1917 ‘At all costs’ Monchy Le Preux (from the book "Neath a Foreign Sky" by Paul Allen)
R.I.P.
- Private George Arthur Hill
- Private George Ernest Colley
- Lance Corporal John Stanley Morrison
The British 37TH Division had, after vicious fighting, captured the important village of Monchy Le Preux on the 11TH of April and by the thirteenth the Third Army had captured some seven hundred prisoners and a hundred and twelve guns, suffering only 8,238 casualties. The successes of the opening days of the offensive however had been offset by the disaster that had befallen the Fifth Army’s attack on the Hindenburg Line at Bullecourt, a village some nine miles south east of Arras. The decision for the Fifth Army to take a part in the Arras Offensive had been instigated by it’s Commander, General Sir Hubert Gough, who having heard of the successes of the First and Third Armies to the north had unwisely launched an ill prepared and planned attack on the village using the First ANZAC and Fifth Corps together with ten tanks.
After a false start on the tenth of April and despite the deplorable conditions underfoot and misgivings of the ANZAC, the attack had begun at 4-30am the next day. Some of the tanks blinded by a snowstorm had failed to reach the start line and the others had either broken down or had been hit by shellfire, as a result, men of the Australian Fourth Division had found themselves attacking the Hindenburg Line with no supporting barrage and with the German wire defences almost intact. Against all the odds the Australians had fought their way as far as the second line of trenches.
Despite repeated requests, direct artillery support was denied the Aussies due to misleading reports about the progress of the tanks. Marooned in the labyrinth of trenches in the Hindenburg Line, and increasingly subjected to enemy counter attacks the beleaguered Australians had been without reinforcements of men and ammunition owing to the intense fire put down by machine guns they had been driven from their dearly paid for positions.
The casualties at Bullecourt had been appalling; of the attacking formations the Fourth Australian Brigade alone had lost 2,258 men out of the 3,000 who had begun the operation. The Australians, who had been doubtful from the outset, had naturally been very bitter about the fiasco at Bullecourt and their trust in British Generalship had again been badly shaken, to put it mildly.
During the ensuing few days the French had launched their long awaited ‘mass of manoeuvre’ on the Aisne. Emboldened by Nivelle’s optimistic declarations and supported by 3,810 guns the soldiers of the Fifth and Sixth Armies had finally gone into action in an assault on a twenty five mile front on the sixteenth of April. The Germans, in possession of the French plans through captured documents, had been waiting. Their defences had been constructed on a new doctrine of lightly held forward positions with strong reserves in the rear in readiness to counter attack. The French had made some progress and by the 20TH had taken 20,000 prisoners and a hundred and forty seven guns, but they had not achieved the promised breakthrough. The French Government had lost confidence in the grandiose plans of Nivelle and By the 21ST of April his authority had been slipping away. On the 29TH of April the writing had been on the wall when Petain had been appointed Chief of the General Staff with extended powers that in effect had made him the French Governments chief military councillor.
Despite being almost exhausted by colossal casualties the French had mounted further attacks on the fourth and fifth of May. The Sixth Army had gouged a hole in the German held salient near Laffaux and in addition had captured the German defences along the two and a half mile front on the Chemis des Dames, non of which had saved Nivelle. By this time the French had been almost on their knees having suffered over 187,000 casualties, as signs of mutiny by a disillusioned army had become increasingly apparent he had been removed from command on the fifteenth of May. The disappointing start to the French offensive had inevitably made the prolongation of the B.E.F.’s offensive at Arras all the more necessary in order to divert German attention away from the Aisne.
Whilst the French had been shedding their blood to the south, north of the Scarpe the British had temporarily suspended their offensive. However, on St George’s Day, Monday the twenty third of April their offensive had been rekindled. This new offensive [later named the Second Battle of the Scarpe] had developed into some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting that had been experienced throughout the whole of the war thus far.
Amongst the units who had taken to the sodden field of battle on the twenty third had been the Territorial’s of the Fifth Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment [150TH Brigade, 50TH [Northumbrian] Division], which had received it’s ‘baptism of fire’ exactly two years previously in Flanders during the Battle of St Julien, where, little more than patriotic amateurs the Yorkshiremen had gone into action armed with enthusiasm and antiquated weapons, nonetheless, the men had acquitted themselves to such an extent that they had acquired the nickname of ‘The Yorkshire Gurkha’s’. Two years later the surviving band of men had been seasoned veterans of two years of trench fighting on the Western Front.
During the early hours of the 23RD the men of Fiftieth Division had assembled in positions which had been dearly paid for some days before which had stretched between a ruined tower at Wancourt to a small lake in the Conjeul Valley, between the villages of Wancourt and Guemappe. For the attack the Fifth Yorks [with 5TH Durham Light Infantry] had been in support to the Fourth Battalion’s of the East Yorkshire and Yorkshire Regiments, who would spearhead the assault. The Division’s objectives had been the capture [with the assistance of two tanks] of enemy positions which had ran south of the Vis en Artois to Heninel and Cherisy to Guemappe crossroads [the Blue Line], followed by the taking of a similar network of positions five hundred yards west of the northern edge of the village of Cherisy to the river Cojeul at St Rohart Factory [the Red Line].
Promptly at 4-45 during the morning of the twenty third, eighty-four 18 pounder field guns and thirty howitzers had begun to bombard the German positions on the high ground north west of Cherisy. This had drawn heavy enemy counter fire that had caused many casualties amongst the men huddled in their assembly trenches. Nonetheless, the two spearhead battalions had ‘gone over the bags’ as planned. Within a hundred yards of the start line disaster had befallen the East Yorkshires when they had ran into the British supporting barrage, which had been moving too slowly. Again serious casualties had been sustained including every officer and non commissioned officer in the flank companies, who had either been killed, or wounded.
Despite these setbacks all the objectives had been reached by 5.25am, and the surviving men had begun to consolidate their newly won possessions. Later in the day however, the Germans had launched a savage counter attack which had necessitated the bringing forward of the supporting two battalions to reinforce the by then decimated leading battalions. The four battalions of 150TH Brigade had eventually been surrounded and in danger of total annihilation until the order had been given to retire, this had evidently been carried out in good order under the command of junior N.C.O.’s due to the large number of casualties sustained. By 11-30am the exhausted attackers had been back at the original start line.
Later in the afternoon Allenby had telegrammed that the Blue Line ‘must be taken that day at all costs’, although the four battalions of the 150TH Brigade could barely muster one full battalion between them, the attack had been renewed. On the second attempt the 1ST/5TH Border Regiment and 1ST/9TH Durham Light Infantry had been thrown into the fray supported by the remnants of the Fifth Yorks, and Fifth D.L.I., which according to the Official History had been the only two battalions of 150TH Brigade ‘which could muster more than small parties of weary men’…
The British artillery had laid on a barrage similar to the mornings bombardment, shortly afterwards the men of Fiftieth Division had made their advance. ‘This time, according to the Official History;
The steadiness and determination of the advance proved too much for the enemy. He was wearied out and beaten after a long ‘slogging match’. Parties of his infantry surrendered freely, while others retreated under fire’…
The cost of the days fighting had been enormous. The 4TH East Yorkshire had suffered three hundred and sixty nine casualties; the Fourth Yorkshire Regiment had three hundred and sixty three casualties [including Captain David Hirsch, who had been awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his actions during the day, he had been killed towards the end of the day’s fighting]. The Fifth Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment had fared little better. Three officers and sixteen men had been killed, or had died of wounds, three officers and a hundred and eighteen men had been wounded, while a further two officers [later reported as killed] and fifty five non commissioned officers and men were listed as missing, amongst these had been the twenty years old; 240187 Private George Arthur Hill.
Born in the City of York at No.24 Price Street on the 29TH of October 1896, George had been the only son of Isabel [formerly Venebles] and railway fireman Robert Hill. The Hill family had arrived in Scarborough during 1908, by this time the forty years old Robert Hill had been promoted by the North Eastern Railway Company to engine driver and had taken up residence in the town at the railway company owned No.5 Locomotive Cottages, in Londesborough Road. At the age of twelve George had become an errand boy for the Scarborough Gas Company based at their showroom at No.32 Westborough, and had remained with the company until the outbreak of war. [1]
Although a Private in the original Scarborough based First/ Fifth Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment before the war [Service Number 1413], Hill had been amongst a number of the younger men of the battalion who had been under age for active service when the unit had been put on a war footing on the fourth of August 1914 and had been amongst a number of officers and men who had formed, during September, the Second Line, 2ND/5TH Battalion [a photograph of a trio of soldiers from the unit, including George Hill, had appeared in ‘The Scarborough Pictorial’ of Wednesday the 26th of May 1915].
Originally intended for Home Service, the Battalion’s Headquarters had at first been housed in Scarborough’s Grand Hotel, however, during November the formation, including Hill, had moved to Darlington, where the men had been billeted in local schools, the officers in the King’s Head Hotel. During April 1915[by which time the original 1/5 Battalion had begun their journey to France] the battalion had moved into camp at Benton, near Newcastle where they had continued to train for war. Whilst at Benton the unit had been divided into two separate parts. One half of the Battalion had been formed into a Provisional unit whilst the other, consisting of medically graded A.1 men, had formed a unit that had been intended for active service.
Meanwhile, the original First/Fifth Battalion had gone into action on the twenty third of April and had received heavy casualties in the Battle of St Julien and the ensuing Second Battle of Ypres. Inevitably the men considered fit enough for active service had been sent abroad to join the depleted parent Battalion, included in the draft had been Private Hill, who by this time had been eligible [18years] for service abroad. He had joined the by then battle hardened battalion in Flanders during May 1915.
Hill had spent the ensuing year in the mud and despair of the trenches in the area of Ypres. Whilst there, although the Fifth Battalion had not been involved in any major operations, the front line here had nevertheless been a hazardous place to exist. A survivor of those days’s in Flanders had laconically recorded;
’Shelling, mortaring, machine gun fire, and sniping occurred at all times of the day and night: no part of the line was ever free from one or the other. Patrol work was assiduous: casualties were sometimes heavy and, at other times extremely light. But generally speaking there were no untoward incidents and those months spent in the trenches at Ypres may be written down as quiet’…
On the 10TH of September 1916 the Fiftieth Division had begun to move inescapably southwards towards the meat grinder of the Somme Offensive. The formation had eventually relieved the Fifteenth Division in Mametz Wood, where they had made their preparations to take part in the Third Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Flers/ Courcelette, which had lasted from the fifteenth to the twenty second of September.
On the opening day of the Battle the three battalions of the150TH Brigade [4TH East Yorks, 4TH, and 5TH Yorks] with the assistance of two tanks, had been tasked with the capture of Martinpuich. The attack on the village had begun at 6.30am on the sixteenth of September; the Brigade had reportedly secured all it’s objectives with very little loss until the Germans had opened a heavy retaliatory bombardment on their recently lost positions that had resulted in grievous losses amongst the Yorkshiremen. The History of the Regiment records;
‘The 5TH Battalion with the 4TH, reached its objective and clung to it under very heavy shelling, but when relieved early on the morning of the 19TH by a Brigade of the 23RD Division and withdrawn into Divisional Reserve, the 5TH had had four officers and forty eight other ranks killed, eleven officers and one hundred and sixty two non commissioned officers and men wounded, and twenty seven men missing [later listed as killed in action], a total of two hundred and fifty two casualties’…[2]
Fortunate to have survived the Maritnpuich ‘push’, Hill had once again seen action on the Somme during the Battle of Morval [25-28 September] when the Fifth and Fourth battalion’s had attacked a trench system running from the village of Eaucourt L’ Abbaye. On that the two battalion’s had again achieved their objectives only to find that a flanking attack by the First Division had not gone ahead. Without the support of First Division the Yorkshiremen had encountered heavy enemy counter attacks from their front and both sides that had eventually forced them to withdraw from their hard earned possessions. This operation had cost the Fifth another four officers and seventy other ranks wounded, and four men killed.
Exhausted by this time, the Fifth Battalion had returned to Mametz Wood on the twenty ninth to ‘refit and reorganise’, in other words wait for reinforcements. By the onset of October 1916 the Battalion had been training near Baizieux, on the eleventh the unit had again been moved to Mametz Wood, where they had been put to work repairing roads, a task which the History of the Regiment describes as;
‘A job of work which was not as safe as it sounds, since over sixty casualties were incurred while engaged upon it’…
Private Hill had arrived with the Fifth Battalion in the Arras Sector during March 1917 when the unit had taken up residence in the village of Bayonvillers. Up until the 11TH of April the formation had been in Corps Reserve near Arras. On the 20TH of April Hill and his comrades had been sent to the front to occupy a position known as ‘Nepal Trench’, from here on the twenty third he had gone into action for the last time.
Robert and Isobel Hill had initially been informed by the War Office that their son had been wounded in action on the twenty third, however, they hd subsequently received another telegram from the military stating he was also missing. The news had been included in ‘The Scarborough Mercury’ of Friday the eighth of June;
‘Wounded man now reported missing - Mr. And Mrs. Hill, 5 Locomotive Cottages, Londesborough Road, have been informed by the War Office that their only son, G.A. Hill, Yorkshire Regiment, Lewis Gun Section, previously reported wounded, is now reported missing since 23rd April. He is about 20 years of age, and single’…
Two weeks later the Hill’s had received the news that they had been dreading and ‘The Scarborough Mercury’, Friday June 22nd 1917 had duly reported;
‘Missing man now reported killed - Mr. And Mrs. Hill 5, Locomotive Cottages, Londesborough Road, have now been informed from the War Office that their only son, George Arthur Hill, Yorkshire Regiment, was killed in action on April 23rd. He was about 20 years of age, and was formerly employed at the Gas Office, Westborough. He joined the Yorkshire Regiment previous to the outbreak of the war. We announced some time ago that he was missing’…
Despite numerous searches during and after the war no identifiable remains of George Arthur Hill were ever found, and his name had eventually been included on the Arras Memorial, situated in the city of Arras, which commemorates over thirty five thousand British, South African, and New Zealand casualties who had lost their lives in the fighting nearby between the spring of 1916 and the seventh of August 1918 for whom there is no known grave, [George’s name is listed in Bay 5 of the memorial].
A former member of the congregation of St James’s Church in Seamer Road, George Arthur Hill’s name can be found inscribed on the church oak ‘Rood Screen’ War Memorial which bears the names of fifty five men, women, and children of the church who had lost their lives as a result of the war.
In addition, George’s name can be located on a gravestone in Scarborough’s Manor Road Cemetery [Section K, Row 5, Grave11], which also bears the name of his Yorkshire born mother Isobel Hill, who had passed away at her home in Locomotive Cottages at the age of forty seven years just two years after the death of her son, on the 21st of September 1919. Also included on the stone is the name of George’s elder sister, Gladys May Hill, the wife of Arthur William Cuthbert and mother of Billy, Arthur, Margaret, and Derek, who had died at her home at No.7 Fieldside, Northstead, on Saturday the 21st of October 1972, at the age of seventy six years. Her husband had subsequently passed away on Tuesday the twelfth of February 1985 at the age of eighty-nine years; he is also commemorated on the stone. George’s Lincolnshire born [in 1868] father, Robert Hill, had continued to live at No.5 Locomotive Cottages until the early 1930’s when his name disappears from Scarborough’s Electoral Rolls. By this time the author is led to believe that he may have remarried [wife’s name Mary], however, I have no evidence to corroborate this. As far as can be gathered he had not died in the town, therefore it must be assumed that he had left Scarborough at this time.
Amongst the many men of Fiftieth Division who had been wounded in the fighting of the twenty third of April had been a grievously injured Scarborough born Private, who had been transported to one of the many Base Hospitals that had been congregated around the city of Rouen. The soldier had unfortunately succumbed to his wounds in No.11 Stationary Hospital during Wednesday the 2ND of May 1917 at the age of twenty four years; 325633 Private George Ernest Colley.
