Sam and new ex-POW pals enjoy Dad’s Armying around Brighton, from promenading to What The Butler Saw on the Palace Pier to… a shock sighting of his revered Gallipoli CO, last heard of “presumed dead” at Vimy Ridge…

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 February 1, 2019, is £3,979.66 (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 made conspicuous public progress while the negotiators felt caught up in chaos and worried about what they were doing, given lack of advance planning and the absence of German involvement in their decisions. Beyond the politicians’ formal deliberations conflict continued in many corners of Europe.

    The Conference produced the preamble to the Constitution Of The League of Nations (February 14) expressing general commitments to “international co-operation… peace and security” – proposed as a starting point towards more detailed agreements. 

    In the course of the widespread striving for post-war order, in Germany they published a provisional Constitution of their own and elected a new President, Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democratic Party (February 11), while Austria and Georgia too elected their first republican democratic assemblies and reached the same conclusion – Social Democratic governments.

    Meanwhile, Russian Bolshevik forces continued fighting the Allied invaders around Archangel (February 10), suffered a defeat in their incursion in newly independent Ukraine (12), began an attack on Estonia and lost a small skirmish with Polish troops at Bereza Kartuska (14; current Belarus) seen as a precursor of the Russo-Polish War which began months later.

    On the side, so to speak, in Ukraine Haidamaka Cossack paramilitaries massacred 1,500 Jewish villagers at Proskurov (February 15) and, in Albania, Yugoslavian troops slaughtered 432 in Rugova (16).

    The while, the US Senate rejected votes for women by a single vote (February 10).

[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 – via the ministrations of French, British and American military doctors and nurses in Nancy and Rouen. Finally, on December 10, 1918, he returned to England and another few days in hospital before he was allowed home and reunited with parents and siblings, especially brother Ted, home on a week’s leave but suffering badly from gas damage. Still, civilian life continued to offer Sam a warm welcome… until, in February, 1919, the Army called him back…]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

February, 1919, Brighton: after January’s meetings with two old POW pals and a brief workers’-and-soldiers’-playtime party season when, in his Edmonton, north London neighbourhood anyway, “everybody was smiling at everybody else” my father Private Sam Sutcliffe got the call to return to the colours… after a fashion.

    To his surprise as 20-year-old veteran of Gallipoli, the Somme and such, the Army transferred him to the Royal Defence Corps – which Sam also called the Home Forces and regarded as a Dad’s Army. With his new comrades, he settled into elegant digs in posh Palmeira Square – albeit furnished only with mattresses on low trestles… “luxury sleeping compared to POW conditions,” as my father noted:

‘I found myself among men all new to me, but that proved no hindrance to friendly exchanges of experiences. Returned prisoners like myself, they cared little for having to join the ranks of the defenders of home and beauty. Still, the war hadn’t officially finished yet, as some of them pointed out, and our soldiers could still be sent abroad if fighting broke out on one of the Eastern Fronts – but ole-timers like us, defenders of Merry England, could sleep soundly with no fears of being thrown again into a horrid battle in which somebody would be sure to get hurt.

     A month spent by the sea with nothing to do but polish our boots and buttons, and promenade along the front, or walk out on the Palace Pier and spend pennies on “What The Butler Saw” machines(2), did me a power of good. In fact, I began to really appreciate the wisdom of the men at the War Office who decreed that some special care should be taken of chaps like us. So… I devoted quite some time to inspecting the structure of the Pier, trying to guess its age and concluding that, in 1919, it and its amusements looked very old-fashioned and would, doubtless, soon be replaced by an up-to-date structure representing the Great New World(2) promised by some of our more reckless politicians(3).

One great surprise encountered there made me extra happy; walking in the centre of Brighton, I caught sight of our revered Major, the last commander of my first Battalion before it was disbanded at Rouen in 1916. I had, some time previously, been told that he was last seen at Vimy Ridge suffering from a bullet wound in his head and presumed dead(3); but here he was, before my very eyes, driving an open car through the streets of this busy town.

