‘We went up into the front line near Arras, through sodden and devastated countryside. As we were moving up to our sector along the communication trenches, a shell burst ahead of me and one of my platoon dropped. He was the first man I ever saw killed. Both his legs were blown off and the whole of his body and face was peppered with shrapnel. The sight turned my stomach. I was sick and terrified but even more frightened of showing it.’

Victor Silvester

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

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Copyright © Ken Porter and Stephen Wynn, 2014

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About the Authors

Stephen is a retired Police officer who served with Essex Police as a constable for thirty years between 1983 and 2013. Both his sons, Luke and Ross, were members of the armed forces, serving five tours in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2013 during which both were injured. This led to his first book, Two Sons in a Warzone – Afghanistan: The True Story of a Father’s Conflict’ which was published in October 2010. His daughter, Aimee, is currently at Secondary School.

Both Stephen’s grandfathers served in and survived the First World War, one with the Royal Irish Rifles, the other in the Mercantile Navy and his father was a member of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps during the Second World War.

Ken and Stephen have corroborated on a previous book published in August 2012, German POW Camp 266 – Langdon Hills which spent six weeks as the number one best-selling book in Waterstones, Basildon in Spring 2013.

Stephen has also had three crime thrillers published. His hobbies are writing and watching sport. His days always begin with him and his wife Tanya walking their four German Shepherd dogs.

Ken is also retired, having spent his working life in accountancy as a finance director. He is a respected local historian of many years standing, born under the shadow of St Nicholas Church and he hasn’t ventured far away from it over the years, still living in the Great Berry area of Langdon Hills today.

His maternal grandfather, James Fredrick Pitt, served with the 6th Battalion of the City of London Rifles during the First World War. He survived after having been invalided out due to his injuries.

Ken is an active member of the Laindon and District Community Archive and Basildon Heritage Group and regularly writes for historical websites and newsletters. His other main interest is cricket, having represented Laindon Cricket Club and for many years Southend-on-Sea Cricket Club as well as Essex over fifties and sixties. He was also an ECB advanced cricket coach for over thirty years.

Ken has been married to Carol for forty-eight years. They have three children and five grandchildren.

Prologue

It is estimated that the worldwide total number of casualties, both military and civilian, as a result of the First World War was a massive thirty-seven million. Of this figure an estimated thirteen million lost their lives. Astonishingly some three million military deaths weren’t directly related to combat, instead being down to a combination of disease, accidents or whilst being held as a prisoner of war.

At the start of the First World War the British Army had an overall strength of just over 700,000 men including reservists. By the end of the war 5,397,000 million men had enlisted in the armed forces of the United Kingdom and Ireland, approximately one in four of the total male population.

Of these 703,000 men were killed and another 1,663,000 million were wounded. Roughly half of those who enlisted volunteered and the rest were conscripted. When compared to the 82,000 soldiers of today’s British Army (2013) not only does it put them in perspective but it shows just how astounding these figures are.

The last military engagement which the British Army had been involved in prior to the First World War was in South Africa between 1899 and 1902 during the Anglo-Boer wars. Although it afforded the infantry regiments an opportunity to hone their shooting skills, nothing had really been learnt from a tactical point of view. The horse was still the main form of land-based transport in both a civilian and a military sense. It ruled supreme throughout the world which meant that the main battle tactic which the British Army was likely to deploy would be that of a cavalry charge. With the birth of the twentieth century bigger and more destructive weaponry was being developed sounding the death knoll for the cavalry as an effective tactic.

As in the society of the day, there was a well-established class system operating within the military which had a very defined ‘us and them’ attitude, and where a combination of arrogance and outdated ideas still prevailed. At the outbreak of the First World War, the officer class appeared to be top heavy with senior and elderly officers who, it quickly became apparent, were often incapable of making speedy decisions in the new age that came with the fast moving military environment of the twentieth century.

The only military tactic which the British military seemed to possess was an offensive one. This involved bombarding the enemy lines with artillery shells before sending thousands of soldiers, with bayonets drawn, across what had ironically become known as ‘no man’s land’, head first in to enemy positions which were vigorously defended with heavy machine guns.

These same senior officers simply accepted that this meant they would unfortunately incur large numbers of casualties. This tactic was accompanied by a belief that a fast moving attack would overwhelm the enemy, especially when coupled with an offensive spirit and a moral belief that right, or perhaps God, was on their side.

There was no ‘Plan B’ mainly because British military doctrine of the day didn’t think in such terms. Little, if any, consideration was given to the possibility that ‘Plan A’ wouldn’t work. There were no immediate plans to review the tactics of the British Army, because there was a general feeling that the war would be over by Christmas 1914, a belief based on nothing more substantial than a hunch.

Throughout 1915 one and a quarter million men had enlisted. By the end of 1916 this number had reduced by nearly 100,000 and by the end of 1917 the number was down again to just over 800,000 men. By 1918 the British Army had a total strength of nearly four million men, nearly half of whom were 19-years-old or younger.

Without a doubt the First World War was one of the defining moments of the twentieth century. It wasn’t just about a war which lasted four long bloody years, it was also about massive social and economic change for both the victors as well as the vanquished.

It didn’t actually acquire the title ‘First World War’ until the beginning of the Second World War, in 1939. Then it was used to be able to distinguish between the two wars. Up to that point in time there had simply been a World War.

The British and the Canadians referred to it as the First World War, whilst the Americans decided upon World War One. It was even called the Great War, a term believed to have originally been ‘coined’ by elements of the press. Describing any war as being ‘great’ is a topic of discussion on its own!

The first time the term, First World War, was actually used was in September 1917, ironically, by the German philosopher, Ernst Haeckel, who claimed, ‘there is no doubt that the course and character of the feared European War, will become the first world war in the full sense of the word’.

Billericay in the First World War, was a bustling, thriving and close knit community of some two thousand people, the nearest other towns being Laindon five miles to the south, Pitsea some eight miles to the south-east, Wickford five miles to the east and the quaint village of Stock slightly further along the Southend Road as it slowly meanders on towards Galleywood and the county town of Chelmsford.

Billericay has a long and interesting history dating back to the Bronze Age. There is evidence of Roman occupation including what was believed to have been the remains of a fort. There have also been Saxon settlements discovered at nearby Great Burstead. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Billericay was an important route for pilgrims on their way to Canterbury before they crossed the River Thames at East Tilbury. Even today there are still six pubs in the half-mile length of the High Street, which was a strong indication of just how well trodden a route the town was for travellers passing through. Over the years there have been numerous pubs, hotels and ‘watering holes’, for both locals and travellers to use, with such descriptive names as, The White Hart, The Red Lion, The Railway Hotel, The Crown Inn, The Fox, The Chequers, The Temperance Hotel, The Rising Sun and The Bull, to name but a few.

Billericay’s most notable historical footnote to date took place on 28 June 1381, when King Richard ll’s soldiers defeated the Essex rebels at Norsey Woods in the town. Some five hundred rebels were slain in the battle, which in effect ended the Peasants Revolt.

The Pilgrim Fathers held meetings in Billericay before departing for the New World in the early sixteen hundreds. Four local residents from the town were amongst those who sailed on the Mayflower to start a new life in the Americas. For a short while during the mid-1600s Billericay even had its own money when local businessman and wool merchant, Joseph Fishpole, introduced a halfpenny token in 1669.

The road that ran from Billericay all the way across to Tilbury some fifteen miles away to the south, could be a treacherous journey, with the risk of footpads and highwaymen an ever present threat to law-abiding citizens going about their daily business.

In 1840 the town had a Union Workhouse built as part of the implementation of the Poor Laws Act. At the start of the First World War in 1914, the master of the workhouse was Walter Needham who lived there with his wife Elizabeth and their four children. The 1911 census shows that there were thirteen staff and 215 inmates staying at the workhouse but only one cook to feed all of those hungry mouths. The oldest inmate shown at the Union Workhouse was eighty-seven and the youngest just two months old.

When it eventually closed some of its old buildings remained to form what became St Andrew’s hospital and when that closed its doors, the majority of the buildings were retained and turned into exclusive modern day housing.

Billericay Town football club was formed in 1880, making it one of the oldest in Essex. Up to the end of the First World War the team played in the Romford and District League, when they entered the Mid-Essex League, where they remained until after the Second World War in 1947.

Around 1896 the Isolation hospital came in to existence in Mountnessing Road, Billericay. It was maintained by the Billericay Rural District Council and dealt with diseases such as diphtheria and in 1914, a scarlet fever outbreak. Because of its function as an isolation unit it wasn’t used during the First World War for returning wounded soldiers. In 1938, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, it was then acquired by the South East Essex Joint Hospital Board and in 1948, with the beginning of the National Health Service; it was taken over by the South Essex Hospital Management Committee. It later went on to become an annex for the nearby main St Andrew’s hospital.

The railway finally arrived in the town in 1889 as part of the Great Eastern main line between London and Southend.

CHAPTER 1

Billericay at the Outbreak of the First World War 1914

One of the joys of researching and writing a book such as this is that every now and then you come across what can only be described as an absolute gem. The little gem in question this time, came in the shape of a nine-page booklet, entitled, Billericay at the outbreak of the First World War. It was written by Miss Mary Needham who in 1914 was only 6-years-old. She was one of the four children of Walter and Elizabeth Needham. Walter Needham was the Master of the Union Workhouse in Billericay which was where the family lived and where Mary was born. He took up his post in 1891 at the age of thirty which, for such a responsible position, was an extremely young age.

When Mary Needham published her booklet in 1993 she was 85-years-old, having lived in Billericay all her life. The booklet provides both clarity and realism of what Billericay was actually like back in 1914. The picture which Mary is able to create with her delicate and detailed prose, provides the reader with a clear understanding of Billericay and its people at that time. It was probably written from her diary entries rather than from her memory some seventy years after the actual events. The details and information she relates are precise and to the point. There’s no uncertainty because she knew the people and the places that she talks about. She had seen them, spoken with them and had lived in the same close knit community. These were family friends and neighbours who ran shops in which her parents did business.

Mary has captured the essence of what made Billericay what it was back in 1914. She writes:

‘In 1914 Billericay was a compact village of about 2000 inhabitants. There was the High Street, Back Street, which today is called Chapel Street, and Back Lane which is now Western Road. Within half a mile of the High Street there were groups of cottages; Sun Street had some, which are still there today. There were others in Laindon Road at the beginning before you come to the Roman Catholic Church, and Stock Road, most of which are still there, along with Norsey Road and Western Road.

