1919: As Sam’s military career concludes at the “cold and impersonal” Essex Regiment HQ he fondly recalls the boys of his first Battalion… and wonders what the hell he’s going to do next… The penultimate episode of FootSoldierSam’s five-year WW1 blog epic!

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 (next week!)  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 July 2, 2019, is £4,329.44 (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 finally ratified the Treaty Of Versailles (July 8), but only after new Chancellor Gustav Bauer, President Friedrich Ebert and Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg seriously discussed resuming hostilities. That is, they believed the Allies’ threat of immediate invasion if they didn’t accept the Treaty and the politicians asked Hindenburg whether the Army could mount effective resistance. Reluctantly, he said no.

    So they recommended acceptance to the Weimar National Assembly who agreed 237-138, then wired acceptance to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau in time to beat the Allies’ deadline, before bringing it back to the Assembly for ratification. Thus, by common consent, the seeds of WW2 were sown, fed and watered… although the Allies did at last lift the Navy blockade on Germany (July 12) which had brought the population to the brink of starvation.

    In the USA, however, when President Woodrow Wilson personally presented the Treaty to the Senate he met unbending and enduring resistance from those who opposed the Treaty entirely and others who wanted amendments. His pet Treaty project, the League Of Nations did become reality six months later, but his own country never joined it…

    Elsewhere, the Greco-Turkish War (1919-22) proceeded from its small beginning in Anatolia; General Kemal, later Atatürk, had been mustering forces there, but then found himself dismissed by Sultan Mohammed VI (July 8). In Russia, Bolshevik counterattacks interrupted the southern White Army of General Denikin’s Advance On Moscow (July 3-November 18) and the northern White forces’ Siberian leader Admiral Kolchak involved American troops in a minor sequence of actions on the east coast fighting Bolsheviks in the Suchan Valley Campaign, defending the railway (throughout July).

    Otherwise, an array of uproars continued internationally, triggered by WWI’s end to varying degrees, including the demobilisation of millions of servicemen. The Moroccan Insurrection against Spanish rule began (July 11) – marking the start of an Arab resistance movement against colonial powers. In America, the latest in a “Red Summer” of race riots flared up in Longview, Texas (July 10-12). Whites attacked the black part of town in the wake of lynching a black man for having an affair with a white woman. After a lot of shooting and one further black fatality, National Guard troops and Texas Rangers restored order. Many from both sides were charged and nobody prosecuted. The (all-white) local enquiry into the whole event reached one interesting conclusion – that black people should not be allowed to write about white people in the newspapers (a story had appeared in the northern black newspaper The Chicago Defender).

    Also, among a sequence of post-war travel breakthroughs the US Army sent a convoy from Washington D.C. westwards to see if they could drive all the way to the Pacific – it took months, but instigated the massive highway-building programme of the 1920s which featured Route 66, established on November 11(?), 1926… whether or not with commemorative intent I don’t know.

[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… 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… and now it’s really here: demob!]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

May, 1919, Essex and home to Edmonton: my father, Private Sam Sutcliffe – formerly Lance Corporal Signaller, but reverted to the rank he signed up to on September 10, 1914 – has spent the spring quite enjoying life as a Royal Defence Corps POW camp guard in East Preston, near Arundel, Sussex. He cast aside hatred and made friends with the former enemies, fellow frontline veterans…

    But come April health problems assailed him: a resurgence of the gastric uproar and pain he’d experienced in the aftermath of Gallipoli and the Somme, then again as a malnourished POW in France and Germany for eight months of 1918 – until he apparently recovered in various hospitals post-Armistice.

    Last week, a doctor recommended his release from the Army “having become physically impaired”…

‘I had to go to Warley in Essex to get my discharge from the Essex Regiment, that being the last one of the several in which I had served(2). The place was cold and impersonal, the people too – particularly the signing-off officer, who might well have had his mind on his post-war problems. So many officers had briefly enjoyed a degree of power which would not be theirs in the keenly competitive civilian market…

     In truth, the only feelings of comradeship still remaining with me after all those seemingly endless years of war were for the brotherly boys of my first volunteer Battalion(3). Months of hard, slogging training in the Mediterranean sunshine(4), living under canvas before and after the inglorious campaign on that scruffy Turkish peninsula… Our total effort, both in Egypt and later in France(5), near Rouen, to so build up our efficiency that the authorities must augment our numbers and restore our depleted strength to that of a Battalion… One knew affection and friendly consideration for one’s mates in that mob, but not in any other(6).

