The Making Of Foot Soldier Sam, 1900-1905 Uprooted 2: new beginnings in London – the wrong accent, the wrong clothes – not to mention poverty and hunger…

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

All proceeds to the British Red Cross

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Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… What’s described as the first major air raid on England saw a squadron of German Gothas bomb Folkestone and Dover, killing 92, injuring 192, most of them civilians and the majority caught out shopping on Tontine Street, Folkestone (May 25).

    Another attack on an arguably non-military target, by coincidence the SS Dover Castle, a hospital ship sunk by torpedoes en route from Malta to Gibraltar (May 26), proved so controversial it ended up subject to a war crimes prosecution after the war – interestingly the skipper was acquitted, essentially, because he was obeying orders. Another strange thing about the Dover Castle story is the diversity of casualty figures from various sources – they range from six dead to maybe 600, depending on whether the ship was loaded with wounded or had only crew aboard (consensus seems to favour the low numbers).

    On land, after the bloody disappointments of April, the Allies advanced usefully on the Western Front with the British taking a section of the Siegfried line from Bullecourt to east of Arras (May 21; the northern end of the Hindenburg Line), and the French, now under Pétain, taking and holding Moronvilliers Ridge (21) and repulsing a German attack at Craonne plateau (23).

    Italian advances towards Trieste in the 10th Battle Of the Isonzo continued with an artillery bombardment on the Carso Plateau (May 23) leading on to taking San Giovanni (27; now in Slovenia).

    And out on another limb of the war, the Anzac Mounted Brigade and Camel Corps raided and destroyed 14 miles of the Hejaz railway, which ran from Damascus to Medina in Ottoman Empire territory (May 22).

[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers volunteer and Gallipoli veteran [Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016] had fought on the Somme Front with his second outfit the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until officialdom spotted his age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the battlefield – and told him he could take a break from the fighting until he was 19. He did so, though with an enduring sense of guilt. By December, 1916, he ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again, this time to the Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion, along with a bunch of other under-age Tommies training/marking time – and in Sam’s case dicing with meningitis and other battle-fatigue enhanced ailments – until such time as they severally became eligible for the trenches once more… But for now the blog continues with themed childhood and teens material from the Memoir under the title The Making Of FootSoldierSam – because my father didn’t write enough about his year “off” in England to cover 1917 in weekly chunks (I can hardly blame him; writing in the 1970 he wasn’t really thinking about blog requirements)]

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, the Uprooted 1 themed excerpts covered three-year-old Sam’s 1901/2 move from Manchester to London and from comfortable wealth to poverty via the “ruin” of his father’s family firm.

    I left them in a cheap hotel in the Minories (near the Tower Of London), mother and four children in two beds – father still away somewhere looking for work. Well, after a few days they moved to a place he’d found and mother approved, a rented three-bedroom house – the address crops up in a baptism record: 24 Vale Side, Eade Road, Tottenham.

    Their father says he’s got some work representing a German firm, but they haven’t paid him yet. Mother starts to sell items of china and furniture she’d optimistically had sent down from Manchester. Sam notes: ‘For a time, at any rate, they were able to live, not well, but adequately’. Now mother continues the process of getting their lives in some kind of order despite straitened circumstances. One of the first considerations, getting the kids to school. (NB: my father wrote the early chapters in the third person, calling himself “the boy” and then “Tommy”):

‘At the first opportunity, mother took them to a school. The older brother and sister had, of course, been sent to school in Manchester, but under slightly better circumstances because the parents had been able to pay for their education. In London they attended an ordinary council school – quite a good school, but utterly strange to the boy…

     Within a few days, as the other children grew bolder, whenever Miss Tasket or another teacher called on him to answer a question his accent started to attract adverse attention because it was so different from what all the Cockney kids around him were used to. The trouble really started when, for some reason, he had to say “photograph”. With his Mancunian vowels, it came out “phawtawgraph”, with a short, hard “a” in the final syllable. They all laughed – many, it seemed to him, with that mean, harsh, forced laugh children produce when they want to wound one of their fellows. “It’s ‘phoetoegraaph’!” one of them yelled and in a trice the whole class was chanting “Phoetoegraaph! Phoetoegraaph! Phoetoegraaph!” until Miss Tasket exerted her rather languid authority and quietened them, though saying only that the noise must stop without explaining that their mockery was wrong and cruel.

