say, the troop of Boy Scouts of which he had been a fairly important member a few months earlier. Even in his London office, as an insignificant junior, he felt like a recognised member of a sort of staff family… “I suppose all goes on there as usual,” he surmised — though perhaps not, bearing in mind the Company Secretary’s forecast**… And the family at home? They would manage, perhaps even do well if Pa could find some work connected with the war effort…’

But soon his mind ceased wandering as fresh exertion provided his first experience of old-Empire English indefatigability when it comes to choosing inappropriate clothing for foreign climes…

‘Eventually the Colonel and his white horse took their place at the head of the column and the Battalion moved off. Although the month was February, the thick wool underwear and sturdy uniform, plus a full kitbag carried over one shoulder, soon demonstrated the difference between marching conditions in far-away England and those now to be experienced on this Mediterranean island. The men relieved their feelings with many a “Phew!” and “Oh gawd!” – by “having a moan” or “effing and blinding”. And, while thus occupied, their feet transported their protesting bodies onwards at a steady four miles an hour. Authority required no more than that of them.

     At least, Tommy felt reassured to see he wasn’t the only one becoming increasingly sweaty. But, here again, the recollection that he had lied about his age and shouldn’t really be there at all gave him the determination to endure without complaint. So he just plodded on… And savoured the air, its flavour exciting to him simply because it was foreign. On the waterfront, smoke from coal-burning ships drifted over them at times… but something stronger, probably from the drains though not too objectionable, had also been noticeable. Now as they marched, variety of aroma supplied almost as much interest to his questing nose as did the people, the buildings, and narrow side streets, to his appreciative eyes.

     All this he regarded as a great bonus. By now he had expected to be under fire and subjected to the ordeals of the Front where, the newspapers reported (with extensive casualty lists), Allied advances occurred so rarely we had to persuade ourselves retreats counted as moral victories – some of them therefore worthy of a special medal. That was not the kind of war that patriotic Englishmen had hoped to take part in. Our wonderful Army with its 15-rounds-per-minute rifle fire should have scared the Germans. As it transpired, the enemy had lots of machine guns, any one of which could lay a hundred men low in a minute. Now why hadn’t we thought of that? Of course, we had some, but they had many…

     Well, instead of being quickly involved in all the roaring of guns, holding of positions till forced to move back, woundings, deaths, mud and filth of the battlefields, Tommy and the others had been put ashore on this charming island. Should he have felt shame about this? He did think about these matters at the time, he remembers… but he only felt thrilled, even joyful.

     Common sense urged him to enjoy the sweets while available, there would be plenty of bitters later without doubt.’

Sam/”Tommy” marched and mused on, often mentally drifting away beyond his fatigue and discomfort, but still observing and absorbing everything around him…

‘Across the town of Valletta, before, alongside, and behind him marched his comrades, but inside Tommy was this very personal thing which looked, sniffed and listened to people and places…

     No pretty girls. The women he saw walking the pavements mostly dressed in dark or black velvet. They had sallow complexions, though a minority added a touch of rouge to their cheeks. So many of them looked alike to him that way back, he surmised, they must have had a common ancestor… The older chaps made noises which bore witness to their interest in areas of the ladies’ bodies remote from their faces and Joe Parker once again proclaimed that, with sacks over their heads, all women looked alike.

     The lad, with no real, personal interest in the subject, nevertheless fully understood that married men used to regular companionship in bed would have physical problems which demanded solutions…

     Their route followed what was obviously the most important street in the town – the Strada Reale a road sign announced. Impressive buildings and churches to the right, Tommy noted, fine shops, restaurants, cafés… But they soon turned left, and then right, into a thoroughfare across which hung many lines of washing. Families evidently shared accommodation in these fairly tall blocks, and the articles of clothing and bedding overhead added gaiety, like bunting at a carnival.

     The clatter of soldiers’ heavy boots on ancient cobbles brought heads peering out of windows. Some of the British lads sang, others shouted greetings and waved, but no response or encouragement came from above – the town clearly too long associated with garrison troops to get excited about marching men.

     But soon they reached open country. The occasional women walking by wore black headdresses draped over their shoulders. A wire frame hidden in the fabric enabled them to swing them across their faces for concealment from foreigners. This had a historical significance, Tommy learned later, but considering the unattractiveness to himself of these females, he thought the cover-up quite a good idea. In any case, the headdress business had that quaint, exotic touch he hoped to find in foreign parts.