Born at No.17 Wooler Street during 1893, George had been the youngest son of Annie Elizabeth and George Hackney Colley, a self-employed bricklayer. A pupil of the nearby Gladstone Road Infant and Junior school from the age of four, George had left the institution at the age of thirteen to begin work as an errand boy in the accounts department of Scarborough’s Town Hall, situated in St Nicholas Street, where he had been employed at the outbreak of war in August 1914 [the family by this time had been living at No.62 Prospect Road]. [3]
Colley had enlisted into the Army at the Recruiting Office in St Nicholas Street towards the end of 1915 and had eventually, like Private Hill been posted to a Territorial Force Second Line unit, the 2ND/9TH Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry, which at the time had formed part of the 190TH [2ND/1ST D.L.I.] Brigade of the original 63RD
[2ND Northumbrian] Division [the divisional number had later [1916] been allocated to the Royal Naval Division] which had been stationed in the North East of England on coastal defence duties.
Colley had remained in England until September 1916 when he had been included in a draft of replacements for battle casualties that had been incurred by the 1ST/9TH Battalion D.L.I. during the fighting at Flers/Courcelette. The battalion [and the remainder of 50TH Division] had moved to the Arras Sector during March 1917. Here it had soon [April 12TH] become embroiled in fierce fighting for possession of a valuable ridge in front of the village of Wancourt, known as ‘Wancourt Tower Hill’. Here Colley had received his ‘baptism of fire’ in an action described in the British Official History;
‘The 50TH Division [Major General P.S. Wilkinson] had relieved the 14TH [Division] in difficult circumstances, while the latter was in the act of surrounding Wancourt and crossing the Cojeul. Brigadier General N.J.G.Cameron , commanding the 151ST Brigade, pushed forward the 9/Durham Light Infantry, with orders to establish itself from Wancourt Tower northward to the Cojuel. It did reach a point a little north of the tower, but heavy and accurate machine gun fire up the valley prevented progress on the left’…
Having received heavy casualties during the attack the 191ST Brigade had been relieved during the night of 14TH/15TH April to move back into support whilst the remainder of 50TH Division had continued the battle, [which by the 26TH of April had cost the Division over two thousand casualties].
The Colley’s had received a telegram from the War Office at the beginning of May stating that their son had been wounded in action on the twenty third of April, the news had subsequently been included in a lengthy casualty list which had appeared in ‘The Scarborough Mercury’ of Friday the fourth of May, two days after he had died in France;
‘One of four soldier son’s wounded - News has been received that Private George Ernest Colley, Durham Light Infantry, youngest son of Mr. George Colley, builder, and Mrs. Colley, 60 Prospect Road, has been wounded- a gunshot wound in the hip. He is one of four brothers-all the lads of the family-serving, and before enlisting he was engaged in the Borough Accountant’s office’…
The family had received news of George’s death the following week, the ‘Mercury’ of Friday the eleventh of May had reported;
‘Died of Wounds - On Monday we [The Scarborough Evening News] reported that Private George Ernest Colley, Durham Light Infantry, the youngest son of Mr. George Colley, builder, and Mrs. Colley, 60 Prospect Road, had been wounded—a gunshot wound in the hip.
The parents, unfortunately, have now received the sad news that he has died from wounds received. Private Colley was one of four brothers—all the lads of the family serving, and before enlisting he was engaged in the Borough Accountants office. He was 24 years of age and single’…
[Although the above articles mention four sons of the Colley’s had served in the war, as far as the author is aware the Colley’s had been the parents of three sons, Charlie, born in 1889, Sidney 1891, and Ernest 1893. Neither the 1891, nor the 1901 Census list the name of a fourth son].
The remains of George Colley had eventually been transported to St Sever Cemetery Extension situated on the southern outskirts of Rouen where they had been buried in Section P.I.D. 2B. [From late 1916 until the end of the war the Cemetery had been the burial ground for over a dozen hospitals that had been situated nearby, and contains the graves of over 8,500 casualties of the Great War, [and three hundred from World War Two]].
In Scarborough, apart from the War Memorial, George Colley’s name is commemorated on a now [2004] broken gravestone in the town’s Manor Road Cemetery [Section L, Border, B, Grave16]. The stone, bearing the regimental crest of the Durham Light Infantry, also carries the name of George’s Seamer born mother Annie Elizabeth Colley, who had passed away at No.60 Prospect Road on Sunday the twelth of April 1931 at the age of seventy-two years. Also included on the stone is the name of Scarborough born George Hackney Colley who had died on Thursday the fourteenth of July 1955, at the age of 95 years. He had been buried in the grave in Manor Road during the afternoon of Monday the eighteenth following a service at Gladstone Road Primitive Methodist Chapel. [Demolished during the late 1960’s the site of the Chapel now [2004] forms part of Brook Street car park]. For many years George Colley had lived at No. 60 Prospect Road with his eldest daughter, Edith Mary, she had died in Scarborough at the age of 76 years on the 16TH of November 1966. Her cremated remains had subsequently been buried with her parents in Manor Road Cemetery
A former pupil of Gladstone Road School George Colley’s name had been included on the School’s ‘Roll of Honour’, which had been erected in the Junior School hall during the post war years. The brass plaque listing over seventy former pupils who had lost their lives during the Great War is to be found where it had originally been placed almost ninety years ago.
The day after the death of Private Colley the B.E.F. had launched the last major ‘push’ of the Arras Offensive. Later named the Third Battle of the Scarpe, the ill conceived offensive had begun some days before with the saturation by British artillery of the enemy’s positions with High Explosive and Lachrymatory Gas shells. A top priority of the artillery had been the by then notorious killing ground in and around the village of Rouex and its equally notorious Chemical Works, objective which had been expected to be in British hands earlier in the battle. The defenders of Rouex had held on to their village with tenacity despite repeated assaults by some of the best infantry units in the British Army, whose many hundreds of bodies littering the ground by the beginning of May had been a stark testimony to the ferocity of the fighting and the incredible amount of troops the British High Command had been prepared to sacrifice to take the most evil of places.
Zero Hour for the assault had been set for 3-45 on the morning of Thursday the third of May, at the appointed hour the three British armies [First, Third, and Fifth] fielding fourteen battle weary and sorely depleted Divisions [some battalions could barely muster 200 men] had gone over the top on a sixteen mile frontage in complete darkness and had gone forward towards the enemy’s well prepared positions which had been manned by relatively fresh troops. The operation had been doomed to fail from the start, with little advance preparation [some units had not received their orders of attack until an hour before Zero] many of the units had been unfamiliar with the terrain, this compounded by the darkness, uncut wire, and heavy enemy machine gun fire had created a state of unparalleled confusion which had later been described by many as ‘a total balls up’.
Amongst the units of Third Army which had taken part in the assault had been Fourth Division’s Tenth Brigade, which had sent five Regular Army battalions into action, First Somerset Light Infantry, First Royal Irish Fusiliers, First Seaforth Highlanders, 2ND Royal Warwickshire, and the Household Battalion, a unique infantry battalion composed of officers and men from the reserve regiments of Household Cavalry and volunteers drawn from the First, and Second Life Guards, and the Royal Horse Guards.
Faced with the virtually impossible task of capturing Rouex the attacking battalions had come to grief almost straight away. The History of the Household Battalion says;
‘At zero hour 3.45am, the darkness was increased by a heavy smoke barrage, and to maintain direction was next to impossible. The attacking troops plunged forward and were lost to view. The first wounded brought the report to Battalion H.Q. that while one or two parties had crossed the Roeux—Gavrelle road the greater number had been held up by intense machine gun fire in front of the cemetery; the Somerset Light Infantry, attacking a few minutes later and a little more to the right, had made little but headway. The proposed formation of the right defensive flank which was to await the advance, was deleted by the arrest of the Somersets, and at 5-30am the new came back that the one remaining officer in the line, Second Lieutenant Barker, had been forced to withdraw as best he could from the original front line. Reinforcements were sent up, and a small patch of captured ground was consolidated, but a party of some fifty men of the Brigade, reported to be holding out on the road, was cut off entirely. A German counter attack near the cemetery was dispersed by our artillery in the afternoon, and after dusk, stray parties of the Battalion crept in from No man’s Land’…[4]
The following day the remnants of the Household Battalion had been paraded for the customary post battle roll call, were it had been found that the unit had suffered over two hundred and thirty casualties in the attack, most of which had been caused by the enemy’s intense enemy machine gun fire. Amongst the dead had been a twenty years old former Scarborough tram conductor; 187 Lance Corporal John Stanley Morrison.
Born in Scarborough on the 8TH of August 1896 at No.22 Britannia Street, John had been the only son of Rachel Alice, and John Herbert Morrison, a Joiner/Carpenter by trade [Rachel A. Jackson and John H. Morrison had been married at St Mary’s Parish Church on the 22ND of December 1894]. Initially educated at the Central Board School in Scarborough’s Trafalgar Street West [the site in 2004 is occupied by Genevieve Court], at the age of twelve John had won a scholarship to the town’s Municipal School the equivalent of today’s comprehensive school, which had been situated in Westwood, and is now part of the Campus of Yorkshire Coast College. John had remained at the ‘Muni’ until 1908, when he had left the institution to become an errand boy in the Scalby Road depot of the Scarborough Tram Company. [5]
As the clouds of war had begun to waft across Europe in the summer of 1914, the eighteen years old Morrison had been living with his parents at No.6 Marlborough Street. Britain had eventually declared war on the Germans at 11pm on the fourth of August and by the end of September over 300,000 men between the ages of nineteen and thirty had responded to the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, plea for a hundred thousand recruits for Britain’s ‘New Armies’. Morrison had responded to the call on the twelfth of October [a photograph of Private Morrison had appeared in the ‘Scarborough Pictorial’ of December 2ND 1914] by enlisting for three years, or the duration of the war, at Scarborough’s Recruiting Office in St Nicholas Street, into the Royal Horse Guards [‘The Blues’]. At the time that he had accepted the King’s Shilling, Morrison had stood at five feet ten inches, had had a ‘healthy’ complexion, dark brown hair, and grey eyes, and had possessed ‘no visible impediments’.
Following his enlistment, Morrison had been sent to Combermere Barracks, the Household Cavalry’s Depot at Windsor, in the Royal County of Berkshire. Whilst there he had been issued with a uniform, and all the paraphernalia that went with soldiering in one of Britain’s most prestigious cavalry regiments, in addition, he had been issued with the Regimental Number 1835, and eventually, and most importantly for a cavalryman, a horse. Whilst at Windsor Morrison’s day had begun at six in the morning and had ended at six at night, in between his time had been spent in a seemingly endless round of foot drill, gymnastics, cleaning stables, and riding drill, without any appreciable breaks for rest. In addition, he had endured countless hours of bellowing and chivvying from fearsome moustachioed instructors in the depots notorious Riding School, where he began acquiring the equestrian skills required of a Household Cavalryman. For a good number of weeks he had learned to ride without a saddle, even longer without stirrups. The chief aim of the instructors had seemingly not been to give the recruit confidence, rather as many falls as possible.
Being in the Household Cavalry had, nonetheless, had its benefits. Paid the princely sum of one shilling and ninepence a day, this had been twopence more than a ‘donkey walloper’ [private] in the Cavalry of the Line, and ninepence better off than a shilling a day private in the infantry [a private in the Foot Guards had been paid one shilling and two pence a day].
After six months of gruelling training Morrison had been deemed fit enough to join one of His Majesty’s Squadrons of Royal Horse Guards and had duly been posted to Knightsbridge Barracks in London, where he had undergone further training whilst waiting for a draft to the regiment, which had been serving with the 8TH Cavalry Brigade, of the 3RD Cavalry Division in Northern France.
Attached to the Indian Corps for the Loos operations during the autumn of 1915, the Third Cavalry Division had been held in reserve in readiness to follow up and exploit any gaps, which had been made between the villages of Hulluch and Loos. The expected breakthrough had never materialised, and Morrison and his comrades had merely ‘stood by’ as the disastrous campaign had unfolded before them. Nonetheless, the day after the opening of the battle, the men of Third Dragoon Guards, and Royal Dragoons, from 6TH Cavalry Brigade had gone forward on foot armed with rifles and bayonets into the village of Loos to take over a tenuous line, which had been established by the Third Division. This had been the only part to be played by the cavalry at Loos.
Morrison had remained on the Western Front until the seventh of June 1916, when he had been sent to England and spell of leave at Scarborough. Following this respite from the war Morrison had reported to Knightsbridge Barracks with the expectation of returning to France. He had been stationed there when the order had been received to form the Household Battalion. He had transferred to the unit on the 28TH of August 1916.
The formation of a Household Battalion had been instigated by the Chief of the Imperial Staff, General Sir William ‘Wully’ Robertson, as a means of utilising the many ’aspirants to military fame’ who had, by 1916, still besieged Knightsbridge and Windsor Barracks in the hope of joining the Household Cavalry, the supply of these men far outstripping the horses available to mount them. Being the Sovereign’s personal mounted bodyguard, the idea had been submitted to King George the Fifth for his approval, the King had found favour with the notion, duly, on the 30TH of August 1916 the order had gone out to the Officer Commanding the Reserve Regiments;
The training of the battalion had begun at the beginning of September 1916. Essentially cavalrymen at heart, the men had nonetheless adapted quickly to the ways and tactics of the infantryman. Sent to the Brigade of Guards musketry training ranges at Pirbright, the cavalrymen had soon mastered the British Army’s standard fire rate of fifteen accurately shots per minute, the intricacies of foot drill, and bayonet drill, the latter to such an extent that shortly after their arrival in France the battalion had been placed second in a Divisional bayonet fighting competition.
By late October the Household Battalion had been deemed fit to begin their embarkation for France. On the twentieth of the month the unit had been paraded in London’s Hyde Park, where King George had taken the salute as the spit polished and brass gleaming unit had marched past to the strains of the Household Cavalry’s mounted band.
Captain Portal had taken his command aboard during the eighth and ninth of November 1916, and had eventually joined the Tenth Brigade of the Fourth Division on the Somme at the beginning of December. On the eighth of the month the battalion had entered the trenches for the first time on the Combles—Priey front. Initially under the wing of the veteran First Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, two days later the Household Battalion had taken over the line from the Warwicks. The conditions in the trenches had by this time been appalling;
‘The Somme mud was now in all it’s richness, and on the way up to the communication trenches forty men had to be dug out. In the line itself it was almost impossible to move, and part of the system had to held in posts, the men being often so exhausted that they had to be sent back in buses when their tour was over’…The line was fairly quiet, but it’s conditions were atrocious, and friend and foe were too busy in improving the trenches to trouble each other beyond a few occasional quuasi-courtesy shots. The trenches themselves were broken down, and in many places unprotected by wire, and in the absence of communication trenches, reliefs had to be carried out above ground; whale oil, massage, and a continual flow of dry socks were impotent to prevent constant cases of trench feet’… [4]
Despite this ‘fairly quiet’ period, the war had inexorably taken its toll; in the first week alone the battalion had incurred nine casualties to enemy snipers. By mid January 1917 the unit had still been ‘on the Somme’ in the Bouchavesnes Sector, by which time it’s total trench strength had been reduced to just 276 men, including bandsmen and servants.
During early March 1917 the Fourth Division had been moved northwards to the Arras Sector in preparation for the forthcoming spring offensive. Attached to the Seventeenth Corps of Third Army, the Household Battalion had been located to the east of Arras near the village of Athies, where, on the twenty sixth of March Morrison had been promoted to the rank of Lance Corporal.