     Over the following days, similar derisive eruptions occurred when he’d say “coom” – “Cum! Cum! Cum!” – or “glass” with that short “a” — “Glarss! Glarss! Glarss!” The boy cringed with shame and embarrassment.

     At once, and desperately, he tried to change the way he spoke. With his first, momentary, new friend – a forgotten name – he spent an afternoon’s play, as it might have been, under a table; he couldn’t remember where, but he had a clear picture of it, the thick table legs, the dark shadows, the other lad’s Cockney quack, exasperated yet persistent and somehow kind as he repeated time after time “T’ain’t plànt, it’s plarnt! Plarnt!” and ”T’ain’t bàth, it’s barth! Barth!” The boy copied him diligently and found he had a good ear. Impelled by raw fear of ridicule, within a couple of weeks – if he measured his words carefully – he could speak with a fairly anonymous middling English accent which, at least, did not provoke mass mockery. At which, mercifully, the other children forgot about him and he returned to the obscurity he craved.’

Sam recalls that, months on, with his father still unpaid, his mother started wearing a nurse’s uniform. She’d become some kind of auxiliary to earn a little money. But she had to do it at home too, getting the children through scarlet fever. And she must have stopped work for a while at least when her fifth child, Alf, was born in 1903. Certainly bitter about “coming down in the world”, she carried on taking steps to ensure their survival in this new life.

‘Mother saw that living must become very frugal. She devised a system of apportioning food. Bread, for instance. For breakfast, slices were cut and the cheapest sort of margarine spread on them. She gave each child five half slices of bread for breakfast. Dinner comprised the cheaper sort of meat and potatoes, some greens. Five more pieces of bread at teatime. Jam vanished from the table, except that it might appear once a week. Sometimes not. Beyond that, nothing available for the children. And this had to go on for several years.

     So, when one day our boy saw a lad younger than himself sitting on the ground tearing up paper and eating bits of it, he asked him, “Why are you eating paper?” “Because I’m hungry,” said the boy. Our lad thought, “Perhaps it would help if I could do the same”. He tore up some paper and chewed it, but, oh, it tasted horrible. He never resorted to that again and he didn’t hear what became of the little boy who had been eating quite a lot of it.’

Not carrying any grief about their social decline, Sam actually started to enjoy life when they had to move across the road to rent a floor of another house from the upholsterer who lived there with his cheery family. Too good to last, though…

‘In fact, from the boy’s point of view, life in general had started to go fairly smoothly. But suddenly a jolt. Father appeared one day and said, “You must say goodbye to your mother for the moment and come along with me. We’re off to a different home.”

     So they set off and walked the quarter of a mile to the end of the road on which they were living – the unbuilt part with fields on either side – and came to the main road where they boarded a horse tram and climbed to the upper deck. For the children, an exciting journey followed. New buildings, new sights. It lasted nearly an hour. Twice the ponies pulling the tram had to be taken out of the shafts and fresh ones installed. It was the custom to change them quite frequently.

     The journey finished in what seemed to be a very far away place, a developed suburb eight miles to the north of Central London**. Streets of small houses. They walked along until father turned off and led them to a front door at one end of a terraced row. The house was completely empty. At that point, father said, ”I shall have to leave you here for a time. I have to see to something. You amuse yourselves.”

     So now we have three children in an empty house, no food, no warmth, but still the excitement of the new surroundings kept them occupied for some time.

     They went to the bedroom at the back and looked out over a small garden. They saw a group of children playing a few doors away and called out to them. By way of response, a boy swung his arm back and threw a stone which hit Tommy on the forehead. A howl of pain, down came the window. Above the pain, fear of the new place and what these children might do. A swelling came up. His brother applied a wet hankie, but the loneliness and anxiety, that wasn’t so easily got rid of.