Apart from that there were the farms. In London Road there was Hodges Farm and others along Laindon Road where it verges on to Little Burstead, Norsey Road, Stock Road and Jacksons Lane. The roads back then were no more than dirt roads. They weren’t flat and smooth and made of tar. They were just mud which was hard and dusty in the summer and wet and clingy in the winter with plenty of lumps, bumps and ruts. If you picked blackberries from the roadside hedges, they were usually covered in dust, especially in the summer.’

The picture this conjures up is so different from today with our busy, fast moving roads being driven along by ever increasing numbers of cars, buses, lorries and vans. Back then life just crept along at a nice slow, steady pace, where the king of the road was still the horse. Horses were used for riding, pulling delivery wagons, ploughing the fields and, for those who could afford it, carriages to be driven around in, much like a car today. Mary names three affluent residents who owned such carriages and who could also afford to employ coachmen to drive them about.

When it came to harvesting the fruit and vegetables they were collected from the surrounding farms, stacked up high in the big farm wagons and taken off to sell at the nearby markets, each of them pulled along on their journey by two large horses. There was a mill just up the road in the nearby village of Stock, so large wooden carts would be used to take the wheat there, which had been gathered from the farmer’s fields, to be ground into flour.

Horses played a very important part in all aspects of daily life throughout the country. There were two blacksmiths in Billericay High Street, where the Post Office and Boots the Chemist are located today. Because of the number of horses there were lots of roadside ponds for them to stop and drink from.

During the First World War Britain sent 1,000,000 horses across the English Channel to help with the war effort. Over the course of the four years 500,000 of them were killed, only 65,000 of them made it back to these shores. The rest were sold in Europe to either farmers or the slaughter house, which isn’t so readily recorded. There was actually more tonnage of animal foodstuffs shipped to France, than there was ammunition, so it would be fair to say that the horses were at least in part well looked after. Each horse was allocated 25lbs of grain a day.

‘In the High Street there were lamp-posts with the little glassed-in lamps, which were actually produced in Billericay, at the gas works on the former site of Job Salters foundry. These little glass lamps had a pilot light with a chain and a ring and every evening the lamp lighter went round and pulled the chain with a hook on the end of a stick to set the lights going.

It was only the High Street that was lit. There were no lights in Western Road or Norsey Road, in fact Norsey Road was very eerie because Mr Castleden’s property had a black creosoted fence and there was something very peculiar about it, because if you walked past it in the dark it did the most un-nerving things. There was a strange echo to your footsteps and, of course there was no light around to get under, or any sort of refuge.’

It is easy to picture that little old man walking up and down the High Street with his long stick, starting the lights up each evening, no matter what the weather was like. It is almost possible to imagine the eeriness of Mr Castleden’s house and its surrounding creosoted fence, because of the detail in Mary’s writings.

‘If you were to walk up the High Street you could have walked up the middle of the road if you had wanted to. You wouldn’t have needed to walk on the pavement. You could walk safely up the High Street and there would be very little traffic and what traffic there was would be the odd cyclist and horse traffic.’

Over the years I’ve seen lots of pictures of Billericay High Street which show that exact same scenario, with children playing in the street or adults going about their daily routine.

Mary effortlessly describes the quaintness and simplicity of life for the people of Billericay during the First World War, which was most definitely a pleasant contrast to how life was for the thousands of soldiers in the trenches on the Western Front. Here are a few examples:

‘Once a week the drovers, old Harry Totman was the drover in Billericay, drove their cattle to Chelmsford Market, nine miles away, so you can imagine how early they had to be up to get there, and can you imagine the state of the cattle when they arrived.’

‘Every Saturday morning there was the excitement of the Fox and Hounds meeting and very often they met outside the Red Lion pub. All the foxhounds, the horses and the huntsmen gathered outside in the High Street, and it didn’t matter because there was no passing traffic to upset. Everybody turned out to see them off.’

‘At first there was just one postman for the whole of Billericay, a Mr Ramsey, whose head nodded as he walked. He delivered the mail for the whole of Billericay. When it eventually became too much for one man to do on his own, Mr Collins and Mr Polley came along and they would take the north side of the town one week and the south side of the town the following week. That gives some idea of just how small and compact Billericay was then.’

In 1914, between the bottom end of the High Street, as it forks off into Stock Road and Norsey Road, and the top end at Sun Street, there were a total of fifty-four premises including private residences, shops, pubs, the bank, Post Office, the Police station, the undertakers, a school and a Church, which goes to show how self-contained village life was for the residents. The county town of Chelmsford, with many more shops was only nine miles away if anything more specialised was required.

Mary Needham writes about one shop in amazing detail, describing the staff, the layout of the shop and the many different items which they sold. She even describes the normality of the shop providing a delivery boy on a bicycle to drop off purchases to the customer’s home if required.

Below gives a flavour of what the shopping experience was like in those days, especially when compared with the giant and impersonal supermarkets that have replaced those same shops today. Mr Moore’s Grocer and Drapery shop was next door to where the current Police station is situated at the top end of the High Street, as it meets with the London Road.

‘I would like to take you into one of the grocer’s shops. The one in question is a family business which is owned and run by old Mr Dick Moore and his two sons, Lennie and Percy, all decked out in their white calico aprons and very attentive to their customers. Had you arrived in your carriage Mr Moore would have come out on to the pavement to receive your order.’

That paragraph alone conjures the values of yesteryear, when the word service actually meant what it said.

There were schools at either end of the High Street. At the top end as the road continues in to the Laindon Road, and in the area where Quilters Primary school is today, there was a school which mainly catered for children who lived in some of the outlying farm cottages. With no transport available to drop them off and pick them up, for most it was a very long walk which, in the winter months, meant arriving and leaving school in the dark. In those days all children left school when they were fourteen years of age to go out to work, for boys either some kind of manual/labouring work or an apprenticeship, For girls going in to service or shop work. There were opportunities for some of the brighter children to continue their education, but it meant travelling to schools in different towns such as Brentwood, Romford or Southend which for most was simply an impossible and unaffordable journey.

Discipline was strict as this was a time when children were ‘seen and not heard’. The main part of the curriculum focused on reading, writing and arithmetic and in addition the girls did cookery and needlework whilst the boys were taught woodwork.

At the other end of the town was the Burstead House private school which was fee paying and mostly for the children of professional people or farm owners. The building which housed the school is still there today. This was Mary Needham’s school before she left to attend the Ursuline Convent in Brentwood.

Interestingly the last page of the booklet talks about a couple of the regiments that were billeted in the town during the war, which were numerous due to the camp which was situated close to the town centre.

‘The war began to put Billericay on the map. During the war of course, we had soldiers billeted here. There was a camp down Mountnessing Road opposite Station Road, but some of the soldiers, usually officers, were also billeted in people’s houses. Right at the very beginning I clearly remember we had the 6th Warwickshire Regiment, they were the people who volunteered right at the very start of the war, eager young men. We had the Captain and the Lieutenants billeted with us. They were very kind and well-mannered people. I can see them now, if I’d have met them years later I would have recognised them, but sadly not one of those officers came back from the war.

Then there were the Worcestershires who followed after them. On Saturday mornings the embarkation always began. It started with the men marching down Billericay High Street with their band playing as they made their way to the train station on the first stage of their trip to France. They would sing as they went, such songs as It’s a long way to Tipperary and Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag. I still cannot listen to either of those tunes without dissolving into tears. I find it so sad to think that virtually none of those young men returned home, but no doubt they wrote letters home while they were here, so more people got to hear of Billericay.’

The photograph shows officers and sergeants from the 5th Warwickshire Regiment, which although slightly different from Mary’s account, is confirmation that men from the Warwickshire Regiment were in fact billeted at the Workhouse.

Officers and sergeants of the 5th Warwickshire Regiment billeted at the Billericay Union Workhouse. (Cater Museum, Billericay)

There must have been numerous similar personal accounts kept of those yesterdays in diaries and journals which have then unfortunately been either lost over the years or have just simply never come to light. These first hand historical accounts provide us with a window back in time.

Although the village of Stock is literally just a couple of miles up the road from Billericay on route towards Chelmsford, during the First World War the area actually came within the Metropolitan Police District and not Essex. In itself there is nothing too out of the ordinary about that as the border between the two police forces has changed a few times over the years.

Late on in the war, on 11 March 1918 to be precise, a ban on taking photographs, making sketches, drawing plans, models or any other representation of any place or thing came into force in certain areas within the Metropolitan Police District. This included the areas of both Stock and Buttsbury and meant it was prohibited to take a photograph, draw a sketch, or write a description in public. This could still be done indoors, inside the curtilage of one’s own property or at a photographic studio. Just being in possession of a pencil in a public place could leave someone liable to be arrested. Imagine the problems that would come with trying to enforce such rules in today’s world of mobile phone technology.

The British authorities felt there was a real risk of a German invasion as the document highlights. The date at the bottom of the page shows 14 May 1914, some three months before the war actually started.

Instructions issued in case of an invasion. (Cater Museum, Billericay)

CHAPTER 2

How the War Began

It’s strange looking back all these years later and realising that although it was Britain who declared war on Germany, the reasons behind how matters escalated to that moment in time, weren’t as straight forward as they might at first appear.

Europe was effectively split in two by 1905. On one side there were the countries which comprised what was known as the Triple Alliance – Germany, Austria and Italy – and on the other side were the countries which made up the Triple Entente – Britain, France and Russia.

In December 1905, what became known as the Schlieffen Plan came into existence. It was created by General Count Alfred Von Schlieffen, the Chief of the German General Staff, and was an operational plan for a designated attack on France once Russia had started to mobilize her forces close to the border with Germany. Schlieffen believed that the most likely theatre of war was going to be on the Western Front. He had also recognised that France posed more of a military threat to Germany than Russia. He concluded that a successful surprise attack on France by German forces, would serve to deter Britain from becoming involved in a European war.

Having defeated France, Germany could then re-deploy troops to the borders with Russia, defeating them as well. The Schlieffen plan was daring, but it also had some glaring weaknesses, the main issue being its implementation couldn’t begin until Russia had begun the mobilization of her troops, which meant that Germany had absolutely no control over when that would be, the worst case scenario being that this might occur at a time when Germany wasn’t ready in a military sense to implement the plan.

When Germany eventually did go ahead with it in August 1914, the first part of the plan didn’t work due to their defeat at the Battle of the Marne between 5 -12 September 1914.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on 28 June 1914 set in motion a series of diplomatic events that eventually led to the outbreak of war in Europe at the end of July 1914.

The Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were killed by a Serbian nationalist and member of the notorious Black Hand Movement, Gavrilo Princip, while they were on a formal visit to Sarajevo. Princip shot Ferdinand at point blank range while the latter was travelling in his car from a town hall reception, having earlier that day already survived one assassination attempt, when a bomb was thrown at his car by another of Princip’s associates. Some sections of Bosnian society questioned the timing of the Archdukes visit, falling as it did on Serbia’s national day, believing it to be unnecessary and somewhat provocative. Tensions had been at fever pitch in the region for many years. From that one act, whatever the reason for it and whether it was just or otherwise, millions of people went on to die as a result of four years of bloody war.

The Archduke’s death set off a series of events, exacerbated by the treaties and alliances already in place amongst most of the European countries, which within five weeks had seen the declarations of war turn in to an all-out conflict.

It culminated with Britain supporting her ally Belgium, who had refused Germany permission to take a route through her country to attack France. On 3 August Germany invaded Belgium regardless. At 2300 hours on 4 August Germany had still refused a request by Britain to remove its one million troops from Belgium, Herbert Asquith, the then British Prime Minister, announced that a state of war existed between the two countries.

Most Britons believed the war was going to be a short lived affair, being nothing more than a relatively minor altercation which would be all over by Christmas. On the evening of 4 August there were huge crowds of people cheering and singing about the beginning of the war outside Buckingham Palace, as if they were celebrating nothing more important than the dawning of a new year. It wouldn’t be too long before the singing and cheering had been replaced by the crying and mourning of loved ones lost.

At the start of the war Germany had a battle ready army of 4.3 million troops at their disposal whilst Britain had only 750,000 regular troops in service.

On 7 August 1914, just three days after the beginning of the war, Field Marshall Horatio Kitchener, who was also the Secretary of State for War and who was seen fondly by most as the epitome of Britain’s wartime resolve, called for 100,000 young men between the ages of nineteen and thirty to volunteer for the Army. By early October 1914 the number of men who had actually answered Kitchener’s ‘call to arms’ stood at 761,824. By the middle of September 30,000 a day were enlisting. By the end of the year that number had passed the one million mark and by the end of 1915 had more than doubled to 2.46 million.

Men joined the armed forces for many different reasons. Those who made up the upper classes of British society filled the vast majority of the officer ranks. It could be said that they had the most to lose; they had ideals of honour, glory, self-sacrifice, chivalry and duty, virtues that had been instilled in them throughout their school years. The working class on the other hand made up the vast majority of the infantry soldiers. They too believed in the virtues of honour and duty, but for them it was also about getting caught up in the popular excitement that quickly followed the outbreak of war, it was about having a respite from the routine of a boring job, fear of being thought of as a coward, pressure to join up by their peers and a genuine belief it would be over by Christmas.

In the first five months of the war, up to the end of 1914, one million men from all sides had already lost their lives, quickly eradicating the mistaken belief in some quarters of society, that the war was no more than an inconvenient and irrelevant ‘skirmish’ that would soon be over with.

For a nation that had ruled an empire for so long, it was hard for most people to understand why it was taking so long to defeat our European neighbours. What was even harder to take was the enormous cost in human life, the loss of young men who were dying in their thousands. Young men who were brothers, sons and husbands from close-knit communities with families that depended on them.

There was no welfare state back in 1914 and it would be thirty-four years and another World War before the National Health Service (NHS) came into being in 1948.

In general terms more people supported the war than there were those against it. In towns and villages up and down the country, people gathered to show their support. History has shown that down the years during times of war people pull together, forget their differences and unite against a common enemy. The First World War was no different, neither were the British people.

This feeling of popular excitement at the announcement of war was perfectly illustrated in the book written by Lloyd Clark and first published in 2001, World War 1 – An Illustrated History.

‘On August 5th 1914, I reported to my regimental depot, being an Army Reservist. What a meeting of old friends! All were eager to take part in the great scrap that every pre-war soldier had expected. At the depot all was bustle, but no confusion. In the mobilization stores, every reservist’s arms and clothing were ticketed, and these were soon issued, with webbing equipment. About 300 men were then selected and warned to hold themselves in readiness to proceed to the south coast to make up the war strength of their battalion stationed there. There was great competition to go with this draft, the writer being one of the lucky ones to be selected.’

Private R.G. Hill, ‘An Old Contemptible at Le Cateau’, August 1914

Private 10060 Ralph Gordon Hill landed at Le Havre in France with the 1st Battalion Leicestershire Regiment, on 14 September 1914 and took part in the Battle of Mons as well as the Battle of Le Cateau.

In July 1915 Private Hill was with the 6th Battalion Leicester Regiment when they arrived in Gallipoli. On 6 August he took part in the landings and subsequent action in Suvla Bay. He was killed on 8 August 1915 whilst taking part in an attack on Scimitar Hill or Hill 90 as it was also referred to. There were 391 other ranks from the 6th Battalion who were killed that fateful August day in 1915.

War has always papered over the cracks of any political shortcomings that were apparent back home and the First World War was no different. The Liberal Party won a massive political victory when they came to power in 1906. However, during their election campaign they didn’t promise to bring in any welfare reforms. In fact poverty and welfare were not big issues for any of the main political parties. Despite this the Liberal government brought in wide ranging, and what some saw as controversial, reforms almost as soon as they took office.

In 1908, old age pensions and school meals were introduced. In 1909, David Lloyd George brought in a new budget which ‘stopped people in their tracks’. Its main aim was to pay for the pensions and the other welfare reforms that the Liberal party were bringing in. With it came these words of wisdom.

‘This is a war budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away, we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time, when poverty and the wretchedness and human degradation which always follows its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests.’

When the war began the Liberal Party was in power with Herbert Asquith as the Prime Minister, but with the military defeats and failings mounting up behind him, his hold on political prominence dwindled, particularly with the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 and the need to form a coalition government the same year. The horrors of the Battle of the Somme followed in 1916, and in a political sense Asquith was finished. He was ousted from power by factions within his own party and replaced by David Lloyd George.

In 1911 they brought in National Insurance, which gave workers sick pay and unemployment benefits. These were radical measures for the day, truly ground breaking, and as with anything that is both new and radical, people weren’t always sure how to react. British society had for many years been based on a class system where everybody knew their place in its very foundations. Unexpectedly Asquith and the Liberal Party had come along and begun making drastic changes, which resulted in people becoming very nervous especially at the speed and the amount of changes that were taking place.

This is a snapshot of the political as well as public attitudes and beliefs that were held by the majority of society back in 1914, whether those same ideals prevailed as the war painfully continued for four more bloody years, will be a topic always open to debate.

On 10 November 1918 after four long years of bloody war, the Allies issued the German Government an eighteen-point list of demands for an Armistice to take place. It was accepted in its entirety without argument or discussion and at 1100 hours on 11 November 1918, the war in Europe was finally over.

CHAPTER 3

Kitchener’s Address to the Troops 1914

By the time Britain had declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914 preparations were already well underway to send a British Expeditionary Force (BEF) across the English Channel to assist the French and Belgians. The man initially in charge of the BEF was Field Marshall Sir John French.

The Minister for War at the time was Lord Kitchener, who decreed that every member of the BEF should be handed a document which contained his personal advice and guidance as to how troops should conduct themselves whilst in France. The intention was to ensure that British troops behaved in a correct and professional manner, primarily so as not to damage Anglo-French wartime relations. The address given by Kitchener was as follows:

‘This paper is to be considered by each soldier as confidential, and to be kept in his Active Service Pay Book. You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the King to help our French comrades against the invasion of a common enemy. You have to perform a task which will need your courage, your energy, your patience. Remember that the honour of the British Army depends on your individual conduct. It will be your duty not only to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire but also to maintain the most friendly relations with those whom you are helping in this struggle. The operations in which you are engaged will, for the most part, take place in a friendly country, and you can do your own country no better service than in showing yourself in France and Belgium in the true character of a British soldier.

Be invariably courteous, considerate and kind. Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting as a disgraceful act. You are sure to meet a welcome and to be trusted; your conduct must justify that welcome and that trust. Your duty cannot be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.’

Do your duty bravely. Fear God. Honour the King.

KITCHENER, (Field-Marshal).’

Nearly one hundred years later that document doesn’t come across as being particularly awe inspiring for young men just about to go off to fight in a war against an enemy on foreign soil. It certainly doesn’t make the hairs on the back of our necks stand up. If anything, it seems slightly condescending. I believe it clearly showed how far apart the mind set was between the common soldier, senior officers and politicians.

To most it would have been an adventure. It would have been the first time some of them had even set foot outside their own communities let alone been in another country. For all of them it was an opportunity to be able to do what they would have seen as being their duty, to serve their king and country when called upon to do so. Behaving in a disrespectful manner to innocent civilians in their own country wouldn’t have been high on the list of a soldier’s priorities of how they should conduct themselves. After having been in the front line trenches for the first time, the only thought on any of their minds would have been making sure that they stayed alive and made it back home to their loved ones. After that first taste of trench warfare they would have quickly realized they weren’t on any romantic adventure or holidaying in a foreign land, but living a nightmare on a horrifying and bloody journey where the next stop might well be their final destination.

When looked at in those terms, the more self-effacing and arrogant Kitchener’s words become, but on balance it has to be remembered that was the attitude of the time and it is hard and maybe somewhat unfair to look back and judge yesterday by today’s standards.

CHAPTER 4

Enlistment

The expansion of the British Army at the beginning of the First World War from a small professional unit to a larger and much more effective fighting machine, capable of defeating the world’s most formidable military adversary, was a truly remarkable achievement. It had been built on the back of an overriding sense of national pride and a steely determination not to be defeated.

From 1908 it was been possible to join the British army in different ways. A man could join up as a full time professional soldier in the Regular Army or as a part-time member of the Territorial Force or as a soldier of either the Special Reserve or the National Reserve. Unlike a lot of her European neighbours, Britain did not have a system of national conscription in place at the start of the First World War.

It had long been a bone of contention amongst both politicians and senior military personnel as to whether or not Britain needed a programme of national conscription. There had been political tensions bubbling under the surface throughout Europe and beyond for quite a few years. With all of the different alliances that countries were signing with each other to help protect the most vulnerable, there was always the strong likelihood of a war at some time in the near future, it was really just a case of when.

The Regular Army was quite an appealing option for a lot of young men who otherwise only had a lifetime of hard manual labour or submissive service to look forward to.

Most wouldn’t even get to venture out of the communities to which they had been born in to, let alone travel to a foreign country.

The allure of army life wasn’t such an unattractive option in the circumstances. They would at least be provided with accommodation, a uniform, three square meals a day and a regular wage.

Recruits, aged between eighteen and thirty-eight, had to pass certain physical tests and be willing to sign up for a number of years although they could not be sent overseas to serve until they were nineteen years of age.

The man had a choice of the regiment he was assigned to. He would typically join the army for a period of seven years full time service with the colours, to be followed by another five in the Army Reserve.