The Battle of Arras had duly begun on the ninth of April. Two days later the Fourth Division had been tasked with ‘passing through the Ninth Division, seize the German second line and the village of Fampoux, and sit down in the Green Line’. Despite driving snow the attack had been launched as planned. The Official History describes;
All three infantry brigades took part in the attack, but the role of the 11TH was mainly to form a flank from the inn to Hyderabad Redoubt. The 12TH Brigade on the right, which had as its first objective the village of Roeux, the cemetery, and the chateau south of the Chemical Works, was allotted for assembly the ground south of the Fampoux-Plouvain road. The front of the division was a very cramped one on which to form up, being less than 1,500 yards long, whereas the first objective, from the Scarpe at Rouex to the inn measured nearly twice as much. The right, the 1ST King’s Own [Regiment] with two companies of the 2ND Lancashire Fusiliers, had, moreover, to follow a circuitous route in order to avoid to avoid the marshes on the river bank. In consequence, the barrage was lost and the attack broke down’…[6]
Assembled in the road between Fampoux and Gavrelle, Morrison’s Tenth Brigade had been observed by enemy aircraft and had come under heavy enemy shellfire from the outset. Nonetheless, the assault had gone ahead. Advancing over more open ground than the Twelfth Brigade the formation had suffered far heavier losses, according to the Official History, ‘without achieving any greater success’. Despite this scathing comment Falls continues;
‘It was pressed with extraordinary gallantry and determination by the two first line battalions, the 1ST [Royal] Irish Fusiliers and 2ND Seaforth Highlanders, which went forward regardless of withering fire from the chateau, the Chemical Works, the station, and the embankment. One party of the fusiliers got to within two hundred yards of the station, and the better part of a company of the Seaforths reached a trench just west of the first objective, the Rouex-Gavrelle road. Isolated and having run out of ammunition and bombs, both attempted to withdraw, but for the most part were shot down. The second line battalions, the Household Battalion, and the 1ST Royal Warwickshire [Regiment], came under fire so heavy that they did not progress even as far as the troops through which they were to have passed’…
Following the repulse of 10TH Brigade, the attack by 11TH Brigade had been called off. The total casualties of Fourth Division had been over a thousand killed, wounded, and missing, [those of the Seaforth Highlanders had been twelve officers and three hundred and sixty three men out of the twelve officers and four hundred and twenty who had gone into action at the outset]. Despite having suffered four officers and a hundred and sixty six other ranks killed, wounded, and missing, the whole affair is dismissed in the Household Battalion’s War Diary with; ‘The Battalion carried out the scheme of work laid down’…
Relieved on the twentieth of April, the Household Battalion had been withdrawn to await the arrival of reinforcements, following refitting and more training the battalion had returned to the front line to prepare for their next operation, which had begun on that fateful Thursday the third of May.
The telegram bearing the news of their son’s death had reached the Morrison’s at their home at No.6 Falconer’s Square on Monday the 21ST of May 1917, the ‘Scarborough Mercury’ of the following Friday had reported;
‘Local tram conductor killed - An intimation has been received from the War Office by his father, who resides at Falconer’s Square, that Corporal Stanley Morrison was killed in action on May 3RD 1917.Corporal Morrison joined the Royal Horse Guards [Blues] early in October 1914. He was sent out to France in August 1914 his first big battle was Loos. Later he was at Ypres, and also serving in France and Flanders for eleven months, he was drafted back to England for a short course in bayonet fighting and machine gun instruction. His regiment was then renamed the Household Battalion. After being inspected by the King in Hyde Park he was again sent out to France where the regiment has seen very heavy fighting. Previous to joining, Corporal Morrison was a conductor on the Scarborough trams and had been well known. He was only just 18years of age when he joined up and arrived in France before he was 19years of age’…
Unknown to the British at the time, Roeux had been built over a labyrinth of interlinked caves and subways which had connected with the extremely strong fortifications above ground this, plus the tenacity of the villages defenders, had contributed to make Rouex one of the toughest nuts for the British to crack throughout the Arras Offensive. It had initially been envisaged that the village and its attendant Chemical Works would fall to the 9TH [Scottish] Division on the 12TH of April, this attack had been repulsed with huge casualties to the Scots, and so had a subsequent assault by the 51ST[Highland] Division, which had taken place on the 23RD of April.
Amongst the hundreds of British corpses littering the battlefield in and around Rouex, the remains of Corporal Morrison had eventually been recovered and buried in a cemetery located just outside the village on the road leading to the nearby village of Fampoux. Now containing the graves of over three hundred casualties of the Arras Offensive, this cemetery is now known as ‘Roeux British Cemetery’, and contains the graves of three hundred and fifties casualties of the fighting around Roeux including those of one officer and thirty nine other ranks of the Household Battalion. Morrison’s final resting place is located in Section A.Grave 3 [where his grave marker, for some unknown reason displays the cap badge of the Army Vetenary Corps and not the Household Battalion].
Although a former pupil of Scarborough’s Municipal School John Stanley Morrison’s name does not appear on the school ‘Roll of Honour’. nonetheless, his name is perpetuated in on a War Memorial in the town’s St. Saviours Church. Taking the form of an oak ‘Tryptich’ this memorial had been unveiled before a packed congregation during the evening of Monday the 24TH of April 1922 and contains the names of twenty two former members of the church that had lost their lives whilst on active service during the ‘Great War’ of 1914-1919 [following the Second World War a furhter eleven names had been added to this memorial]. John is also commemorated on a memorial in Scarborough’s Manor Road Cemetery [Section L, Row 25, Grave35], which also bears the name of his mother, Rachel Alice Morrison, who had died suddenly at her home at No.38 Roscoe Street on Wednesday the 2ND of December 1931 at the age of fifty-nine years.
Also included on the memorial is the name of John’s father, John Herbert Morrison who had continued to live in Roscoe Street with daughters Gertrude Winifred, Isobel Margaret, Jessie Evelyn, and Alice Louisa [married name Hick] until the early 1940s.when he had moved to No.14b Moor Lane, Newby. the Master Builder had eventually died in Scarborough Hospital on Tuesday the 28TH of April 1953 at the age of eighty-one years. In addition to the above, the memorial also bears the name of John Stanley’s four years old nephew, Gordon Lambert Hick, the only child of sister Alice ‘Louie’, and Noel Hick, who had passed away on the 12TH of May 1933.
The Morrison’s had also included an epitaph to their lost son on the memorial in Manor Road - ’He nobly answered Kitchener’s call for men, September 1914. He sleeps not in his native land but neath the foreign skies, far from those who loved him best in a hero’s grave he lies’…
Following the action at Rouex, Major General Lambton, the G.O.C. of 4TH Division, had reported of the battle directly to the King. Part of this report reads;
‘Your Majesty will be glad to hear that the Household Battalion did very well both on the 3RD when they attacked in the first wave and on the 11TH when they took Rouex Cemetery, a sort of Stronghold full of machine guns. Their dash and spirit has been all that I could wish and I think this success has thoroughly put them on their legs and they are now full of confidence and keen to fight. They were commanded by Major Kirkwood as Portal was away. I fear their losses have been heavy especially in officers [19 officers and 550 men]’…[4]
The Household Battalion had remained in the Arras Sector until September 1917 when the Fourth Division had been moved to Flanders for the beginning of the proposed Third Battle of Ypres [Passchendeale]. Again the battalion had been sorely mauled during the ensuing fiasco in the mud of Flanders, by October 1917 few of the original members of the unit had remained. By this time the replacements for the battalion’s casualties had not come from the Household Cavalry and the writing had been on the wall indicating the disbandment of the unit. The order had arrived at Battalion Headquarters on the seventh of February and by the 16TH the disbandment of the Household Battalion had been completed. A number of the officers had been transferred to the Foot Guards, whilst the majority of the men had been returned to their respective cavalry regiments. [7]
[1] At the time of the 1901 Census of York’s population the Hill family had been living in the City at No.24 Price Street and had consisted of Robert, aged 33years, Railway Engine Driver, born at Reepham, Lincolnshire. Isobel, aged 28years, born Yorkshire. Ada J. aged 7years, Gladys M. aged 6years, George A. aged 4years, Blanche aged 2 years, and Clair aged 1year. All the children were born at York.
[2] The History of the Green Howards in the Great War 1914-1918; Wylly.
[3] During the 1901 Census the Colley family had been living in Scarborough at
No.25 Livingstone Road and had consisted of George, aged forty one years, born at Scarborough, Annie, aged forty two years, born Seamer, North Yorkshire, Charles, aged twelve, twins Sidney and Edith aged ten, and Ernest aged eight years. All the children had been born at Scarborough.
[4] A short history of the Household Cavalry, Captain Sir George Arthur and Captain Shennan; Heinemann; 1926.
[5] At the time of the 1901 Census of Scarborough’s population the Morrison family had been residing at No.22 Britannia Street and had consisted of Joiner/Carpenter, John Henry, 29years old, Rachel Alice also aged 29 years, John Stanley, aged four years, and daughter Gertrude Alice, aged 2 years. All were born at Scarborough.
[6] Military Operations France and Belgium, Volume One, 1917. Captain Cyril Falls.
[7] Often cited as being amongst the finest body of men to serve on the Western Front during the war of 1914-18, the Household Battalion had, nonetheless, been virtually forgotten during the post war years. Thankfully during 2005 George William Harvey had produced a book entitled ‘The diary of a forgotten Battalion’ which includes this extract from Lambton’s report, and much more, hitherto unknown, information regarding the Battalion. It had once been stated that ‘The Battalion has fought nobly and has made a reputation that will live in history’, however, this had sadly not been the case. Nevertheless, thanks to the huge efforts of Mr Harvey, the memory of the Household Battalion and its magnificent band of men like Corporal John Stanley Morrison may endure a little longer before it once again vanishes into oblivion.
A few miles to the north of Rouex, in 1ST Army’s area of operations, had been the heavily fortified village of Oppy which had been defended on it’s western flank by an equally formidable wood, which by the third of May, had been a labyrinth of strong-points, and trench systems amidst a tangle of shell blasted and fallen trees;
‘The wood, in itself, was an admirable protection to the village, for it covered the latter from attack from the west. But in front of the wood was a well-organised system of trenches, well wired, with numerous communications [trenches], which covered Oppy from flanking attacks and practically enclosed both the wood and the village in a veritable maze of defences. The wood contained a large number of machine gun posts and all along the German front lines machine gun and mortars were well placed to repel any attack from the west. Moreover, Oppy Wood and village were held by German Guardsmen, some of the bravest of the enemy’s troops’…[1]
The unenviable task of capturing the village had fallen to the ‘Hull Pals’ of the 92ND Brigade of the 31ST Division. Consisting of the 10TH, 11TH, 12TH, and 13TH Battalions of the East Yorkshire Regiment, the Brigade had relieved the 99TH Brigade of 2ND Division in front of Oppy during the night of the 30th/April/1st of May, with orders to attack the wood and village at about 4am on the third of May. At 11-30 pm on the second the three battalion’s had moved up in brilliant moonlight [a move which had been observed by the enemy] to their allotted assembly position, a ‘scrape, in the ground barely 250 yards from the German trenches, which according to the Battalion’s History had been little more than; ‘a map reference rather than an actuality, for the taping party of May 1st had found it to be merely an isolated untraversed length of trench barely four feet deep, with no communication to the rear, nor any means of contact to left or right’…[1]
Whilst in their assembly position the men had made their final preparations for the forthcoming attack, and much more importantly, received their customary pre battle ration of treacle thick Army issue rum. Their moment of peace had however been broken when a German aircraft had flown over their position dropping flares amongst the assembled battalions. Furthermore, at around midnight an enemy patrol had been spotted, shortly after this [12-30], the enemy had begun a twenty-minute bombardment of the position, which had been renewed after a lull at 1-30am. This time the shelling had been more intense, and although few casualties had been incurred much confusion had been caused resulting in some platoons moving out of the way of the bombardment thus being in the wrong place at the launch of the assault.
At Zero Hour [3-45am] the British bombardment of the enemy’s positions had begun with a roar, timed to advance a hundred yards every four minutes, the barrage had encouraged the German artillery to reply with a vengeance, thus clouds of smoke and dust had added their pall to that of darkness thereby making it impossible for the troops to see a yard in front of them once the barrage had lifted from the enemy’s trenches. Nonetheless, with shells bursting all around them, the air whistling with machine gun and rifle bullets, and all the infernal din of the battlefield deafening their ears four waves of Hull men had disappeared into the clouds of smoke and dust towards Oppy Wood.
On the right of the assault had been the four companies of the Tenth Battalion. Former Hull school teacher Private J. Beeken of ‘C’Company describes;
‘We advanced to the attack, it was hell. Our shells were shrieking over us and bursting just in front. It was a creeping barrage advancing as we moved forward. The German shells were shrieking over us and bursting behind. Machine gun fire swept the whole front. Different coloured very light and rockets went up over the German lines’… [3]
Sorely decimated by the intense machine gun fire the survivors of the battalion had soon come across uncut wire, the men hacking at the entanglements with their spades and bayonets, some of the leaderless men [by this time the four company commanders had become casualties] had eventually been funnelled through the few gaps that had been made and had reached the enemy’s first line of trenches, Private Beeken says;
‘Although we were only about 100 yards from Oppy Wood I couldn’t se it, for a mist had descended. The fumes almost choked us and I had a splitting headache. As we walked on we saw a number of dead lying about. Eventually we met the sergeant major and his party who were lost. I was not surprised for we couldn’t see where we were going. All we could do was walk towards the lights’…
In the struggle for the first line the barrage had been lost, and had been rolling far ahead by the time those small parties of the battalion had penetrated the front system. Impossible to advance further, or to consolidate the line, the survivors had withdrawn to their original assembly point, and to shell holes nearby where they had remained throughout the remainder of a day filled with the whine and explosion of bursting shells, and incessant machine gun fire.
Similar conditions had met the assault by the 11TH Battalion, in the centre of the attack. The leading companies of the battalion had followed about fifty yards behind the creeping barrage, but the dust, smoke and darkness, added to the blackness of Oppy Wood beyond had made it impossible to tell when the screen of fire had lifted from the German front line. Raked by intense machine gun fire from the wood and a withering rifle fire from the enemy trenches, ‘B’ Company, on the right of the advance had nonetheless gone on bravely. The first attack by the unit had been repulsed, but out in No Man’s Land, still under heavy fire, the men had been reformed by their officers and led forward once again. Once again ‘B’ Company had been beaten back, however, a solitary platoon from the company, under the command of 2ND Lieutenant John Harrison [already the holder of a Military Cross], had gone forward yet again.
The band of men had eventually negotiated three belts of thick wire only to be stopped by fire from a machine gun sited in the extreme southern corner of Oppy Wood. Ordering his men to shelter in shell holes, Harrison, carrying a grenade had gone forward alone under the covering fire of his men in an attempt to subdue the gun, he had almost reached it and had hurled his bomb at the German crew when his men had seen him fall face downwards, his task completed, the gun had never fired again. [Harrison had eventually [June 1917] been awarded with a posthumous Victoria Cross for his ‘Conspicuous bravery and self sacrifice’ in the attack].
Inspired by the deeds of their C.O., Harrison’s men had made one more attempt to get forward but finding themselves isolated the men had again taken cover in shell holes, staying there throughout the remainder of that terrible day, to return to the Battalion’s original start line at nightfall. Despite a veritable hail of machine gun and rifle fire, the first and second waves of the 11TH ‘s ‘C’ Company had got into Oppy Wood and had penetrated as far as the outskirts of the village only to be cut off, at which point some of the men had been killed, the remainder taken prisoner.
The 12TH Battalion, on the right of the attack, had fared little better. The first wave of the right company had fought their way into the enemy’s strongly held front line trench, the following second wave had also gained a footing but had been forced to withdraw, the first wave, fighting ferociously had also eventually been forced to relinquish it’s tenuous hold and forced to beat a retreat. The centre company had also entered the enemy’s front line, but heavy counter attacks, in which hand grenades had been ‘freely used’ coming from the direction of the Wood and a nearby sunken road had forced this unit also to beat a retreat. The left company, despite suffering a number of casualties, including it’s commanding officer, during the barrage before Zero Hour had also gained a footing in the enemy’s front line, but heavy counter attacks had forced the Hull men to relinquish their hold and they too had been driven back the way they had gone.
The tattered remnants of the three battalions had made their way back to the original assembly point in front of Oppy Wood throughout the remainder of the 3RD. With the onset of darkness they had been joined by the men who had been sheltering in ‘No Man’s Land throughout the day, amongst them had been Private Beeken, who had been with a group of men huddled in one of the many shell craters;
‘There was always the possibility of the Germans coming forward so we kept a sharp lookout. We had plenty of excitement during the day for a sniper would persist in firing into our shell hole. He must have been in a tree but we couldn’t see him. It turned out to be a very fine day but it was very hot. Aeroplanes of both sides flew over us and of course the guns blazed away at them…At 5pm after having something to eat I was hit in the shoulder by a piece of shrapnel from the German guns firing at one of our aeroplanes. At 9pm we set off and eventually reached the scarcely recognisable trench of our company and then started to dig in. Many wounded men came to our trench and all the time Fritz kept up his shelling’…
During the following day the survivors of the 10TH Battalion had been assembled for the customary post battle ‘Roll Call’, which had found that of the sixteen officers and four hundred and eighty four other ranks who had gone into action the previous day, fifteen officers and two hundred and twenty three men had either been killed, wounded, or were ‘missing’. Amongst the four killed, seven wounded, two died from wounds, and a further three missing officers had been ‘A’ Company’s twenty-six years old Officer Commanding; Captain James Carlton Addy, Military Cross.
