Sussex, May, 1919: Brit POWs guarding German POWs… and Sam’s first post-war romance – with the little lady from Littlehampton – reaches the crunch moment: can his despite-it-all virginal virtue survive a roll in the haystack?

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

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

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

All proceeds from all versions of Sam’s Memoir will always go to the British Red Cross – and the current running donations total as of May 1, 2019, is £4,178.05 (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… Germany started to get the bad news from the Paris Peace Conference. Given no voice in the discussions, on May 7 their new Weimar government was granted its first official sight of some of the Versailles terms. In the previous days, they’d lost their Chinese colonies to Japan (to China’s chagrin – riots ensued as reported in last week’s blog), but now they learned of German East Africa’s re-assignment to Britain and France and German South West Africa’s transfer to South Africa. Four days later, after digesting, Germany protested. But only worse was to come…

    Meanwhile, Italian Prime Minister Orlando, concerned about any future reunion between Germany and Austria – the latter Italy’s invader foe during World War I – had negotiated in April to acquire the South Tyrol, taking in about 250,000 German speakers, Trieste, Trentino and Dalmatia. Then, when President Wilson blocked Italian acquisition of Fiume, on the Adriatic, Orlando stormed out… only to return in early May having gained nothing and lost out on his ambition to take the port of Smyrna (now Izmir) in western Turkey.

    Away from the conference table, Russia remained at war – albeit with itself. While the vestigial Allied forces up north near Archangel again beat off the Bolshevik Army (May 10), in the ‘Counteroffensive Of Eastern Front’ (April 22-July 19; definitely no definite article before the ‘Eastern’) phase of the civil war the Red Army’s southern group tried to surround their White opponents in Tatarstan (about 1,200 miles east of Moscow), but they got away to the east (May 6). Trying to build their strength out that way, the Bolshevik Government drafted 35,000 Central Asian Muslims (from May 7), but soon found them rebelling and joining the anti-Russian Basmachie fighters – Turks in Turkistan, particularly around Tashkent (2,100 miles southeast of Moscow; now in Uzbekistan).  

    In “the subcontinent”, Great Britain started a war on Afghanistan (May 6-August 8) following an Afghan incursion into India to take a town called Bagh at the western end of the Khyber Pass (May 3). British, Indian and Gurkha troops attempted to recover it on May 9 and failed, but came again and drove the Afghans back over the border (11)…

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

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

April-May, 1919, Sussex: Sam continues with his final Army job, in a squad of fellow ex-POWs guarding German war prisoners still detained at a run-down near-stately home in the village of East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel. Transferred to Home Guard forerunner, the Royal Defence Corps, he’s emerged from a short-lived lust for revenge and come to enjoy fraternising with (most of) the enemy – the two lots of POWs found they had quite a bit in common as fellow veterans of WW1 attritional front-line trench warfare… 

    But Sam still had business unconcluded – and mutually frustrating – with the sophisticated(?) young woman he’d been seeing in Littlehampton (a two-and-a-half-mile walk across the fields from East Preston). Thus far the virginity he’d not surrendered throughout the war, despite it all, remained intact…

‘For a brief, extremely enjoyable period, I continued to take my dozen or so Jerries along to the river to push those large lumps of chalk about(2); those we had placed in position earlier had already combined into a smooth, strong riverbank which would last for many years.

     I still walked out once or twice a week with my formerly prim, arm-swinging bird(3), but I sensed that my slow rate of progress towards something more intimate made her impatient – especially on one fine, warm summer’s evening, when she led me to the rear of a haystack where we rested among the sweet-smelling stuff, and she encouraged me to explore so far uncharted areas by telling me about her wartime goings-on.

     I learned that a coloured American soldier(4), one of many billeted in the district during the final months, had lived in her home and become very much one of the family – to such an extent that, as an accepted part of household routine, each morning he took a cup of tea up to my girlfriend in her bedroom. He stayed talking to her while she drank it and so subtly extended the length of his visits that no one noticed when a quarter of an hour, or sometimes even more, passed before he joined the others at breakfast.

     Eventually, there came a time for him to join her between the sheets. She enjoyed this morning ceremony, and tried to get me at it – even with hay for a bed and the risk of the farmer arriving at an interesting, if awkward moment.

