Sam and the new Fusiliers squarebash — and frighten the horses in central London

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… notable Western Front battles began: Messines, western Belgium (October 12th, BEF/German Army), Armentieres, northern France (13th, French Army-BEF/German Army), Yser, western Belgium (16th, Belgian-French Armies/German Army).

      Yes, that’s Armentieres as in the Mademoiselle From Armentieres, an early classic of Word War 1 Poor Bloody Infantry songcraft — ideal for marching because jaunty and infinite, given plenty of verses were “written” and then you added you’re own, ribald, surreal, satirical, tragi-comical according to taste. Et voilà, a quick web search reveals 50-60 variations — no repeats, come to that! — including these choice items (many ruder than this, of course): “She's the hardest working girl in town/But she makes her living upside down!/… I fell in love with her at sight/Wacked myself for half the night/… She had four chins, her knees would knock/And her face would stop a cuckoo clock/… She could guzzle a barrel of sour wine/And eat a hog without peeling the rind/… The officers get the pie and cake/And all we get is the bellyache/… The Colonel got the Croix de Guerre/The son-of-a-gun was never there!/… You might forget the groans and yells/But you'll never forget the mademoiselles.” Well, inkypinky parlee-voo, eh?

      Meanwhile, in Edmonton, north London, my father Sam, older brother Ted, and their pals and fellow novice Royal Fusiliers Len and Harold made their debuts as squarebashers, marchers and — since they’d been brought up in the church and the Scouts by quite proper parents — lightly blushful listeners, hesitant singers, of coarse military rhyme.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

The Battalion — 2/1st City Of London — got itself organised in the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, as was — the walled “parade ground” area is still there in Bloomsbury, south of King’s Cross Station, preserved as a playground.

    Roughly a thousand men assembled, Sam writes. An array of Sergeant Majors shuffled them into eight Companies of 100 each — Len in C, Ted and Harold G, Sam H, his first separation from them — the remainder “a reserve who would fill vacancies in the ranks as they occurred…” An officer explained that everything they did, no matter how dull and repetitive, had a practical purpose:

“You must all bear in mind that the movement and formations taught in military drill form the basis of control of troop movements on the battlefield… At a later stage, hand signals from the men in charge will take the place of spoken words — which, in certain circumstances, cannot be heard.”

“Vacancies”, “certain circumstances”; clearly, euphemism played its part from the outset…

    Observing his new comrades, Sam — and time now for the weekly alert to new readers that, in the first part of the book, my father wrote in the third person and called himself “Tommy Norcliffe” — Sam/Tommy, then, reckoned that, despite lying about his age to sign up at 16, he might have an advantage in readiness over some older men because of his Boy Scout training in skills such as rifle shooting and signaling.

    When Company Sergeant Major West ordered them to fall in, the lad weighed up the men on either side of him (all of them still in their ordinary clothes, no uniforms available for a while yet):

“On Tommy’s left stood a man of 36, probably, wearing a cap at an unusual angle — the soft cloth pulled back and the hard peak pulled forward as far as they could possibly go. Tommy wondered if the two sections would part under the strain. Under the peak, dark inquisitive eyes moved constantly, taking in everything with keen interest; a cheerful, though pale, face with a sharp, red nose and black moustache; a soiled black jacket, dark grey trousers shiny with what appeared to be grease, and heavy, black boots completed Tommy’s sidelong view of Joe Parker.

Had Joe cut his eyes to the right, he would have seen that Tommy too wore a black jacket with tight grey trousers but, instead of a cap, he wore the City office boy’s hard, flat bowler. A boy in men’s clothing?

A rather elderly fellow of scholarly appearance called Ewart Walker stood to Tommy’s right. He looked stern, or somewhat benign, or quizzical, all dependent on what the brainy bloke was observing at any given moment. He wore grey flannel trousers, a Norfolk jacket, brown, brogue shoes and, unusually at that period, no hat to cover his cropped, grey hair.”

They spent the morning on drill, just learning to start out on the left, then turn… then “Form fours!” really put the cat among the pigeons with regard to stumbling about and banging into one another.