Born in the West Riding of Yorkshire at Hodroyd Hall, situated between the hamlets of Felkirk and South Hiendley, on the 19TH of October 1890, James had been the eldest son [brother Roland had been born on the 13TH of October 1891] of Mary [late Hammond, formerly Holloway] and James Jenkin Addy, the manager of the nearby Carlton Main Colliery.
The Addy family had arrived in Scarborough during 1902 and had taken up residence in the town in the well-heeled South Cliff area, at ‘Carlton’, No.9 Esplanade Crescent [at that time, in addition to this house, the Addy’s had also had a residence at ‘Osbourne House’ at Monk Bretton, a hamlet in South Yorkshire, situated a couple of miles outside Barnsley]. During the summer term of the year the two boys, then aged twelve and eleven, had become boarders at Mr Samuel Servington Savery’s ‘Bramcote Lodge’ Preparatory in Filey Road.
Addy’s ‘major’ and ‘minor’ had remained at Bramcote until the end of the Summer Term of 1905, when they had left the school to continue their studies at Shrewsbury Public School, in Shropshire. Members of a house named ‘Pickering’s’[now Churchill’s], by October 1905 James had been the House Captain of the second eleven football team, whilst brother Roland in ‘Remove Lower’ had been House Captain of the Third Eleven Football team, and Captain of the Second Eleven cricket team. James Addy had remained at Shrewsbury until the 22ND of June 1910 when he had been admitted as a ‘Pensioner’ to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had been a resident on ‘B’ Staircase in New Court. During April 1913 Addy had been awarded a Batchelor of Arts Degree in History [Parts1 and 2] and had eventually ‘gone down’ from Trinity during June 1913.
By the outbreak of war in August 1914 the seemingly inseparable brothers had been working in the city of Kingston Upon Hull, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where, at the beginning of September the first of four battalions of ‘Hull Pals’ had begun recruiting. Already Subalterns in the Territorial First/Fourth Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment, James and Roland Addy had applied for, and had received a transfer to the new [originally known as the 7TH [Hull] Battalion] battalion, joining the unit at Wenlock Barracks in Hull’s Anlaby Road during the second week of September 1914. By this time the unit had been at full strength [over a thousand men] and had already begun it’s training for war, albeit without weapons and uniforms. [1]
Basically a ‘middle class’ battalion composed of men from various offices and industries in Hull, ‘The ‘Commercials’ [The unofficial name used by the officers and men of the battalion throughout the war] had initially been billeted in their own homes and training had been carried out on any piece of open ground that had been available. The unit’s training had gradually taken on a wider aspect with the four companies practising extended order drill, outpost duty, judging distances and skirmishing. Company drill and physical training had also increased. As most of the new officers and men did not know what to do for physical training they had to parade at an earlier time than the men to learn the skills from those senior N.C.O.’s that did.
Nonetheless, training had gone ahead. Route marches had become progressively longer and went further afield. Drill became more complex and was held on grounds further from the city centre. These distant grounds being, of course, being reached by marching. Eventually the men had been initiated into musket training, aiming and trigger pressing, all of course without serviceable rifles and ammunition. By the beginning of November the men had at last begun to be issued with khaki uniforms, up until this time the only identification that the men had worn had been an armlet bearing the unit’s number.
The Addy’s had eventually left Hull with their battalion during November to move the few miles northwards to Hornsea, where the unit had been tasked with guarding the East Coast between Mappleton and Ulrome against a possible German invasion, quite what the battalion had been supposed to do in the event of such an occurrence armed with little more that a couple of obsolete rifles is not recorded.
The Commercials had endured the boredom of trench digging and trench routine at Hornsea until June 1915 when the battalion had marched, via Beverley, York and Boroughbridge to their new home at Ripon Camp, in North Yorkshire. Here the four Battalions of Hull Pals had been brought together for the first time to begin training as a whole Brigade. By October the Pals had been joined by the remaining two infantry Brigades [93RD and 94TH], plus the supporting artillery, medical, and engineering units that would make up the 31ST Division.
The division had left Ripon at the beginning of November 1915 to move down to Fovant on Salisbury Plain for more divisional training. By this time renamed the 10TH [Service] Battalion, the Hull Commercial’s had taken up residence at a Camp at Larkhill, where the men had at last been given instruction in the tool of their trade, the British Army’s standard Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle. [3]
With the onset of December the men’s thoughts had turn to the possibility of leave that Christmas, the War Office, however, had had different plans for the Division. It had originally been intended for the 31ST Division to proceed to the Western Front and with that in mind Divisional Headquarters had originally been informed that embarkation would begin on the ninth of December with advance parties leaving for Southampton and Folkestone on November 30TH and December 1ST respectively. However, on the second of December the Division had been warned that it would not be going to France after all; they would instead be going to Egypt. On the 2ND of December the division had received orders to prepare to move abroad at a very early date. The following day all the officers and men had been issued with sun helmets and identity discs. [Throughout the war it had usually been the practice for soldiers to be given forty-eight hours leave prior to embarkation, however, due to the short notice none of the Hull Brigade had got home prior to sailing for Egypt].
The Hull Brigade had begun their journey to Egypt on the 7TH of December 1915. The first Battalion to leave Salisbury Plain had been the Commercials who had marched out of camp in torrential rain dressed in sun helmets and greatcoats to the railway station at Salisbury where the men had boarded three trains that had taken them to Devonport.
The Battalion had boarded His Majesty’s Transport ‘Minnewaska’ the following day, the crowded ship sailing during the afternoon. Nine days later the troopship had made a short stop at Malta, sailing the same day, the Minnewaska had subsequently arrived at Port Said during the afternoon of December the 21ST. Shortly after it’s arrival the unit had disembarked and encamped outside the town in No.4 Camp.
Sent to Egypt to guard the Suez Canal against a perceived assault by the Turkish Army following the closing down of the Gallipoli campaign, the Thirty First Division had eventually been assigned, with the British 11TH, and 13TH Divisions, to Number Three Section [Northern], with the responsibility of defending the Canal between Port Said and El Fedan, some thirty miles south.
After a short period of acclimatisation, where the men had been allowed to indulge in a little sightseeing and trinket buying the Commercials had got down to the business of defending the Suez Canal, Bilton says;
‘For the few months that the Hull Brigade had been in Egypt life was both monotonous and at times very hard and taking the entries of the four battalions into account, of very little consequence. There were no Turks to fight or accidental killings or deaths to record as in the other battalions of the division, just the continual movement of one battalion from one place in the desert to somewhere else in the desert to relieve either one of the Hull battalions or a battalion from another brigade…[2]
Early in February 1916 the Addy brothers had finally been separated when Roland had received orders to return to England to join the training cadre of the recently formed 15TH [Reserve] Battalion [Hull], of the East Yorkshire Regiment, unlike his brother, Roland had survived the war.
James Addy, by February 1916, promoted to full blown Lieutenant, had remained in Egypt until the end of the month when the 31ST Division had received orders to embark for France. On the 29TH of the month the four battalions of Hull Pals had moved to Port Said where they had boarded the Transports, City of Edinburgh, Tunisian, and Simla. Thirty three officers, six warrant officers, and nine hundred and twenty men of the 10TH Battalion had taken passage in the ‘Tunisian’ supposedly to a secret destination, however, after exchanging their sun helmets for caps no one had been left in doubt as to where they were going.
Following an uneventful journey the ‘Tunisian’ had docked at Marseilles during the morning of the seventh of March, that afternoon the Commercials had disembarked to march to the harbour station of the Paris-Lyons-Mediterranean Railway where at 10-30pm they had boarded trains that set them on their way to the Western Front.
Three days later the battalion had arrived at their destination, the snow shrouded town of Longpre’-Les-Corps-Saints, where the sun bronzed men, some still wearing their sun helmets, had disembarked into a blizzard. After a short period of training and trench duty the 31ST Division had eventually been moved to the relatively quiet Ancre Sector of the Somme where they had taken over a section of the line in front of the village of Beaumont Hamel. By the opening day of the Somme Offensive however the Division had been in the front line facing the heavily fortified village of Serre, the objective of an attack which was to be made by the 93RD and 94TH Brigades of the Division [the Hull Brigade had remained in reserve]. At Zero Hour [7-30am] on that warm sunny day First of July, the Leeds and Bradford Pals of 93RD Brigade and the Barnsley and Accrington Pals of 94TH Brigade had left their assembly trenches to begin their advance towards their objective.
Within moments the ranks of the leading waves of Pals had been cut to pieces by heavy machine gun fire, nonetheless, in the early stages of the assault some progress had been made, but soon the two decimated Brigades had been driven back the terrible way they had gone. Watching the slaughter helplessly from support trenches, A and B Companies of the Commercials had eventually gone forward to cover the retreat of the survivors and had assisted many of the wounded back to the British front line. [During the attack at Serre the 31ST Division had suffered over four and a half thousand casualties].
Relieved during the night of the fourth of July, the sorely battered Division had played no further part in the Battle of the Somme until November when the Hull Brigade had been used in another attack on Serre. In thick fog on the thirteenth of November men of the British Third Division had launched their assault on the village. Placed on the extreme left flank of the attack three of the four Hull Battalions [most of the Tenth had been kept in reserve] had also gone forward to act as a flank guard.
The Hull men had initially captured a large section of the enemy’s lines, however, like the July First assault the attack had faltered, then failed as the Germans had mounted strong counter attacks. Nevertheless, the men from Hull had continued fighting throughout the day but had eventually been driven back to their original start line owing to the neibouring Third Division’s failure to secure Serre, which had left the right flank of the Hull Brigade perilously exposed to murderous enfilade fire. In the assault, the 12TH and 13TH Battalions had suffered two hundred and forty four killed and many more wounded, the 10TH had had just seven men killed and perhaps a dozen wounded. In the wake of Serre the Commercials had acquired another nickname, ‘The Lucky Tenth’.
Throughout the remainder of a winter that had proved to be the worst in living memory the Commercials had continued to take tours of duty in the line in the Ancre Valley and had provided men for the endless working parties. At the beginning of February 1917 the Germans had retreated to their newly created fortress named the Hindenburg Line. During the withdrawal Serre had been abandoned to the British, and the Hull Pals, without a shot being fired. As the Germans withdrew, a scheduled attack by the Commercials on the nearby village of Bucquoy had been cancelled due to the mud, which had resulted in insufficient ammunition getting through to the supporting artillery, once again the 10TH had been lucky, it would be the last time.
By the onset of April the Commercial’s had still been in the trenches in the Ancre Valley. Whilst there Addy had learned that he had been awarded ‘for conspicuous gallantry’ with the Military Cross. The award had been ‘Gazetted’ in the London Gazette of the third of May 1917. [Unfortunately no citation had accompanied the award therefore it is not known during which period he had gained the M.C.. Decorations without citations, the author has found, are awarded for a number of acts of gallantry, which may have been performed over months of service].
Preparations for the assault on Oppy Wood had begun on the First of May when officers and N.C.O.’s of the 10TH and 13TH Battalions had gone forward to see their respective assembly positions, returning the next morning to their various Battalion Headquarters which had been situated around the village of Bailluel. Throughout the remainder of the last day before the assault had been filled with issuing of the various stores needed for the operation, and a final briefing of the men. At 11pm that night the assembled men had begun their march to the assembly points. The first away had been the 11TH and 12TH Battalions, closely followed by the 10TH. The following day the three units had launched the attack, which had been the death of Captain James Carlton Addy.
Initially believed to be missing in action, confirmation of Addy’s death had afterwards come from Private Thomas Green who had advanced with the first wave of ‘A’ Company. Finding himself alone and approaching a German machine gun with a crew of twelve, the soldier had described;
’They had stopped firing for a moment and I threw a Mills bomb which wrecked the gun, killed four men and wounded one and the others then threw up their hands. Just then Captain J.C. Addy jumped into the trench and when he saw the prisoners he said ‘you’d better take them back, Green, you seem to have done your bit for today’. ‘Captain Addy had been killed shortly afterwards’…
Mary and James Addy had received a telegram from the War Office reporting their son as missing in action on Tuesday the eighth of May 1917; the tidings had subsequently been included in a Casualty List that had appeared in ‘The Scarborough Mercury’ of Friday the eleventh;
‘Scarborough Officer missing - Captain J.C. Addy, East Yorkshire Regiment, 9 Esplanade Crescent, is reported missing from May 3RD. Capt. Addy has been at the front since early in 1915, and has been engaged in severe fighting. He was last seen leading his men towards the German second line’…
[The news had also been relayed in the ‘Hull Daily Mail’ of Tuesday the 15TH of May].
Following that first notification from the War Office there had followed the heartbreaking period of not knowing which had been experienced by countless parents and wives throughout the war. Surprisingly, as late as June 1917 the Addy’s had received the news that their son had been awarded with the Military Cross. The ‘Mercury’ of Friday the eighth had reported;
‘Missing Scarboro’ Officer Honoured - Captain J.C. Addy, East Yorkshire Regiment, 9 Esplanade Crescent, who is reported missing from May 3RD, is one of those on whom the Military Cross has been confirmed’…
The dreaded official buff envelope containing the news of Addy’s death in action had finally arrived at No. 9 Esplanade Crescent during August 1917. The information had been included in a casualty listing which had been included in the ‘Scarborough Mercury’ of Friday the tenth;
‘Captain J. C. Addy. Captain J.C. Addy, M.C., East Yorks. Regt., eldest son of Mr. And Mrs. J.J. Addy, of Esplanade Crescent, Scarborough, who was reported as missing on May 3rd , is now stated to have been killed on that date. He was educated at Shrewsbury and Trinity College, Cambridge, and received his commission in August 1914’…
No remains identifiable as Captain James Addy had ever been found, either after the battle, or during the extensive searches of the battlefields at the war’s end. His name had eventually been included on the Arras Memorial to the Missing, which commemorates the names of nearly 35,000 casualties of the British, New Zealand, and South African Forces who had died between the spring of 1916 and 7TH of August 1918 in the Arras Sector for whom there is no known grave. Addy’s name can be located in Bays four and five of the Memorial.
In Scarborough, apart from the town’s War Memorial, James Carlton Addy’s name is commemorated on a ‘Roll of Honour’ located in his old school at ‘Bramcote’, in Filey Road. Further down the road in South Cliff Addy’s name can be found on a similar memorial inside St Martin’s, the Church he had attended every Sunday whilst a pupil at ‘Bramcote’. St Martins also has a small brass plaque located near the entrance to St George’s Chapel which reads; ‘
'To the glory of God and in memory of James Carlton Addy died May 3 1917 at Oppy Wood. Kenneth Balguy Addy died October 3 1916 at Vermelles. Joseph Noel Walker died July 2 1916 at Thiepval. And of all those from this parish who gave their lives during the Great War. This Chapel of St George is the offering of James Jenkinson Addy and Mary his wife’…
Addy’s name is also commemorated in the town on a ‘Roll of Honour’ in St Saviours Church, which is located on the corner of Gladstone Road, and Belle Vue Street. In addition, his name is to be found engraved on a monument in Manor Road Cemetery which also bears the names of his Sheffield born [January 9TH 1850] father, James Jenkin Addy, who had passed away in a Scarborough nursing home on the 28TH of June 1927, and his York born [23RD of May 1850] mother, Mary Addy who had subsequently died at her home in Esplanade Crescent on the 23RD of January 1937.
Shortly after the death of Addy, the magazine of Shrewsbury School, ‘The Salopian’, had included an obituary dedicated to their fallen student, the final sentence reads…
’In him Shrewsbury loses a very loyal and devoted friend and the nation a gallant and efficient officer, ‘sans peur et sans reproche’…
The remnants of the Tenth Battalion had eventually been relieved in the front line at Oppy Wood during the night of the fourth and fifth of May, the men moving to trenches near to the village of Gavrelle. In these positions for some days, the unit had inevitably suffered more casualties due to heavy enemy shellfire, amongst them; 10/933 Sergeant Albert Henry Nash.