     Difficult to put my finger on the real reason for my reluctance to co-operate… Being number two to the Alabamy bloke was one thing anti, a black man in bed; a clash of some sort there. But the teachings of my pre-war mentor, Mr Frusher(5), the vicar, piano teacher and Scoutmaster, still held much influence within me; never take advantage of a woman’s natural urge to have the egg fertilised, he would say… I also felt chagrin about being such a rotten judge, believing that what my eyes saw was necessarily the truth. The pretty little hat, the waisted, calf-length, Navy-blue coat, the white gloves the dainty step, and that swinging arm. Demure propriety personified…

     At the time, without giving too much thought to any of these matters, I decided to quit. That there might have been a piccaninny in the making may also have occurred to me. I don’t rightly remember.’

(2) See last week’s blog for the details of the work detail in the Arun valley below handsome Arundel Castle.

(3) See Blog April 14 for Sam’s gradual “courting” of the “arm-swinging bird” or the Littlehampton Lady as I dubbed her: ‘…she walked, her bearing regal, she looked neither right nor left. Her right arm swung sort of diagonally, finishing behind her back. Her left hand held a large handbag carried with arm fully extended and rigid. A Captain maybe could make an advance of some kind, or even a Lieutenant, but me, no. Till late one afternoon…’ – she stopped this strange ritual of walking ahead of Sam (she must have spotted him entering the town across the fields and timed her walk precisely several weekends in a row, it seems), turned around and invited him to walk with her. After some platonic “walking out” – literally, to country inns – she evidently decided to hurry him along a bit by saying ‘she enjoyed my company best when I’d got a couple of whiskies under my belt’.

(4) As Sam’s son, I remain somewhat embarrassed about this passage because of the language he uses – “coloured” and (further on) “piccaninny” now deemed racist diction – and the degree of racism he recalls feeling in the course of this episode back when he was 20. As his editor, I decided not to cut or remove these paragraphs because, like everything else about his Memoir, it was personally honest and true to his times. “Times” plural, because a) you can see here how the old Sam – in his 70s during the ’70s when he was writing – was uneasy about his younger self’s attitudes while candidly recording them, but b) in ’70s Britain, neither “coloured” nor “piccaninny” had become subject to the linguistic shifts which, in the natural course of cultural evolution, constantly move the meanings and implications of words around so that, for instance, some, like these two, become signifiers of racism. 

(5) Mr Frusher, his de facto mentor in Edmonton when he was aged about 10 to 16, had made Sam a prude or a gentleman, according to taste, with his emphasis on the male responsibility to rebuff female desires until the appropriate time – namely, after marriage. He called it “chivalry”. Sam’s Littlehampton Lady obviously thought his restraint worse than unnecessary. And young Sam no doubt persuaded himself that it was all down to rather noble virtue… so that he could overlook his shyness and fear in relationships with women. Fortunately, I can report that he got over this impediment soon after the war, thought rather later than the end of his Memoir; he told me how another bold girl visited him when he was bed-ridden with a cold, climbed in with him and gave him an experience he deemed well worth repeating quite often thereafter.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam, writing in 1972-6, didn’t foresee that I might adapt his Memoir into a weekly blog, so he didn’t write enough to about certain periods to spread evenly across the months – and May to late June is one such thin spell. So before returning to his demob and the crescendo of the grand Peace parade on July 19, I’m going to run a highlights reel, so to speak: a three-part Retro sequence from his north London childhood and teens covering The Making Of A Tommy, followed by four long collections of excerpts on the key moments of his three great campaigns/battles, Gallipoli, the Somme, the Spring Offensive and one on his POW months through to Armistice and freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week, in the aftermath of the Armistice… While not much detail was emerging from the Paris Peace Conference, French PM Georges Clemenceau wrote to one of his generals (April 15) that everything was turning out well from his point of view: “In the last three days, we have worked well. All the great issues of concern to France are almost settled. Yesterday, as well as the two treaties giving us the military support of Britain and the United States in case of a German attack, I obtained the occupation of the Rhineland for 15 years, with partial evacuation after five years. If Germany does not fulfil the treaty, there will be no evacuation either partial or definitive. At last I am no longer anxious. I have obtained almost everything I wanted.”