     Father didn’t reappear and the children felt hungry. No food in the house and no money. They started searching the garden – overgrown with weeds and dumped rubbish. They did discover something that might have been eatable. A piece of bread, green with mould. The boy nibbled at this, but it tasted too horrible.

     As darkness fell, the children huddled together in the corner of a room. After what seemed like many hours, a bang on the front door. They rushed down and it was father, in the road behind him a small, horse-drawn van. The driver and father began to unload bedding and a few bits of furniture. Beds were set up: a double bed, a smaller bed, and a cot. Mattresses, sheets, two blankets per bed and a cotton cover, pillows. So, a roof over their heads and a bed to sleep in. But no food still. Cold, sad, nevertheless grateful for their father’s presence, they tucked themselves in, quite warm, and went to sleep.

     The next day they got dressed and father said, “Well, I must go up to where we lived before. Mother is staying on there for a while to continue with her nursing work and make some money to keep us going until I can work myself. I must see her and get a bit of money to buy some food and bring it to you.”

     Sister started a thorough exploration of the house. The two boys followed her around. She found a sink with one cold-water tap from which they all had a drink. A boiler made of brick and cement with a big metal container for water and a fireplace underneath it. For lighting, gas jets in the back room, the living room, the front room and the passage; upstairs just one, in the largest of the three bedrooms. The boy took stock of the furnishings father had brought along. No floor coverings anywhere. The front room contained a cabinet and a pair of steps, the living room three chairs and one wooden table, the scullery a few pots and pans. Upstairs the three beds. On the landing a large chest covered with hide — a mystery to the children for many a year.

     Hungry, fearful, miserable, the children huddled together in one of the beds until, after some hours, father returned. He brought some cheap meat, potatoes and carrots. Although no cook, no handyman at all, he put all these things into a saucepan, boiled them up and shared them out so the children had their first meal. Not a very good one, not a very palatable one, but at least it filled them and warmed them and, with night coming along, they went to bed and forgot all their troubles in sleep.

     In the morning, father set off again, but soon returned. He’d had a few coppers left and bought some bread. He showed it to the children, a loaf with a small upper deck and a large lower deck, which could be pulled apart. Not only this, but another piece of bread too. He told them the baker had weighed the loaf and found it not quite up to the two pounds it should have been for tuppence ha’penny. According to custom, he added a piece off another loaf as makeweight. Father cut slices off and handed them round. The children devoured them ravenously before he departed yet again.

     They had to amuse themselves for hours around the house and in the rough garden until, towards evening, father turned up, this time with not only bread, meat and vegetables — meat was 2d a pound and the vegetables “a pennorth of pot herbs” — but a real luxury: a cake. One of the people mother worked with had given it to her. They tucked into what they considered a really satisfying meal.

     But it was a bleak experience in a bleak house.

     While doing what business he could for the German firm – hoping for a lump sum in final payment – father looked for more permanent work. This again entailed a vast amount of walking right across London. He had to arrange to finish up each evening at their previous home and get from their mother money or provisions, anything available to keep the children and himself going.

     The boy gradually built up a picture of the area. But he was concerned immediately with four walls, a small railed-in garden, and the terrors which lay beyond.’

** Edmonton, probably at the address shown in the 1911 census, 26, Lowden Road, Edmonton (now N9).

Soon after this alarming house move (1903/4), their father at last got a steady job, albeit low-paid and with train fares from Edmonton to Liverpool Street to be paid.

‘That week when Dad received his first pay packet was long remembered because on the Sunday, very unusually, their mother lit a coal fire in the grate of the kitchen range and they baked rather more potatoes than usual and boiled a small number of haricot beans (hard when bought, they had to be soaked for 24 hours or so before cooking). For this occasion dishes they hadn’t used for some time were set out on the table. One for the potatoes, another for the beans, and a larger one for the joint. Mother placed it at the end of the table where father sat. He carved it most carefully, small portions for the children, of course, but the taste of that meat in addition to the beans and the potatoes was a treat.’

In Edmonton, my father moved up to the junior mixed school (probably in Eldon Road, 1905, when he was seven). The teachers placed him in the top stream – and he started to feel self-conscious about his home-made clothes.