     I could not safely try to attract his attention, so I watched him pass and disappear up the crowded street. (When, in later years, he became a Lord, he still preferred that we few, his “old boys”, address him as “Major”.)(4)

(2) For younger readers and older ones never exposed to the low entertainments of piers and arcades: What The Butler Saw was a film played on a hand-cranked mutoscope machine. The makers shot the original in the early 1900s, but I saw it in the early ’60s, slightly weathered but, I guess, still “erotic” as advertised. Apparently the “story” derived from a scandalous divorce case in the 1880s when a butler gave evidence that he’d looked through the dining-room keyhole and seen his mistress (in the other sense!)  “Lady Campbell in flagrante with Captain Shaw of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade”. I think you needed to know that.

(3) Although my father capitalised “Great New World”, it doesn’t seem to have been “a phrase”, so to speak. No doubt he cross-wired it with “Brave New World”, Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel. The title had no specific connection with WWI but Huxley did. When aged 21, Huxley volunteered to join the Army in January, 1916, but was rejected because he remained half-blind in one eye from a disease he contracted in 1911. Prime Minister Lloyd George apparently made the actual political promise which has resounded ever since when, in a General Election speech at Wolverhampton on November 23, 1918 (quoted in The Times two days later), he said, “What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in” – of course, this gained eternal life adjusted to “A land fit for heroes”.

(4) My father added one of his own Endnotes here: “Actually, some 57 years later, as I write in 1976, they have just removed the ‘What the butler saw’ and similar machines and sold them at fantastic profit at auction… and that old pier… is still earning money”; Palace Pier, Brighton’s third pier, opened in 1899, and remains in operation now (or as of Friday a week ago when, coincidentally, I was gazing at it from the prom).

(5) In December, 1916, at the start of Sam’s “year out” when he was found to be underage for the battlefield, i.e. still 18 – after Gallipoli and the Somme – back in London he talked with some recovering wounded soldiers from the Western Front who told him that ‘dear old Major Booth, of whom I’ve said so much – a comparatively young man really, of course – had been wounded in the head; it was assumed that he too had died’ (Chapter 42 of the Memoir, Blog December 11, 2016). “Booth” was his alias for Major Harry Nathan, just 30 in February, 1919, CO of the 2/1st Royal Fusiliers in Gallipoli and until their disbandment on the Western Front in May, 1916. 

     In Strong For Service, Nathan’s biographer, H. Montgomery Hyde, reports the Major’s own account of his wounding – in mid-July, 1916, a while after the initial Somme onslaught and massacre, a sniper shot him, his steel helmet saving his life, Nathan thought, although the bullet ‘went clean through the base of his head’. On July 24, 1916, from hospital, he dictated a letter home saying that ‘very considerable pain’ was decreasing. He convalesced – very slowly – at Palace Green Hospital For Officers, Kensington, and another hospital in Bournemouth, before being sent for additional psychiatric treatment for ‘melancholia’ at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, under the renowned trauma treatment pioneer Dr William Rivers (while there, Nathan met another Rivers patient, the war poet and decorated hero of the Somme, Siegfried Sassoon who was officially under treatment for shell shock/neurasthenia after writing a public letter to his commanding officer titled Finished With The War: A Soldier’s Declaration; Sassoon eventually returned to the Front, was promoted to Captain, then wounded near Arras in July, 1918, and returned to England; Dr Rivers is still renowned because of his portrayal in the Regenerationtrilogy of novels by Pat Barker (1991-5) and the film adaptation of the same name (1997)).

     After 18 months convalescence, Nathan was invalided out of the Army with the permanent rank of Major. Still often in pain, but – says Hyde – more personally confident because of his treatment by Rivers, he proceeded to a career in public life (although always a working solicitor to some degree). A Liberal MP for Bethnal Green North East from 1929, he switched to Labour in 1934 and returned to Parliament for Wandsworth Central in 1937, before stepping down to make way for Ernest Bevin (then General Secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union, shortly Minister Of Labour under PM Winston Churchill in the wartime coalition) – by way of consolation, being ennobled as Lord Nathan of Churt, and serving in the post-World War II Labour Government as Under-Secretary Of State For War and Minister For Civil Aviation; a Privy Counsellor from 1946; Hansard at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/people/colonel-harry-nathan/ (may prove hyperlink-resistant) shows how he contributed in Parliament constantly down the years, until his death on July 31, 1963 (why he’s ranked “Colonel” in Parliamentary records I don’t know); his wife, Eleanor (née Stettauer, 1892-1972, MA economics and maths Girton College, Cambridge), was a member of London County Council for many years – initially a Liberal, like her husband she switched to Labour (and became LCC Chairman in 1947).