     Still, my discharge yielded quite a bit of money from back-pay, the war gratuity, Corporal’s pay credited to me but never paid over more than two years(7), and a ten shillings a week pension, plus a book of coupons, each worth 29 shillings, which I could cash at the rate of one per week until I started doing some sort of work.

     So I dressed in a fine, new, wool, grey suit. I felt cool and prosperous. Not a clue, at that moment, as to what I might do for a living, but free and able to pay for my keep, and even for the occasional bottle of port wine which some of us favoured in those far-off days – a large bottle, of good quality, cost about three shillings.’

(2) Warley: a military town since the 18th century and HQ barracks to the Essex Regiment from its founding in 1881 until 1960 http://www.forces-war-records.co.uk/unit-info/253/ (may prove hyperlink-resistant; if so, copy and paste into a search engine and it will work!).

Amid the host of scrawled info on this page including various ‘Warley’ references, look at the lower left half under ‘[Dis]embodied on demobilisation” where it records the date he appeared at Essex Regiment HQ in Warley ‘6.5.19’. To the right of that is the official reckoning of his war’s landmark dates – as regular readers will know, not all of them correct by my reckoning, having correlated my father’s account, war diaries and other sources.

(3) The 2/1 Royal Fusiliers, London Regiment.

(4) From February to August in Malta, a place Sam loved the moment he saw it, despite the marches with 90 pounds on his back (normal pack plus Signaller’s gear) – see Blogs February 22, 2015 to August 16, 2015.

(5) From January to late April in Egypt, then maybe three weeks in Rouen before their CO told them they would be disbanded rather than reinforced and restored – see Blogs January 10, 2016, to May 1, 2016.

(6) As editor, I would just add here that my father generalised this overall feeling he had, resulting from the bitter grief of his Battalion’s demise at the hands of remote Army decision-makers in France. But, despite that, everywhere he served, he did form good, trusting relationships with comrades, notably with Neston at Arras with the 2/7th Essex Regiment – see Blogs December 17, 2017 and then January 1 to March 25, 1918.

(7) The story of my father’s rank during WW1 gets confusing. Here’s a quick zigzag through it. I think of him as “Lance Corporal Signaller Sutcliffe”, which he was from spring, 1915, in Malta – until promoted to Corporal in June 1916, while his new outfit, the Kensingtons were in and out of the front line at Gommecourt on the Somme. Thereafter, ups and downs ensued. During the subsequent battle, through to September, he often served as Acting Sergeant too. But when the Army noticed he was still under-age and sent him back to Blighty. Because he detested holding any rank, en route to his new posting in Harrogate he took one stripe off his arm. So when, in Yorkshire, he was transferred to the Essex he appeared to be a Lance Corporal again… although he wasn’t according to the records. Then, strangely, in mid-summer 1917 his Company CO – whom he loathed – offered him training for a commission (the upper- and middle-classes being drained of officer material by then) – see Blog June 30, 1917. Sam refused and, either as punishment or by (genuine) choice, “reverted” to Private for the duration. Regarding the back pay for his period as a Corporal, I presume that, with it happening on the Somme front, the formal notifications didn’t reach the appropriate clerk. 

All the best– FSS

Next week: Good heavens… five years on it’s Sam’s last blog. He and older brother Ted, a fellow Somme survivor but bearing the gas damage that would kill him, see the war off by attending the July 19 Peace Parade, happy onlookers applauding “the men who won the war”…

(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.

1919: Sam, still a POW camp guard in lovely Sussex, suffers post-POW sickness and general war aftermath/pre-demob depression … so now he’s saying fond farewells to all his new German friends!

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 June 1, 2019, is £4,228.17 (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 Treaty Of Versailles led to widespread celebration in Europe and much anger from those who thought it sowed the seeds of future conflict by being too hard or too soft (really!) on Germany.

    In fact, French Marshall Foch opined, with apparent prescience: “This [treaty] is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years". But he said that believing it left Germany with far too much territory and power – he’d wanted the Rhineland annexed.