     The road became dusty and bordered by walls built with the rock which was in evidence everywhere. They passed through a village, but saw no inhabitants, except that some young men sat around a table in what appeared to be a drinking shop. They just stared at the passing troops; imaginative Tommy thought he sensed their hostility. So along a coast road and on their right a beautiful bay bounded by long headlands, with a residential area – few signs of business there, just an occasional shop or café.

     They now traversed firm road and tramping boots supplied a steady beat for the singing troops. Between choruses, one of the witty chaps would be sure to raise a laugh or two – especially in H Company, at the front of the column when, not infrequently, the Colonel’s horse farted and they took it full blast as it hung in the still air. So, with some good humour, they bore the heat, their awkward kitbags, and the sluggishness caused by both the privations and inertia of their voyage.

     Finally, the way ahead lay through a barren, rocky area but, at the end of it, they saw buildings, some single-storey, others two-storey, all flat-roofed and extending over a wide area. Had the setting been the African desert, Tommy would have expected to see French Foreign Legionnaires manning the ramparts – but a closer view revealed no ramparts, camels or képis.

     Still, these were barracks, he realised, and he was about to experience the sort of life he’d read quite a lot about in the penny weeklies. Nobby Clark, Spud Murphy***, and other tough soldiers had enjoyed wonderful times in such accommodations and, surely, great times lay ahead for the new adventurers about to move in.’

* “Mateoti” wasn’t a trade, but the tradesman’s surname, Maltese sources advise.

** The company secretary had told Sam/“Tommy” he thought the war would finish them.

*** Characters from Edgar Wallace’s Smithy, Nobby & Co published in the Daily Mail, 1904-18 (maybe in a weekly too, but I couldn’t confirm my father’s recollection on that); the fictionalised archetype Wallace called Smithy dated from his reports as a Mail Boer War correspondent.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Settling into barracks – and dining on biscuits saved from the Napoleonic Wars…

Sam sets sail, leaving England for the first time in his young life

For Details Of How To Buy Sam’s Memoir In Paperback Or E-Book See Right-Hand Column – All Proceeds To The British Red Cross 
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Dear all

A hundred years ago… yesterday, January 31, saw the first notable use of “poison” gas in World War 1 – by the German Army against Russian troops at the Battle Of Bolimov, near Lodz, Poland. This followed failed attempts – i.e. they did nobody any harm – by French and German Armies a couple of months earlier. On this occasion, although the German gunners fired 18,000 gas shells, they contained “only” a tear gas and it did that grim-joke thing which always made it an ambivalent weapon, blowing back into the Germans’ own lines. So it probably registers as little more than a curiosity; the day’s real business involved 20,000 German casualties (in WW1 that word always meant wounded and dead aggregated), 40,000 Russian and… no conclusive winner.

      Similar slaughterous inertia proceeded on the Western Front too, while the coming week’s main war politics event saw the German Government give advance warning that their U-boats would commence an “unrestricted” campaign on February 18, i.e. torpedoing merchant ships without recourse to the gentlemanly yet hazardous process of surfacing to check whether the vessel carried war materials and, if so, permitting the crew to board the lifeboats before concluding their business.

      Meanwhile – on this very day, February 1, a Monday a century ago – my father, Sam, 16, his brother, Ted, 18, both under-age volunteers, their pals from Edmonton, north London, and a thousand other comrades in the 2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, had bidden sweet-sad-fearful farewells to their families at Waterloo station, before taking an overnight train to Southampton…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

They’d trained as best they could for four months. That is, still no rifles issued, no clues as to what real fighting might be about, and… actually, nobody had told them where they were going, though they sort of understood why that would be the case. In his Memoir, my father recalled that night (back to writing about himself in the third person here and for another few chapters, I should explain for new readers – Sam is “Tommy”):

‘Despite the unusual emotions of the family farewells, once the train moved off, Tommy found himself wholly forward-looking — until sleep overtook him. He’d had little of that for 36 hours and even the natural excitement caused by the journey to an unknown destination — which might be a battlefield in France — could not prevent his eyelids drooping.

    For him, then, a journey of hazy impressions, because nervous tension demanded some awareness of what was going on: the sudden hissing snarl of a train passing in the opposite direction; the change of sound from clickety-clack to echoey racket as they sped through a station; raised voices attempting to win an argument against the roar of the train as it raced through a tunnel. Eventually, he emerged from yet one more doze to comparative silence. No roaring, no smoke swirling past windows. Just quiet conversations and a distant hiss of steam.

    “Fall in, H Company!” bellowed the CSM and they quickly lined up on a station platform. Southampton. There it was in large letters — the first port he’d ever seen. And not overmuch of it visible on a darkish night.’