All the best– FSS

Next week: While Sam enjoys that “month spent by the sea with nothing to do but polish our boots and buttons”, the Blog goes Retro in a thematic vein – first, Sam on how a frontline Tommy felt and dealt with his fears…

(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.

Sam, recovering from illness in a German field hospital, meets a real spiv – or worse – and fakes up a dirty deal so he can take some extra food back to the POW camp for himself and his pals…

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir(1) in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode & Arras 1918/POW etc mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… The German last throw of the dice initiated by the Spring Offensive resumed with a massive “surprise” attack dubbed The Third battle Of The Aisne by the Allies and Operation Blücher-Yorck by the Germans (May 27-June 2). The strategy was to menace Paris while preventing the French reinforcing the British in the Flanders-Lys sector.

    The attack began with artillery and gas across a nine-mile front on the Chemin Des Dames, in the Aisnes department, and succeeded brilliantly with one of the war’s greatest single-day gains – 10 miles (80 miles from Paris, which they hit with long-range shells during this campaign). This progress steadied but continued as the Germans took Soissons (May 29), Fère-en-Tardenois (30) and Château-Thierry and Dormans on the Marne (31). But at that point the Allies began to hold and counterattack – the French at Longpont, Corcy, Faverolles, Trones and Champlat, 12 miles southwest of Reims (June 2), and the Americans in their first major action at Château-Thierry – and the Germans, supply lines overstretched again, called a halt to Blücher-Yorck (casualties: Allies 127,000, German 130,000)… nominally, because it effectively transmuted into the Battle Of Belleau Wood just along the Marne (June 1-26).

    Alongside this epic action, the fights elsewhere look like skirmishes, but several were substantial steps towards the ending of the war in other regions. in Macedonia at the Battle Of Skra di Legen (May 29-30), the Greek Army undertook their first attack since, eventually, joining the Allies; supported by the French, they defeated the occupying Bulgarian force. 

    In Anatolia, the Battle Of Sadarabad (May 21-9) saw the Armenians’ final counterattack against invading Turkish forces achieve a startling victory (27), although, when the Turks reinforced and came again at Shirvandzhug (29) the Armenians, promptly agreed a ceasefire – then declared their first ever independent republic, which held until the end of the war, and arguably also saved them from extermination given the Turks’ 1915 attempted genocide which killed 800,000.

    Meanwhile, among many other actions, including in Mesopotamia and German East Africa, the Italian Army resumed its gathering endeavour to push the Austrian Army back north of the river Piave and Venice by storming Capo Sile (May 27; 18 miles northeast of Venice).

[Memoirbackground: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller 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)… untilofficialdom spotted his real age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He took up the offer, 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.An interesting year ensued – four months of blizzards, a meningitis scare, special training in various northern locations, and then a few summer weeks stomping around Yorkshire on a route march… which in due course led him to hospital again, to recover from lurking effects of trench warfare’s privations andprepare for more of the same (his 19th birthday passed in a Sheffield hospital). During that period, his Company Officer told him he’d been offered the chance to train for a commission, but Sam detested ordering men around so he refused; one immediate-post-war pension form suggests this defiance may have brought about his “reversion” to Private, but perhaps he actually requested it, given his feelings on the subject of rank. Come November/December, 1917, he enjoyed what proved to be the final home leave of his military career – and assured his family of his firm conviction that he would survive. In December/January, he returned to France, unattached to any specific Battalion pro tem, and knocked about Brigade HQ in Arras, dogsbodying where he could – though he was soon out at the front line, just a few miles away. But by mid-March he found his own Essex Battalion; they moved into the trenches near Fampoux, about six miles east of Arras, on March 19… just in time, it turned out, for the opening artillery bombardment of the German Spring Offensive and a last stand by the Battalion on March 28 which left 80 alive and OK 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.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, my father, Sam Sutcliffe, taken prisoner outside Arras on March 28 at the tail-end of the German Spring Offensive and then for some weeks part of a wandering band of POWs, was settling into his first purpose-built POW camp – at Sancourt (about 50 kilometres southeast of Arras and just north of Cambrai).