There was also the Special Reserve which provided a form of part-time military service. It was introduced in 1908 as a means of building up a pool of trained reservists in addition to those of the regular Army Reserve. Special Reservists enlisted for six years and had to accept the possibility of being called up in the event of a general mobilisation and to undergo all the same conditions as men of the Army Reserve. This meant that it differed from the Territorial Force in that the men could be sent overseas. They had to undertake three to four weeks training per year. A man serving in the Special Reserve could not serve beyond the age of 40, whereas a former regular soldier whose period of Army Reserve obligation had been completed could also re-enlist as a Special Reservist and serve up to the age of 42.

The Territorial Force, which was the forerunner of today’s Territorial Army, came into existence in April 1908 as a result of the reorganisation of the former militia and other volunteer units. It provided an opportunity for men to join the army on a part-time basis. These units were often recruited from within local communities which meant recruits had a choice of regiment, but because of the local nature of the Territorial Force, in general men would join their home unit. The training was generally undertaken at weekends or in the evenings and there was also a two-week summer camp that had to be attended once a year. Territorials were not obliged to serve overseas, but when they enlisted it was on the basis that in the event of war they could be called upon to undertake full-time military service.

The National Reserve was a register maintained by Territorial Force County Associations of all those men who had military experience, but who had no other reserve obligation. In October 1914 men of the National Reserve were formed into companies and attached to existing Territorial Force battalions, for guarding installations such as railways and other vulnerable points within Britain. In July 1915 there was an attempt to identify men from the National Reserve who were capable of marching ten miles with a rifle and 150 rounds of ammunition.

These men were formed into battalions of the Rifle Brigade and sent out to Egypt and India at the end of 1915 to replace Territorial Force units that were committed to fighting in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia.

When the war ended there was suddenly no longer any need to have so many men in the armed forces. When a soldier was demobbed, depended on what his individual terms of service were. Soldiers of the regular army who were still serving their normal period of service remained in the army until their contracted amount of years had been completed. Men who had volunteered or who were conscripted for war service were generally given priority. Understandably, everyone wanted to get back home as quickly as they could once the war was over, but it simply was not possible for everybody to just down tools and go.

Not only would it have been practically impossible to process such large numbers of men in such a short period of time, but the British Army still had military commitments to fulfil across Europe as well in garrisons throughout the Empire.

Before soldiers left their units they were examined by an Army doctor and then given a form which allowed them, if applicable, to make a claim for any form of disability which had arisen as a result of their military service.

On the outbreak of war in August 1914, Britain had 247,432 regular troops. About 120,000 of these were in the British Expeditionary Force and the rest were stationed abroad. It was clear that more soldiers would be needed to defeat the German Army.

On 7 August 1914, Lord Kitchener, the war minister, began a recruiting campaign by calling for men aged between nineteen and thirty to join the British Army. At first this was very successful with an average of 33,000 men joining every day. Three weeks later Kitchener raised the recruiting age to thirty-five and by the middle of September over 500,000 men had volunteered their services.

Meanwhile the leadership of the Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU) began negotiating with the British government. On 10 August the government announced it was releasing all Suffragettes from prison. In return, the WSPU agreed to end their militant activities and help the war effort instead.

With the men going off to fight in such large numbers, the jobs and work which they were leaving behind still needed to be done and not just for the benefit of the war effort. Regardless of whether there was a political will to provide women with the right to vote, having them ‘on side’ and in support of the war effort was an absolute necessity.

Emmeline Pankhurst announced that all militants now needed to fight for their country in the same way and with the same tenacity as they had previously fought for the right to vote. Ethel Smyth pointed out in her 1933 autobiography, Female Pipings for Eden:

‘Mrs Pankhurst declared that it was now not a question of Votes for Women, but of having any country left to vote in.’

After receiving a £2,000 grant from the government, which was an extremely large sum of money in those days, the WSPU organised a demonstration in London. Members carried banners with slogans such as ‘We Demand the Right to Serve’, ‘For Men Must Fight and Women Must work’ and ‘Let None Be Kaiser’s Cat’s Paws’. At the meeting, attended by an estimated 30,000 people, Emmeline Pankhurst called on the trade unions to let women work in those industries traditionally dominated by men.

At the beginning of the war the army had strict specifications about who could become soldiers. Men joining the army had to be at least five feet six inches tall with a chest measurement of thirty-five inches. By May 1915 the need for even more soldiers led to the criteria being changed. Now a man only had to be five feet three inches tall and the age limit was raised to forty years. In July the Army agreed to the formation of ‘Bantam’ battalions, composed of men between five feet and five feet three inches in height.

In 1914 David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, was given the task of setting up a British War Propaganda Bureau (WPB). He appointed the successful writer and fellow Liberal MP, Charles Masterman as head of the organization.

During the first few months of the war the WPB published numerous pamphlets, such as the report on alleged German outrages that gave credence to the idea that the German Army had systematically tortured Belgian civilians, all of which were penned by well-known writers of the day.

The government also began a successful poster campaign. Artists such as Savile Lumley, Alfred Leete, Frank Brangwyn and Norman Lindsay, helped to produce a series of posters urging men to join the British Army. The desire to fight continued on into 1915 and by the end of that year some two million men had volunteered to serve in the British armed forces, evidence enough that both the pamphlets and the posters had more than adequately proved their worth.

CHAPTER 5

Defence of the Realm Act 1914

The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) which came into being in August 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War, brought about some of the most fundamental changes in British society. In 1914 Britain was concerned with two main issues, how to defend itself against the threat of possible internal enemies and how to mobilize the country behind the war effort.

With the Act came a raft of measures that would have been inconceivable to have even thought about, other than at a time of war, where national security was paramount. These included in no particular order, the following restrictions.

It was illegal to photograph military bases and establishments.

It was illegal to own or use telephones or telegraph without specific government permission.

Civilians needed a permit to be able to keep homing pigeons.

There were strict controls on the ownership and use of firearms, chemicals and film for moving pictures.

The military could take control of any piece of land without needing the owner’s agreement or permission.

Local councils could take over land that wasn’t being used for food production and grow crops on it.

The sale of medical drugs and alcohol was strictly controlled.

Shops had to close by 8pm each day.

Lights had to be put out or their use kept to a minimum.

No talk about naval or military matters in public places.

No one was allowed to spread rumours about military matters.

No one was allowed to buy binoculars.

No one was allowed to trespass on railway lines or bridges.

No one was allowed to melt down silver or gold.

No one was allowed to light bonfires or fireworks.

No one was allowed to give bread to chickens or horses.

No one was allowed to use invisible ink when writing abroad.

No one was allowed to buy brandy or whisky in a railway refreshment room.

No one was allowed to ring church bells.

The government could take over any factory or workshop.

The government could try any civilians breaking these laws.

The government could sensor any newspapers.

As the war continued and evolved the government introduced more laws to the Defence of the Realm Act.

The government introduced British summertime to give more daylight for extra work.

Opening hours in pubs were cut.

Beer was watered down.

Customers in pubs were not allowed to buy a round of drinks.

The Act was varied and wide-ranging and whilst some of its restrictions were both obvious and understandable, some of them appeared to be equally obscure and confusing. The outbreak of war had certainly given the government the opportunity to give itself some extremely intrusive powers and control over its population.

In 1914 at the outbreak of the war Britain’s Army was still relatively small. The government asked for one hundred thousand young men to volunteer, instead they ended up with five times that number, but by the latter part of 1915 they found that they needed even more.

In January 1916, compulsory military service was introduced, otherwise known as conscription, for all single males between the ages of 19 and 30. Three months later in April 1916 this was extended to include married men.

By using DORA the government tried to prevent unions and workers from taking strike action against their employers, but the idea was flawed from the outset. Some unions saw this as being extremely provocative and no more than a veiled threat to what they saw as being a worker’s right. With this hanging over them some unions threatened to go on strike. The last thing the government could afford was a loss of productivity in any of its industries, especially in the areas of food, clothing, engineering or armaments, any of which could dramatically affect the war effort. The unions called their bluff and the government had folded like a pack of cards which gave the unions the upper hand where industrial relations were concerned, a position which they continued to enjoy until the mid-1980s.

Prior to the war there was a very specific structure to society, people knew their place and what was expected of them, but all of that changed with the First World War and there would be no going back to how it had once been.

The war didn’t totally prevent industrial action from being taken by some unions, a tactic usually employed over pay, conditions and working practices. After the war industrial relationships between employer and worker became even worse in some quarters. After four years of bloody war, where hardly a single family had not made some kind of personal sacrifice, usually at the cost of a loved one, there had been a massive shift in the very fabric of society. People were no longer prepared to go back to how things had once been, to what had been a very class driven society. They now wanted and demanded more. Post 1918 saw the dawning of a new age not only in Britain but across the whole of Europe.

Under DORA, the government also took increasing control of industry and food production. When the war began, there were no clear plans to do this. However, as the war continued and became more intense it was clear that private companies could not cope. In 1915 there was a munitions crisis. Private companies were unable to produce enough munitions, partly because they were too small and partly because they could not get enough metal, coal or rubber. The government took control of co-ordinating the supply of materials. It also set up its own munitions factories and took control of the coal industry in 1917.

On the whole, it seems that most people accepted the somewhat harsh restrictions, the majority of arrests or cautions given by police or military authorities being for people who accidentally broke DORA Regulations rather than those protesting about government restrictions on their freedom.

The government’s biggest challenge was finding enough men to fight. When war broke out the British Army was nowhere near the size of Germany’s, a country which had been preparing for war for years. Traditionally Britain had always relied on a large navy to defend itself from invasion and therefore hadn’t seen the need to increase the size of its land army to any great degree, but this was a war that would ultimately be won and lost on the battlefields of Europe and not in the oceans of the world.

The First World War would be like no other war that had gone before it, the industrial revolution and subsequent technological revolution in weapon development had seen to that. Along with the artillery, machine guns, tanks, aircraft and other weapons that were all part of the new type of warfare, it also required millions of soldiers.

All the other great powers had systems of conscription. Men were called up for a few years compulsory military service. This meant that Russia, Germany, Austria and France all had large armies in 1914 and could call up thousands of men who had been provided with military training because they had recently finished their national service. Britain had never had a system like this because it had never needed one. There was also the fact that British people saw compulsory military service as a threat to their liberty and democracy.

At the outbreak of war Britain needed volunteers and by the end of 1914 and into 1915 the pace of volunteering had slowed. Many men simply did not want to go to war. Men could earn high wages in war-related industries. Many also had wives, children and in some cases parents, to support.