    One of the earliest adverse reactions to the conquering Allies’ carve-up came from Syria. Amid internal conflict, political and religious, the national congress, which had lately replaced a monarchy, rejected the French Mandate awarded under the treaty and declared they wanted full independence (July 2) – or a British or American Mandate. (The Franco-Syrian War ensued the following year.)

    In Turkish Anatolia, the developing Greco-Turkish War saw the Battle Of Aydin conclude (July 4) when the Greeks reoccupied Aydin, destroying most of what was left of the city – even though 40 per cent of the populace was Greek (and they were acting in contravention of Versailles agreements regarding Smyrna and the surrounding territory).

    Meanwhile, the Russian Civil War took a turn against the Bolsheviks as the White Russian leader in the south, General Anton Denikin, issued a directive to launch the Advance On Moscow (July 3-November 18). It began successfully because the Bolshevik Red Terror had turned the region against them.

    And in the USA, Arizona’s Bisbee Riots (July 3) forewarned of more to follow in what became known as the Red Summer. The combatants were returning black Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry and that small town’s police force, following a controversial arrest.

    But the UK had more to celebrate than peace: when the R-34 airship touched down(?) in New York it became the first to cross the Atlantic. The flight took 106 hours…

[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… 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

Back to April-May, 1919, Sussex: we left Sam quite enjoying life as a Royal Defence Corps POW camp (but really a country house) guard in East Preston, five miles southeast of Arundel. He’d cast aside residual hatred from his own spell as a prisoner of the Germans, decided fraternising with the enemy was the way forward, and befriended many of his charges, mostly former front-line men themselves.

    With the war over, though waiting on the final treaties, they all worked together amiably enough as the Germans did their hard labour reinforcing the banks of the River Arun. On his days off he had one of his series of inept flings with a local woman and then ended it in confusion and embarrassment.

    But now health problems, which had assailed him from time to time because of his war’s assorted severe privations, have returned:

‘In Sussex, the fat – even a burgeoning dewlap – which happiness and good living had prematurely bestowed on me in the months after my return to England gradually disappeared. In fact, my face partially reverted to its prisoner-of-war gauntness; food had seemed so wonderful after previous deprivations, but in time my voracious appetite waned, abdominal pains returned and irked me and, despite my efforts to bear in mind all the blessings now available, a dullness settled like a blight upon me.

     I resisted it constantly, pressed it down inside me. I attempted normal conversation and persevered with laughter, but it was all difficult. The officer who regularly inspected the prisoners and premises, granted my request for an interview and was understanding when I told him about these things. He sent me to see an RAMC doctor at the local Headquarters and the results of his tests led to an appointment with a Medical Board. Doctors there probed my abdomen thoroughly and somewhat painfully, then recommended my release from the Service “having become physically impaired”.

     I told George(2) everything I knew about Lotty the hotty(3) and suggested that he might enjoy brief dalliance with her. To help things along I prepared a careful letter of introduction to her. George said he would have a go at the proposition and that concluded my mild affair.

     I had a fortnight’s leave due before demob, during which I was to attend a further Medical Board in Chelsea, for examination and assessment relating to pension rights(4). 

While the handwriting is hard to read, you can see that he was diagnosed with gastritis and, less technically, “stomach trouble” – blamed on his POW time in Germany, starting “28.3.18”. In fact, he’d had intermittent gut problems (hospitalised for a month in Sheffield in 1917) since his long stints in the trenches months of Gallipoli and the Somme – probably caused by both ill-nourishment and stress.

     So, before setting off for home, I called on my several German friends(5) to bid them farewell, starting with the Unteroffizier in his little room upstairs. The rather lonely chap was touched that I had taken the trouble and showed it; although aware that his formerly great country had fallen into horrible disarray, he spoke of his yearning to get back to the Fatherland.

     A formal handshake and heel click reflected little of our mutual understanding that uncertain futures awaited both of us. He had valuable skills, I had none. There again, he had known people of position and influence, but where were they now? Revolutions destroy such connections, and he had frankly admitted that he might need good fortune to survive what would be a period of bloody conflict between the Old Guard and those who intended to grasp control of their defeated country.