    This meant sleeping on the floor of crowded huts – and a peculiarly agonising form of torture provided by his neighbour Jimmy Britten’s salivating reminiscences about the products of his local meat-pie vendor in Bradford. More arduous, though, was their introduction to forced hard labour – unloading coal barges, shoveling lime out of a goods wagon.

    As a result, weak and ill with dysentery, Sam was transferred temporarily to a nearby German field hospital where he helped the wounded and recovered, in part, through their kindness as they gave him the food they couldn’t manage to eat.

    Now the hospital’s unsavoury orderly, Adamski, seeks to involve Sam in a bit of dirty business:

‘The powerfully built man in charge of my tent, the orderly as we would say, began to notice the improvement in my condition and must have reported it to the doctor, for I was given a sort of large metal dish – the orderly, by putting it to his backside, indicated its purpose. Regret close to fear that I would be returned to the prison camp, almost made me sorry to feel so much better, but I took the bedpan to the latrine and produced the required, shall we say, sample; the officer doctor was passing, examined my stool – and the presence of blood secured me a reprieve.

     The men called the orderly Adamski. He now got me to do most of the very limited nursing chores he had sometimes done for the wounded men. In return, he allowed me to keep on eating and drinking leftover items.

     One day, he gave me to understand – I was acquiring a few words of German – that I would leave the hospital, such as it was, in a week’s time. Then he said “Ringen!”, which from his actions I guessed meant “rings”. “Gold Ringen,” he said excitedly, pointing in the direction of our prison camp. “Gefangenen (I knew that one, of course: “prisoners”) hab’ gold Ringen?”Now I got the drift of his hopeful questioning and quickly assured him that the Gefangenen had lots of gold Ringen. So, said he – demonstrating with a pile of mess cans – I could help myself to spare food, fill as many cans as I could carry, and exchange them for my fellow prisoners’ gold rings. These Jerry food cans were not wanted, he explained, their owners having died, tot, kaput.

     I began to collect every bit of food I could lay my hands on – stewed meat and veg, macaroni, beans, soup — and hid the full cans under my bunk, hoping the stuff wouldn’t go mouldy. I also collected spoons and forks.

     On the day before I was to leave, I sat on a box, chatting as best I could with a young German. He spoke a little English and, by means of signs and odd words in either language, we understood each other pretty well. He had almost recovered from his wound, but he was homesick. He lived near Berlin, he said, and he handed me photographs of home and family, explaining with easily grasped German words such as Mutter, Vater, Schwester, Haus and Heim(2). The lad had a good face, which description has nothing to do with bone structure or colour. I’d have liked to have him as a friend; he wasn’t repulsed by my emaciated condition, looked straight at me, and smiled now and then.

     I retain no clear memory of the many other patients in my big tent. I spoke to most of them — those I was able to do small things for and those who showed signs of tolerance or friendliness by trying to match my efforts at communication. I always listened and tried to learn or work out more words of their language.

     For instance, a standard question of theirs sounded like, “Wie lang gewesen sie hier?”, which I took to mean, “How long have you been here?”, and I could reply something like “Drei Monat Gefangene”, which I hoped meant roughly “Three months a prisoner”(3). Then some words on a noticeboard puzzled me, but I got one when a name beside the word “Arzt” at the bottom of the board made me think this must meant “doctor” or “surgeon”. And so often was I told “Bleib’ du da!” with an imperative finger pointing at my feet that I decided it must mean “Stay you there!”

     The sad day came when Adamski told me to go back to the prison camp, accompanied by an elderly guard. I quickly tied a string around my waist and hung from it all the full German mess tins; I filled my pockets with the spoons, knives and forks I had accumulated, and stuffed my tunic with pieces of rye bread quickly gathered from bedsides.