‘Finding himself among that top group, Tommy wondered why. He was clean, which was something to a teacher in charge of perhaps 40 small boys but, looking around, he saw that most of them were better dressed than him.

     He wore completely home-made clothes. For the first time since they moved to London he had the luxury of a vest, a woollen vest. To make it, mother had cut down an old men’s vest. A cotton shirt over that, a white celluloid collar – quite deep and easily washed under the tap, it cost thruppence farthing, no more than that, and no laundry… In addition a sort of jacket; blue, thick, wool cloth, strong and warm – because Tommy’s family’s next-door neighbour had a son in the Navy. He came home once and gave Tommy’s mother a complete uniform, a flannel vest, jacket and baggy trousers, in good condition although he’d worn it for some while. Quite a lot of cloth there for her to work on and produce a jacket and knee-length trousers. Of course, the cut wasn’t marvellous. The most obvious thing about it was that it was home-made.’

All the best – FSS

Next week: The Making Of Foot Solider Sam, 1901-1904 Uprooted 3 – London, the expanding city: animals everywhere!

* 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, 17, in the Somme front line, July 1, 1916.

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

All proceeds to British Red Cross

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

Dear all

A hundred years ago this week… on July 1 the British and French Armies began an onslaught along a 25-mile front north and south of the river Somme, Gommecourt to Foucaucourt-en-Santerre. Part of an Allied strategy to co-ordinate attacks on all fronts, devised the previous December – though repeatedly replanned in point of detail – it had two strangely different outcomes.

    Of course, infamous in the UK memory is the "worst day in the history of the British Army", July 1 itself. The 4th Army attacked between Gommecourt (see FootSoldierSam speaks, below, for my father's personal account from the trenches) and the Albert-Bapaume road, gained almost nothing and suffered 57,470 casualties (19,240 dead).

    Field Marshall Haig acknowledged this disaster the following day, by ordering the small gains at Gommecourt relinquished and, contrary to the wishes of the French commander General Joffre, redirecting some of his remaining forces to support the French Army – who had achieved a success since largely forgotten by their Allies, so overwhelmingly grievous was the British experience. Despite reducing their strength to reinforce Verdun, the French Fourth and Sixth Armies advanced up to six miles against the German Second Army. Casualty figures for the Somme are subject to much controversy among historians, but one standard accounting of the first day shows the French losses as a remarkably low (in the circumstances) 1,590 and German as 10-12,000.

    That same week the French also did well at Verdun, repulsing the Germans at Fleury (June 27) and Hill 304 (29) and recapturing Fort Thiaumont (30).

    Other Allied successes saw the Russian Army's Brusilov Offensive on the Eastern Front continue to prosper in Latvia and the Ukraine, despite German counterattacks; and the Italian Army pushed towards a conclusion its defence against the Austrian Strafexpedition, driving their forces north again with victories at Postina and Arsiero (June 27) and Pescala (28).

    Meanwhile, my father Lance Corporal Signaller Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London (still under-age at 17), was in action on the Somme, throughout the build-up – daily fighting throughout the spring, despite the historic starting point being designated as July 1 when the grand attack began. After a winter at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, and three months recovering in Egypt, his 2/1st City Of London Royal Fusiliers (250 survivors out of 1,000) had moved to France in late April. At Rouen the Army disbanded their Battalion and transferred the remnants to other outfits – Sam to the Kensingtons, about May 14. They had enough Signallers so he became an ordinary Lance Jack in the line. Through much of June, the Kensingtons put in a long stint in and around the front line at Hébuterne, opposite the German positions at Gommecourt – the British artillery bombardment initiating the Somme attack started on June 25…

FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS

Last week, Sam finally donned his extra stripe to acknowledge a (detested) temporary promotion to Corporal, he survived more hair-raising scrapes in No Man's Land at night, and was astonished and moved to see some school children at play just behind the front line.