Although born at Northampton Albert had lived for most of his life in Scarborough at No.8 Granby Place [Queen Street] with his parents, Sarah Emily and James Henry Nash, a Joiner/Carpenter by trade. [3]
A pupil of Friarage Board School between the ages of four and eleven years, Albert had eventually won a scholarship for entry into the town’s Municipal School, situated in Westwood [now a part of the Campus of Yorkshire Coast College]. Nash had remained at the ‘Muni’ until 1910, when he had left the institution to begin employment as an errand boy with the Hull branch of the Commercial Union Assurance Company, which had been situated in ‘The Avenue’, High Street, of the city.
By the outbreak of war Albert had graduated to the exalted post of clerk with the Commercial Union, nonetheless, on the first of September 1914 he had been amongst the first prospective recruits who had mustered outside the gates of Hull’s Wenlock Barracks eager to enlist into the first of the four battalions of ‘Hull Pals’. Nash had accepted the ‘King’s Shilling’ the same day and had gone on with the remainder of the recruits, to begin laying the bones of the 7TH Hull ‘Commercial’ Battalion. How well had he taken to the life can be gauged from the fact that during November Nash had been promoted to the rank of acting Lance Corporal, by the time the Battalion had left Ripon for Salisbury Plain the following October he had attained the rank of full Corporal.
A veteran of Egypt, and a survivor of the living hell of the Somme Offensive [where he had been promoted to Sergeant during December 1916], Nash had also survived the operations at Oppy Wood only to be killed by a splinter from an exploding shell on Monday the seventh of May 1917.
News of Albert’s death had reached his parents by the tenth of May; the tidings had subsequently been transmitted in a casualty list that had appeared in ‘The Scarborough Mercury’ of Friday the eighteenth of May;
‘Municipal scholar killed. The sad news has reached his mother at No.8 Granby Place, that Sergt. Albert Nash, East Yorks Regiment, was killed in action on the 7TH. An officer, in a sympathetic letter says Sergt. Nash, who was 23 years of age, was carrying food to comrades in an exposed position. He attended the Municipal School and enlisted in Hull, where he was employed on the outbreak of war. He had also served in Egypt with his regiment’…
The remains of Sergeant Nash had originally been buried by his comrades in ‘Ouse Alley’ Cemetery, near the village of Bailleul, however, between 1917 and the Armistice the following year, the cemetery had been hit by enemy shellfire which had destroyed many of the graves, including Nash’s. In essence killed twice, the soldier’s remains had never been located again. Following the Armistice ‘Ouse Valley’ had been cleared by the then, Imperial War Graves Commission, who had relocated the cemetery’s thirty eight British burials [possibly including some remains of Nash] in the nearby, and much larger Cemetery named ‘Orchard Dump’, located near the village of Arleux-en-Gohelle, where Nash had eventually been amongst six British and thirty eight Canadian servicemen who are commemorated by Special Memorials, as ‘known or believed to be buried in the Cemetery’.
A former member of the congregation of St Mary’s Parish Church, Albert’s name had eventually been included on a ‘Roll of Honour’, which is situated on the north interior wall of the church. Nash’s name had also been commemorated on the old Municipal School’s ‘Roll of Honour. The memorial, albeit with a new surround, is to be found in the entrance to Graham Comprehensive School, situated in Woodlands Drive, Scarborough.
During the post war years the Nash family had continued to live in Granby Place. On the 30TH of January 1928 the Scarborough born James Nash had died there at the age of 65years. He had been buried in Manor Road Cemetery three days later; a gravestone bearing his name and that of his soldier son is to be found in Section N, Border, Grave 15. Wakefield born Sarah Emily and her youngest daughter, Harriet Nash, had remained in Granby Place until the mid 1930’s when their name disappears from Scarborough’s Electoral Rolls.
The casualty returns of the two other Hull battalions had been equally harrowing. The 11TH Battalion had attacked with fifteen officers and four hundred and fifty four other ranks, of these eleven officers and two hundred and forty men had been lost. Of the fifteen officers and four hundred and seventy four other ranks of the 12TH Battalion who had begun the attack, ten officers and three hundred and seven men had either been killed, wounded, or were missing. Of the officers four had been killed outright, four were missing [later reported as killed], and two had been wounded, one of these had subsequently died from the effects of his wounds; Second Lieutenant Percy Moore.
Born in Scarborough during 1895 at No.23 West Bank, Percy had been the youngest son of Amelia and Master Builder, Abraham Moore. A builder with an enviable reputation by the turn of the century, Moore had eventually moved his family to the affluent Stepney Road area of Scarborough, the house at number one had been named ‘Rockville’, and had become the family home for almost forty years. [5]
At the age of four Percy Moore had begun his education at Gladstone Road Infants School, which had been under the Headship of the austere Miss Julia Pritchard, and had been a pupil of the school when on the sixth of February 1901 it had closed for the day to enable the children to hear the proclamation of the accession of King Edward the Seventh. Unlike many of his contemporaries Moore had never graduated to the Municipal School and had eventually left ‘Glaggo Road’ during 1908, at the age of thirteen, to work with his father in the family business, which had been based in the Moore’s former home in West Bank.
Moore had remained in the family business until September 1914 when he had enlisted [at Scarborough] as a Private into the West Yorkshire Regiment. Shortly after he had accepted the ‘King’s Shilling’ Moore had been posted to Fulford Barracks at York, where he had joined the ranks of recruits of the newly formed 12TH [Service] Battalion. After a period of training at Fulford the twelfth battalion had moved down to Hertfordshire where the unit had been incorporated in the 63RD Brigade of the 21ST Division. The battalion had been involved in training at divisional level until July 1915, when the various units comprising 21ST Division had moved to the Aldershot area prior to being sent to France. The Division had begun to leave Britain at the beginning of September 1915 and by the thirteenth the whole of the formation had been concentrated to the west of St Omer.
Soon after their arrival in France the men of 21ST Division [and 24TH Division] had been catapulted into the disastrous Battle of Loos. Following a gruelling series of night marches totalling forty miles; the division had travelled from St Omer to the village of Lillers, some sixteen miles from the Loos front, where the unit had expected to be held in reserve. Barely trained, exhausted, and with no front line experience, the division had nonetheless received orders to proceed to the front during the twenty fourth of September and had embarked that night on nightmarish march in pouring rain which had been likened to ‘trying to push the Lord Mayor’s procession through the streets of London without clearing the route and holding up the traffic’. Indeed, So chaotic had been the march up to the front that the two divisions had arrived incomplete, only the leading brigades were in position by the opening of the offensive, with the rear brigades more than three miles behind.
The two divisions had eventually been thrown into action during the afternoon of Sunday the twenty-six of September. The formations had begun their advance over open ground towards the Bois Hugo in the belief that their role had been to pursue a retreating and disorganised enemy. Instead they were advancing towards an enemy line that had been substantially reinforced during the night and was protected by strong, and intact, barbed wire entanglements and concrete machine gun emplacements.
Unsupported by artillery the advancing forty thousand men had presented an awesome sight. German observers had seen what had seemed to be ten columns of extended lines of infantry. Consternation had turned to amazement due to the lack of artillery covering fire, a German regimental history records; ‘A target was offered to us as had never been seen before, nor even thought possible. The machine guns opened fire at 1500 yards and, although men fell in there hundreds, the survivors pushed on. Never had machine guns had such straightforward work to do’. Another had recorded: ‘with barrels burning hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the ranks unceasingly: one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. Some attackers actually got as far as the German wire but: Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle, the survivors turned and began to retire’… A total failure, the attack had cost the 21ST and 24TH Divisions over eight thousand killed and wounded.
Fortunate to be amongst the survivors of the battalion’s catastrophic ‘baptism of fire’, Moore had continued to serve on the Western Front. During October 1915 the Twelfth West Yorks had been transferred to the Ninth Brigade of the veteran Third Division [a pre war unit of the Regular Army which had been one of the first British Formations to land in France during August 1914]. Moore had eventually served with this unit in the Somme Offensive, seeing action in the Battle’s of Albert [1-13 July], Bazentin Ridge [14-17 July], and Delville Wood [15 July-3 September].
By October 1916 Moore had become a seasoned warrior of the fighting on the Somme, where the terrible daily casualty rate had ensured rapid promotion. During November Moore had been selected as a potential officer, and had been sent back to England for a short course of ‘training’. By the New Year Moore had been ‘gazetted’ as a Second Lieutenant and had been posted to the Twelfth East Yorks, joining the unit, still reeling from the Serre attack, at Hebuterne in mid January 1917.
Recruited originally from the various sports clubs and associations of Hull, the Twelfth Battalion had suffered heavy casualties at Serre including fourteen of the sixteen officers who had taken part in the assault [Moore had probably been a replacement for 2ND Lieut. Edward Wilfred Estridge of ‘B’ Company who had been reported as missing, believed killed in action during the assault, his remains were never found]. Despite the enormous casualties, there had been rewards for the Battalion. Scunthorpe born [1897], 12/21 Private John Cunningham, had secured a Victoria Cross for the unit for ‘most conspicuous bravery and resources’ during the operation. The citation for the award, included in the London Gazette of the 13TH of January 1917 reads; ‘After the enemy’s front line had been captured, Private Cunningham proceeded with a bombing section up a communication trench. Much opposition was encountered and the rest of the section became casualties. Collecting all the bombs from the casualties, this gallant soldier went on alone. Having exploded all his bombs, he returned for a fresh supply and again proceeded to the communication trench, where he met a party of ten of the enemy. These he killed and cleared the trench up to the enemy line. ‘His conduct throughout the day was magnificent’…
[Cunningham had survived the war despite being wounded during 1918; he had eventually died at Hull on the 21ST of February 1942 at the age of 45years].
During February the Germans had begun their withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line. The Hull Brigade had been engaged in follow-up operations until the twelfth of March, when the formation, with the remainder of 31ST Division, had been transferred to the Arras Sector, in preparation for the forthcoming Spring Offensive. On the nineteenth the Hull men had been at a village named Robecq, where the various battalion had been occupied with training exercises. On the eighth of April the brigade had left Robecq for trenches near Vimy Ridge, [which would fall to the Canadians the following day]. During the next three weeks the Brigade had continued it’s programme of training, all the while moving inexorably towards Oppy Wood.
The Hull Brigade had arrived in the area towards the end of April. During the night of the 29TH and 30TH the brigade had begun the process of relieving the 99TH Brigade of the 2ND Division in the trenches facing the wood. Throughout this, the Germans, aware of what had been taking place, had put up an intense artillery bombardment of the positions with High Explosive, Lachrymatory [tear gas], and two other types of gas shells, which had made the exchange all the more difficult due to the men having to wear their gas masks. Fortunately only one man had been gassed. This shelling had been the prelude to an attack which had been made by German bombers and rifle grenadiers, luckily the attack had soon been repulsed and the attackers driven off. Their introduction to the sector had cost the Hull Battalions eleven men killed.
Moore and the remainder of the grievously wounded had lain in no mans land throughout the remainder of that long hot spring day. With the onset of darkness stretcher parties from the 13TH Battalion had gone out to bring in their comrades, amongst the carrying parties had been Private Surfleet, who had recorded in his diary;**
‘We went out at night on a stretcher bearing party; quite the most efficient and well-organised affair I have been on. We first of all got in all the wounded we could find and scoured the whole area. I think it is credible that every wounded man was brought in: a different tale to that of previous attacks on this seemingly impregnable wood, and far easier than that of that unforgettable November 13TH, when mud and shelling made the task almost impossible. There were dozens of dead bodies about, we collected all we could and stacked them in piles ready for removal to a decent burial further back. I am still amazed at the casual way we piled those bodies like so many huge logs, without any sense of horror at such a gruesome task’…
Moore had eventually been evacuated to the village of Aubigny-en-Artios, a village situated some twelve miles to the north west of Arras, where the 42ND Casualty Clearing Station had been situated, here, despite the efforts of the Royal Army Medical Corps surgeons he had died on Saturday the Fifth of May 1917 at the age of twenty-two years.
News of Percy’s death had reached the Moore family by the following Wednesday, the tidings had been included in a casualty list which had appeared in ‘The Scarborough Mercury’ of Friday the eleventh;
‘A son of Councillor Moore Killed - Councillor and Mrs. Moore, of Rockville, Stepney Road, Scarborough, have received intimation that their youngest son, Second Lieut. Percy Moore, East Yorks. Regt. has died from wounds. He was only 22, and with his brother, George Edward Moore, now a Second Lieutenant, he joined up within a month after the war broke out. Percy joined the West Yorks, as a private, and gained a commission, being transferred to the East Yorks. George joined the Royal Fusiliers as a private, and has now gained a commission.
Second Lieutenant Percy Moore was in the first battle of Loos, and he has now, as stated, met his death on the Western Front. He was wounded, says a letter from the Chaplain, last Thursday, and died on Saturday. Before the war he was engaged with his father in the building trade’…
[Percy’s brother, George Edward Moore had served as a Temporary Second Lieutenant with the 23RD [Service] Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers [1ST Sportsmen] and had been decorated with the Military Cross on the 8th of June 1918 for ‘conspicuous gallantry’ during the German Spring Offensive of March 1918.The award had been ‘Gazetted’ in the London Gazette of the 26TH of July 1918, the citation reads; ‘He held a position against repeated enemy attacks, and when a party of the enemy secured a lodgement on his flank, he led forward a party and expelled them, killing most of them. He set a splendid example of gallantry and what a platoon commander should be’… He had survived the war].
The remains of Lieutenant Moore had eventually been buried in the C.C.S.’s burial ground, which after the war had been taken over by the then, Imperial War Graves Commission, and named Abigny Communal Cemetery Extension. Moore’s grave is located in Section 4, E, [Grave 16] of the cemetery.
In Scarborough, apart from the town’s War Memorial atop Oliver’s Mount, Percy’s name is commemorated on a ‘Roll of Honour’ in the hall of Gladstone Road Junior School. The memorial, a large brass plaque contains the names of seventy-one male, and two female [V.A.D. nurses and sisters E.W. and M.M. McLaughlin] former pupils of the school who had lost their lives during the Great War.
Percy’s name can also be found on a gravestone in Dean Road Cemetery [Section E, Border, Grave 23], which also bears the name of his mother, Amelia Moore, who had died on the 31ST of December 1925 at the age of sixty-four years. Following the death of his wife Abraham Moore had married Elizabeth Maynard [born in Scarborough during 1890, the youngest daughter of plumbing contractor David, and Elizabeth Maynard] during 1934, the couple living at ‘Rockville’, where Abraham Moore had passed away three years later on the 29TH of May 1937 at the age of seventy-five years. One of the main contractors involved in the building of Scarborough’s future Town Hall, and the General Post Office in Aberdeen Walk in addition to the hundreds of houses and smaller properties which had been built by his firm, Moore had been elected into the town council during 1908 and had become a Justice of the Peace during 1920.
Twice elected as Scarborough’s Mayor, 1928 and 1929, he had become an Alderman of the town in January 1933. Long considered ‘the father of Scarborough Town Council’, Moore had for over fifty years been a local preacher and a circuit steward at St Sepulchre Street Methodist Church [now demolished], where, a service had been conducted in his honour on Tuesday the first of June prior to his burial at Manor Road Cemetery [Abraham Moore’s name is also included on the memorial]. Also included on the stone is the name of Percy’s nephew, Edward Percy Moore, the five and a half years old son of George Edward and Elsie May Moore, who had died on the 2ND of December 1929.
Abraham Moore’s second wife, Elizabeth, had survived her husband by almost fifty years; she had died on the 29TH of June 1985 at the age of 95 years, and is also buried [with her parents] in Manor Road Cemetery.
A further attempt to capture Oppy Wood and the village beyond had been made on the 28TH of June 1917. On that occasion the brunt of the assault had been borne by the 94TH Brigade, the Hull Pals merely taking a supporting role. The attacking force had initially been shelled in their assembly area that had caused around two hundred casualties; despite this the attack had gone ahead as planned. The Official History [Volume Two 1917] records;
‘So rapid was the advance that when the barrage fell on no man’s land, three minutes after the start, it was already clear of troops. In the actual assault, casualties were incurred, and besides two hundred prisoners taken, 280 German dead were counted in the captured area’…
The third of May had almost been the death of the Hull Battalions. Following the killing off or wounding of almost all of the last of the veterans who had enlisted in the city three years before, the four battalions had never been the same again and had soldiered on throughout the remainder of the war predominately composed of underage youths, many with no Hull connections, conscripts, and men who had been transferred from other units.