     The weight of all this almost defeated me, especially when Adamski kept me standing and waiting while he gave me careful instructions about handing over the gold rings I’d promised him in return for all the cans and food. He waxed very emphatic about my obligations to him; I understood his meaning and threats, not word for word but sufficiently. When we left the prison-camp to move elsewhere we should have to pass the field hospital on our way to the nearby Bahnhof(4) – I guessed he was telling me – and he would be there to collect. “Ja, ja,” I assured him and struggled away with my load.’

(2) Mutter, Vater, Schwester, Haus, andHeim: in case they’re not that easily grasped, they mean mother, father, sister, house, and home.

(3) That would take these events well into June – the time paralleling in these POW blogs is very rough and as-it-comes because Sam gave few indications of dates and, naturally, wrote much more about some periods than others.

(4) Bahnhof means railway station.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam shares his food booty with a necessarily protective circle of pals. Then they move from Sancourt and, Ringen-less, he tries to sneak past the outraged Adamski… meanwhile, he sends a fateful German field card on its way…

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

Sherlock Holmes’s creator Conan Doyle lectures Somme veteran Sam about… the Somme… Just part of the Army’s richly varied programme of entertainments before sending him back to the Western Front!

For details of how to buy Sam’s full Memoir* in paperback or e-book & excerpted Gallipoli & Somme episode mini-e-books & reader reviews see right-hand column

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

For AUDIO excerpts click Here  Join Foot Soldier Sam on Facebook Here

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… Georges Clemenceau replaced Paul Painlevé as French Prime Minister (November 13) and perhaps got lucky to a degree as the week produced no decisive actions on the Western Front, despite the always deadly to and fro around recent major battlefields including Ypres (12-13), Passchendaele (13-16), St Quentin and Champagne (17) where British and French forces defeated German attempts to win back lost ground.

    Russia’s withdrawal from the war appeared to move closer as the former leader of the provisional Government Alexander Kerenski, lately ousted by Lenin’s Bolsheviks, staged a last military stand with “loyal troops” at Pulkovo near Petrograd. He went into hiding then fled for France.

    Down in Italy, the battle which began life as the 12th Isonzo and changed its name to The First Battle Of The Piave (or Of Monte Grappa – river or mountain, November 11-December 23) as the Italians retreated south. But with their new chief-of staff installed (Cadorna replaced by Diaz) and Allied reinforcements arriving, during this week they began to hold the line from about 20 miles north of Venice to said Monte Grappa, about 60 miles northeast, near Veneto in the “pre-alps”.

    Finally, in Palestine, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force (British, Anzac and Indian) concluded the success of the 3rd Battle Of Gaza by pursuing Ottoman forces and breaking down their attempts to establish a defensive position. The cavalry-led Action Of El Mughar’s success (November 13) enabled them to chase the Ottoman Army northwards for an average of 50 miles from their starting point, with Jaffa the furthest point captured (November 16).

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Signaller 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 real age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the battlefield. So they told him he could take a break from the fighting until he turned 19. He took up the offer, 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 until such time as they severally became eligible for the trenches again… An interesting year ensued – four months of blizzards, a meningitis scare, special training in various northern locations, and then a few summer weeks stomping around Yorkshire on a route march… which in due course led him to hospital again, to recover from some lurking effects of trench warfare’s privations – and prepare him for more (he was 19 on July 6 while in hospital). In recent weeks, because material from Sam’s “year out” at home didn’t stretch to weekly blogs, I rewound excerpts from his experiences of Gallipoli and the Somme. But now the story’s returned to the this-week-100-years-ago narrative.]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, the Army finally noticed my father had attained the age – 19 – at which he was legally entitled to resume his Gallipoli and Somme role as a unit of cannonfodder. To prepare him for his return to the Front in France they sent him on a signalling refresher course at Crowborough, Sussex (“refresher” because after he’d learned these skills in Malta during 1915 and practised them in the front line at Suvla Bay, on the Somme his expertise proved surplus to requirements and he fought as a plain foot soldier).

