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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… To
say it was a quiet seven days in WW1 will always be wrong: people fought and
died. But the major engagements of the spring had subsided. So it might be
worth noting the hubbub of political subplots I rarely mention: for instance,
Britain and France discussing how/when to depose King Constantine of Greece and
occupy Athens and Thessaly (May 28; London), and Brazil revoking its neutrality
and seizing German shipping in its territorial waters (June 2), and Italy
declaring Albania its Protectorate (June 3).
Among
the continuing U-boat toll at sea, French liner/troopship SS Yarra was torpedoed northwest of Crete
en route from Madagascar to Marseilles (May 29; 56 died), and British transport
SS Cameronian was sunk off
Alexandria, Egypt (June 2; 63 dead, plus 877 mules).
On
the Western Front static attrition proceeded with the British Army repulsing a
German attack at Hurtebise, southwest Belgium (May 28), heavy British-German
artillery exchanges continuing for days on end around Ypres and Wytschaete (May
31- June 3), and the British advancing south of the Souchez river then losing
the same ground the following day (June 2-3). Similarly, the French and German
Armies conducted artillery battles in Champagne and around St Quentin (May 29),
while the fiercest fighting growled on at Moronvilliers, near Rheims (May
30-31; this village was destroyed and never rebuilt) and on the Chemin des
Dames ridge, Aisne department, where the Germans gained a little ground (June
1) but then found their follow-up attacks beaten back (June 3).
In
the 10th Battle Of The Isonzo (May 10-June 8), the Italians pressed on to
within 10 miles of Trieste and advanced well into Slovenia (south of
Konstanjevica), taking 24,000 prisoners, but on June 3 the Austro-Hungarians
suddenly launched a powerful counterattack…
Down
in Africa, where British and South African forces had driven the Germans out of
most of their East Africa colony, the remnants of the German Army there made a
break south from Rufiji (May 30; now in Tanzania) towards Portuguese East
Africa (now Mozambique).
[Memoir background: my father, Lance
Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from
Edmonton, north London,
under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran [Blogs
September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016] had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the Kensingtons
(Blogs May
15 to September 25, 2016)…
until
officialdom spotted his age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the
battlefield – and told him he could take a break from the fighting until he was
19. He did so, though with an enduring sense of guilt. By December, 1916, he
ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again, this time to the
Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion, along with a bunch of other under-age Tommies training/marking
time – and in Sam’s case dicing with meningitis and other battle-fatigue
enhanced ailments – until such time as they severally became eligible for the trenches
once more… But for now the blog continues with themed
childhood and teens material from the Memoir under the title The Making Of
FootSoldierSam – because my father didn’t write enough about his year “off” in
England to cover 1917 in weekly chunks (I can hardly blame him; writing in the
1970 he wasn’t really thinking about blog requirements)]
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, ‘The Making Of Foot Soldier Sam,
1900-1905 Uprooted 2’ blog told the story of my father Sam’s painful new
beginnings in London (when aged four to seven) after the family fell from
prosperity to ruin in their hometown, Manchester. As, at first, they only grew
poorer and more hungry, Sam struggled with schoolmates mocking his accent, his
own self-consciousness about his obviously home-made clothes and – when they
move from Tottenham to Edmonton – the hostility of the neighbours’ children.
But
this child’s view took in far more than the details of his own problems. Young
Sam noted the sights, sounds and smells all around him and remembered them for
the rest of his life – he wrote his Memoir in the 1970s. Here he describes the
way animals thronged the streets and lives of city kids in the early 1900s –
bringing them the sort of entertainment and education later available only to
country children.
For
this first glimpse, we’re back in 1902 when the family arrived in London and,
momentarily, four-year-old Sam felt things weren’t so bad after all (NB: my
father wrote the early chapters in the third person, calling himself “the boy”
and then “Tommy”):
‘They all climbed into a horse-drawn cab at the terminus,
their bags piled up beside them, and off through the busy streets – seeing all
these carriages and big wagons drawn by numbers of horses. Horses everywhere.
Splendid sight. Temporarily at least, life seemed to be on quite a prosperous
plane. It wasn’t so really, of course. They just had no other means of
transporting the family and baggage across London.
They went into a
big building, a hotel right down in the East End, a district called the
Minories**. They were shown to a room with only two beds in it for the five of
them. A temporary arrangement mother had made. She said she had rented a flat
on the outskirts of the city, but they couldn’t move in for two or three days.
