Not worthy

Civic war memorials don't tend to bear the names of executed men. When they were being commissioned the disgrace of such individuals was something to be forgotten about rather than celebrated, the prevailing opinion being that the inclusion of their names would sully the memory of those who had died honourably in the service of King and Country.

Society has moved on and, de jure, the men executed for purely 'military' crimes have now been granted a posthumous pardon, being regarded as much victims of war as any of the others who died. Occasionally there have been attempts to 'update' local war memorials, although, by and large, the clamouring has been resisted by the councils or public bodies responsible for their upkeep.

One man who is not commemorated on any war memorial in Barrow-in-Furness is 2701, Lance Corporal William John Irvine, of the 1st Battalion. He lived in Sloop Street, one of a series of canyon-like tenements on Barrow Island, cheap and cramped housing, built to supply the demand of the town's burgeoning population in the late nineteenth century. They still stand to-day, although now modernised, of course.

Sloop Street, Barrow-in-Furness c.1902.

Reportedly, he'd joined the 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion around August 10th, 1914, and - puzzlingly - he was posted to the 1st Battalion in France on September 12th, only a month later. I say, 'puzzlingly,' because this seems an awfully short time to have sufficiently trained a man for active duty and, assuming the enlistment date to be correct, I suspect that he may have had some prior military service, perhaps as a Territorial, although he was only 19according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.* He was also (speedily) promoted to Lance Corporal, which again suggests a bit more than the average new recruit.

Whatever his background on enlistment, after a month in France he'd had enough of soldiering and, after stealing the property of another soldier, deserted on October 13th, while the 1st Battalion was at Hazebrouck, preparing to move off to the trenches near Meteren. It was a bad day to abscond: by nightfall, nearly forty of the battalion were dead, with many more wounded. Under the circumstances I suspect that he wouldn't have attracted a great deal of sympathy from his fellow soldiers regarding his subsequent fate.

He was eventually arrested but managed to escape from custody. The second time he was apprehended was the last. It was time for the Army to settle it's account with him and they did, near Steenwerck, at dawn on April 20th, 1915.

He was buried in Le Grand Beaumart British Cemetery. Six days later, on April 26th, he was joined by 8136, Private James Kershaw, another deserter from the 1st Battalion.

The graves of Irvine and Kershaw, side-by-side in Le Grand Beaumart British Cemetery.

After the war William Irvine's mother, Jane, supplied her address details to the Imperial War Graves Commission when invited to do so, for inclusion in the cemetery register. Whether she ever submitted his name for inclusion on any of the Barrow-in-Furness memorials I'll never know, although somehow, I doubt it.

Nearly a century on, I think it's probably best left that way.

* I suspect that his age, as given in the CWGC's database, is incorrect, as he is shown on the 1911 Census as being 21, which would make him around 25 when he was shot.

His just desert?

The execution of soldiers for desertion during the First World War is an emotive issue with opinions on either side being both polarised and irreconcilable. Much has been written about the subject, a lot of it sensible and a lot of it nonsense.

When visiting the battlefields of France and Belgium I would usually sign the visitors’ books left in the cemeteries and I would often come across the scrawls left by well-meaning fools drawing attention to the fact there was a “Shot at Dawn” man buried there. It was also a particularly undignified spectacle to see a coach-load of battlefield tourists being specifically directed to these graves, there to gawp and ‘tut-tut’, before being hustled on to the next location on their packed itinerary. It was almost as if the other casualties interred there were entirely co-incidental and of a lesser consequence.

To me, such people seem to miss the point of a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery entirely. The central tenet of these places is equality of commemoration, irrespective of rank or deed. The grave of a general is no more carefully tended or marked than that of a private; ditto the graves of those shot by the enemy or by their own side.

I once visited the French military cemetery at Barly, near Arras, there to photograph the grave of a local man, Private William Kerr of the Northumberland Fusiliers, originally from the hamlet of Kirksanton. He wasn’t killed in action nor did he die of wounds; he’d had a heart attack while on a route march on July 18th, 1916. He left a widow and two children. Two days previously, on the 16th, a man of the 1st/4th Battalion had been shot for desertion, possibly the first Territorial soldier to be executed in the war, and he too was buried at Barly, only three graves away. He was 3563, Private John Sloan.

Although his Service Records and Court Martial transcript have survived he is a bit of a mystery. Naturally enough, there were no references to him in the newspapers of the time. His enlistment at Ulverston on June 22nd, 1915, would imply that he was living in that vicinity, although he originated from Northumberland and his next of kin was living in Workington.

It would appear that he may have been illiterate, as he signed both his Attestation Form and the Imperial Service Obligation (to serve overseas) with an ‘X’, and in August a travelling medical board assessed him as having an ‘inferior physique’ and being ‘unfit for any military duty.’ Despite this, in April, 1916, he found himself posted to France to join the 1st/4th Battalion.