Shortly after the operation at Oppy Wood the 31ST Division had been withdrawn to the Gavrelle Sector where they had occupied the line alongside the 63RD [Royal Naval] Division. Never a quiet sector of the Western Front, there had been a constant drain of men who had become casualties to the deplorable conditions, trench raids, snipers bullets, and exploding shells. Officially referred to as ’trench wastages’, amongst the casualties of Thursday the 18TH of May had been the thirty three years old; 12/611 Private Harry Craven Busfield.
Born in Whitby during 1884, Harry had been the eldest son of Jane Elizabeth, and Thomas Craven Busfield, a Joiner/Carpenter by trade. The Busfields had arrived in Scarborough at the turn of the century, and by 1901 the family had been residing at No.14 Lyell Street. Aged seventeen at the time, Harry had secured a job as a Drapers Apprentice with local drapers Hopper and Mason, whose shop had been located at No.100 and 101 Westborough.
By the time of the out break of war Busfield had been working in the City of Sheffield, swept along by the flood of men enlisting into the newly created ‘Kitchener’s Citizens Army’, he had enlisted at Sheffield City Hall during September 1914. An original member of the 12TH York and Lancs [Busfield’s service number shows that he had been the six hundredth and eleventh man to enlist into the battalion], a battalion which had begun to form in Sheffield on the 5TH of September 1914.Initially predominantly composed of city office workers, the battalion is remembered by Private Frank Lindley of the 14TH York and Lancs [Second Barnsley Pals];
‘I’ll always remember the Sheffielders with their handkerchiefs stuffed up their sleeves and their wristwatches flashing in the sun. They were the elite of Sheffield. We were the ragged arse battalion, but they were the coffee and bun boys’…
Harry had eventually served with the unit in Egypt and subsequently ‘on the Somme, where he had taken part in the first disastrous assault on the village of Serre, on the opening day of the Offensive [the first of July 1916]. Although severely wounded Busfield had been extremely fortunate to be amongst the survivors of the massacre of 94TH Brigade during this operation [of the Sheffield Battalion alone, which had begun the action that day with 680 officers and men, a mere hundred and sixty eight had remained by the end]. Busfield had subsequently been evacuated to a hospital in England where he had remained until December 1916. Duly returned to the front, the soldier had subsequently endured that most terrible of winters in the flooded trenches of the Ancre Sector and had taken part in the operations following the withdrawal of the enemy towards the Hindenburg Line.
A widow by May 1917[Thomas Busfield had died at the age of 62 years on the 16TH of May 1915], Jane Busfield had been residing in Scarborough at a house named ‘The Lindens’ at No.103 Prospect Road when the news of her son’s death had been reported by the War Office. The tidings had appeared in ‘The Scarborough Mercury’ of Friday the 8TH of June 1917;
‘A widow’s loss - Mrs. Busfield, The Lindens, 103 Prospect Road, Scarborough, has received official news that her son, Private Harry Craven Busfield, York and Lancaster Regiment, has been killed in action. He was a single man, about 31 years f age, and he enlisted in September 1914. He was a draper, and served his apprenticeship at Scarborough, but later was employed at Sheffield. It was at Sheffield where he enlisted. After enlisting he went to Egypt and subsequently to France. He was wounded in the battle of the Somme last July, and he returned to France in December. H e was the only remaining son of Mrs. Busfield whose husband, Mr Thomas Busfield, died two years ago after a long illness; whilst the younger son [Thomas Melton], who was on a merchant vessel, was drowned four years ago. There are four daughters’…
Killed by the explosion of a shell, the remains of Harry Busfield had never been found and his name had eventually been included on the Arras Memorial to the Missing, at Arras. His name can be located in Bay Eight.
Harry’s name can also be found on a memorial in Scarborough’s Manor Road Cemetery [Section K, Row 4, Grave 72] which also bears the names of his Whitby born father, and Scarborough born younger brother, Thomas Melton Busfield, a seaman in the British Mercantile Marine, who had been drowned in the Brazilian port of Para on the fourth of January 1913 at the age of twenty years.
Also included on the memorial is the name of Harry’s younger sister Lilian Mary [born in Scarborough during 1888] Busfield, a victim of the post war ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic, who had died on the 26TH of March 1919 at the age of thirty one years. Having survived a husband and three of her children, Jane Elizabeth Busfield had eventually passed away at her home in Prospect Road on the fifth of December 1929 at the age of seventy-three years. Three days later her remains had been buried with those of her husband and daughter in Manor Road Cemetery.
The Busfield’s eldest daughter Jenny [born in Scarborough during 1886] had married ‘Great War’ veteran Thomas William Clayton, who had served in the East African campaign with the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, with whom he had been mentioned in despatches and awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. William Clayton had eventually become a ‘’traveller’ for office equipment company, Messrs J.C. King of London and had also served as the part time Signals Officer with the Scarborough based Territorial Army 5TH Battalion of the Green Howards. At the beginning of the Second World War, the fifty one years old Clayton had joined the Home Guard, and had served as a Captain in the Pioneer Corps until the eighth of August 1940, when the ship he had been taking passage in had been sunk in the English Channel. Clayton’s body had eventually been washed ashore on the coast of Southern Ireland and had been buried, with full military honours in Termon Old Graveyard at Dungloe, in County Donegal.
Living in Scarborough at No14 Prospect Park at the time of her husband’s death, Jenny Clayton, the mother of two sons [one of whom had served in the Royal Air Force during the war] had eventually died on the 18TH of August 1976 at the age of ninety-one years. Jenny and Thomas Clayton are also commemorated in the family plot in Manor Road Cemetery. The author has been unable to locate any information regarding Harry Busfield’s two youngest sisters, Annie Elizabeth, and Emma Busfield, born in Scarborough during 1889 and 1891 respectively.
On the ninth of November 1918 units of the 31ST Division had crossed the Scheldt and had been located at Renaix when the last shots of the war had been fired had been fired two days later. News of the Armistice had reached 10TH Battalion’s Headquarters at 2am, nine hours before the cessation of hostilities; the diarist of the unit’s War Diary had recorded;
’Battalion runners carried the news to the companies at 6am, when such a heavy bombardment was in progress so very near at hand that most of our men turned over for that last hour in bed well nigh incredulous! Later, when the men began to stir and to discuss the momentous news, there was a surprising lack of enthusiasm. The war had continued for so long that we had come to know army life pretty well—civilian life would mean taking a fresh plunge- besides breaking up what seemed lifelong friendships’…
Demobilisation of the 31ST Division had commenced by the end of 1918; by April 1919 the four Hull Battalions had been reduced to cadre strength [around four officers and forty men], the following month the remains of the units had arrived back in England. On the 26TH of May 1919 the Hull Pals had finally returned to the city, where they had been met at Paragon Station by crowds of well wishers, and a host of local dignitaries, including the Lord Mayor of Hull [Councillor Peter Gaskell]. Shortly afterwards to the strains of ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘The’ Yorkshire Lass’ the men had marched along the packed Jameson Street, King Edward Street and through Alfred Gelder Street to the Guildhall, where after taking the salute, the parade had been addressed by the Mayor, who had told them; ‘You have fought a fight, you have gained a victory, you have won a peace’. Eventually the Hull Pals had dispersed and been officially demobilised. At the time only one officer was serving in ‘The Commercials’ who had joined the Battalion in September 1914. There had been about a hundred and twenty original ‘other ranks’ still remaining with the unit.
Apart from the capture of Fresnoy by the Canadian Corps the operations of Thursday the Third of May 1917[later named the Third Battle of the Scarpe] had been a total disaster. Conceived in haste this last great thrust of the Arras Offensive had been doomed to failure from the outset. Extending all the way from the Vimy – Acheville road in the north to the village of Bullecourt sixteen miles to the south, it had been an enormous frontage of assault for the three British Armies. Haig had known full well that the enemy had bolstered the defences of the Hindenburg Line with seven fresh divisions of infantry, whereas, only two of the fourteen British Divisions could in any have been called ‘fresh’. In addition, there had only been two days notice given of the impending operation, the preparations of which, had in all manners, been skimped, some units had not received their attack orders until one hour before the launch of the assault. As Falls so rightly comments in the Official History [P450]; ‘The capture of Fresnoy was the culminating point of the series of brilliant successes by the Canadian Corps during the Arras battles, and the relieving feature of a day which many who witnessed it consider the blackest of the war’…
[1] The East Yorkshire Regiment in the Great War, 1914-18; Everard Wyrall; Harrison & Sons 1928.
[2] David Bilton; ‘Hull Pals’; Pen and Sword Books Ltd, 1999.
[3] During December 1914 the official designations of the four Hull Battalions had been altered to that of ‘Service’ Battalions, thus the 1ST Hull had become the 10TH Service, the 2ND Hull the 11TH Service, the 3RD Hull 11TH Service, and the 4TH Hull the 13TH Service Battalions.
[4] At the time of the 1901 Census of Scarborough’s population the Nash family had been residing at No.8 Granby Place and had consisted of Scarborough born 38 years old James Henry, Wakefield born Sarah Emily, aged 35 years, Annie aged 9years, Albert aged 7years, Florence aged 5years, and Harriet, aged two months. With the exception of Albert, all the children had been born in Scarborough.
[5] During the 1901 Census the Moore family had consisted of Filey born, Abraham, aged 39 years, Amelia also aged 39 years, Clara aged 11years, Lillian aged 9years, George aged 7 years, Percy aged 6years, and Florence aged 3years, all of whom had been born in Scarborough. [Another son, Edgar, had been born during March 1899, he had died on the 26TH 0f October aged seven months and had been buried Scarborough’s Manor Road Cemetery, his [broken] grave marker can be located in Section O, Row 17 of the Cemetery].
The author would like to express his gratitude to the following people who had responded so kindly to his enquiries regarding James Carlton, and Roland Addy; Headmaster Andrew Lewin B.A., John Horton M.A., Director of Sport and History, of Bramcote Preparatory School, Scarborough. Anisa Malik-Mansell, Librarian at Moser Library, Shrewsbury School, Shrewsbury, and Adam C. Green, Assistant archivist and Modern Manuscripts Cataloguer, of Trinity College Library, Cambridge. Without their assistance the story of the Addy brothers would have remained incomplete.
‘The Blood Tub - Simultaneous with the opening of First and Third Armies operations north of the Scarpe, Fifth Army, at the southern extreme of the Arras Sector, had renewed its struggle for possession of the Hindenburg Line and the village of Bullecourt. Reduced to rubble by May Bullecourt had nonetheless continued to be a veritable hornets nest of machine gun positions which had been hidden in the honeycomb of cellars underneath the village, thus making Bullecourt one of the most formidable positions of the Hindenburg Line.
Following a tremendous saturation barrage by supporting artillery the assault had been renewed at 3-45am on Thursday the third of May. North of Bullecourt the Second Australian Division, using two brigades of infantry [5TH and 6TH] had attacked two trench systems of the Hindenburg Line know as ‘O.G.1’ and ‘O.G.2’. According to the precisely timed schedule both of these positions should have been taken by 4-20am, however, when the leading waves of the Fifth Brigade [on the right of the assault] had reached the enemy wire they had been held up by the customary wall of intense machine gun fire, both from the German lines and from concealed positions to their left and right. Succeeding waves of ‘Diggers’ coming through were also caught, and in the ensuing panic, an order to retire had been given. The rear waves, unaware of what had been happening, saw men coming back and followed suit. By 4-45am about 400 unwounded men had been back in the original start line, leaving behind many of their comrades trapped in shell holes near the German line.
The attack made by 6TH Brigade, despite the superhuman efforts of probably the best British soldiers on the Western Front, had also gone awry due to the severity of the enemy’s resistance. Nevertheless, a number of men had entered both of the trench systems, where vicious exchanges of bombs had taken place throughout the remainder of that most savage of days. Despite a number of attempts to dislodge them, these men had managed to hold on precariously to a small section of the front and support trenches.
On the Australians left flank had been the Territorials of the British 62ND [2ND West Riding] Division. Taking part in their first major action, the formation had been given the monumental task of attacking Bullecourt itself, and trenches to the west of the village. The division’s three brigades of infantry assisted by eight tanks [the highly distrustful Australians had refused to use tanks in their assault] had ‘gone over the top’ at the same time as the Australians and had met similar conditions and had achieved the same ‘mixed results’. On the right, the 185TH brigade had found the wire well cut and units of the formation had quickly captured part of ‘O.G.1’ and pressed on into the village, where they had established a post near to the ruined church and one in the northern outskirts of the village. The 186TH Brigade had also found the wire well cut. The 2ND/5TH Duke of Wellington’s Regiment had reached the support line where they had established touch with the 185TH Brigade. The 2ND/6TH Dukes on the left had, however, found the wire uncut. The first wave had got into shell holes, those behind closed upon it, and there had been such confusion, increased by bombs thrown by the Germans that that no further progress had been made. The attack made by 187TH Brigade had also degenerated into total confusion. At least part of the 2ND /4TH York and Lancaster Regiment, on the right had reached the support trench. The 2/5th on the left, crossed the first line without recognising it and had entered the sunken Lagnicourt to St Martin road, but attempts to advance further had been met by heavy fire. By 6-50am the situation had been so confused that it had been decided that the protective artillery barrage should be maintained on the second objective until a further advance could be organised.
Repeated attempts later in the morning by the 186th and 187th Brigades to make ground had been beaten back and by mid day the remnants of 185TH brigade had been driven out of Bullecourt. The remains of the other two brigades had shortly followed suit. By late afternoon it had been clear that the division had failed in its attempt to capture Bullecourt and had been in no fit state to try again. During the assault the 62ND Division had suffered almost three thousand casualties.
Of the tanks [from No.12 Company, D Battalion] which had taken part in the attack, three had actually entered Bullecourt, one of them had been in the village for at least an hour and a half until it had been hit and eventually set on fire. The other two had eventually returned to the start line. The remainder of the tanks had also been forced to withdraw.
Determined to maintain the precarious footholds in the Hindenburg Line and Bullecourt, the Commanding Officer of Fifth Corps [Fanshawe] had insisted that the attack had been renewed, thus, over the ensuing fourteen days of unremitting bloodshed six British and Australian Divisions had been committed to an operation of very little military value and had been engaged in fighting the ferocity of which had never before been experienced during the whole of the war. Not for nothing would the Second Battle for Bullecourt be baptised, ‘The Blood Tub’.
During the afternoon of the third units of the veteran Seventh Division had taken over the line from the shattered 62ND Division. The attack had been resumed at 10-30 that night. On that occasion the 22ND Brigade had been used, Fielding it’s four battalions of infantry, of which the Second Battalion of the Honourable Artillery Company, and 1ST Royal Welch Fusiliers had advanced from the railway south of Bullecourt, their objectives had been a trench system on the southern outskirts, and another running through the centre of the village. The other two units, 2ND Royal Warwickshires, and 20TH Manchesters, were to remain in reserve in readiness to go through the other battalions once they had secured their objectives, and capture the remainder of the village.
The attack had duly begun at 10-30 that night, almost immediately the two battalions had come under the intense machine gun fire that Bullecourt had become infamous for and as a consequence had suffered heavy casualties. That attack had failed in the darkness and by 2am the brigade had been arranging a new bombardment, with a view to two fresh battalions ‘going in’. Still in darkness, and unfamiliar with their objectives, the 20TH Manchesters and 2ND Warwickshires had been ordered into the attack at 3-am on the fourth of May. As the men had been forming up on the line of the railway embankment the Germans had got wind of what had been taking place and had saturated the position with heavy shellfire, causing the Manchesters some eighty casualties.
The attack had eventually begun at 4am by which time the men had been reorganised. Small parties of the Mancunians had fought their way into the southwest corner of Bullecourt but had been unable to hold on to these positions. Throughout the day attempts had been made by Brigade Headquarters to find out what had happened to the attack, but most of the patrols which had tried to penetrate into the village had been badly shot up by an enemy, who had clearly still been in Bullecourt in strength.