    When they got a break, Sam/Tommy chatted with “old” Joe Parker, as he thought of him. He worked as a casual porter at Billingsgate fish market, but…

“… he’d spent much of his life at sea, mainly on coastal vessels. He proceeded to describe nights ashore in small seaports, winding up with his choicest experience — his face glowed, his eyes sparkled, as he told how he put up at a lodging house once, ate a lovely meal, and shared his beer with the buxom landlady, her husband presently away at sea it turned out. Then he turned in. The bed had lovely, clean, white sheets and pillows, but to all this luxury the landlady later added the pleasure of her curvaceous body. Joe relived the delights of having her meaty legs wrapped round him until the order to fall in saved Tommy from making the expected noises of approval.”

That afternoon, the Battalion undertook its first formal march through the city:

“[Lieutenant] Swickenham told the men about the march to follow. He asked them, in spite of their varied civilian garb, to bear themselves like soldiers. The eyes of many London citizens would regard them and a good impression must be aimed at.

Thus began one of many foot-slogging ventures in the course of their elementary training. This one took them along Tottenham Court Road, New Oxford Street, and Oxford Street, to Marble Arch and into Hyde Park, where they rested and did some drill before returning via a different route. They marched at attention and in complete silence for the most part, with a deal of conversation breaking out when the CSMs ordered ‘March at ease!’ — but all of it subdued by the unaccustomed public performance they felt they were staging.

However, the column was long, not much short of a thousand men, and probably at quite an early stage the officers began to realise that an error of judgment had occurred.

People crossing the road could not possibly wait while this long procession passed so they would try to hurry through any gap they espied. This caused pauses and broke the marching rhythm. Elderly folk would be helped by the men, pretty girls too — as the occasional shriek or squeal would attest. Policemen controlling busy crossings could not help causing gaps in the long column. So did congested traffic, especially in Oxford Street, where a bus or a lorry frequently became interposed between Companies, even though drivers of all sorts of vehicles, motor or horse-drawn, tried to let the Battalion through.

Cart and dray drivers, perched in high seats, some of them no doubt old soldiers, shouted words of sarcastic encouragement to the self-conscious recruits: ‘Keep them ‘eads up!’ or ‘Swing them arms there!’, along with one or two unfavourable comparisons to another Army apparently commanded by a certain Fred Karno. But it was just cheerful banter and, provided you didn’t take yourself too seriously, no offence was taken.

All the same, the officers ensured that future route marches avoided Central London and were undertaken Company by Company rather than the whole Battalion together.

But familiarity with the new routine of living soon encouraged those men who had subdued noisy and garrulous natures on that first march to commence raising their voices in joke and jibe. Some of the Cockneys’ humour was amusing, some of it downright rude and embarrassing. When the Battalion marched at ease, singing would break out — and not discouraged by the CSMs because it helped to maintain a marching rhythm and to overcome boredom.

They started with innocent numbers like Clementine, Boys Of The Old Brigade, John Brown’s Body and so forth, but a sort of vocal degeneration gradually set in. John Brown’s Body became John Brown’s Cow — it went peepee against the wall. The music hall song which went ‘Our lodger is a nice young man, such a nice young man is he’ lent itself to suggestions about his lewd practices. The Company officer had to lead his men and Tommy, anonymously tucked away, felt sorry for the young man who marched alone in front of this sometimes blasphemous company.”

And even as they marched and sang in the streets of London, on the front line the collective musical genius of the BEF initiated its saucy extempore regarding the good lady from Armentieres…

All the best — FSS

Next week: Meanwhile, in the suburbs…

Sam's first march — London gentry tip their hats at the volunteers

Dear all

A hundred years ago this month… at 16, Sam Sutcliffe, my father, ceased to be a poor working lad from Edmonton, north London, a junior office boy at a mining company HQ near Liverpool Street station, and became a soldier. Albeit by lying about his age and with precious little idea of what that might entail although the papers had already begun reporting “heavy casualties” on the Western Front – retreats, defeats if you read between the lines.