     I had described to him what I had seen around my prison camp near the Black Forest: the overnight disappearances of all commissioned officers, the substitution of black and white Iron Cross decorations and traditional Regimental cap badges with red ribbons and buttons, the red flags adorning every military vehicle(6). Like me, he doubted the turnabout was genuine. It could have been an instinctive and desperate attempt to kid the Allies that the German nation had not really wished to conquer Europe, it was just that wicked Kaiser and those terrible Prussians. Maybe, but my friend would have to find out the hard way. No “Auf wiedersehen” for us, not a chance of ever meeting again.

     Farewell to “Wie heisst du?” Hans… who, I recall, had told me I was wrong in thinking that Karl was the German equivalent of my first name, Charles(7). Farewell to smiling Willi. And farewell to short, fat, rosy-cheeked “Mitzi”, the cook, so nicknamed by me because that was his cat’s name and he was always calling out for her. Then, quick handshakes with other Jerries who had been nice to me and a general wave to our chaps who happened to be around – handshaking was not our custom, the casual touch suited us better.

     Our boozy-faced Sergeant nearly managed a smile as I made a point of calling “Goodbye” to him. So well-loved was he that I’d heard one man leave him with a promise he’d “fuckin’ do for him now I’m free”, but I had no feeling of ill will towards him. Finally a hearty handshake with George. I told him I felt I’d known him for years and waited to hear him at last remember that we had indeed known each other in pre-war days, but his very friendly smile and good wishes had to suffice.

     Forever after, Sussex remained my favourite English county, having been such a warm and pleasant place in which to resume living, after some very hard times in the Great War.’

(2) George turns up in the Blog dated April 14, 2019. Sam had known him before the war when both were teenaged juniors working as dogsbodies for tin industry companies near Liverpool Street. He roomed with Sam and never recognised him and, for his own quirky reasons, Sam never reminded him of their previous acquaintance.

(3) Lotty: the first time he’s named her, hotty or otherwise – this is the lovely lady from Littlehampton he had a walking-out with for some weeks – remaining virginal the while, despite her best efforts. She appears in Blogs dated April 14 and May 5, 2019

(4) Various documents found for me by Western Front Association Ox & Bucks stalwart (and kind researcher for passing guest speakers it turned out) Nigel Crompton include the information that Sam’s date of “Disembodiment” was May 6,1919 (see Medical History Of doc below – which doesn’t record his 1917 hospital stays; the odd term is much discussed in WW1 circles – e.g. https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/106981-discharged-or-disembodied/– but most think it meant the end of war service for a Territorial, which Sam had been in his three different Battalions). Then his final date of discharge was May 26. But… since these administrative matters seem to require their element of confusion I’ll add that the Essex Regiment Museum’s Ian Hook (who answered my queries before he left in 2017) found that my father’s full discharge from the Army came through on March 12, 1920, which suggests that, like his brother Ted, he may have been registered to Z Reserve for those final months i.e. still liable to recall in an emergency.

(5) The German POWs Sam says personal goodbyes to are introduced and described in Blogs dated March 24 and April 21, 2019. Sam gave Hans his “Wie heisst du?” nickname because that was the first thing the affable POW said to him and Sam had picked up enough German to respond “Ich heisse Sam”.

(6) See Blog November 11, 2018, for Sam’s account of the day after Armistice at his POW camp in Lorraine.

(7) Hans was wrong as far as I can tell, although my father believed him. “Karl” meant “man” in Old Norse, “peasant” in Old English, and thence became the first name “Karl/Carl” in German, then “Charles” in English says https://www.behindthename.com/name/charles.

All the best– FSS

Next week: The penultimate episode of FootSoldierSam’s blog! He goes to the “cold and impersonal” Essex Regiment HQ to conclude his discharge… reminisces about the boys of his first Battalion he loved so much… wonders what the hell he’s going to do next… and, regardless, spends some of his back-pay on a new suit and a bottle of port…

(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.

April/May 1919: Sam contemplates leaving the Army soonish – and finds his self-confidence vanishing… Brother Ted‘s back in his old job, but Sam’s pre-war employer’s bust…

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 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… One early direct result of agreements at the Paris Peace Conference was rioting in Peking (as was) where 3,000 students were incensed by the news that Germany’s former territories in Shantung on the east coast had been handed over willynilly to Japan; the students sought out the warlord believed to have sold out his country and beat him to death in his home, thereby founding the May The 4th Movement which soon spread to Shanghai and elsewhere (China recovered its lost land three years later). 