There was a suspicion that in some areas men were not being pressured to volunteer, while in other areas they were, and confusion over whether the government wanted workers like miners or shipbuilders to join up or stay in their jobs and produce much needed materials for the war effort.

All this added up to a crisis in the second half of 1915. As a result, Lord Derby, who had been appointed the government’s director general of recruiting on 11 October 1915, was given the job of trying to boost numbers of men volunteering. He had some success and recruitment rose, but with thousands of casualties, predominantly on the Western Front, Lord Derby’s efforts were not enough to meet the Army’s needs. In January 1916 Prime Minister Asquith introduced conscription for all single men aged between eighteen and forty. It was a tough decision. No members of the government wanted conscription, but they felt that it was the only way that Britain could get the troops it needed. It was also widely seen as the fairest and most organised way to recruit. Conscription was eventually extended to include married men in April 1916.

Not everybody felt this way. Around fifty Liberal and Labour MPs voted against conscription. The trade unions opposed it because they did not trust the government not to extend conscription to industrial work as well as military service. Conscientious objectors also opposed the measure.

On the whole, however, the evidence suggests that conscription worked. It was well organised and people felt that they were being treated equally. Some people were exempt, such as men in jobs which were vital to war industries which were referred to as ‘reserved occupations’. Anyone called up could appeal and have his case heard by a Military Service Tribunal. (See Chapter 18).

Food shortages were not a major problem in Britain during the initial stages of the war. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of panic buying when the war started, which caused shortages, but this didn’t last too long. A more important issue was that of rising prices, as the old scales of supply and demand kicked in with a vengeance, not helped by the greed of certain individuals who saw the war as an opportunity to make money. The government restricted the amount of food and other goods that could be imported, which meant the prices of certain items and products would increase. For most people, this was not too much of a problem because their wages went up as well. However, for the old and poorer paid unskilled workers, rising prices made life much harder.

The situation became worse in 1917 when the Germans adopted a tactic of unrestricted submarine warfare. They had done this for short periods in 1915 and 1916, but in 1917 it became a concerted attack. The tactic was simple, all ships that were on their way to the shores of Britain were fair game and were to be sunk on site, no matter which country they hailed from or flag they sailed under. The effects were devastating. Essential supplies began to run short and in April 1917 Britain was only six weeks away from running out of wheat. Prices began to soar, queues grew longer and shops ran out of food. The government introduced a voluntary rationing scheme, led by the King and Queen. The main aim was to save wheat by getting people to eat less bread. For the better off in society this wasn’t too much of an inconvenience. However, for the less well off, bread was a major part of daily dietary needs.

By the end of 1917 resentment amongst the poorer working classes was on the increase against the better off who could still afford the rising prices as well as be able to purchase other items from what had become known as the ‘black market’. In January 1918 the Government finally had to act and had to introduce rationing. At first it was limited to the Home Counties in the south-east of England. By April it had spread to the entire country. Every person was issued with a ration card, even the King and Queen. The weekly allowances were as follows:

15oz (425g) of meat.

5oz (142g) of bacon.

4oz (113g) of butter or margarine.

Sugar was also rationed, and the government controlled the availability of many other consumer goods. Rationing largely solved the problems of rising prices and food queues. The health of the majority of people, especially the poor, may have actually improved as a result of rationing. They received better food than they could have afforded before rationing came in.

Britain’s second biggest trading partner in 1914 before the war began was Germany, so when the war started a lot of British firms lost customers to whom they could sell their goods. Lost trade meant a reduction in the need for so many workers and in some cases also meant closure for the smaller businesses. This situation did not last for long. As men were joining the Army in such large numbers, more jobs became available on the home front.

The First World War would be decided as much in the factories as it would on the battlefields. Although large numbers of men were needed to fight, they couldn’t do it without equipment, such as rifles, machine-guns, bullets, artillery pieces and shells, medical supplies and uniforms, not forgetting the large and continuous quantities of food and animal feed that were required to feed an ever-increasing army and a growing stock of horses.

With workers in demand, employers had to pay higher wages to get them, as fewer and fewer men were available due to the war. Employers also had to compete for the materials they needed to make their goods. The down side was that even though workers’ wages rose, the prices of goods also went up even faster. Eventually the government had to take control of industries like coal and munitions.

The shortage of workers was met by the recruitment of over a million women, employed to do what had traditionally been male jobs. Nearly one million went to work in munitions factories up and down the country and worked in many other areas like engineering, driving buses and taxis, while around 16,000 of them joined the Women’s Land Army. This was a radical change in society which would never have come about if it hadn’t been for the war. Of course, women were paid less than the men had been earning, although in most cases it was probably more money than women had previously been able to earn. There were two large munitions factories near to Billericay, the British Explosives Syndicate factory at Pitsea, eight miles away, and the other twelve miles away at Kynochtown which is today Coryton oil refinery.

With women workers being employed in such large numbers, many trade unions feared for the future, for a time after the war when the status quo of the employment market would resume. They did not trust the employers, many of whom had made a lot of money from the war. The concern was that when men returned from the war they might be sacked and replaced by women workers whose wages would be much lower.

CHAPTER 6

The Essex Regiment

The Essex Regiment was an infantry regiment in the British Army between 1881 and 1958, with the majority of its men recruited from within the county. Its headquarters and barracks were on a large site in Warley on the outskirts of Brentwood, which today houses the Ford Motor Company. Today the now defunct regiment lives on in the shape of C Company of The Royal Anglian Regiment.

During the First World War so many men joined the Essex Regiment that they were able to provide thirty battalions for the British Army. As we will see later, some of these men were from the Billericay area, a number of whom paid the ultimate price.

The 1st Battalion of the Essex Regiment was in Mauritius at the outbreak of the First World War, but they were brought back home by December 1914 and almost immediately began their training for deployment to the Western Front. However, instead of France they left for Gallipoli in March 1915, sailing from Avonmouth near Bristol, and landing at Cape Helles, Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, stopping en route in Malta, Alexandria and Mudros.

In Gallipoli they were involved in some heavy fighting before eventually being evacuated on the evenings of 7 and 8 January 1916 to the relative safety of Alexandria in Egypt, where they stayed until March before then sailing to Marseilles in southern France where they were redeployed on the Western Front.

They were involved in the action on the very first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. At just before 1100 hours, and after a two-hour delay due to heavy German bombardment of their positions, the order came through for W, X, Y and Z companies to go ‘over the top’. Many didn’t even make it out of the trenches as they were cut down by heavy German machine-gun fire. They lost nearly 1,000 men that day; the names of some of them are recorded on the Thiepval Memorial in France.

The memorial is reserved for those missing or unidentified soldiers who have no known grave. A large inscription on an internal surface of the memorial reads:

‘Here are recorded names of officers and men of the British Armies who fell on the Somme battlefields between July 1915 and March 1918 but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death.’

In 1917 men from the Essex Regiment took part in all three actions known as the Battle of the Scarpe during the Arras offensive. They also took part in the Battle of Langemarck as well as the Battle of Broodseinde. Their other battle honours from the First World War included actions at Le Cateau, Ypres, Loos, Cambrai and Gaza.

By 1881 numerous different regiments had evolved into what became the Essex Regiment, which saw active service in the Boer War and both the First and Second World Wars. The regiment was also involved in the Irish War of Independence during 1919 through to 1921, when it was stationed at Kinsale in County Cork. The 2nd Battalion was stationed in Constantinople in Turkey during the Greco-Turkish war in 1922.

The regimental barracks at Warley continued to serve as a training centre and depot for the Essex Regiment until after the Second World War, with many young men going there to serve the first few weeks of their National Service, but with the ending of conscription in 1960, the site was closed and sold off.

Although the regiment no longer exists, the Essex Regimental Chapel is still located in Eagle Way, Warley. It was built in 1857, originally for the East India Company, but with the establishment of the Essex Regiment Depot at Warley, the chapel became the regiment’s ‘home’ church. The site of the old regimental depot has long since been demolished and is now the headquarters of the Ford Motor Company. Most of the original barracks have been knocked down and only the chapel, the officer’s mess, which is now a nursing home, and one of the regimental gymnasiums, remain.

CHAPTER 7

5th Norfolk Regiment – Sandringham Pals – The Vanished Battalion

Although we are unable to come up with a definitive answer to the question, how many different regiments were billeted in the town of Billericay or even at nearby Stock during the First World War, we know enough to be able to establish that there were quite a few mainly because of the area’s strategic geographical position in the event of a German invasion.

One such regiment was the 5th Norfolk or the Sandringham Pals, so named, as the 5th was predominately made up of men who worked on the crown estate at Sandringham in Norfolk and who were employed by the Royal Family. The battalion had been formed in 1908 at the personal request of King Edward the Vll.

Norfolk Regiment cap badge.

When war was declared and Britain started to mobilize its forces the 5th, which was part of the 54th Division, was originally billeted in Billericay but on 17 August 1914 moved to Colchester. Over the next year they moved to different locations around the UK, training and honing their skills in readiness for war. That day soon arrived and they left these shores and set sail for the Dardanelles on 29 July 1915 on board the SS Aquitania from Liverpool. There were 1,000 men in the battalion along with thirty officers of different ranks. Their Commanding Officer was Colonel Sir Horace G.P. Beauchamp, Bart, C.B. They eventually reached Mudros in Turkey on 5 August 1915 as part of the commitment to the Gallipoli campaign. Amongst the officers were the four Beck brothers and the three Cubitt brothers. On arrival the regiment was dispatched to Suvla Bay, where heavy fighting had already taken place.

It was very hot during the day and freezing cold at night, so extreme were the temperature changes. The men were still not fully recovered from the rigours of their long sea journey and were untried when it came to actual fighting, when on 12 August 1915, nearly the entire battalion was wiped out during an ill-conceived attack against a well-drilled Ottoman enemy. The attack was carried out in broad daylight across open ground which provided little, if any, cover.

What happened to the 5th is eloquently captured in Commanderin-Chief Sir Ian Hamilton’s dispatch dated 11 December 1915, when he describes what he calls, ’A very mysterious thing’:

‘The 5th Norfolk’s were on the right of the line and found themselves for a moment less strongly opposed than the rest of the Brigade. Against the yielding faces of the enemy, Colonel Sir H. Beauchamp, a bold self-confident officer, eagerly pressed forward, followed by the best part of the Battalion. The fighting grew hotter and the ground became more wooded and broken.

At this stage many men were either wounded or grew exhausted with thirst. These found their way back to camp during the night, but the Colonel along with sixteen officers and 250 men, still kept pushing on, driving the enemy before them. Nothing more was ever seen or heard of any of them. They charged in to forest and were lost to sight or sound. Not one of them ever came back.’