    But, still only seven weeks in, it evidently wasn’t one-sided either way as the French-British Allies toed and froed with the germans at the Aisne, then Albert, and the Russians besieged the Austria-Hungary Empire at Przemysl (now in Poland), and a German cruiser sank a British cruiser off Zanzibar… and Sam got his first chance to observe and admire “the calm, efficient manner” in which Army men could “organise a thousand strangers into easily controlled groups”.

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

After a hard evening persuading his parents that he should be allowed to stay in the Army along with his 18-year-old, ergo less-of-a-liar, brother Ted, Sam didn’t really know whether they’d agreed because if they reported him he might go to jail… or because soldier’s pay, 21/- a week, would be so useful to a poor family with four children and a toddler to feed.

    But the main thing was they’d let him stick with Ted, and their slightly older pals, Len and Harold. So, remembering that Sam, in this first part of his Memoir, wrote in the third person and called himself “Tommy”, here’s his story of his first day in the Army, if not yet in uniform (supply a long way short of catching up with volunteer demand at that point):

“Next morning the lads were up in good time, met as arranged, and took the tram back to Bloomsbury… When they arrived they were amazed to see the road in front of the adjacent Royal Fusiliers and Royal Field Artillery depots packed tight with men and hundreds more queuing along another road behind them — all enlisted men like themselves, they learned, and ordered to parade that morning. Harold observed that it would take a mastermind to sort this lot out. But he was soon proven too skeptical.

    Presently, a uniformed man, stout and ruddy-faced with several chins, mounted a box or chair, they couldn’t see what. In an extremely powerful voice, he called for quiet, then issued instructions. With surprising, almost professional, speed, men on the outskirts of the crowd formed into lines of four across, and the mass became a somewhat ragged column.

    The rotund Regimental Sergeant Major took his place at the head of it and, with no attempt at ceremony, started marching. Stragglers at the back attached themselves in new lines of four and followed in his wake. Within a few hundred yards, the whole of the leading formation had fallen in step to a man. That almost spherical RSM necessarily set a steady, almost slow, pace. But two streets crammed with men had to be cleared and he’d achieved that very quickly.

    Had he been dealing with conscripted men, he would undoubtedly have had a problem on his hands. These were volunteers, though. A small, but sufficient, proportion of them had seen service previously and, of the remainder, many had come through various youth organisations, Scouts, Boys Brigades, and others, companies of which trained and marched in every town throughout the land.

    No new experience for [Boy Scout] Tommy, of course, this marching in step, but the pace, the stride, felt different — longer, slower, heavier, and somehow more exhilarating.

    On this, their first rhythmic progression as an Army unit, each member carried himself as he believed a real soldier would and kept in step with the man in front of him. No one shouted, ‘Keep in step there, left, right, left!’ None of that. Crunch, crunch, rrrp, rrrp, a steady pace with arms a-swing.

    Tommy liked the rhythm — and the thrill as he saw the column of men ahead, bearing left round the far side of a London residential square. ‘We’re all in step then,’ he thought. ‘Marvelous.’ He did notice the odd one lose the step and touch the heel of the man in front or trip the man behind — no natural sense of rhythm or perhaps over-eager or anxious. But correction soon followed. Such culprits would later endure the wrath of newly appointed non-commissioned and commissioned officers who had to justify their existence. But today not a word.

    Every man wished that he should do well and that his comrades should do well… and that perhaps some famous General might be watching unseen, later to issue a full report full of praise for the volunteer soldiers… who reminded him of the Guards…

    If Tommy dreamed thus, we may assume others did too. But he did notice, at first with incredulity, that some men on the pavement — invariably smart well-dressed types — raised their hats on sighting the column. One such, coming down the steps of a large house, reached the pavement as Tommy drew level. He raised his bowler hat, and as his eyes rested momentarily on Tommy’s the boy felt himself blushing. ‘Ridiculous,’ he told himself. ‘The gentleman was saluting the volunteers, not a lad who had lied to get in. There’ll never be another march like this one.’