    Years later, UK PM Lloyd George observed of his more-or-less ally against US President Woodrow Wilson’s more moderate approach to punishing Germany’s: “It was part of the real joy of these Conferences to observe Clemenceau's attitude towards Wilson… He listened with eyes and ears lest Wilson should by a phrase commit the Conference to some proposition which weakened the settlement from the French standpoint. If Wilson ended his allocution without doing any perceptible harm, Clemenceau's stern face temporarily relaxed, and he expressed his relief with a deep sigh. But if the President took a flight beyond the azure main, as he was occasionally inclined to do without regard to relevance, Clemenceau would open his great eyes in twinkling wonder, and turn them on me as much as to say: ‘Here he is, off again!’”

    Apart from the jaw-jaw, war-war still proceeded in eastern Europe. While the Red and White Russians’ conflict in the Urals stalled for a few days, Bolshevik forces took a heavy loss in the Battle Of Lida April 16-17), part of the Polish-Soviet War (February 14, 1919-March 18, 1921). Having camped outside the town (in present-day Belarus) since mid-March, the Polish Army attacked the Russians – who’d lately taken it after German occupation – and drove them out, pursuing them eastwards with cavalry. This signalled a strategic shift by the newly independent Poles who decided to stop fighting the Ukrainians and concentrate on their Russian border.

    Much further east, in the Punjab, five days of rioting followed the Massacre Of Amritsar (April 13) – connected to World War I because the Punjab had been the main source of recruitment for the Indian Army which fought at Gallipoli, in the Middle East and on the Western Front.

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

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

April, 1919, Sussex: Sam is continuing with his final Army job, guarding German POWs detained at a run-down near-stately home in the village of East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel(2). His fellow guards, like my father, are all ex-POWs transferred from their fighting Regiments to the Royal Defence Corps. They’d been told Winston Churchill conceived this set-up in the belief that it would do them good…

    Last week, Sam ventured into a failed attempt at romance with one of the village schoolteachers – and also took to weekend walks across the fields to Littlehampton, 2.5 miles west. There he enjoyed the usually deserted YMCA – missing its departed GI clientele – for big lunches served up by the underemployed ladies in the café. 

    But now the small seaside resort offers him a different kind of attraction…

‘More than once, when I wandered into Littlehampton, I found myself walking behind a girl quietly dressed in a calf-length, Navy-blue overcoat. She usually turned right, as I did, into the High Street, at the far end of which stood the YMCA. Then, every time, she would walk straight past the building and I would climb the steps… beginning to feel curious about her and where she was going.

     Everything about her suggested a degree of respectability which would preclude interruptions to her progress from a poor soldier such as myself. As she walked, her bearing regal, she looked neither right nor left. Her right arm swung sort of diagonally, finishing behind her back. Her left hand held a large handbag carried with arm fully extended and rigid. A Captain maybe could make an advance of some kind, or even a Lieutenant, but me, no. Till late one afternoon…

     She must have despaired of anything coming of the haughty act and this time when I followed her along the High Street – by chance as ever – she stopped in her tracks, turned round, confronted me and smiled. “You’re not going to duck into that dump again, are you?” she asked. Of course, I quickly adjusted my thinking and promised never again to do that if she was likely to be available.

     Nothing exciting came of it, but we met often, walked around the district and usually called at a country inn for a couple of drinks… Something different, then, to make the fairly long walk to Littlehampton worthwhile.

     I treated her with the respect due to one of her obviously high moral standards. But when, on one of our pub visits, she told me she enjoyed my company best when I’d got a couple of whiskies under my belt, I wondered if I was perhaps overdoing the gallantry(3).

Resting one day on my mattress in my little room just below the roof of the old mansion, I heard a knock on the door and in came our Sergeant – a boozy-faced old twit, I thought – accompanied by a tall lad. “Hope you won’t mind sharing with this young man,” said the gaffer and, of course, I made him welcome. I said, “Come in, George, very glad to have you for a mate after all these years!” – expecting, as I did so, a sign of recognition from him… Marvelling at the strange coincidence of it all, I was staggered when he said it was great I called him by his proper name before he’d introduced himself; at which, I realised this was a stock joke of his – he thought I’d called him George because, in the Army, everyone called you George if they didn’t know your proper name.