The excitement of watching the comings and goings occupied the time they
remained there. Then once more to a horse-drawn cab – their last ride in such a
vehicle for many a day. The journey took an hour or so — the children peering
about all the way, everything around them of interest***.’
** The Minories: a
district (former parish) and street near the Tower of London.
*** Their destination and
new address was 24 Vale Side, Eade Road, Tottenham, as evidenced by Sam’s
brother Alf’s birth certificate
Settled in Tottenham and soon
starting school, my father really began to encounter and learn about urban
livestock of various kinds, whether draft animals, meat on the hoof, or even on
one occasion a wildish and rather menacing herd of horses:
‘To children, the distance from house to school felt
considerable. Down the road, round a corner, round another corner, and they
came to a busy main road, the traffic all horse-drawn – horses everywhere,
horses pulling small carts, great wagons. Milkmen used them, bakers used them
delivering house to house. But the boy took a particular interest in
horse-drawn trams. He had never seen anything like them. The horses weren’t big
really — large ponies you’d call them. Two of them pulled each tram along on
its rails, the driver seated at the front, the reins in one hand, a light whip
in the other. A conductor on the back collected the fares. The lower deck was
glazed, the upper deck open to the sky.
Strange that
coming to live in this busy town brought him into contact with animals; not
nature in the raw, but nature anyway. Manure constantly cluttered the roads. A
deal of urine lay around. The boy and thousands of children like him watched
the normal processes of what you might call intake and output and very soon
clearly understood what was going on.
These tram
drivers, for instance, would be observed closely by the children, especially
when they came to a terminus. Our boy would stand there and, if there happened
to be a fairly long wait between arrival and departure, watch the driver put
the bag of corn or chaff under the horse’s nose, pass the strap over its head,
and adjust it so that the animal could eat comfortably. He’d see the horse’s
jaws champing away. Every now and then it would blow hard when the dust got in
its nostrils. To see a bucket of water placed in front of one of these ponies,
that was worth watching. In went the horse’s mouth, a sucking and pumping operation
followed, the speed at which the water vanished from the bucket unbelievable.
That was the front
end of the animal. The rear held his interest equally. Some horses, he noticed,
had one opening just under the tail and some had two. One can’t say that the
reasons for this were clear to him at first. He knew that if the tail went up
and the animal was of the type which had one opening, dollops of manure would
issue forth, landing on the road with a series of thuds and what, to him, was
quite a pleasant smell. If the animal had two of these openings, if he saw the
lower one moving he knew that a jet of water would presently shoot out. It was
advisable to step back because, although the water had no bad odour, if one
arrived home with shoes and socks soaked with the stuff there would certainly
be trouble from mother.
He was learning,
all the time learning.
It soon became
obvious to him that the animal with only one of these openings must have an
outlet elsewhere for the water. On the first occasion it became apparent to
him, he watched, with wide-eyed amazement, the emergence from immediately in
front of the horse’s hind legs a big, long thing from which poured forth a
stream of liquid splashing into the road and flowing away along the gutter.
So that explained
how the two types of animal urinated and he thought no more about it. But
sometimes a horse some distance away would put up his head and neigh loudly,
perhaps start to jump about, even lash out with his hind legs, his hooves
cracking against the bodywork of the tram or cart. The boy didn’t quite
understand the reason for this behaviour, although he realised it was connected
with some other animal in the vicinity. But it wasn’t for him to know that the
noisy, frisky animal was disturbed by one of the opposite sex.
It wasn’t just
horses. One could see cattle driven along a busy road to market, a flock of
sheep – just one old man with his stick and a dog controlling them. Butchers
bought sheep live at the nearest market and had them driven to their own
slaughterhouses.
Animals everywhere
The lad came into
further contact with ponies because his road ended in a low, large field. You
went down an embankment and there horses were put to graze. A free feed. Quite
a consideration for the owners, no doubt.
Well, one day the
children were playing in that field and the horses all gathered into a mob.
When that happened, usually there was fighting — they bit each other or, more
often, presented their rear ends to their foe and shot out their back legs to
catch him a whack in the ribs with their hooves. The children would watch,
excited.
But, on this
occasion, when the children turned to leave, the mob of horses all followed
them from the field up the embankment on to the road. Why they did it, I don’t
know – unless they thought the children were leading them to food or water —
but the children got rather scared. So the sister led them up the pathway to an
unoccupied house, thinking the horses would go straight on. But they didn’t,
they followed the children to the front door. So now you had the children
cowering against the door with several of the horses crowded in between the
house and the front-yard railings while others waited on the pavement.