He’d only been with the Battalion ‘in the field’ a couple of weeks – and had seen little in the way of front-line service with them – when he absconded from a bombing course on May 18th, as noted in the War Diary.

He wasn't at liberty for very long. Apprehended six days later, he was court-martialled for desertion. There were plenty of witnesses and, no credible excuse being offered in his defence, he was sentenced to death. Commanders all the way up the line to Douglas Haig confirmed the sentence, and on the morning of July 16th he was shot. He was 25. The execution wasn't noted in the War Diary; it simply stated that the Battalion was in training at Barly with a view to the forthcoming offensive, and that the billets were very poor.

Should John Sloan have been executed for his crime? You can decide that for yourself. I do know one thing, though: for every John Sloan there was also a William Kerr, and when 'remembering' one it's all too easy to overlook the other.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire

“For you, Tommy, ze war is over!,” was the sort of stereotypical comment that filled the cheap pulp fiction war comics that were popular in my youth. In 1918, for young Lance Corporal Joseph Steele, the opposite was true.

He was an agricultural labourer hailing from Corney, a rural community of scattered houses and farmsteads in West Cumbria. Desperately keen to join up, he’d lied about his age when enlisting in the 4th Battalion in late-November, 1914, claiming he was 18, when in fact he was only 16. Apparently, his mother was furious when she found out, although she must have relented, with nothing more being said, because after training at home with the second-line unit of the 4th Battalion he was posted to France on Christmas Eve, 1915, still only aged 17, and technically too young to serve in an active theatre of war.

The next couple of years were uneventful, with him managing to emerge unscathed from the various actions in which the 1st/4th Battalion participated. Then, on April 9th, 1918, at Givenchy, during the stand made by the 55th (West Lancashire) Division against the German offensive on the River Lys, he was taken prisoner.

He might have expected to be removed to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, or at least to a location well away from the battlefield, in accordance with the terms of the Geneva Convention, to which Imperial Germany was a signatory. If he did, then he was wrong. He, and many others of the West Lancashire men who were captured that day, were instead held just behind the German lines at Salomé, almost within sight of Givenchy, there to be put to battlefield clearance, burial, and carrying duties by their captors.

By means of a post-card delivered through the Red Cross he managed to get word home that he had been captured but, by the time it arrived in early-June, he was already dead, killed by a British shell. His family subsequently learned that he, along with several other prisoners of war, had been confined in the ruins of the church at Salomé, being employed as a stretcher-bearer by the Germans. On April 28th, the British artillery started shelling the area and apparently the German sentries ran out of the church to find cover, leaving Joseph and the other men unguarded; they promptly made a run for it. Joseph, however, had left his helmet behind and went back for it, only for a shell to make a direct hit on the church, killing him outright. Some of the other prisoners, who got back to the British lines safely, reported what had happened him.

Lance Corporal Joseph Steele (photograph courtesy of Mr. Ivor Holden).

He wasn't the only prisoner from the 1st/4th Battalion to be killed by the British shellfire that day. Private Robert Helm of Dalton-in-Furness also became a victim, as did Private Robert Ralston, of Caton, near Lancaster, both also having been captured on April 9th at Givenchy. These two men were possibly not with Joseph when he died, as their graves were located post-war and to-day they are both buried in Plot VIII, Row U, of Cabaret Rouge British Cemetery, Souchez. Joseph's grave, on the other hand, was never formally identified and he is now commemorated on the Loos Memorial, although I feel that in all likelihood he is buried somewhere in a quiet cemetery marked simply as an "Unknown Soldier."

I wonder how many more British soldiers were killed under such circumstances? Probably quite a few.

Grandad's Army

A few weeks ago I sat and watched an episode of Dad's Army, although I have to admit I don't usually need much of an excuse to do so. It was one of the first series - in black and white - and the storyline centred around an officious inspecting Major's assertion that Lance Corporal Jones was too old to be in uniform.

It prompted memories of a name on a war memorial in St. Mary's Church at Egton-cum-Newland, near Ulverston. It was a name that intrigued me a great deal when I first researched that particular memorial because I didn't recognise the unit listed and it took me a while to identify the man commemorated.

'Private' George Frearson was 60 years old when he died on on March 7th, 1917, at home, peacefully, in his bed. His was a military funeral, attended by fellow members of the Crake Valley Section, and also the Ulverston Section, of the 14th Battalion, Lancashire Volunteer Regiment, a unit of the Volunteer Training Corps affiliated to the King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment).