     It shook me for, as a pre-war youngster, this lad had worked, just over Southwark Bridge from Lake & Currie’s offices, in the laboratory which assayed mineral samples sent in by our firm’s mining engineers. General dogsbody George(4) trotted over to the City with the results and took back anything that needed testing. I often chatted with him while he waited in the outer office I occupied with the old “Sergeant” commissionaire; I knew him well, even knew about a kidney complaint which caused him to become drowsy and fall asleep regardless of where he happened to be. He had told me he lived in a block of flats and had to climb several flights of stairs and sometimes sat down on a step and dozed off. Unusual for a boy of 15 or so, but that was about the only result of his complaint that bothered him.

     I knew all this, yet he didn’t appear to remember me. Feeling sure he would suddenly recall our earlier acquaintance, I waited with pleasant anticipation for his day of awakening. It never came. At meals, we often sat together and, when duties permitted, we’d withdraw to the small room up top and chat before dozing off. Most days, I tried to say things which should have made him question me. But it just didn’t happen. Quiet, kindly George would occasionally talk about his boyhood times, but I had no place in them.’

(2) Area map at https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.8359756,-0.5158142,13z 

(3) While Sam here seems to be struggling with the girl’s apparent propriety, I’ll note again that he’d emerged from the war still a virgin and carrying his own burden(?) of restraint inculcated by the mentor of his early teens back in Edmonton, the Rev Mr Frusher, who instructed the lads in his charge, as choir- and scoutmaster, that they “had a bounden duty to accept responsibility and ensure that nothing occurred, when the girl was in his care, which he could not freely reveal to her parents. The final word had a memorable simplicity to it: chivalry.”

(4) I can’t give you a back-reference here because George didn’t get a mention in the section about Sam’s two years working for Lake & Currie. Even allowing for my father’s appearance having changed somewhat between 1912-14 and 1919, ages 14 to 20, with added impact from his war experience, no doubt this odd episode mostly reflects my father’s extraordinary memory encountering a very bad one.

All the best– FSS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week, in the aftermath of the Armistice… The Paris Peace Conference produced one if its earliest and most substantial creations, the International Labour Organisation/ILO (founded April 11 and still going, with 187 nation members currently). The previous day, the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference, which had run in parallel to the Peace Conference since February 10, delivered its final resolutions concentrating on the trafficking and sale of women, voting rights, inclusion in education and human rights generally. Much of this was initially set aside by the Peace Conference participants, but it is reckoned to be the first time women (aside from the odd monarch, I presume) took part in an international treaty negotiation – officially recognised, albeit meeting away from the main chambers of debate and decision-making.

    Away from the Peace Conference, the other stories of the week largely involved fighting. In Russia, the Bolshevik forces had good and bad days. In the White v Red battles in the Urals – the Armies numbering about 100,000 on each side – the Whites took Belebey (April 7; 800 miles east of Moscow in Bashkortostan) and Bugulma (10; 80 miles northwest of Belebey) forcing the Reds to withdraw and regroup. But down south, Bolshevik troops entered the Crimea (8) and occupied Yalta (12; 925 miles due south of Moscow). Meanwhile, the dire situation of the White-supporting Allied forces around Archangel (765 miles north of Moscow) provoked the British to send a relief force (9).

    Territorial and political disputes and skirmishes continued in many parts of Europe, but the historic event for Great Britain and for India, whose troops had so recently fought alongside one another on the Western Front and elsewhere, was the notorious Massacre Of Amritsar (April 13). In the northern Punjab, heart of Indian recruitment for WW1, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer ordered 50 British and Gurkha troops to open fire on unarmed 20,000 people – apparently a mixture of religious pilgrims and political protesters – gathered in Amritsar’s main square. In 10 minutes deaths totalled between 379 (British account) and 1,000 (the figure from an enquiry initiated by Matama Gandhi). Initially lauded, Dyer was was forced to quit the Army the following year by vote in the House Of Commons. The Massacre fuelled the burgeoning Indian independence movement, especially Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent protest.

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

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

April, 1919, Sussex: Sam and his group of fellow ex-POWs had been sent to a small village called East Preston, about five miles southeast of Arundel where, to their considerable surprise, they were deployed to guard German POWs detained in Preston Place, the local sometime semi-stately home. 