    This week's blog covers the notorious July 1  – as ever, just from one man's point of view as my father stressed, asserting no wider knowledge than what he personally experienced. Brace yourself if you mean to continue, it makes grievous, painful reading. I would add that the editor's endnotes I include on the blog, and which are often of just passing, detailed interest, on this occasion are crucial to understanding what my father and his comrades did and endured on that day.

    In Remembrance, for Dad and all of them:

‘After a spell in that village, which appeared almost remote from the perils of war although within marching distance of the Front, we were once again to return to the trenches. Information circulated one afternoon, roughly 24 hours before we must depart*. We had been training for a few hours each day but, on our last day in this comparative little heaven, we were freed of all duties except really necessary chores.

     I strolled around the village noting the utter ruin of some houses and marveling at others’ apparent immunity from damage. The place was in a valley, fairly shallow, but the ridge on the western side shielded it from direct enemy observation, so only the odd plane would see anything worth reporting. Up to that time, at any rate, it had provided a very fortunate spot for troops who rested there, savouring something of its peacefulness.

     As evening approached, I felt the sadness of leaving this unexpectedly cosy haven. A final sleep on the comfortable wire netting, the packing up of all our bare requirements for survival up front, and our trek westward began.

     In the last three or four kilometres we slowed, for then we moved in darkness, in two files, while giving complete attention to maintaining contact with one another. The mere thought of wandering alone in that black gloom with no road or track visible, no buildings, great holes here and there usually containing a foot or two of water into which one might topple… these things kept one keenly alert, as did the knowledge that, in this new era of the conscripted soldier, trust and faith in the good intentions of one’s comrades was dead or dying, and a man wandering away from his unit, no matter under what conditions, would attract suspicions of trying to “dodge the column”.

     We found the section of trenches we took over in fine condition. The Engineers had installed their “revetting with expanded metal” system quite splendidly, as well as a sump under the duckboard floor of the front trench, perfect drainage, and so superior to the old, sloppy, mud floor on which we had often slithered.

     The Regiment had formed a machine-gun unit by combining all the Battalions’ heavy machine guns and their gunners under the control of a separate authority at, I understood, Brigade level. They had become a force to be reckoned with by the enemy. Well behind our machine guns lay numerous batteries of field guns which fired 18-pound shells, and still further back the heavy howitzers whose shells tore great strips out of the atmosphere as they roared towards targets in Jerry rear positions – borrowed from the Navy, some of these big guns, to back up what was going to be a massive British attack…

     Each day, the number of low-flying Germans increased. They just roared over our trenches and, heading towards our rear positions, vanished from sight. They never returned, which puzzled us, until we learned they used another route well beyond visibility from our positions. We got used to these forays and so, perhaps, did the people in the rear who surely should have paid close attention to these unusual tactics…

On the day – which followed a period of massive bombardment of enemy positions to destroy their barbed wire defences etc – our Battalion was to occupy the ordinary front line, and our most advanced trenches where my Platoon found itself. The support trenches behind us sheltered a kilted Regiment who would come through our line to start the infantry attack, at which our men in the front trench would advance over the German front trench – by then in the hands of the Jocks – and go on to take the German support trenches. Finally, from the advance trenches, we would pass over all those people and clean up and occupy the German rear positions.

     Perhaps surprisingly, the Germans easily matched our artillery bombardment for several days before our attack. Their shells passed over us, the infantry and – not that we knew it at the time – caused massive destruction to our artillery, damaging guns, and killing or wounding their crews, thus rendering our bombardment less intense than expected. The low-flying German planes must have photographed all those so carefully camouflaged guns and calculated their distances from German batteries…

     Meanwhile, enemy machine guns massed at strategic points and they stood their field artillery almost wheel to wheel, or so it seemed, and the whole area became an inferno of explosions and bullets.

     When the kilted lads advanced, their numbers decreased alarmingly with every forward stride. Meanwhile, our own advanced position was being blown apart piecemeal; pockets of survivors lost touch with their leadership and the nearest NCO had to make decisions… If he could only see ahead that our first line of attack was destroyed before capturing its objective, that its members lay dead and wounded on the ground ahead or grotesquely draped over the enemy barbed wire which our bombardment should have destroyed, then when should he take his small force over the top?