It was not until some years later that any trace was ever discovered of the 5th Norfolks. Writing on 29 September 1919 the officer commanding the Graves Registration Unit in Gallipoli said:

‘We have found the 5th Norfolks, there were 180 in all, 122 Norfolk and a few Hants and Suffolks with 2/4th Cheshires. We could only identify two Privates, Barnaby and Cotter. They were scattered all over an area of about one square mile, at a distance of at least 800 yards behind the Turkish front line. Many of them had evidently been killed in a farm, as a local Turk who owns the place told us that when he came back he found the farm covered with the decomposing bodies of British soldiers which he threw into a small ravine.

The whole thing quite bears out the original theory that they did not get very far, but were mopped up one by one, all accept the ones who got in to the farm.’

For some reason, why we will never know, the officer concerned omitted from this report the fact that every single one of the bodies that had been discovered had been shot in the head, as if they had either been executed or finished off after having being discovered wounded.

The War Diaries of the 5th Norfolk, record that their total casualties at Gallipoli were twenty-two officers and about 350 men.

CHAPTER 8

Edith Cavell 1865 – 1915

The major event in the War in August 1915 wasn’t taking place on the Western Front but on the Gallipoli peninsula, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. The allies had begun their main offensive on 6 April 1915 and after three months there was somewhat of a stalemate in place. Intense fighting had already resulted over 20,000 British and Commonwealth casualties.

Such losses were not seen by the British authorities as being good for morale. At the same time in Belgium a British nurse had been arrested by the German authorities and she was soon to become a household name.

Edith Cavell.

We gave quite a bit of thought about whether to include this chapter or not as Edith Cavell has no direct association with Billericay, other than having a street in the town named after her. But having said that we believe it was right to include a little bit about her as it showed another side of the war, it showed the total inhumanity of it all. It made ordinary people ask the question how could a civilised nation kill a woman for what they saw and understood as her simply doing her job, which was to save lives.

Edith Louisa Cavell was born on 4 December 1865 in Swardeston, Norfolk. She was a nurse who whilst working in German occupied Belgium, she gained a popular reputation as a humanitarian by saving the lives of soldiers on all sides without showing favouritism to anybody.

She also helped some 200 allied soldiers escape the area, which under German military law was seen as an act of treason. She was arrested by the Germans on 3 August 1915, held in prison for ten weeks before being charged with harbouring Allied soldiers, found guilty and sentenced to death.

Despite Allied pressure and pleas to the German authorities to show her mercy, she was shot by firing squad at 0700 hours on 12 October 1915 in Shaarbeek, Brussels, Belgium. She was only forty-nine years of age.

Her execution was met with world-wide condemnation. It was seen as being somewhat of a barbaric act even when compared with the slaughter and bloodshed that had been taking place almost on a daily basis for the previous year.

Ironically the German actions were supported by the first Geneva Convention of 1906, specifically article 7 of the act, thus giving the German decision to execute Edith Cavell, a somewhat warped kind of international credence and legitimacy.

The British government decided to use Cavell’s heroic story as part of their propaganda machinery in an attempt to raise morale amongst troops and the civilian population, as well as trying to galvanise support for the war effort especially when it came to recruitment. Edith Cavell became the most prominent British female casualty of the First World War.

She had schools, streets as well as nursing facilities all named after her. Memorials were raised in her name. There is an Edith Cavell ward, which specifically cares for elderly patients, both male and female, at Basildon hospital.

Edith Cavell, executed 12 October, Brussels. (Wikipedia)

CHAPTER 9

Loyal North Lancashire Regiment

Billericay was not a happy place for the soldiers of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment when they came to the town in May 1915. Within the space of three months, four men serving with the 11th Battalion would be dead, three of them as a result of water-related incidents, two of which still remain suspicious to this day and a fourth as a result of a heart attack. Another two men who were witnesses at two of the subsequent inquests would both transfer to the regiment’s 6th Battalion, and be dead within the next nine months.

Private 21118 William Gregson died on 7 June 1915. He was found dead in a pond in Drummonds Wood, Mountnessing. The inquest into his death took place at the Billericay Union Workhouse on 14 June 1915. The Coroner was Mr C. Edgar Lewis.

On the evening of Saturday, 12 June Private G.B. Austin was out for a leisurely stroll on his own near the pond, when he noticed a uniform jacket and cap lying on the grass immediately by the side of the pond. He saw a body lying face down in the water, but rather than attempting to wade into the pool to retrieve the body – after all, the man may well have still been alive at that stage – he left to get assistance in the shape of Sergeant Major 4806 Walter Lassam and some other men from his battalion who recovered the body from the pond. Private Austin noticed blood round the deceased’s nostrils, his left eye was blackened and his body had a noticeable amount of bruising on it.

Despite these observations the local GP, Dr W. Shakleton stated that it was the opinion of his colleague, Dr H. Cardin and himself that death was due to asphyxia probably caused by drowning. A verdict in accordance with the medical evidence was duly returned.

There was no comment or observation from the Coroner, that the soldier’s death was in anyway suspicious, despite the injuries that had been witnessed by Private Austin, Sergeant Major Lassam and others, which gave strong grounds to believe that the death of Private Gregson was at the very least suspicious and quite possibly the result of foul play.

Lance Corporal 20847 Henry A. Nourse, was the soldier who identified the body to be that of Private William Gregson. He told the inquest that they were in the same section and slept in the same tent, although Private Gregson did not sleep there on the night of 7 June 1915 and was reported as being absent the following morning when he had not returned to camp. It would be another four days before his body was discovered.

Another colleague of Private Gregson, Private 21068 William George Berry, stated that Gregson, was a 23-year-old single man, the son of a farmer and had lived at Whittle-le-Woods, Chorley, Lancashire. He had given the impression of no longer wanting to be in the Army and had drifted into a morbid state of mind. How Private Berry had come to these conclusions had neither been explored by the Coroner nor explained in any detail.

Sergeant Major Walter Lassam was only 14 years of age when he joined the Army on 13th December 1895 in Dublin, having been born in the city in 1881. At just 19 years old he was promoted to the rank of lance corporal. On 5 January 1903 he transferred to the Foot Police before transferring back to the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment three years later. After having served for twelve years he decided to make it his chosen career and on 21 September 1907 re-engaged at the to complete twenty-one year’s service which meant he had nine more years to go until he retired.

However, he would never see his well-deserved retirement. He transferred to the 6th Battalion on 14 November 1915 and was promoted to the rank of Company Sergeant Major on 2 December 1915, joining them to take part in the Gallipoli campaign and sailing from Liverpool on 15 November. Five days later he was killed in action having served for 19 years 360 days.

The sad irony was that Walter Lassam had previously sat before an Army Medical Board due to a knee injury which had led to rheumatoid arthritis, which he had originally sustained whilst training during the early months of the war. The recommendation of the Board was that he be allowed to continue his Army service but only in a clerical capacity and on the Home Front. There was even talk of him being medically discharged. He would appear to have been very well respected by his senior officers which might go some way in explaining how he managed to get this changed. He was allowed to return to active service overseas on 29 November 1915, a decision which would ultimately cost him his life, leave his wife a widow and their three children without a father, but he was a soldier and soldiering to a large extent defined who he was. He was awarded the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. The only blemish on his otherwise impeccable career was having been found drunk on duty on 5 February 1915 by a senior officer. He was severely reprimanded and returned to duty.

On 11 June 1914, the Coroner had held another inquest at the Billericay Union Workhouse in relation to the death of Private 16982 John Livesey who had drowned whilst bathing in the Moat in Billericay with a colleague, Corporal Robert Frangwill. They had not been given permission to leave camp, let alone be bathe in the moat, which was confirmed by Lieutenant Reiss, one of the battalion’s officers.

Corporal Frangwill told the inquest that he and Private Livesey had only been in the moat for about ten minutes when the tragedy occurred. He had been swimming when he looked up and saw Private Livesey sitting on the bank about four or five yards from the water, he carried on swimming then a few seconds later he heard shouting, turned around and could no longer see the deceased. A young boy on the bank pointed out where Private Livesey had gone under the water. Corporal Frangwill swam to the location and dived several times to try and find his colleague but with no luck, eventually getting himself entangled in the weeds. He then sent the boy to get help.

The boy was William Loxley and he told the inquest that he was walking past the moat and saw the soldiers bathing. He heard shouting and saw one of the men struggling in the water before he disappeared. He confirmed that he had informed the other soldier before being told to get assistance, which he did, returning to the location a short time later with Private Lygtgoe, who then took off his uniform and dived in to the moat to search for Private Livesey. He did this several times before discovering his body under the heavy weeds.

A verdict of accidental death was returned.

The Coroner was certainly been kept busy by the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment because on 15 June 1914, he was once again opening an inquest into the deaths of one of the men from the Regiment’s 11th Battalion – Private John Eccles who was 47 years old and had died suddenly the previous day.

Corporal Dalton told the inquest that the deceased was an old soldier who had re-enlisted at the beginning of the war having previously served with the Regiment in the Boer Wars.

Dr Fiddes gave evidence that the deceased had attended sick parade on Monday morning, complaining of pains in his chest. After examining the deceased he excused him from all military duties and gave him some medicine. Within half an hour of visiting Doctor Fiddes, Private Eccles had collapsed, dying a short while later. A post mortem examination revealed that the deceased’s heart was about twice the size it should have been which was the result of his death. There was no treatment available that could have helped his condition. Death would have occurred regardless of what occupation he had been employed in.

Prior to the outbreak of the war, Private 19016 John Eccles had lived at number 20 Heatley Street, Preston, Lancashire with his wife Florence and was a furnace stoker by trade. They had a young son, John Allen Eccles who was only 5 years old at the time of his father’s death. After the war Florence stayed in Preston but moved to number 2 Herbert Street with her son. John Eccles is buried at the Preston (New Hall Lane) Cemetery.

There were six other men with the name John Eccles who served in the Loyal Lancashire Regiment during the First World War.

James Nicholson wasn’t from Billericay but it was the town where he spent the last six months of his life and where he was living, albeit temporarily, when he died. On 14 November 1914 James Nicholson enlisted in the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment and was posted to the 11th Battalion which had been formed the previous month at Felixstowe in Kent. The battalion came under the command of the 94 Brigade which had originally been in the 31st Division. On 10 April the following year the 11th became a reserve battalion and on 1 September 1916 it was converted in to the 17th Training Reserve Battalion of the 4th Reserve Battalion at Seaford.

At the time of joining the Army, Nicholson was 26-years-old and a newspaper vendor, where exactly is not known. He married Mary Ann McGovin on Boxing Day 1908 and they had three children. The family lived together at 45, Gomer Street, Soho, Liverpool. At his enlistment medical in Liverpool, he was described as being 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighing 112lbs, with brown hair and brown eyes. .