    The houses they passed interested him, and he resolved to take walks in this district, so redolent of London life from bygone days with which he felt he had ties somehow, he didn’t understand why — until, that evening, he concluded that gazing year after year at a picture hung in his parents’ bedroom may have caused his sense of familiarity with the area. It showed a woman, a shopping basket on one arm, descending the several steps from her front door to the street; her young daughter, with a tiny Pekingese dog on a lead, waited on the pavement. Both wore bonnets and the full-skirted costume of the Victorian era. And both, Tommy used to think, looked far too prim and prissy.

    Their house could have been almost any one of the hundreds lining these Bloomsbury streets and squares, their aspect solid and enduring. Much stone had been used in the arches that topped front doors and windows and to face ground floors. Stout iron railings prevented people from falling into the small paved areas outside the basement rooms 10 or 12 feet below street level. While many basement windows were barred, during the day the residents often left open their porch doors, adorned with brass knockers and letter boxes. Tommy reckoned such houses would all have been built with servants’ quarters and he wondered how many were still occupied…

    These wanderings as he marched relieved him, for the moment, from his constant twinges of anxiety and nervous tautness. Would someone suddenly point the finger at him and yell ‘You! Out!’? Probably most of the others had their worries, especially family men. Tommy glanced at the three men along his line, then did as they were doing, stared steadily ahead and kept in step with the thrump, thrump, of all those marching feet.

    The head of the column had disappeared now as they swung into a wide street ahead, then left through large, iron gates into a spacious sanded area with a substantial building facing them and high walls on either side bordered by roofed walkways supported by stone columns. Inside the gates, the column turned right, then left, until the RSM ordered a halt. The men lined two sides of the square.

    A separate small group stood apart from, but close to, the head of the column, one of them obviously the senior officer, the others men of various ranks, some in officer’s uniform, but several well-dressed in civilian clothes, mostly bowler-hatted and all carrying walking canes or rolled umbrellas.

    The RSM approached the senior officer. Halting two paces in front of him, the RSM saluted smartly, the right hand remaining over the right half of the forehead for three seconds before being briskly lowered to the side, thumb in line with the seam of the trousers… these details and many more were to occupy the hours and anxious efforts of Tommy and thousands like him for some time to come. But here was the first military occasion of which they had actually been a part. Really the beginning of their war.”

Thus, for Sam/Tommy and millions of recruits the road to Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras began with a left, right, left right…

All the best — FSS

Next week: Sam/Tommy gives up his day job — and a toff gives him a sovereign.

FootSoldierSam as a pre-WW1 Boy Scout

Out now! Nobody Of Any Importance: A Foot Soldier's Memoir Of WW1

Dear all

A hundred years ago today, war declarations were going off like gun-shots all over Europe and young men were wondering what might befall them - imagining glory, fearing pain and horror, trying to decide what they might do if… Certainly never foreseeing anything to remotely match the forthcoming reality.

Something people wonder about when considering the period before the war is the role and effect of various working-class boys' organisations in preparing the way for the remarkable rush of volunteerism that followed. My father, FootSoldierSam, was a keen Boy Scout and his full account of his childhood (Part 1 of 9 in his memoir) has a lot to say about the movement founded by ex-Boer War soldier Baden Powell in 1908. So:

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Remembering that in this early phase of the book, he wrote about himself in the third person as "Tommy", this is what got his attention and drew him into joining the Scouts, in Edmonton, north London, some time in 1910: "At about this time, on one of the very rare occasions when he stayed out after dark, he saw something that thrilled him: simply a boy standing under a lamp-post, with the gas light shining down on him, looking at a book – but wearing a uniform Tommy had never seen before. A hat with three dents in it and a wide brim; a bright-coloured scarf tied around his neck and hanging down the front of his shirt; short trousers held up by a belt; long socks and short boots; and in one hand he carried a staff, a pole. Tommy had to find out who he was, what he belonged to, and why he dressed like that. He couldn’t bring himself to approach the boy and ask him, but he soon found out that he must have been an early member of the Boy Scouts."