     Some small groups did from time to time go ahead until killed, wounded and captured. Some dedicated officers achieved marvels within limits set by the powerful enemy, but in the end this massively prepared attack failed.

     Nothing was gained in our sector. Many good men were lost. Many normally strong fellows were reduced to trembling, inarticulate old-looking men.

     Our beautiful front line had become an uneven shallow ditch for most of its length, the expanded metal revetments either lost under piles of blasted earth or just sunk deep down in shell holes.

     The wounded men who could not walk or crawl back from No Man’s Land were, in many instances, simply left there for hours following the failed attack because of the mentally and physically exhausted condition of their comrades who had survived.

     I saw a Scot who, though not wounded, just sat and shook. His head nodded, his arms flailed feebly, his legs sort of throbbed, his eyes obviously saw nothing.

     One of our usually most happy and physically strong men was crying non-stop while violently protesting about something. He’d been buried up to his shoulders in earth and, even in that inferno, men nearby had paused in their advance to free him, yet he had this strange grievance.

     So, possibly, nervous shock afflicted everyone there to a greater or lesser degree, even though fear no longer weighed on us as earlier in the day.

     Most of the survivors were stunned into near speechlessness for a time, then the strong ones initiated reorganisation with a view to resisting the enemy counter-attack which would surely follow our failure…

     But Jerry must have also lost heavily in both men and morale; the German artillery gradually became less active and communication between scattered groups on our side more easy to maintain, so a front of some sort was re-established which could resist if not stop an enemy attack**.

During the hours of darkness, we began to receive assistance from the rear – food and the occasional tot of rum, anything which could be transported forward in the awful conditions prevailing. A gradual return to usefulness replaced the varying degrees of stupor and inertia which for many were the invisible wounds following many hours of explosion and upheaval, shattering to eardrums and nerves… and ruinous to pre-conceived ideas of what should be occurring according to plans worked out in grandiose HQ châteaux many kilometres away in the rear.

     Meanwhile, the work of holding positions with a proportion of survivors, and allowing small parties to search for and bring in wounded men was organised by the remaining officers and the unshakeable RSM, who won praises from everyone who chanced to be near him during the battle***.

     Our Company – such as it was now, after its brush with hell – remained in what had been the front line. By dawn, most of us were ready to stop where we stood – crouched, rather – for under cover of dark we had searched for and found many wounded men, their chances of living diminishing with every hour in which they lay exposed with wounds untended.

     We felt that our work was very valuable and the joy with which injured men greeted their rescuers was reward indeed. Perhaps the failure of the massive attack had left us with a sense of guilt which the intensive rescue work relieved.

     So urgent was the need for rapid recovery of the wounded, that RAMC men from hospitals and dressing stations moved forward at night, having volunteered to join the search in No Man’s Land. They gave initial treatment and care during rapid removal to the appropriate medical centre further back. All this, of course, they carried out under risk from enemy guns, a new situation for hospital workers who would only have heard the odd long-range shell or a few rare bombs from aircraft explode. So shells bursting around them while they worked did cause them some excitement. They saved many lives.

     In the front line – the model for all front lines until it went up in dust and smoke – our Company had some sort of cover still, but only in places, and much work would have to be done to make it suitable for occupation. That job wasn’t ours, so we kept watch and rested through the day after the battle, in usable sections of the trench or in large holes.’