During the fifth of May the 22ND Brigade had been withdrawn having suffered almost eight hundred casualties for very little gain, their place being taken by the 20TH Brigade, which, over the following three days had made further assaults on Bullecourt, which had gained a few yards of blood soaked earth in the south east f the village, but in so doing the formation had also incurred serious casualties on a similar magnitude to those of 22ND Brigade. By the tenth of May the 91ST Brigade had taken over, and two days later the assault had been spearheaded by the 2ND Queen’s [Regiment] and 1ST South Staffordshires, each supported by a company from the 21ST Manchesters. Again some ground had been gained in the south east portion of Bullecourt, however, the arrival of three companies from the 22ND Manchesters had merely succeeded in congesting an already overcrowded communication trench in which they had been forced to take shelter until the fall of night. By mid day the operation had been at a standstill, and utterly worn out.
Seventh Division had repeatedly attacked Bullecourt for the next two days. On the fourteenth of May, the Division had been amongst the rubble and dust that had once been a village once again. The 20TH Manchesters left flank had lay on the site of the almost vanished village church, to their left had been the Honourable Artillery Company, holding a ‘lodgement’ to the north of a position known as the ‘Red Patch’. Scattered along the eastern and southern perimeter of the village had been groups of the 21ST Manchesters. At dawn the following day the Germans had launched a concentrated attack by two fresh battalions of elite Guard Fusiliers with the intention of regaining their lost positions. The centre left of the 20TH Manchesters and the H.A.C. had initially buckled under the weight of the assault, however, bolstered by Headquarters cooks, bottle washers, signallers and servants, and a follow up counter-attack by the 20TH Manchesters reserve company, the line had eventually been restored.
Utterly spent and worn out by the 16TH of May, the Seventh Division had been withdrawn from the line the same day, leaving behind a scene of total devastation, and a hundred and twenty eight officers and two thousand five hundred and fifty four men of the division who had become casualties, eight hundred and seventy nine of which being recorded as killed, or missing in action. Amongst them had been the thirty-three years old; 36742 Private Charles Philpot.
Born in Scarborough on the 5TH of June 1884[Baptised at St Mary’s Parish Church on the 29TH] at No.24 Mill Street, Charles had been the eldest son of Sarah Jane and ‘Jet Worker’ William John Philpot. A pupil of the Central Board School, which had been situated on the corner of Trafalgar Street West and Melrose Street [in 2004 the site is occupied by Genevieve Court] between the ages of four and fourteen, Charles had left the institution at the end of the summer term of 1898 to begin an apprenticeship in the ‘Gentleman’s Hairdressing Saloon’ of Mr Alfred Holland, which had been located at No.64 Westborough. [1]
A qualified hairdresser by 1905, Charles had established his own hairdressing ‘saloon’ on the ground floor of the Philpot family home at No.92 St Thomas Street where he had carried on a business until 1909, when Philpot had left Scarborough to cross the Pennines into Lancashire, where he had settled in Shaw, a cotton producing village situated some three miles to the north of Oldham [now a part of Greater Manchester]. On the 8TH of April 1912 at St Paul’s Parish Church, York [Holgate Road], the twenty seven years old Charles had married Caroline Victoria, the twenty five years old daughter of ‘Engine Fitter’ Joseph Rotherham, of No.9 Rosary Terrace, York. The couple had eventually returned to Shaw to live at No. 128 Oldham Road, where their only child, Roland Charles, had been born on the 31ST of August 1913.
One of over a million Britons between the ages of nineteen and thirty who had joined Kitchener’s ‘New Army’ for three years, or the duration, in the first few months of the war [by December 1914 1,186,357 men had enlisted], Philpot had enlisted into the sixth of eight battalions of the Manchester Regiment to be raised by the City, at Shaw during November 1914. Typically, during November and December 1914 a lack of suitable accommodation had necessitated the new recruits to continue to live in their own homes and had commuted into Manchester by tram for training in places such as Belle Vue and City Hall. At first the men had trained in their ‘civvies’, and had eventually been issued with a much-maligned temporary blue uniform, which had earned them the nickname of the ‘tram conductors’. Despite the derision this had caused the formation and intense training of the various units had continued, first in Manchester, then Morecambe, Grantham, and finally on the vast expanses of Salisbury Plain.
Twelve months later the training had ended on the ninth of November when the men of 91ST Brigade had left Larkhill Camp on Salisbury Plain to begun their journey to France. Travelling by train via Amesbury Philpot and his comrades had arrived that same day at Folkestone; however, due to bad weather the 21ST Battalion’s sailing had been cancelled, the men spending that night in Folkestone Drill Hall. The following day the battalion had boarded the Troopship S.S. Atalanta, arriving at Boulogne that night. During the eleventh of November the men had embarked in trains that had taken them southwards to the Somme and the town of Pont Remy, from whence the men had marched onwards to Vanchelles-les-Domart. Six days later the 21ST Manchesters had marched to the town of Bertangles.
The following day the unit had moved to Pierregot, where it had remained in billets until the 26TH when the men had shifted to Puchevilliers. Two days later the 21ST had moved to Fonquevillers [universally known by the British as ‘Funky villers’] where the unit had been instructed in trench routine until the fourth of December. [Originally designated the 91ST Brigade of 30TH Division, the Brigade, comprising of the 20TH, 21ST, 22ND, and 24TH [Oldham Comrades] Battalions of the Manchester Regiment had been transferred to the 7TH Division on the 20TH of December 1915 Following this the unit had consisted of the 21ST and 22ND Manchesters, the 2ND Queen’s [Regiment] and 1ST South Staffordshire’s].
On the second of February 1916 the 21ST Manchesters had moved towards the front line proper. Arriving at Bray sur Somme that day, the unit had eventually taken over the front line from the 22ND Manchesters opposite the village of Mametz four days later. The appalling conditions in which Philpot had served during those first tentative days in the waterlogged trenches of the Somme is recalled by Private Pat Burke of the 20TH Battalion;
‘At stand to on Monday morning it commenced to rain—and then the trouble started. By the time we were relieved on Tuesday afternoon we had been through it, owing to continual rain the trenches had got in such a condition. I cannot explain the state I was in, but to give you an idea I had my greatcoat weighed and it pulled, owing to the quantity of muck thereon, 57lbs. Wet thro’ to the skin, and everything in a terrible mess we marched to the nearest village feeling absolutely done up…up at 6 30 the following morning on ration detail, carrying grub to and from the trenches. Each journey the conditions were getting worse, the last journey was awful, too bad to walk along the fire trench, we had to climb on to the parapet walk along there. Wed and Thursday was on working parties trying to mend the trenches, they were all falling in and inches deep in water. One morning was watching the Germans doing their trenches up such as we were, so they must have been in the same state as we were'... We went in again on Friday the rain never ceasing and that put the lid on it’…[2]
On the opening day [1ST of July 1916] of the Somme Offensive Philpot had taken part in one of the few successes of an otherwise disastrous day for the British Army [over 64,000 casualties in the course of a single day for very little gain], the capture of the village of Mametz by 7TH Division. Despite much bitter fighting the Division had taken the village during the afternoon of the First, albeit with over three thousand casualties, many of who had been from the two Manchester Battalions of 91ST Brigade.
Philpot had soldiered on throughout the remainder of that dreadful summer on the Somme and had taken part in an assault on positions near the village of Ginchy, which had taken place on the fourth of September. On that occasion the 21ST Manchesters had launched an attack on a position known as ‘Ale Alley’ which had met with such intense enemy machine gun fire that the attack had been stopped in it’s tracks, the survivors, including Philpot, having to spend the remainder of the day huddled in shell holes until the fall of night, when they had returned to the British front line. This futile operation had cost the 21ST Manchesters over two hundred men killed, wounded, and missing, [Ginchy had finally fallen to the 56TH Division on the9/10TH September].
The coldest and wettest winter in living memory had followed in the wake of the Somme Offensive. Huddled in waterlogged trenches throughout the bitter weather, thousands of Allied and German troops had been debilitated by trench foot, frostbite, and a myriad of other ailments, which had been brought on by the abominable conditions. Philpot had been hospitalised for a short period with trench foot during January 1917, however, by the beginning of February he had returned to his unit in time to take part in the operations following the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line.
The 21ST and 22ND Manchester’s pursuit of the retreating German Army had begun on the 24TH of February 1917, when under the cover of a misty morning, patrols from the two battalions had discovered that the village of Serre had been abandoned by the enemy. The following day the 7TH Division had begun a slow advance that had pushed through the village of Puisieux towards Bucquoy across a land initially devastated by shellfire and later, as their advance had progressed, by the destruction wrought to buildings and roads by a retreating German Army. By the thirteenth of March the Division had reached the gates of Bucquoy, which had been attacked by the 91ST Brigade at 1am in the morning of the fourteenth.
Surrounded by utter darkness and pelting rain, a welter of muddy conditions and belts of uncut wire the 22ND Manchesters and 2ND Queen’s had advanced to take the village which had proved to be strongly held by an enemy rearguard. No one had seen where he had been going, and within minutes every man’s weapon had been jammed with mud. Nonetheless, the attack had continued and a few of the Manchesters had managed to fight their way into the village taking eight prisoners in the process. However, these men had been unable to hold on in the face of concentrated counter attacks, and having run out of bombs had eventually been driven out of the village. The cost of that senseless fiasco had been an officer and seventy men missing amongst a total casualty list of almost 150 men, a particularly pointless loss of men since the Germans had abandoned the village without a shot being fired three days later.
Following the abandonment of Bucquoy the Seventh Division had pushed onwards and westwards irretrievably towards the Hindenburg Line. The village of Ablainzevile had been taken, and by the eighteenth of March the division had passed through the devastated villages of Hamelincourt and Ervillillers, the following day the division had arrived at St Leger, in front of the strongly fortified village of Croisilles.
Protected by fields of barbed wire twenty yards thick in places, and innumerable machine gun emplacements, the capture of Croisilles, and the equally formidable neibouring village of Ecoust St Mein had held the key to a successful attack on the enemy’s positions in the Hindenburg Line and Bullecourt beyond. Therefore, on the 28TH of March the luckless 22ND Manchesters accompanied with the 1ST South Staffordshires on their left, had advanced out of St Leger to get close up to a barrage which had been timed for 5.45am. At the appointed hour the 22ND Manchesters had begun their advance towards Croiselles and had almost immediately come under intense machine gun fire. One small party, which had eventually been annihilated, had nonetheless managed to get into the village whilst the remainder of the attacking force had been forced to dig in, outside the wire. The attack by the South Staffords had also come to grief, the remnants of both battalions remaining in shell holes until nightfall. During that night Philpot’s battalion had relieved the Stafforshires, whilst the Queen’s Regiment had taken over the line established by the 22ND Manchesters.
The assault had been renewed on the Second of April. This attack had been on a much larger scale, on a ten miles frontage, involving the British 21ST Division, Fourth Australian Division, 20TH Brigade [of 7TH Division], and 91ST Brigade, which would attack Croiselles again. The objective of 91ST Brigade’s attack had been the capture of a railway line to the south and east of the village, after which patrols were to push out behind the village and link up with the men of 21ST Division. The 21ST Manchesters part in the operation had been to advance towards the railway station at Croiselles and then on past the Croiselles to Bullecourt road to the east bank of the River Sensee. On the left of the battalion had been the 2ND Queen’s, whilst on their right had been the South Staffords.
At the start of the assault the Queen’s had been hit by British shellfire which had caused casualties in the leading Company, nonetheless, following some reorganisation their attack had gone ahead. The 21ST Manchesters had also come under fire from British artillery which had opened fifty yards behind the left company’s start line and had gone on to sweep through the assembled ranks. Nevertheless, the battalion had moved without hesitation and had reached the railway’s forty-foot high embankment. In the face of their advance two machine guns, one on top of the embankment and one in a culvert beneath fired incessantly.
All along the top of the embankment sniper posts had been dug into the stone ballast of the rail track. These snipers, the two machine guns, and a number of gun firing from Croiselles, where by this time the 2ND Queen’s had been held up, had caused many casualties amongst the Manchesters. All four of ‘D’ Company’s officers had been killed in the savage fighting where no quarter had been given, nor received from the enemy. Nonetheless after a terrific struggle the embankment had been carried by 6-30am. ‘D’ Company, on the right of the assault, had got a Lewis light machine gun team over the embankment which had put out of action a machine gun firing from a sunken road to the north of the village.
By 10am, after successive small parties of men had rushed over the embankment and, incredibly, through the culvert, the Manchesters had established themselves in the sunken road and had gone on to their final objectives on the Sensee river. The action had cost the 21ST Battalion two officers killed, three wounded, twenty-four men killed, and a further sixty-eight wounded. Fighting for possession of Croiselles [and Ecoust St Mein] had continued throughout the remainder of the day, by the onset of darkness the village had been firmly in the hands of 91ST Brigade [during the subsequent final clearance of the village the 22ND Manchesters had lost five officers and thirty nine men who had fallen victim to snipers, shellfire, and booby traps]. The way had also been opened to the Hindenburg Line and the village of Bullecourt beyond.
Caroline Philpot had received a telegram from the War Office informing her of Charles’s death in action on Monday the 21ST of May, the tidings had eventually been reported in ‘The Scarborough Mercury’ of Friday the third of May, four days before what would had been Philpot’s thirty third birthday;
‘Former Scarborough Hairdresser killed - Mrs. Philpot, who now resides at Shaw, Lancashire, has received official intimation that her husband, Private Chas. Philpot, of a Lancashire Regiment, was killed on the 12TH of May. He was 31 years of age, and was the nephew of Mr. [Edward Milburn & Mary Elizabeth] Crowe, painter, 3, Vincent Street. Prior to going to Shaw he carried on a hairdressing business near the Opera House, Scarborough, and was very well known in the town’…
Charles Philpot is officially recorded as being killed in action during the night of the 11TH/12TH of May 1917, five days later the ferocious fighting in the ‘blood tub’ had finally been brought to an end when the whole of Bullecourt had been taken by the men of 58TH Division. By this time the once peaceful village had ceased to exist, the field of battle resembling little more than a slaughter house where;
’The dead of both sides lay in clumps all over the battle field, and in the bottom or under the parapets of the trenches many hundreds had been hastily covered with a little earth. One witness after speaking of the nauseating stench expresses his astonishment ‘that any human beings could hold and fight under these conditions’. He added that he never saw a battlefield, Ypres in 1917 not excepted, where the living and the unburied dead remained in such proximity for so long’…No wonder that no identifiable remains of Charles Philpot had been recovered recovered from the battlefield. His name had eventually been included in Bay 7 of the Arras Memorial to the Missing. [3]
Following the death of her husband Caroline Philpot had brought her son to Scarborough where they had lived for many years at No.35 James Street. However, by the 1950’s the couple had been residing at No. 54 Moorland Road, where, on Monday the 16TH of July 1956 Caroline had died at the age of 69 years. She had been buried in Scarborough’s Woodlands Cemetery following a service at St Paul’s Mission Church [which had stood on the corner of Regents Street and Castle Road] during the afternoon of Thursday the 19TH of July. Roland Philpot had continued to live in the family house in Moorland Road and had worked for a number of years with Jeweller and Watchmaker, J. Smith & Son, who’s shop had been situated in Scarborough at No.5 Newborough. As far as the author is aware Roland had never married, and had died suddenly in Scarborough General Hospital on the 27TH of July 1981 at the age of 67years. His remains had been interred with those of his mother on Monday the third of August 1981. Their last resting place is located in Section D. Internal Border. Grave 37, of Woodlands Cemetery [their grave marker also includes the name of Charles Philpot]
By the end of the battle at Bullecourt the totally exhausted Seventh Division had been in action for twelve days without respite. the division had lost 128 officers and 2,554 other ranks during that time. According to the Official History, [p479] 1ST ANZAC had suffered 292 officers, and 7,190 other ranks casualties, whilst the British Fifth Corps as a whole had incurred 300 officer, and 6,500 other ranks casualties. The total British casualties over fourteen days had therefore been over 14,000, killed, wounded, or missing, an average of a thousand a day.
On the same day that Charles Philpot had lost his life, north of the Scarpe the Third Army had begun operations to tie up it’s loose ends, the most important of which had been the final capture of Rouex and it’s equally infamous chemical works. The task of capturing the chemical works, the village cemetery, chateau, and railway station, had been given to the battered and exhausted men of 4TH Division [including the surviving members of the Household Battalion], the assault ‘going in’ after a massive artillery bombardment at 7-30am on Friday the eleventh of May.