Nicholson’s Army discipline record was far from being exemplary, it fact it was quite the opposite, as it had resulted in him receiving several official reprimands for his conduct and behaviour. On 1 March 1915, whilst his regiment was at barracks in Chichester he was discovered drunk at about 2230 hours. Nearly three weeks later on 24 March 1915, he was once again in trouble for being absent from the tattoo until 2235 hours as well as being drunk. As if that wasn’t enough he managed to get himself in to further trouble on 23 May 1915 by overstaying his leave pass by four days, which was almost tantamount to desertion.

Soon after this last incident the regiment moved to Billericay, where it stayed until the end of September 1915 whilst undertaking training. The change of scenery didn’t appear to have helped him at all. The regiment had only been in Billericay for less than a week when Nicholson was in trouble again. On 4 June 1915 he was charged with ‘leading a disturbance and using obscene language to a Non Commissioned Officer’ (NCO). Two months later he was at it again. On 3 August 1915 he was charged with ‘overstaying his pass, remaining absent until reporting himself at 2200 hours on 6 August 1915’. There is no record of the punishments or fines which Nicholson received for his seemingly ever-growing list of misdemeanours.

On 8 August 1915 the body of Private 18189 James Nicholson was discovered lying face down in the River Wid near Wickford. His throat had been cut with such force that his windpipe had been completely severed. A newspaper article attached to his service record reported the findings of the inquest which had dealt with his death. Somewhat surprisingly most might feel, the jury managed to come to the conclusion that Nicholson had in fact committed suicide by cutting his own throat with a razor. The article was entitled, ‘Soldier’s Suicide in Buttsbury’:

‘The Coroner, Mr Lewis held an inquest at Billericay Union Workhouse on Monday regarding the death of Private James Nicholson, aged 26 of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, whose body was found in the River Wid at Buttsbury on Sunday.

Private Joshua Malone, of the same regiment, stated that the deceased’s home was at Liverpool. He last saw him alive at the guard tent between one and two o’clock on Sunday afternoon. He was then on the defaulters list for being late on a pass, a minor offence, and he had come to report himself.

Deceased had previously been to see the doctor, and when witness asked how he had got on he replied, “Rotten. I will get my ticket properly”, meaning his discharge.

Stephen Sidney Shuttleworth, a boy who was not sworn and who lives in Bluebell Cottage, Buckwyns Estate, said he saw the deceased in the river at five o’clock the previous evening. He was face downward and the witness could just see his khaki uniform. He found a razor on the bank by the side of the river.

PS Whiting said he received information from the last witness, and proceeded to the spot. There were bloodstains on the bank and on the razor. The water was about two feet six inches deep. With the assistance of three other men, witness got the body to the bank and then found that the throat had been cut, the windpipe being severed.

Dr H.J. Shackleton, stated that he saw the deceased at noon on Sunday, and he then seemed depressed. When asked, ‘What was the matter?’ He said his mates had declared him consumptive. There was evidence that he had been drinking, although he was not actually drunk then. He admitted that while on leave his friends had treated him. Witness advised him to leave the drink alone.

There was no doubt that the wound in the throat was self-inflicted. The jury returned a verdict that deceased committed suicide by cutting his own throat while suffering from the after effects of alcohol.’

Reading that verdict now, all these years later and with the benefit of the advances there have been in both the medical world and that of forensics, it’s quite alarming to think that the jury at the coroner’s inquest decided that Nicholson’s death was no more than an act of suicide, a decision which if judged by today’s standards could have possibly been determined quite differently.

Although it has to be taken into account that this is 1915 suicide still seems an very unusual conclusion to have reached. Without the benefit of being able to look at any pictures of the fatal wound, it is hard to be certain about any of this, but slitting one’s own throat with such effort as to be able to slice through the windpipe, is not easily achieved by any stretch of the imagination. In 1915 we didn’t have the advantages of being able to undertake DNA sampling to confirm the blood on the razor matched that of Nicholson’s own blood, nor was there opportunity to determine whether the wound was made by a left or right-handed person and then compare that with which hand Nicholson used to write with.

From the inquest notes there is no mention of exactly how far away the razor was found from Nicholson’s body, but from what we do know it certainly wasn’t in the immediate vicinity. How that was so, does not appear to have been explored by those investigating the incident. Surely if someone had managed to cut their own throat they wouldn’t have had the time or inclination to have thrown the knife any distance, on the contrary, they would have simply dropped it.

It is quite possible that Nicholson could have consumed more alcohol after he had been seen by the doctor but Shackleton himself, confirms that he was far from being drunk. Although he stated he thought Nicholson to be depressed, he didn’t appear to be unduly concerned about his overall mental state of mind, simply telling him to ‘leave the drink alone’. There was a time period of nearly five hours between when Nicholson left the doctor and when he was then discovered by young Stephen Shuttleworth, so it is possible that he’d consumed a lot more alcohol, but we have to be careful to make sure that we deal with the facts as they were and not what we think they might have been.

Unfortunately we don’t know if the Police ever treated Nicholson’s death as being suspicious. There are no Police records available today which have survived concerning the incident, so it is extremely difficult to look into the matter. All we are left with is supposition and guesswork about what actually happened.

It is difficult to believe that somebody was depressed to such a degree, who had the presence of mind to see a doctor would later decide that things were so bad he had no other option but to take his own life.

There had been no previous suggestions that Nicholson had ever suffered with any kind of depression and at the inquest although Dr Shackleton uses the word ‘depressed’, he doesn’t elaborate as to why he thought that was in fact the case. His only advice to Nicholson is to stay off of the drink. He doesn’t refer him on to a specialist, he doesn’t offer him any medication and, as far as we know, doesn’t inform Nicholson’s regiment. If Nicholson was trying to ‘work his ticket’ and have himself discharged from the Army, he would have been seen by an Army Medical Board and needed to have convinced them of his state of mind and not a local doctor.

A letter from the War Office written shortly after the inquest stated that; ‘In view of the circumstances of the death, his widow and children are not eligible for pensions from Army funds’.

It would appear that PS Whiting, the first Police officer on the scene, was in fact Police Sergeant 94 Henry A. Whiting. He was 38 years old at the time, having joined Essex Constabulary on 7 September 1899. He had worked at Billericay Police station since 1913, arriving there from his previous station at Grays. He eventually retired with the rank of superintendent on 4 July 1931 having served almost thirty-two years.

As well as being a doctor, Dr Shackleton, an ex-missionary to China, was also a lay preacher who delivered weekly sermons from his own church in the town. He set up his own medical practice in Billericay in 1912 and was much respected, described as, ‘a man of prayer but somewhat eccentric’, his main eccentricity being that he would always pray with the family before examining a patient he visited. He continued in general medical practice until 1940.

The Gospel Hall, which was already in existence when Dr Shackleton came to Billericay, was subsequently purchased by him from the original owner and for several years he oversaw the work which went on there. He often preached himself and he invited preachers of many different denominations to do so as well.

When war broke out in August 1914, Billericay had a regular and steady influx of soldiers who came to stay at the town’s army camp in Mountnessing Road whilst undergoing training. Whilst in town some of the soldiers would visit the Gospel Hall, which was open to them each weekday afternoon, for some peace and quiet but mainly as a reading room or somewhere they could go and write a letter home to a loved one. It was open at two o’clock each week day afternoon and Dr Shakleton’s aunt, a Miss Shackleton, used to go there with other ladies until four o’clock and mend the soldiers’ uniforms and socks.

During the First World War, the 6th Battalion of the Loyal Lancashire Regiment was raised in August 1914, as part of Kitchener’s Army. Soon afterwards it moved to Tidworth barracks in Wiltshire and then in February 1915, on to Blackdown in West Sussex. Eventually it sailed as part of the 38th Brigade of the 13th (Western) Division, to join the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. As part of the 13th (Western) Division, the battalion served in the Gallipoli Campaign. The division landed at Anzac Cove on 4 August 1915. After participating in the battles at Anzac Cove and Suvla Bay, the 6th Battalion along with the rest of the division were withdrawn from Suvla and moved to the Helles landing beaches. The division was finally withdrawn from Gallipoli and sent to Egypt to refit and guard the Suez Canal in January 1916.

In February 1916, the division was ordered to move to join the Tigris Corps in its operations to relieve the Anglo-Indian garrison which was being besieged at Kut.

They were initially deployed along the left bank of the Tigris River, and participated in the Battles of Fallahiya, on 6 April 1916, and at Sanniyat, on 9 April 1916, which is where Private 18181 Joshua Malone, who gave evidence at Private James Nicholson’s inquest, was killed.

The 6th North Lancs managed to break into the Turkish positions at the Sanniyat, but because supporting forces were unable to link up with them they, along with the rest of the 38th Brigade, were eventually driven back by the Turks.

During the two world wars, the United Kingdom became an island fortress used for training troops and launching land, sea and air operations. Many of those who were involved paid the ultimate price.

There are more than 170,000 Commonwealth war graves in the United Kingdom, many of them being those of servicemen and women killed on active service, some who later succumbed to their wounds whilst others died in training accidents, because of sickness or disease. Their graves can be found in more than 12,000 cemeteries and churchyards.

Preston (New Hall Lane) Cemetery contains 324 burials from the First World War, some of them from Fulwood Barracks, the headquarters of both the Loyal North Lancashire and East Lancashire Regiments.

Preston (New Hall Road) Cemetery. (Photograph Commonwealth War Graves Commission)

CHAPTER 10

Zeppelin Over Billericay 1916

Twenty-five major battles took place during 1916 as the war came to the end of its second year, including the infamous and bloody Battle of the Somme which started on 1 July 1916. On that day the British Army suffered the loss of some 58,000 troops, one third of whom were killed on the first day of the battle. To this day it remains as an unwanted and haunting record as the largest number of British and Commonwealth soldiers killed in a single day.

German Zeppelin somewhere over Great Britain.

Trench warfare on the Western Front had become a way of life by the summer of 1916. Mainly because of this the war in France and Belgium had reached a stalemate, with both sides dug in and defending what they had already won. In essence it had become a war of attrition.

Back home in England, life was as normal as it could possibly be in the circumstances. Its citizens were going about their daily routines, and those with brothers, husbands, and fathers fighting in the war, were keeping their fingers crossed that they weren’t going to receive a telegram with the dreaded news that they had lost a loved one. The newspapers were full of ever-increasing lists of those who had been killed, hardly a single family or a local community wasn’t affected in some way. Then in 1916, the Germans introduced night-time Zeppelin bombing raids.