But just who were the 14th (Barrow) Battalion of the Lancashire Volunteer Regiment, and what did they do? Fortunately, for anyone interested, there is an excellent description of the Volunteer Training Corps available on the website of the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment Museum - http://www.kingsownmuseum.plus.com/ww1-volbnskorlr.htm - and I don't think it will serve much purpose to repeat it here. Suffice to say, the Volunteer Training Corps were the quasi-military forerunners of the Home Guard of WW2, and were employed locally, finding guards for strategic locations and industries. In reality, I think their existence was an excuse to enable men who were too old or unfit to serve in the regular forces to feel that they were still able to play their part - rather like Corporal Jones.

The pedant in me notes that the memorial at Egton-cum-Newland Church is actually wrong, since it gives Private Frearson's regimental details as 2nd (V) Battalion, King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment). In fact his unit didn't receive that title until 1918, when Army Order 208 of that year authorised new alternative titles for the units of the Volunteer Force. At the time of his death, in 1917, it was still the 14th (Barrow) Battalion, Lancashire Volunteer Regiment, as correctly stated in his newspaper obituary.

Unfortunately, I know of no photographs showing men of the Volunteer Battalions of the King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment), although I'm sure there must be some somewhere. However, the following two photographs come courtesy of a contributor to 'The Great War Forum', and show men of a detachment of the Volunteer Training Corps on parade in Manchester. This particular unit would later be styled the 2nd (Manchester?) Battalion, Lancashire Volunteer Regiment.

The oganisation and activities of the Volunteer Training Corps seems to be an aspect of the 'Home Front' during the Great War about which there is little known or written down. Perhaps it's a subject long overdue for some serious research.

Volunteer Training Corps badge (King's Own Museum).

Mr. Smith goes to war

A few years ago some renovations were being done at a shop in Sevenoaks, Kent. The shop had once previously been a photographic studio belonging to the Essenhigh-Corke family of photographers and artists and, bricked up in an old fireplace, were discovered nearly 500 glass plate negatives, photographs of soldiers of the WW1-era. These precious objects are now in the safe custody of the Kent County Archive.

Among many others in this amazing time-capsule were several photographs of men of the Territorial battalions of the King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment), who had obviously had their portraits professionally captured when stationed in the district in early-1915, there probably not having been sufficient time or opportunity to do so in their home towns after they had enlisted on the outbreak of war.

Unfortunately, in the main the photographer had only recorded the surnames of his subjects and most cannot now now be definitely identified, although one, of Richard Usher of the 4th Battalion was obviously the portrait supplied by his parents for publication in the 'Barrow Guardian' when his death in August 1916, was announced.

2410, Private (later C.Q.M.S.) Richard Usher.

One of the unidentified images is of a youthful-looking 'Private Smith.' His portrait is perhaps unusual in that it depicts him in full marching kit, holding his rifle.

I know nothing else about him other than he must have been serving in either the 4th or 5th Battalion, and that by deciding to get himself professionally photographed it would suggest that he was a new recruit to the regiment - and proud of the fact.

I have never seen this photograph reproduced in any of the local newspapers in connection with the reporting of a casualty so that is no proof that he survived the war unscathed, but I hope he did.

Wrapping up

The Met' Office  forecasted snow to-day and it seems they were correct. I was watching a cantankerous grey squirrel vigourously defending it's territory in the pine tree at the bottom of the garden against the unwanted incursion of a wood pigeon when the first delicate flakes started to descend. It's now quite heavy and settling on the already-frozen ground. Cumbria will be shut for business again, no doubt!

The winter of 1914/1915 was a particularly cold one too and the soldiers on the Western Front would have needed all the insulation they could get, being as they were, exposed to the elements. In letters sent home by ordinary soldiers during that period a common theme seems to be requests for warm clothing - gloves, scarves, balaclavas, and the like. I'm not sure what the Army provided in the way of severe-weather clothing as 'kit' other than the standard-issue greatcoat. Whatever was issued, it appeared to have been inadequate. Given the rapid expansion of the British Expeditionary Force the requirement was perhaps on such a scale that no-one had ever really anticipated the need or planned for it.

In consequence, the photographs from that time tend to show men wearing a variety of garments and usually presenting a somewhat 'unmilitary' appearance. One particular item often seen was the fleece - quite literally, being either of goatskin or sheepskin. I don't know whether these were officially issued or whether individuals had to purchase them privately, although perhaps the latter is more likely as I would have thought that if they were generally available then most soldiers, if not all, would have been wearing them.

Men of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers in the trenches: Winter 1914.

Some photographs of the 2nd Battalion, King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) dating from February 1915, when it was billeted at Ouderdom near Ypres, also show men wearing fleeces.

Officers' Mess kitchen (King's Own Museum).

Hutted encapment (King's Own Museum).