    In Germany, left-right fighting continued as 9,000 Weimar Republic troops and Freikorps irregulars took control of Munich, where socialists had set up a Bavarian Soviet (May 2) – the Freikorps executed 700 to reinforce their message.

    To the east, however, the Russian civil war took a turn to the Red, when Bolshevik forces, recovering from their defeat at Orenburg, crushed two White Russian Divisions at Buguruslan, Orenburg Oblast (April 28; 1,220 miles southeast of Moscow), capturing the town six days later and forcing the Whites to retreat 73 miles north to Bugulma, Tatarstan. 

    Other post-World War eruptions ranged widely. The new Emir of Afghanistan, Amanoellah Khan, apparently under Russian influence, declared war on Great Britain (May 3).

    In America a wave of anarchist bombings began (April 30) with 36 bombs mailed to politicians and businessmen, although the only people they injured were servants and a Georgia Senator’s wife. And in Cleveland, Ohio, the May Day Riots saw a trade union and socialist protest against the jailing in April of Eugene V. Debs, already a four-time Socialist Party candidate for the Presidency (he ran again in 1920 from the Atlanta pen); the demonstrators fought police and soldiers in three locations and the riots, noted as the most violent incident of the USA’s first “Red Scare”, left two dead, 40 injured and 116 arrests.

    Finally, way down in Western Australia, the Freemantle Wharf Riot pitted the Waterside Workers’ Federation against the National Waterside Workers Union, noted as strikebreakers during the war and thus preferred for all the work going on the docks. One WWF man died after being clubbed by police.

[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… through the spring, Sam and others ex-POWs guard German POWs at a camp in Sussex…]

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 – they don’t share much language, but they do have a lot of WW1 front-line experience in common… 

    But while that job trundles on through the spring, he’s starting to think of the life to come, the life aborted by the war in 1914 when he was 16 – and stuck in an unpromising office-boy position anyway. His brother Ted looks well set, mind (bar the terrible gas damage to his lungs, of course)…

‘Weeks and months passed until June(2) arrived with warm sunshine and news that a Peace Treaty was soon to be signed. My brother had been demobbed(3); on the first day after he left the Army, he’d started work back in his old job with a City of London paper company, determined to forget all about the recent wasted years and bring himself up to date in everything concerning his chosen trade – which company manufactured every type of paper, where it was warehoused, who the mills’ agents were and where to find them… All the information he’d had at his fingertips before the war, as he described to me in many talks before we went to war and then, lately, whenever I came home on leave from Sussex.

     But Ted’s return to work did bring one difficulty. His boss still thought of him as the lad of five years ago and hoped to pay him accordingly – which meant merely doubling his pre-war salary(4). Ted could just have flown off the handle and told him to stuff the job, yet no such reckless action followed; fuming inwardly, he worked politely and industriously to relearn his trade so that, at the appropriate time, he could demand a reward commensurate with his worth to the firm – eating humble pie, he told me, for a strictly limited period.

     Meanwhile, I felt that, compared with Ted, I had a life of ease. Although I realised some of us must do the necessary chores aimed at winding up the Great War(5) (as it was beginning to be called, for reasons elusive to me), I itched to shed the uniform which five years earlier had so attracted me.

     However, when I faced my situation as it would look from the moment the Army handed me my notice of discharge, the shock was sufficient to destroy all the self-confidence slowly restored since my release from the degradation of living as a war prisoner. The boy who had, without much serious thought for his long-term prospects, gone along to enlist with his brother and two somewhat older fellows and struggled so hard to stay with them when that nasty Quartermaster Sergeant had thrust him aside because he suspected the lad was too young… age-wise, five years on, that kid was about to become a Man…

     After posing as one for so long, I suddenly had to understand that a wartime man and a peacetime man had quite dissimilar problems to cope with… although survival remained the eventual aim of both, I reflected. These realisations shook me. So, while I guarded the prison “camp” and accompanied parties of Germans to their compulsory labours, my thoughts often wandered far from them and their activities.

     Back in the City with his old firm and, therefore, close to the offices of my former employer, Lake & Currie, Ted said he would telephone or call on them to find out about my prospects, if any. But he had become so busy picking up former threads and contacts that I felt too much time was being lost. With thousands of men released from the Forces daily, I might well miss my opportunity.