* The British Army’s Somme attack had long been planned for June 29. The order to postpone until July 1 came through on June 27. The Kensingtons, who had been in the line June 9-21 then rested, were ready to move out on the 28th, but remained in Souastre for another 48 hours until 8.25pm on Friday, June 30 ­– in case anyone’s confused, the various observations and anecdotes Sam mused on in the couple of pages after he refers to leaving the village are clearly from his various experience of the Front over the previous weeks. During this postponement, one extraordinary thing happened to the Kensingtons; the Brigade command replaced their Commanding Officer! On the 27th, says the Battalion War Diary, “Major HWH Young of (7th Batt.) Leicestershire regiment arrived with his batman”. The following day, “Temp. Lt Col WHW Young” (I don’t know whether the change of rank was the diarist’s mistake or an overnight promotion) took over as CO from Lieutenant Colonel HJ Stafford who promptly “proceeded on leave to England”. Young’s notes, attached to the Kensingtons’ WD by the National Archive, say he was rushed in by car from Étaples on the 27th – to Stafford’s astonishment. So Young went to Brigade HQ to seek an explanation. He was told the Battalion, being City boys, were “not good at digging”. Perhaps seeking a clue as to how a change of CO might effect an improvement in this area by July 1, he asked about Stafford; the Brigadier said he “knew very little” of the ousted CO – who’d led a Battalion under his command for five months. Young writes that he found this “an extraordinary statement”. Still, of course, he had to then try to get to know his officers at least, given they’d all convene on the battlefield within two days. Strange/interesting that my father didn’t recall this change at the top as a significant event from where he stood.

** Something odd struck me, as maybe it strikes you, about my father’s account of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle Of The Somme; at times, it’s as if he’s not a participant, but a remote observer. This is very different to the way he writes about other battlefields – in Gallipoli earlier, and subsequent experiences on the Western Front, including his front-line account of fighting against the German Spring Offensive around Arras in March, 1918.

    When he wrote his story, back in the 1970s, and I first read it, section by section, at his request querying anything I didn’t understand, one of my questions – I still have the handwritten sheets – was “[Writing about the Somme] you cover the general situation but, for once, don’t say what was happening to you – were you in the… advanced trench throughout and therefore a ‘spectator’?… you get personal again in the aftermath, recovering bodies etc, but there is this notable blank on what you were doing at the peak of the action…”. He didn’t answer that question; but then he didn’t answer any of the other far more banal questions on that sheet either and I simply don’t know why not. So my speculation runs from he just didn’t see that sheet of questions for some reason, to the events of that day so shook him that his usual total-recall memory registered very little bar broken fragments, to he did remember but it was so terrible he couldn’t bring himself to write down much of it, to he felt guilty that he could do nothing/did nothing to help his comrades.

    Knowing him, his strength, his capacity for bitterly candid self-criticism, and considering the one reference he made to “guilt” in writing this passage, in the Endnotes to the first edition of the Memoir I made what I called “a strong guess… that he and his Platoon, like others I’ve read about elsewhere, got stuck in their trench, cut off, no orders coming through, and never moved, just watched the carnage and tried to live through it – hence, the remote onlooker point of view”. Since then, the Kensingtons’ WD and Alan MacDonald’s wondrously detailed book Pro Patria Mori: The 56th (1st London) Division at Gommecourt, 1st July 1916 have put factual flesh on those bones so I’ll add here some detailed information/probabilities about what happened to my father on that day…

    His A Company, marching Platoon by Platoon at two-minute intervals to minimise shell casualties, led the Battalion from Souastre via the Brigade “equipping dump” at Bayencourt (three kilometres due south, where they gathered ammunition, grenades and picks) to Hébuterne where they arrived in the night, at 12.05am on July 1. His Company moved into front-line trenches designated W47 and W47S facing Gommecourt. The 1/14th London Scottish (my father’s “kilted lads”) had reached their positions to the Kensingtons’ left at 11pm, June 30.

    At 2.45pm the German artillery began a massive bombardment, wrecking trenches and killing men, to which the British did not respond until the pre-planned time, 6.25am. An hour later, says the WD, “our smoke started” – cover for an infantry advance – and the German barrage resumed maximum intensity. The London Scottish charged out into this maelstrom on schedule at 7.50am. Company A were supposed to follow up soon after with digging parties to construct a new trench through No Man’s Land to the supposedly captured German front line – which the London Scottish had actually achieved at terrible cost. But the Kensingtons’ new CO, Colonel Young, asked Brigade’s permission to hold his men back because the German artillery made static work in No Man’s Land suicidally impossible – Brigade agreed, so my father and his comrades remained in their crumbling trench.