Sitting writing this in a centrally-heated house it's difficult to imagine just how cold they must have been, living in wooden huts which, I suspect didn't even have a stove to provide warmth. It must have been even worse for the men stationed in the trenches - frostbite was the biggest source of casualties at that time. 'Miserable' probably sums it up adequately.

 Captain Thomas Brittain Forwood (King's Own Museum).

These photographs are particularly poignant for me. In all probability the men featured in them became causalties on May 8th at Frezenberg, either dead or taken prisoner, including Captain Forwood, who is now commemorated on the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial.

Seeing double

The many official memorials to the missing maintained by the CWGC bear the names of some servicemen who, in actual fact, have an identified grave. There are several reasons for this. The graves of some men were identified either during or after construction of the memorials in the post-war years and for aesthetic reasons it was (and still is) preferable to leave the carved panels intact rather than trying to erase a name. However, in the days of cross-referencing paper records there were also administrative mix-ups which resulted in men being commemorated twice, once by a headstone on an offical war grave and also by being listed on one of the memorials.

By and large the CWGC have managed to identify most of the names that fall into the latter category and have amended their records accordingly. Their official line is that the place of commemoration of a man (or woman) is that which is listed in their database, searchable online. So, for example, 3805, Private Tom Eccles, of the 1st/4th Battalion, is officially buried in Serre Road Cemetery No. 2 although his name is also visible on the King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) panel on the Thiepval Memorial, his remains having been found after the Thiepval Memorial was unveiled in August, 1932. More on Tom Eccles in a future blog.

One man who has escaped the regular 'housekeeping' trawls of the CWGC database is 2248, Corporal Thomas Long, of the 1st/4th Battalion.

He was an iron ore miner by trade, working at the Hodbarrow Mine near Millom. He'd previously been a Territorial and rejoined their ranks when war broke out. He was severely wounded at Guillemont in August, 1916, and was evacuated to the U.K. to recuperate, returning to France in January, 1917.

Corporal Thomas Long. Not a brilliant photograph but infinitely better than none at all.

A couple of months later, on March 11th, 1917, he was killed in action, sniped while in the trenches near Wieltje. The news of his death was conveyed to his parents by Lieutenant William Ross Pattinson, then commanding 'D' Company:

     “It is with the very deepest sorrow that I have to tell you that your son, 2248, Corpl. T. Long, was killed in action on the 11th March. He did a brave deed, going out by himself early in the morning to watch the enemy. In the evening he did not return, and a search party later found him lying near the trenches, dead. It will be, I know, some comfort in your sorrow to know that he died painlessly and instantly. He was brought in, and will be buried to-morrow, the 13th, where, I cannot exactly tell you, but I will let you know later on.”

     “Your son was a decent lad, well thought of by all his officers, popular with the men, and his death is very keenly regretted by us all. The Company wishes me to convey their sympathy to you, which I do willingly, adding my own. I am line company commander, and appreciated his worth, although no sympathy can in any way save you any of your awful loss. May it be a comfort to you all that he died doing his duty as an Englishman should, with his face towards Germany.”

Contrast this with the letter his brother, 867, Private George Long had to write to their sister:

     “It is with regret that I write to convey the sad news that Thomas was killed yesterday morning (Sunday). I saw him last night on the stretcher; they were carrying him by our place when they came in and asked us the way to the aid post. They told us who it was, and I went out and had a look at him. He will have a decent burial place. I don’t know how you will let poor mother know about it. I have not written to her, so you will have to let her know. The Captain of his Company has letters and everything out of his pockets. I hope you don’t take this news too bad.”

Leaving the jingoistic sentiments of the officer's letter to one side (which, in truth, probably didn't offer much in the way of consolation at all) the fact that Corporal Long's body had been recovered and would be buried is quite clear. In fact, his burial took place at Vlamertinghe Military Cemetery, a place rapidly filling up with the dead of the 55th (West Lancashire) Division.

However, Thomas Long is also commemorated on the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial - officially!

I suspect the oversight may have occurred due to him being killed right on the cusp of the issue of the new Territorial Numbers, since he is commemorated on the Menin Gate as 200375, Corporal Thomas Long, whereas his commemoration in Vlamertinghe Military Cemetery is as 2248, Corporal Thomas Long. Perhaps the news of his death going back to the Territorial Force County Association and formal notification of his newly-allocated number coming from the Territorial Force Country Association "crossed in the post", so to speak, and after the war, when the records were being compiled, the authorities believed that they were dealing with two different men.

What is puzzling is that his Vlamertinghe database entry gives his next of kin as Rowland and Hannah Long, of Millom, Cumberland; by contrast his Menin Gate database entry gives no next of kin details.

I've never alerted the CWGC to this double commemoration. To me it is simply an interesting curiosity, and it means that "1" should always be subtracted from any official total of war dead.