Sam’s first port? Remember that, like most of his working-class comrades of that era, Sam/”Tommy” had never set foot outside England…

      They walked along a railway platform, the sea to their right, dock buildings around them, then the grey silhouettes of huge ships – one of them, he realised, they were about to board, it’s tall funnel reminding him of “a factory chimney”:

‘During these last moments with his feet still on English ground, he was cheered by the realisation that he would be one of the last to leave it, a member of the last section in the last Company of the Battalion to board that great ship. That was the good thing about being last, oh yes, very nice. But what about being last into the accommodation on board? “We’ll finish up in a cargo hold way down below,” lamented Joe Parker — soldier today, Billingsgate porter recently, and ordinary seaman before that. Joe was right.

    The CSM led H Company “for’ard” (Tommy had read many a sea story including Treasure Island and Masterman Ready)… he had to follow the others down steep steps. He clutched a handrail with one hand and his kitbag with the other. There, below, a combination of many smells assailed him. Tar he thought the most powerful.

    Hammocks hung from the whole ceiling area of the space allocated to the Company. A merciless rush to grab one of them ensued – an early experience of man’s inhumanity to man, Tommy reckoned. Pushed and shoved in that dimly lit, smelly place below, he felt lost and fearful at first…  But when he saw a hammock in the dark corner to which the impetus of the crowd had carried him, he pulled down one side of it, chucked in his kitbag and stood there ready to assert his right of possession.

    For Tommy, the war to stop the Kaiser and his crowd from taking over the world had really started – and he clearly saw that another, smaller, but to him equally important struggle to preserve the life of a boy among a crowd of older, stronger men would also have to be fought.

       Camaraderie existed among members of groups which had formed within the Company. These men would help their own… Some of Tommy’s fellows were strictly loners, probably from choice, but he fell into that role because he was too young and, so far, unused to mixing with men…

         The bareness all around engendered pessimism: bare, wood floor, tables and forms, hammocks suspended from deck joists above. Nothing else whatsoever. A cargo hold in peacetime, surely, and here they were using it as a home.

         And yet another cause for anxiety about living in this confined space began to bother Tommy; he started thinking about the German submarines already taking a toll of Allied shipping…

         He hoped his face betrayed nothing of his thoughts…’

However, despite his determination to present at least a convincing imitation of “manliness”, his body soon betrayed him and led him to a dispiriting encounter with the worst of maritime sanitation – and another indication of how the Army hierarchy regarded “the men”:

‘…  just then a queasy feeling under his belt, plus a revulsion against the tarry, painty, stuffy smell of the place begat doubts as to his ability to retain possession of the food he’d eaten. But the fuggy atmosphere wasn’t all. He became aware of a feeling of uncertainty, of instability… In other words, without announcement or ceremony, they had set sail, they were at sea.

         Trying to look as though he had serious business up above, Tommy briskly climbed the stairway up on to a cold, dark deck and searched for latrines.

       So far he had formed an impression that the standard of food and accommodation on this troopship probably equalled that of the cheapest transports on the North American run from Britain. Hundreds of emigrants left the homeland every week; they could pack very little and feared the rigours and discomforts of the long, sea journey, but faced them rather than endure near-starvation in Britain…

       He gripped a handrail at the side of the ship. Behind him a gangway led up to a higher deck, in front of him the bows, forecastle, and a mast with rope ladders on each side and a small enclosed structure on top, the crow’s nest lookout shelter. At the far side of the ship he saw a sort of long, low shed. Using a steadying hand here and there, he crossed the deck to inspect it.

       Half its width rested on the deck and the other half jutted out over the sea. He entered through a doorway at one end. A hurricane lamp gave dim illumination to the narrow enclosure on the seaward side of which, at regular intervals, he saw seating – with holes of convenient size. Sea noises and surges of air from below informed Tommy that here was a system of instant natural disposal.

       Sitting there, the seat’s thin boards seeming to cut a circle into his freezing backside, splashed by spray when that side of the ship dipped towards the waves, he tried to imagine the scene when men rushed in there of a morning in really rough weather. How, for instance, to dry the sea-washed bottom? Who the hell thought up this rotten idea? Obviously, someone who believed that donning Army uniform reduced one to a status worthy of the treatment he meted out to his black workers in Africa — the continent this old ship travelled to in peacetime.

       Once is enough of that sort of thing was the lad’s resolve — to which he pretty well kept, as we shall see.’

All the best — FSS

Next week: Sorry, didn’t, as promised last week, make it to the Bay of Biscay’s perfect storms this time – headwinds, you know – but they’re coming up next, right up, and over, with Sam as your Joseph Conrad over every peak and trough…