    However, at 9am an A Company Platoon (not my father’s, I gather) did attempt a race through the smoke, shells and machine-gun fire to resupply the London Scottish with ammunition and grenades (“bombs” the infantry called them back then). The WD says they “disappeared” – not quite as stark as it seems, meaning they couldn’t get any message back rather than that they had all died. By 11.30am A Company was still sending parties across no Man’s Land with supplies for the London Scottish; it would take an hour to cover the 400 metres separating the lines, with heavy casualties suffered (I don’t know whether my father was one of the few men sent out in this way who actually made the return journey too; quite probably not, given the sense of grievous impotence his few words carry).

    Pro Patria Mori summarises that by 1pm A Company’s CO Major Cedric Charles Dickens (grandson of the great novelist, killed at Bouleaux Wood on the Somme Front, September 9, 1916) had “spent 6 hours watching the trenches destroyed and his men maimed and killed by the thunderous bombardment of the German howitzers”; accordingly, he sent a message to Kensingtons HQ reading, “Shelling fearful. Trench practically untenable, full of dead and wounded. Very few men indeed left. Must have instructions and assistance.” He got no reply. Author MacDonald adds: “And it was under this ferocious bombardment that the Kensingtons were forced to stand, wait and suffer. Their frustration was intense… The bulk of their dead and wounded were being caused by an enemy they could not see, let alone reach. Somewhere, a few thousand metres behind some low hills to the east, teams of German gunners were pouring a continuous rain of high explosive onto the heads of the Kensingtons.”

    At 1.35pm, Dickens sent another messenger back to HQ reporting he had about 50 men of A and C Companies in trenches W47 and W47S (including my father still). Colonel Young sent what he had left, as recorded in his own notes: “party of Signallers, servants and minor shell-shock cases collected and sent with Capt Harris” (Harris and his men didn’t connect with Dickens, but did end up in another part of the front line and assist in its defence).

    At 3pm, another runner conveyed Dickens’s final message, quoted by MacDonald: “I have, as far as I can find, only 13 left beside myself. Trenches unrecognisable. Quite impossible to hold. Bombardment fearful for last two hours. I am the only officer left. Please send instructions.” The instruction was to withdraw and his group (by then probably not including my father who, I deduce, remained in the front line; see below) reached HQ in the reserve line 45 minutes later.

    At 5.30 or 6pm the bombardment ceased on both sides. MacDonald writes: “Across the fields and in the shattered remains of the trenches on both sides of No Man’s land, hundreds of men lay wounded and dying. In their agony they now filled the air with their shrieks and moans.”

*** Most of the remnants of the Kensingtons had straggled back to Hébuterne on the evening of July 1, and then, says the WD, around 9pm, the 1/8th Middlesex relieved them in the W Sector trenches, whereupon they “walked” (not marched) back to Sailly where they had to spend the night… in another trench. But my father clearly describes how, along with some others from A Company, he spent the first night after the catastrophe, and most of the day too, on the battlefield and, chiefly, in No Man’s Land before catching up with the Battalion. Well, not hard to imagine that in this particular “fog of war” the survivors pretty much made it up as they went along – and they obviously wanted to do something useful, even make amends, having been able to do little more than survive the day through sheer luck while their comrades…

    The Kensingtons’ WD states that 24 officers and 525 ORs (other ranks) went into battle and the casualty count (dead and wounded) was 17 officers and 310 ORs (59% casualty rate). Pro Patria Mori adds that the London Scottish casualties numbered 14 officers, 575 ORs and 15 Medics (77%), the neighbouring Rangers (1/12th London) 17 officers, 447 ORs (58%), and 1/4th City Of Londons (Royal Fusiliers) 16 officers, 344 ORs (58%).

    Incidentally, it’s a shame my father never named “the unshakeable RSM” – I can’t find any reference to him in the WD or Pro Patria Mori.

NB: throughout the summer, these blogs will be unusually long, simply because Sam had such vivid memories of, and so much to say about, his experiences a hundred years ago on the Somme. I hope you’ll agree there’s not too much wasted verbiage and plenty of truth and substance.

All the best – FSS

Next week: The aftermath: "recovering our dead mates"… saying goodbye to Charlie… and on to the Somme's air war…