    Here he gets on with studying some new wrinkles, but mainly recalls the assorted pleasures of training camp entertainments – including a visit from the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

‘Encouraged by a competent Signals Sergeant-Instructor, I regained some of my former speed at using the key, sending and receiving messages on newer, more sophisticated instruments, and laying and rigging lines – using trees where roads had to be crossed, a new skill I learned (healthy exercise with opportunities to revise map and compass practice too).

     But my memories of that tall, lean Sergeant centre more around his talk of pre-war days. He loved to describe the little corner shop owned by his parents. He had helped out in spare hours. He described how farthings** on this line and ha’pennies on that all added up to profits which sustained the family in a fair degree of comfort. I’m sure he applied the same zeal to his studies of Army signals techniques as he had to learning how to buy and sell hundreds of household requirements. Through him, I again felt renewed contact with that civilian world in which I had dwelt briefly, such a long time ago, as it seemed.

     Off-duty, in comfortable cafés within the camp – run by the YMCA, Salvation Army and other doers of good works – we could drink tea and eat cakes, play darts, dominoes or draughts, write letters or just talk. We had a soft-drinks canteen, a groceries etc canteen, and a “wet canteen” for the tipplers. A large concert hall too where, once a week, musicians, singers and entertainers came over from Forest Row, 10 miles west of Crowborough, and presented a pretty good show – for free, although they were obviously professionals. One violinist made beautiful music, sometimes playing Kreisler compositions as well as that great man himself (I heard his recordings many years later).

     Most evenings during the week, they used the hall as a cinema, running a silent movie or two accompanied by a pianist who, since he could not improvise, painstakingly plodded through the score of some current musical. This he had spent most of the preceding daylight hours practicing, as I discovered when passing the building. I guessed he had hopes of retaining that job instead of being sent “over there”. I know I admired his persistence and wished him luck.

     Sometimes, those in charge of the camp laid on different, special events too. One night, in our concert hall, a guest lecturer gave a detailed account of the previous year’s Battle Of The Somme. The speaker, fairly tall, broad and altogether imposing, was none other than the great Dr. Conan Doyle, inventor of Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr Watson, whose investigations I had read about in Strand**** magazines passed on to me by dear old Mr Frusher, the Scoutmaster. The author lived, I was informed, across the valley, in a wooded estate.

     Our visitor, it turned out, had mastered much information about the object of and preparation for that awful battle, and he made full use of a large map, displayed on an easel. His voice was somewhat gruff, perhaps due to a cold, but he earned the audience’s close attention. Conan Doyle was doing his war work, hoping that a fuller understanding of Britain’s strategy would help soldiers to better endure their part in it. I heard differing opinions about that.*****’

** Farthing: legal tender until 1960 in “old money” (lsd), a quarter of a penny, so one 960th of a pound sterling (which says something about why the UK government eventually decimalised the currency); after 1936, this smallest coin bore the image of the country’s smallest bird, the wren – before that it was Britannia on the reverse of the monarch, as per all other British coins.

*** Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962), Austrian-born violinist and composer who spent World War 1 in the USA where, much later, he gained citizenship. The violinist my father appreciated may well have played one or both of his most popular pieces, Liebesleid (Love’s Sorrow) and Liebesfreud (Love’s Joy), both composed in 1905.

**** A monthly, Strand was published from 1891 50 1950 and Conan Doyle contributed over 200 pieces, from fiction to essays and poems.

***** If I’m catching my father’s implication here, as a veteran of the Somme himself he felt somewhat cynical about having an “expert” explain the battle to him, even such an eminence as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). But he didn’t know that the author’s personal stake in it went far beyond the academic. His son, Kingsley, was seriously wounded on the Somme (and died of pneumonia, aged 26, while still “convalescent” the year after Sam listened to this talk, 1918). Conan Doyle wrote a military history, The British Campaign In France And Flanders, published in six volumes, 1916-20. He lived in Crowborough at Little Windlesham House with his second wife, Jean, from 1907 until his death in 1930.

All the best – FSS

Next week: Home leave, December, 1917, finds Sam’s parents moving house. So his final preparation for a return to the Western Front consists of laying lino!

* 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.