Although the majority of the men taking part in the operation had been so physically exhausted at the outset that some of the battalion commanders had been inclined to question their ability to take part in another operation, the attackers had nonetheless secured all their objectives despite stiff resistance from their defenders. In the ruins of Rouex Chateau the victors had found a huge blockhouse with walls six feet thick and other concrete emplacements hidden amongst the rubble. This enormous ‘Mebu’ with numerous machine gun embrasures for multi directional fire and protected by a field of fire from neighbouring concrete gun nests had been linked to other bunkers and the Chemical Works by tunnels and had been the nerve centre of the brilliant defences of the village, little wonder then that the previous assaults on the village since the 23RD of April had ended in failure and huge casualties.
The following day the assault had been resumed by the Eleventh Brigade of Fourth Division, together with the 17TH [Northern] Division on it’s immediate left with the intention of capturing an elaborate system of trenches in the Hindenburg Line which had been christened with the deceptively innocent names of ‘Cupid’, Curly, ‘Cash’, ‘Charley’, and ‘Cuthbert’ Trenches, which had ran north west from the village cemetery to the railway crossing north of Rouex, and then to move forward to occupy a further trench[‘Crook’] at the crossing of the Fampoux--Fresnes, and Gavrelle to Plouvain roads.
Spearheading 17TH Division’s contribution to the operations had been the Seventh Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment, which had belonged to 50TH Brigade. The battalion, together with the 7TH East Yorkshires [also from 50TH brigade], had been given the task of capturing ‘Cupid Trench’, which had been situated a hundred yards north of the railway line.
The assault, supported by an intense artillery bombardment of the enemy positions had been launched before daybreak on Saturday the 12TH of May. On the right had been the 7TH Yorkshires, the 7TH East Yorks taking the left flank. Colonel Cotton, the Commanding Officer of the 7TH Yorkshire describes;
‘The attacking companies went forward under a very effective shrapnel barrage in two waves of two companies each, ‘B’Company on the right of the first wave and ‘A’ on the right of the second, each wave being composed of two lines. ‘A’ and ‘D’ Companies detailed a mopping-up party, consisting of one officer and thirty men from each, to clear Crook Trench, which ran roughly at right angles to their objective. Dust and smoke from the barrage made observation impossible once the attack was launched. At 7-30am a message was received from lieutenant H.A. Croft reporting that Captain R.W.S. Croft, ‘C’ Company, had been killed and that all objectives had been gained with the exception of the junction of ‘Curly’, ‘Cupid’, and ‘Crook’ Trenches, and that the troops were consolidating the position. Touch was maintained with the 1ST Battalion of the Rifle Brigade [Fourth Division] on the right, but the left flank was exposed, as the 7TH East Yorkshire on the left had been unable to gain their objective. Further attempts were made to secure this trench junction, but by dusk it was unoccupied by either side’…[4]
The assault had been continued the following day, Captain Cotton continues - ‘Incessant fighting continued all next day in the neighbourhood of the ‘stop’ in ‘Curly Trench’. The Battalion held it’s own, however, and was abley assisted by the Stokes mortar battery firing from ‘Crook Trench’. At 10pm an attempt was made to push forward northwards in Curly Trench in conjunction with an above ground attack by the 7TH East Yorkshire Regiment. This attack failed…the men in the front line were becoming very exhausted, and there was a shortage of drinking water. Two companies of the 6TH Dorsetshire Regiment were sent up at midnight to reinforce the front line, and the remnants of ‘A’ Company withdrew about 4am on the 14TH to the Fampoux –Gavrelle line on relief by the Dorsets, while the three remaining companies stayed in support to the Dorsets, to which they had temporarily attached, being heavily shelled all day by 4.2 and 5.9 shells. At 2.30 am on the 15TH, ‘B’ ‘C’ and ‘D’ Companies were relieved by a company of the 7TH Lincolnshire Regiment, and joined Headquarters and ‘A’ Company at a camp near St Nicholas’…[5]
Whilst at St Nicholas the remnants of the 7TH Yorkshires had been paraded for the customary post battle roll call, were it had been found that of the eighteen officers and four hundred and eighty six other ranks who had gone into action, only five officers and two hundred and twenty eight men had remained by the end of the operation [only one officer had survived out of the attacking force, the remaining four had remained behind with Battalion H.Q.], of these, four officers and twenty four men had been reported as killed in action, nine officers and a hundred and thirty men had been wounded, a further forty eight men had been listed as missing. Amongst the latter had been twenty-three years old; 26209 Lance Corporal Francis Hodgson.
Born in Scarborough on the 20TH of November 1893[Baptised at St Mary’s Parish Church on the 21ST of December] at No.20 William Street, Frank had been the youngest of four sons of Betsy Ann and George Hodgson, a chimney sweep by trade [George Hodgson and Betsy Ann Dobson had married at St Mary’s Parish Church on the 18TH of December 1882]. [6]
Another pupil of the Central Board School, Frank had begun his education at the age of four and had remained at the school until the age of twelve, when he had left to assist his father with the cleaning of Scarborough’s chimneys. A prominent member of the Central’s football team, Frank had gone on to play at half back for the local Queensbury, and North End Football Clubs during the years leading up to the out break of war.
Hodgson had enlisted into the Army at Scarborough’s Recruiting Office during January 1916, and had eventually been sent for training with the 3RD [Reserve] Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment at the Regimental Depot at Richmond, North Yorkshire. Whilst Frank had been undergoing the rigors of recruit training his future battalion, composed of ‘Kitchener’s volunteers’, had been in the living hell that had been the Ypres Sector, where, during February and March 1916, the unit had been involved in the loss, and subsequent recapture of ‘The Bluff’, a narrow ridge in an otherwise flat landscape which had been of huge importance for observation purposes, situated on the northern banks of the Ypres—Comines Canal.
By the beginning of the Somme Offensive the unit had been facing the village of Fricourt. At ‘Zero Hour’ on the opening day of the offensive the battalion’s ‘A’ Company, consisting of 140 officers and men had been ordered to attack [allegedly by mistake], the strongest defences either side of a position known as ‘Wicket Corner’. The unit had immediately come under intense machine gun fire, which had caused over a hundred casualties. The ordeal of the 7TH Battalion had continued during the afternoon when the remaining three companies had also been sent forward into the face of withering machine gun fire, within three minutes, these three formations had also been virtually wiped out with the loss of over three hundred casualties.
Never a battalion to be sat on the sidelines, the Seventh had been in action throughout the remainder of that dreadful summer. By the onset of the worst winter in living memory the unit had been still been ‘on the Somme’ in Brigade Reserve at Guillemont, where Frank Hodgson had joined the unit with a draft of battle casualty replacements shortly after his twenty third birthday.
On January 2ND 1917 Hodgson had moved with the battalion to trenches to the east of the skeletal remains of the village of Morval, where they had relieved the mud caked men of the 12TH Manchester Regiment. Conditions there had been atrocious;
‘There were no communication trenches to the front line, which was found to consist of what had become a narrow canal with islands at intervals, each island being occupied by a piquet with Lewis[light machine]guns. No communication between these points was possible during daylight, or from them to either the support line or to Battalion Headquarters’…[1]
Hodgson’s tenure of these trenches had been comparatively short, on the thirteenth of January the battalion had moved by way of Meaulte to the village of Corbie, which had been reached the following day. Whilst there, despite heavy falls of snow, the unit conducted an intense course of training. On the twenty fifth of January the battalion had been moved by lorry to Bronfay, from where the men had marched to the village of Fregicourt. The following day the unit had moved into the front line near the German held village of Sailly-Saillisel, which the unit were to attack during the morning of the eighth of February.
Frank’s first assault had begun at 7-30am on Thursday the eighth of February: ‘The morning was bright and sunny, though intensely cold [Colonel Fife had subsequently wrote in the Green Howards Gazette]. The barrage for our assault opened rather raggedly, some of the guns beginning to fire at 6.28am, and, from my position on the left flank, I was horrified to see that some guns were shooting short, their shells actually bursting behind the third wave of men. There was no chance of stopping these guns, as it was impossible to know which battery or batteries were at fault, and the whole affair would be over long before a telephone message could get through. A few minutes later, one of our aeroplanes, which had been flying very low above the enemy’s trenches, turned and flew swiftly homewards. I felt sure that this meant that the attack had been successful , and shortly afterwards a message had arrived from Captain Wilkinson, commanding ‘A’ Company, which confirmed this belief. ‘A’ and ‘B’ Companies were in possession of the whole objective, but had lost heavily, and ‘C’ Company, who were for the most part carrying the materials for consolidating, had suffered even more from our own artillery, with ht e result that quantities of bombs and wire had not reached their destination. The reserve company ‘D’, had also contributed carriers and was now very weak. A counter attack was, of course, imminent, and it was necessary at once to organise and dispatch more bomb carrying parties from the men available’…
The Germans had made five counter attacks throughout the remainder of the day, the Yorkshiremen beating off each assault. Fighting had continued throughout the night, during the following day the survivors of the Seventh Battalion had been relieved by men from another unit and had made their weary way to the village of Bronfay where the post battle roll call had revealed that of the 330 officers and men who had begun the attack, only a hundred and thirty four had remained on their feet. High casualty rates had inevitably meant rapid promotion, even for the newly arrived. Following his first successful operation at Sailly, Frank Hodgson had been promoted to the exalted rank of Lance Corporal.
The cold, wet, and hungry Seventh Yorkshires had arrived [with 17TH Division]at Arras on Easter Monday, the ninth of April, the same day that the Canadian Corps had taken Vimy Ridge. Two days later Hodgson and his comrades had taken up residence in the old German front line to the north and north west of the bitterly fought over village of Monchy-Le-Preux. Over the next ten days the battalion had moved to and from the front line and when the second phase of the Arras Offensive had begun on the 23RD of April the unit had been ‘resting’ in recently captured enemy positions in the ‘Railway Triangle’ to the east of Blagny.
Whilst in this area the Seventh Yorks had been involved in a number of minor operations which had been conducted by 17TH Division, which had cost the battalion four officers and fourteen men killed, thirteen men wounded, and a further fourteen men missing, which had been mainly due to shellfire. The unit had eventually been withdrawn by buses to huts situated in the village of Fosseux, where the men had been rested whilst the unit had been brought back up to full strength. By the end of April the effective strength of the battalion had been thirty officers and eight hundred and sixty one other ranks.
During the night of the 11TH of May Frank Hodgson’s ‘C’ Company, together with‘B’ Company had been situated in ‘Clover Trench where the men had made their preparations to go into action the following day. During the early hours of the 12TH ‘B’ and ‘C’ Compaines had moved forward to occupy some newly dug assembly trenches, here Frank and his comrades had made their final preparations for battle and had eaten breakfasts of hard biscuits and ‘bully’ beef washed down with a liberal ration of pre battle army issue rum before ‘standing to’ to await ‘Zero Hour’ at 6-30am.
Officially recorded as being killed in action on Sunday the thirteenth of May 1917, the unofficial news of Hodgson’s death had reached his parents six days later, the tidings had been included in ‘The Scarborough Mercury’ of Friday the 25TH:
‘North End footballer killed - News has been received by his parents from a comrade in the Yorkshire Regiment that Lance Corporal F. Hodgson, son of Mr. G. Hodgson, chimney sweep, 22 William Street, has been killed. Twenty-three years old and single, he assisted his father in his business before enlistment a year last January, and he had been out in France for six months. Lance Corporal Hodgson was a well-known and valuable playing member of the North End Football Club, his playing position being at halfback. An elder brother serving as a Reservist, was called up on the outbreak of war, and has been a prisoner of war in Germany for over two years’…
[The elder brother mentioned in the above article had been James Hodgson. Born in Scarborough during 1885, James, a pre war soldier in the Regular Army had served with the 2ND Battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment and had been captured during March 1915 whilst taking part in the battle of Neuve Chappelle, he had survived the war].
A few days after the Hodgson’s had received the letter from one of Frank’s comrades they had received a telegram from the War Office confirming their son’s death. The news had been reported by the ‘Mercury’ of Friday the 1ST of June 1917;
‘Confirmed - Official news has now been received by his father, Mr. George Hodgson, 22, William Street, that Lance Corporal Hodgson, Yorkshire Regiment, was killed on the 13TH May. The first news came from a comrade a fortnight ago and was published by us at the time. He formerly played for the Queensbury Football Club’…
Despite numerous searches after the battle, and at the end of the war, the identifiable remains of Lance Corporal Hodgson had never been found, and like Private Philpot his name had been included on the Arras Memorial to the Missing, located in the Faubourg- d Amiens Cemetery, which is to be found in the Boulevard du General De Gaulle in the western part of the town of Arras, Frank’ name can be found on the Addenda Panel.
A former member of the congregation of St Mary’s Parish Church, Frank Hodgson’s name can be located on the Church ‘Roll of Honour’ which is located on the north interior wall. Elsewhere in the town Hodgson’s name is commemorated in Manor Road Cemetery [Section V, Row18, Grave11] on a gravestone which also includes the names of his Scarborough born parents, Betsy Ann, who had died on the 13TH of June 1933 at the age of 68years, and George Hodgson, who had passed away on the 15TH of November 1936 at the age of seventy one. Also included on the stone is the name of Frank’s younger sister, Alice [Baptised in St Mary’s Parish Church on the 20TH of March 1898], she had died on the 19TH of September 1977 at the age of seventy-nine years.
Thirty-nine days after it had begun, and four days after the death of Corporal Hodgson the Arras Offensive had officially been closed down. During the period April 9TH to 17TH of May the three British Armies had almost fought themselves to a standstill at a cost of over 158,000 casualties at an average daily rate of 4,076 killed, wounded, and missing, a figure only surpassed by the Battle of Loos in 1915. By far the most lethal of the four main British offensives of the war Arras is nonetheless overshadowed in the British public’s memory by the Somme of the previous year and the forthcoming Third Battle of Ypres, more commonly remembered as Passchendeale.
To put the severity of the fighting at Arras into perspective imagine that the battle had been allowed to continue for a hundred and forty one days [the length of the Battle of the Somme], at the same daily rate the casualties would have amounted to 574, 716! Consider the outcry were the daily casualty rate during the ongoing Iraqi campaign to reach over four thousand!
[The exact German losses are not known, a general guess would put the figure around the 120,000 mark].
The courage and determination displayed by the ‘Poor Bloody Infantry’ of both sides at Arras, who as always had borne the greatest losses, goes without saying. Twenty-five infantry Victoria Crosses had been won during the Offensive, twelve of which had been posthumous, many more instances of gallantry and self-sacrifice must surely have gone unnoticed.
[1] At the time of the 1901 Census of Scarborough the Philpot family had been residing in the town at No 92 St Thomas Street, and had consisted of William John, a forty-five years old housepainter, born at Whitby, [the son of fishmonger James Philpot]. Whitby born Sarah Jane, aged forty-four, daughter Florence, a twenty-three years old waitress. Charles a ‘barber and hairdressers apprentice’ aged sixteen years. Edith aged eleven years, Emily aged nine, and William, aged seven years. All the children had been born in Scarborough.
[2] Manchester Pals; Michael Steadman; Leo Cooper 1994.
[3] Page 479, Military Operations France & Belgium, Volume 2, 1917; Captain Cyril Falls; Macmillan, 1940.
[4] The Green Howards in the Great War; Wylly.
[5] Pickering born 242697 Private Tom Dresser of ‘B’ Company of the 7th Yorkshires had gained the Victoria Cross during this action. The award had been ‘Gazetted’ in the London Gazette of the 27TH of June 1917; the citation reads; ‘for most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty. Private Dresser, in spite of being twice wounded on the way, and suffering great pain, succeeded in conveying an important message from Battalion Headquarters to the front line of trenches, which he eventually reached in an exhausted condition. His fearlessness and determination to deliver the message at any cost, proved of the greatest value to his battalion at a critical time’ …
Tom had survived the war and had died in Middlesbrough on the 9TH of April 1982 at the age of eighty-nine.
[6] At the time of the 1901 Census the Hodgson family had been living in Scarborough at No.20 William Street and had consisted of George aged 36years, Betsy also aged 36years, Edward aged 19years, a bricklayers apprentice, James aged 16years, a mason’s labourer, Annie aged 12 years, Frank aged 7years, and Alice aged three years, all of whom had been born in the town [At the time of the 1891 Census there had also been a son named Thomas William aged one year, and a daughter eventually named Christiana, had been born during 1896, both had died in their infancy].