Thus entranced, he soon persuaded his parents - who were just emerging from the depths of poverty which had assailed the family during my father's childhood - to let him join. After growing up wearing rather odd homemade clothes, he loved the smartness of the uniform and soon the Scouts became part of the fabric of his life, particularly because the Scoutmaster, Mr Frusher, was also  the vicar who both ran the church choir and gave piano lessons (free to poor boys) which Tommy/Sam took up too. But above all he loved Scouting. And it gave him a whole new range of skills.

"Life had been hard and grim. Now very pleasant pastimes came to occupy many is his out-of-school hours and he began to enjoy the company of other boys under happy conditions, free from the pressures of schoolwork and the overseeing of the form teacher. He experienced more tolerance and kindness from the Scoutmaster and his assistants, this being a voluntary organisation… Troop members had a complete gym available to them for one hour every Thursday night, and several hours on Saturday afternoons. Vaulting horses, parallel bars, and rings stood or hung eight feet apart in rows the length of the hall…

"The Scouts demanded discipline – particularly self-discipline – of all. Any who rebelled against it, especially more senior boys, found themselves quickly turned out of the Troop. The Scoutmaster, Mr Frusher, believed that an older boy who elected to rebel against accepted rules of conduct would contaminate younger members and must be got rid of…  He introduced new subjects to the Troop’s training schemes: so Tommy learnt signalling, semaphore and Morse code (the last, he particularly liked). Using flags — one for Morse, two for semaphore — and, at night, signal lamps, they sent messages across fair distances. Furthermore, after training at the church hall on Saturday afternoons, Tommy and other seniors could go to a rifle club where, for half an hour, they practised shooting on a covered range about 300 yards long, using old Army rifles (surplus from the Boer War, fitted with Morris tubes which allowed them to fire .22 ammunition). Supervisors checked their scores and entered them on competition cards. They paid a nominal sum for bullets used, but some kind person unknown had paid for their club membership. Dear old Frusher, they guessed…"

Later, my father recalls, he came to see the connection – more or less coincidental, he always felt – between these activities and the imminence of war: "Meanwhile, August of 1914 was not far off and a holiday with his Scout Troop an often anticipated treat to come.

"However, he soon discovered that Scouts were not alone in camping out on the edge of London. Walking by himself one Sunday, Tommy came to a wide open space beside one of the main routes from London to the North[1] and he saw with great excitement that this usually uninspiring area had become a town of tents; soldiers with rifles on their shoulders, men filling bowls with water from tanks on wheels, then holding the bowls for one another to help with shaving and washing. They emptied the used water into a large hole dug for waste disposal.

"Tommy watched it all, for an hour or more. In another area, men were cooking a meal in large containers heated by open fires in shallow trenches. They fried bacon, boiled water for tea. When the bugle sounded, the soldiers lined up in orderly fashion until the cooks forked and ladled good helpings of bacon and tea into their mess tins (the lid, with a folding handle, held solid foods or acted as a frying pan, the larger bottom part contained all liquids). Soon afterwards, the clatter of eating changed to the noises of an army striking camp, taking down tents and packing them and generally getting ready for departure, their work accompanied by much banter and laughter…

"Scouting, Tommy realised, had taught him a good deal that would be useful to a soldier. He could help erect a tent, use a rifle, and communicate efficiently by semaphore or Morse code or a simple field telegraph. As a Patrol Leader, he had acquired the ability to stand up in front of a group of lads and give brief orders.

"If any of these things might appear to have been intended to prepare youngsters for military service this was certainly not the intention behind Mr Frusher’s work. As a practising Christian, at heart a pacifist, he never said anything to Scout meetings about the war scare and the training had nothing of a military character to it — no yelling of orders or foot-stamping drill. Saluting, with three fingers raised and thumb and little finger touching, served as a frequent reminder of the three promises a Scout made when joining the movement.

"Tommy, while savouring the excitement and deep interest he felt when observing the soldiers’ encampment, felt no desire to join them. As far as he knew, drummer boy was the only Army job he might be eligible for."

And a hundred years ago next week, for the British, what had long seemed inevitable became official: war.