    This Winston Churchill wheeze – as Secretary Of State For War at the time – was intended to defuse any vestigial lust for vengeance on their recent enemies and jailors. In Sam’s case it only just worked (see Blog March 17, 2019), but in a few days he recovered his equilibrium.

    Last week, he found himself an onlooker to a terrible post-war story as two newly arrived ex-POW/guards, who had suffered not just the usual privations but vilely cruel torture, went berserk and attacked the German prisoners. They did little actual harm, but both had to return to the psychiatric hospital whence they had lately been released, allegedly “cured”.

    Now, what Sam did at the weekends in rural Sussex. Romance?! Hijinks?! Well… he tried…

‘On the railway platform one morning(2), I awaited a train which took my party to Arundel for one of our regular jobs, repairing the banks of the River Arun. A lady, whom I guessed to be my senior by several years, smiled at me. Thus encouraged, I wished her “Good morning” and learned that she was a schoolteacher. Soon she offered me a ticket, price sixpence, which would admit me to a whist drive in the village hall; she took my tanner(3) and hoped we would meet there on Saturday.

     That convivial affair made me several civilian friends and paved the way to several people inviting me into their homes. My teacher friend proved a happy person, though strictly correct in behaviour. She asked me to bring a pal, and call at the house next to the Roman Catholic village school around teatime the following Saturday. We didn’t take out prisoner working parties at the weekend, so I could easily arrange to be free.

     I found a chap of the right sort, as I judged, and he did, in fact, get on extremely well with the teacher. She taught at a Church of England school, but shared the house with a Roman Catholic colleague. As you might guess, the Catholic teacher was Irish and I’ve usually found Irish eyes off-putting… But a good tea preceded settling down to some general conversation, the girls having insisted that we males occupy the armchairs.

     Lumbered, as I felt, with the one I assumed – being RC – was strictly religious, I applied a degree of restraint in my manner which forbade any kind of fun and games. But, surprisingly, the girls seated themselves on the arms of our large chairs. So, to converse with my Irish beauty, I had to put my head back and look upwards – thus acquiring a crick in the neck. All in all, I wasn’t enjoying myself, and a tentative arm placed round her waist when she appeared to be slipping off her perch brought forth a lack of response which reminded me of her calling.

     More conversation rounded off that exhilarating evening.

When free of guard duties, I began to enjoy walking along lanes and across fields. Usually, I found myself in Littlehampton(4) and making a beeline for the YMCA – opened a couple of years previously, the staff told me, to cater for the growing number of troops in the area. But the Armistice had quickly reduced the number of Servicemen using the place, especially the Americans, who seemed to vanish overnight, they said.

     The good ladies who gave their time freely to run the canteen had grown noticeably cool about everything coming to a halt so suddenly. So, when the occasional Tommy like me turned up, their enthusiasm revived, they lavished much smashing grub on us – and Britishers once more became of some account, the wealthy Yanks having deserted the local birds without warning. By way of earning my corn I would sit at the piano and tinkle a two- or maybe three-fingered rendering of The Long, Long Trail or some such tearjerker, the notes of which would echo through the now deserted building and, I hoped, bring back memories of livelier, happier days, when war kept things going at a rattling good pace.’

(2) That’s Angmering station (a short walk from East Preston) whence they’d travel to Arundel (five miles northwest of East Preston). Area map at https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.8359756,-0.5158142,13z

(3) Does anyone under 50 know what a “tanner”/sixpence was? So, six old pre-decimalisation pennies in one little silver-coloured coin which, I just learned, became a “tanner” in nationwide slang because John Sigismund Tanner designed it for the Royal Mint during George II’s reign (1727-1760).

(4) Littlehampton: perhaps 2.5 miles west of East Preston via the lanes and fields route; a seaside resort in Arun district of Sussex, the settlement dating back to the Domesday Book of 1086. Its repute and population grew through the 19th century as poets and artists took a shine to it (Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Constable) and then the railway with linking cross-channel ferry to Honfleur brought other holidaymakers. Also, despite its location, it became a Cockney rhyming slang rude joke deriving from the original deployment of Hampton Wick – ergo “Hampton” = “prick” so… You get the picture I’m sure.

All the best– FSS

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

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