     So I wrote to the man who, in those far-off days just after I had joined the Army, had treated me so generously with his gold half-sovereigns and the kindly good wishes: Company Secretary F.C. Bull – brusque at times, I recalled, but only when under pressure from one of the partners, particularly the Squire of what-d’you-call-it in Suffolk. Sad to say, though, he did not now work at that address and someone at that building forwarded my letter to a different part of the City, whence I received a reply which killed off all hope of rejoining the old firm.

     Signed by, of all people, the pre-war junior typist, it informed me that Lake & Currie no longer existed; she and the former senior partner (the Squire bloke(6)) now worked in a small office in Broad Street and required no staff. So war had put the skids under such a big and prosperous business. Like many a good soldier, it had gone over the top and vanished.’

 (2) June must be a misremembering because  my father was “disembodied” (demobilised, but for Territorials I gather) on May 6 and discharged on May 30 according to records including the “Casualty Form – Active Service” (page 2) right here, if you can wiggle your way through the scrawl about two-thirds of the way down on the left:

(3) Ted Sutcliffe’s Medal Rolls index card, below, suggests his effective demob date was April 1, 1919, though it’s expressed as transfer to “‘Z’ Res” (see on the right, under "Remarks"); Wikipedia says Class Z Reserve was a contingent “consisting of previously enlisted soldiers, now discharged”, created by Army Order on December 3, 1918, pending potential post-Armistice resumption of hostilities; after post-war treaties secured the peace, the Army disbanded Z Reserve on March 31, 1920. Ian Hook, when curating the Essex Regiment Museum (he moved to the Imperial War Museum), told me he found a record of my father’s ultimate discharge as being on March 12, 1920, so it could well be he too got a final admin. transfer to Z Reserve but barely noticed.

(4) According to UK inflation calculator http://safalra.com/other/historical-uk-inflation-price-conversion/(may prove hyperlink-resistant)prices exactly doubled between 1914 and 1919, year on year increases being 12.5% 1914-15, 18.1% 1915-16, 25.2% 1916-17, 22% 1917-18, 10.1% 1918-19 – its source credited as a 2004 paper “Consumer Price Inflation Since 1750” (Economic Trends NO. 604) by Jim O’Donoghue, Louise Goulding, and Grahame Allen. Ted’s firm honoured a promise (in writing, mind you) to give him his old job back when (if) he returned from the war, as noted in Chapter 14 of Sam’s Memoir.

(5) One early source of the title was the Canadian magazine, Maclean’s, of October, 1914: “Some wars name themselves. This is the Great War.” It remained so named until World War II came along and demanded a predecessor – I know that doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s commonly offered as the explanation so… feel free to raise an eyebrow and say, Huh? Or… note original “TV historian” AJP Taylor recording that Charles à Court Repington (1858-1925), a former Lieutenant-Colonel who turned war correspondent (for The Times during WW1), named it World War 1 in order to remind future generations that “the history of the world is the history of war” – Taylor says this was in the aftermath of Armistice, and that may be when it gained a certain currency, but his Wikipedia biog reckons he used it first in writing in his personal diary for September 10, 1918.

(6) The “squire bloke” was Lake – subject, in Chapter 11 of the Memoir, of one of Sam’s remarkably detailed descriptions “A big man indeed. The squire of quite a large village up in Norfolk and the possessor of a dwelling in the fashionable Boltons area of Kensington and a flat in one of those small streets at the back of Trafalgar Square.… Unforgettable too, the appearance, manner and behaviour of the senior partner, Mr Lake; he had this tough, grey hair with a military cut, fairly short back, sides and on top, no parting – a style that became generally popular some years later – and a wide forehead above bushy black eyebrows above small eyes set unusually close, and yet between them stood the very high bridge of a thin, pointed nose; below that, the then fashionable, clipped, grey moustache, and small, petulant lips; the jawbones narrowed to a small, pointed chin; bright red cheeks blazed out from an otherwise pale skin.” The far more amiable and less conspicuous partner, Currie, lived in Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire.

All the best– FSS

Next week: Sam’s first post-war romance – with the little lady from Littlehampton – fizzles via a mixture of old-fashioned morality, a still virginal lad’s overwhelming capacity for embarrassment and awkwardness – and a soupçon of period racism…

(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.