How fortunate then
that, after a while, their father came home, carrying his customary walking
stick. You can picture his astonishment when he saw the children’s predicament.
In wealthier times, he had owned a fashionable trap drawn by a smart pony – he
had aspired to teach it to trot, an ambition of many well-to-do men. So, used
to horses and unafraid, he edged his way into the yard and beat the horses off
with his stick. Quite a feat. He took the children home.
As winter came on,
the poorly surfaced roads frequently became slippery and, on several occasions,
the boy saw horses fall down and become tangled in their harness. When this
occurred, the driver would climb down as quickly as possible and sit on its
head. The first time the boy saw this happen, the horse lay quite still so he
thought, “He’s finished, he’s dead”. But he soon realised this was the accepted
method of controlling a fallen horse and preventing it from trying to get up
while tangled in harness, which might loosen or break the shafts.
At this point,
while the driver remained seated on the horse’s head, almost any man in the
neighbourhood would help to free the beast. Then, with much slipping and
sliding on the ice, the poor thing would scramble up — the forelegs first,
they’d straighten out, then the hind legs would get a grip on the road and up
would come the rear half, and there it would stand, usually quite placid.’
And then there was Daisy,
the friendly cow… and a small equine mystery that aroused Sam’s compassion:
‘… our boy would always go to the rail of yet another field
where he’d hope to see Daisy, a young cow. Often, she would come over and allow
herself to be stroked; he would smell the sweet, grassy breath of her and watch
the flies that gathered around her eyes and sometimes beat them off. On one
occasion, with no Daisy in sight, there was a horse instead. But what had
happened to the poor beast? The lad was shocked when he saw, at the base of the
neck where it is broadest, its coat almost in shreds, obviously torn on barbed
wire. Mercifully, the owner had already dressed it with some ointment, so this
area of torn flesh was a mass of yellow. Something else for him to think
about.’
The move to Edmonton (1903/4)
– because the family couldn’t afford the rent in Tottenham any more – saw the
children once again viewing a new locale from a horse-drawn vehicle (a tram,
not a cab this time):
‘But suddenly a jolt. Father appeared one day and said, “You
must say goodbye to your mother for the moment and come along with me. We’re
off to a different home.”
So they set off
and walked the quarter of a mile to the end of the road on which they were
living – the unbuilt part with fields on either side – and came to the main
road where they boarded a horse tram and climbed to the upper deck. For the
children, an exciting journey followed. New buildings, new sights. It lasted
nearly an hour. Twice the ponies pulling the tram had to be taken out of the
shafts and fresh ones installed. It was the custom to change them quite
frequently.
The journey
finished in what seemed to be a very far away place, a developed suburb eight
miles to the north of Central London****.’
**** Edmonton, probably
at the address shown in the 1911 census, 26, Lowden Road, Edmonton (now N9).
Their new address, on one
edge of the rapidly expanding city, enabled Sam to get close to another bunch
of horses – those used by the builder/developer of their unfinished street –
and also led him to make his debut as a very small-scale tradesman, an
inclination which served him well at times during World War 1 and, thereafter,
for the rest of his working life:
‘The builder had a large number of horses to pull the carts
his men used and he stabled them at the end of the road. Again, Tommy was able
to get close to these animals. As a special favour, the builder sometimes
allowed him to go into the stable’s central cobbled area, sometimes even to
clean out the stalls — rake out straw and manure while the horses were out at
work, hose down the floors and walls, and refill their mangers with hay or
chaff or grain.
That introduced
him to an activity which sometimes produced a few pennies. Men who worked their
gardens for food or flowers needed manure and sometimes Tommy was able to get a
few buckets from the stable. On occasion, the dahlia-loving German next door
would purchase their wares. Often, though, it had all been sold to a market
gardener on contract, so Tommy and his brother took to scouring the
neighbourhood streets to find what their customers wanted. With a bucket and a
small shovel they’d set off in the early hours of the morning. A large bucketful
of horse manure fetched one penny. A valuable coin.‘
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: The making of
Foot Soldier Sam, 1904-1912 – growing up amid the Edmonton hurlyburly: Dickensian
colour alongside London’s crazy modern-world expansion…
* 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.
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