Powered flight had occurred only eleven years earlier, when the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, inventors and aviators, carried out the first powered and sustained flight. The date was 17 December 1903. Before the outbreak of the war, airships had been used for non-military purposes. The well-heeled of French and German society were able to experience flight for recreational purposes, in Germany, something that can still be enjoyed today.

But Germany quickly realised the Zeppelin’s potential use for military operations. The British on the other hand had been slow to understand the same potential benefits of military flight and had seen the main use of all aircraft as no more than in an observation capacity, for their artillery battalions. It was at the insistence of Winston Churchill, who at the time was the First Lord of the Admiralty, that both the Royal Navy and the Army started looking at aircraft as a viable and worthwhile option as an offensive weapon. The Navy had the Royal Navy Air Service and the Army, the Royal Flying Corps.

The first Zeppelin attacks on Britain took place as early as January 1915, when the Norfolk coastal town of Great Yarmouth came under attack, bringing the reality of war home to civilians for the first time. No longer was it simply something which they read about in their morning newspapers over breakfast or in a letter from a loved one overseas. These raids continued on and off throughout the war all the way through until the middle part of 1918.

Initially this simply wasn’t something that had even been contemplated, so no preparations had been put in place to deal with such an eventuality. The authorities had been taken totally by surprise. As far as the civilian population were concerned the war was taking place somewhere across the Channel in places such as France and Belgium, but the bombing raids on civilian populations carried out by the Zeppelins had totally changed that perception.

The casualty lists which populated the daily newspapers, now for the first time started to include the names of civilians who had been killed as a result of Zeppelin raids as well, which by the end of the war had risen to well over five hundred. Being so close to London, Essex towns often fell victim to the Zeppelin’s bombs either by mistake or design. Southend, Braintree, Maldon and Harwich were just some of the locations that were targeted by German bombs.

Cartoon of Special Constable’s nightmare. Notice his cap and truncheon at the bottom of the bed. (Essex Police Museum)

Billericay and the areas which surrounded it were fortunate that they had numerous airfields located nearby at Hornchurch, Rochford, Stow Maries and North Weald, to name but a few, which offered a degree of protection from the threat of Zeppelin raids. The Royal Flying Corps in the shape of the Essex Home Defence Squadrons numbers 37 and 39 flew out of these airfields in an attempt to prevent the Zeppelin’s effectiveness. From the early months of 1916 the BE2C’s (Blériot Experimental 2) were deployed as part of the Home Defence aerial system to deal in part with the ever-increasing threat.

On the night of 23 September 1916 four of the newly designed 6-engine M-Class super Zeppelins which could fly as high as 18,000 feet, set off from their home base in Germany to bomb London and the Home Counties. At 650 feet in length, 75 feet in diameter and with a maximum speed of 65 miles per hour, they were massive in comparison to the previous models which Germany had produced. Their only real weakness was that they were full of highly inflammable hydrogen gas.

In 1916 twenty-three Zeppelin raids took place over the United Kingdom. A total of 125 tons of bombs were dropped during these raids, killing 293 civilians, along with another 691 who sustained injures.

Zeppelins were employed by both the German Army as well as the German Navy to carry out their pre-determined raids over Britain. L32, one of the M-Class super Zeppelins, was captained by Oberleutnant Werner Peterson of the German Navy. As he piloted his airship towards London he began to encounter heavy anti-aircraft fire. Realising the potentially dangerous situation he decided to go no further and jettisoned his five tons of bombs and heavy weaponry along the River Thames near Purfleet. Before he could make his way back home to Germany he encountered Lieutenant Frederick Sowrey, who was flying a BE2C on a routine night patrol out of Hornchurch. On spotting the Zeppelin at just after one o’clock in the morning of 24 September, Sowrey commenced his attack, firing his machine guns continuously into the body of the airship. He continued his attack until it was obvious that the L32 was stricken. Within seconds it was engulfed in flames and had crashed to the ground at Snail’s Hall Farm at Great Burstead, near Billericay. All twenty-two crew on board perished, although Werner Peterson jumped to his death rather than be burnt alive in the resulting inferno.

Oberleutnant Werner Petersen – Captain of L-32.

Newspaper cutting of the Zeppelin Raid.

Lieutenant Sowery was subsequently awarded a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for his heroics on that September night. He survived the war and died in 1968.

Below is a poem that was taken from the Essex Chronicle, ‘The Burning of a Zeppelin in Essex’:

‘Calm, cool and starlit was the autumn night while nature lay, wrapped in serene repose.

From every quarter streamed a bright searchlight when on the late September air arose war’s awful music – the deep bass of guns, the whistling shriek of shells hurtling o’erhead.

The bursting shrapnel falling short of Huns. The thunder of earth-shaking bombs we dread, and looking up I saw through space, a modern battle cruiser of the air.

A thing of beauty, all instinct with grace come shark-like with fell purpose from its lair, an elongated oval amber hued at times then like a silver fish immense.

Floating majestic in disdainful mood, the guns ceased fire with interest intense, the watching crowds saw fairy lights on high. Turning and twisting in a giddy rout.

Like red and white stars dancing in the sky.

“Hurrah! She’s hit” and mighty cheers break out from many thousand throats that did not tire as from her drooping head burst spurts of flames, a shapeless pile of jagged liquid fire, she headlong fell.

Now by God’s sacred name I crave his pity for the souls of those whose burning bodies met so just a doom, that through their agonising and death throes they may find peace beyond their war-built tomb.’

The following is taken from a supplement of the London Gazette dated Tuesday 3 October 1916, which records the awards to both Sowery and 2nd Lieutenant Alfred de Bathe Brandon, for his valiant efforts in bringing down the Zeppelin, L33. Six months earlier he had been awarded the Military Cross for forcing another Zeppelin, the L15, to ditch in the North Sea.

‘War Office 4th October 1916’. His Majesty the King has been graciously pleased to appoint the under mentioned officers companions of the Distinguished Service Order, in recognition of their gallantry and distinguished service in connection with the successful attack on enemy Airships.

2nd Lieutenant Frederick Sowery R. Fus and RFC.

2nd Lieutenant Alfred de Bathe Brandon MC RFC Spec Res.’

Alfred de Bathe Brandon.

Alfred de Bathe Brandon became the first New Zealand airman to be awarded a Distinguished Service Order. He was born on 21 July 1893 in Wellington, New Zealand. When he enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in December 1915, he was 32 years old and an established and respected solicitor. He came to England to study law at Trinity College, Cambridge, before returning to Wellington to work for his father’s law firm. He was awarded the Military Cross, the Distinguished Service Order as well as being mentioned in despatches three times for his heroic exploits as a pilot during the First World War.

Immediately after the war, he was sent back to New Zealand, where he assisted in evaluating New Zealand air defences. In 1919 he quit the military and returned to practising law. He married Ada Mabel Perry at the Cathedral Church of St Paul, in Wellington on 2 January 1942. He was 48 and Ada was twenty years his junior. They had one child, a son whom they named Peter. Alfred died on 19 June 1974, aged 90, in Wellington.

Sowrey’s achievement was all the more remarkable as he managed it in a plane that was considered by some to be the most controversial British aircraft of the First World War, having made its maiden flight on 30 May 1914. It was designed to be a stable reconnaissance platform and although it was a perfectly capable military aircraft its built-in stability and lack of any defensive armaments, made it a sitting duck, to the better equipped and easier to manoeuvre German aircraft. The BE2C was a two-seater aircraft which had been designed with the observer in the front and the pilot at the rear. It could therefore be used either single or double crewed but it also meant that when the observer was on board, his seat was surrounded by the struts and wires between the wings, making it difficult to mount a machine gun.

The most obvious thing would have been to swap the pilot’s and observer’s seats, a move that would have allowed the observer to be given a standard machine gun mounting. Although this change was eventually made to a number of BE2Cs that were operated by the Belgian Air Force, the British did not follow suit. The main problem with the BE2C was that it was designed before the era of the fighter aircraft that would eventually follow it. The lack of a suitable replacement meant that the BE2C remained in use on the Western Front well into 1917, steadily gaining a worse reputation as time went by.

Just three weeks before Sowery’s achievement, Lieutenant W. Leefe Robinson, also flying a BE2C aircraft out of Hornchurch, had become the first man to shoot down a Zeppelin in similar circumstances. He was awarded the Victoria Cross and also given a prize of £4,200, from monies raised by a grateful public, an astonishing sum by today’s standards.

One of the first people to arrive at the scene of the crashed airship was Inspector Allen Ellis who had cycled there from Billericay Police station, then situated in the middle of the High street. He had seen the stricken airship ablaze in the skies overhead and watched as it slowly crashed to the ground. He was soon joined by police constables from nearby Brentwood and Hutton as well as special constables from Billericay and Little and Great Burstead, who were tasked with guarding the bodies of the dead German crew until the army arrived to take them away.

Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson VC, Lieutenant William J. Tempest DSO, Lieutenant Frederick Sowrey DSO. (From a contemporary postcard)

Inspector Ellis went on to become a superintendent which was no mean feat in those days. There was no such rank as chief inspector back then, which meant that there were fewer opportunities for officers to make their way up through the ranks.

He had joined Essex County Constabulary on 14 January 1892, when he was 23 years old and was as being 5 feet 9 inches tall with a 37-inch chest, which I found to be somewhat humorous as I’d had a waist bigger than that for most of my adult life. He had a fresh complexion, with blue eyes and short dark brown hair. Prior to joining the police he had been a blacksmith, working for Charles Edmund Eagle at Park Hall farm in Wix, near St Osyth. He went on to serve with Essex Police for over thirty-three years, retiring on 31 March 1925 aged fifty-six.

Zeppelin L-32 crashed at Billericay.

The location of the crashed airship soon became a haven for sightseers and souvenir hunters from far and wide. There were so many people turning up, some coming from as far away as London, that a few business-minded individuals set up stalls along the lane to the crash site, to sell their goods, including homemade lemonade.

Some of the more prestigious and welcome guests were, General Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the Secretary of State for War, David Lloyd George, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour and Commodore Murray F. Sueter, Director of the Air Department and Officer Commanding the Royal Navy Air Force. The War Office Press department took full advantage of their collective appearance by filming it for posterity.

Armed soldiers, bayonets at the ready, a fearsome sight to those in attendance, along with a small group of police officers who had been drafted in from the surrounding towns and villages, did their best to protect the wreckage of the airship from the hordes of souvenir hunters.

a piece of L-32 made into an ashtray.

a police property label attached to a piece of L-32.

(Photos by Stephen Wynn with permission from Essex Police Museum)

St Mary Magdalene Church in Great Burstead. (Photo by Stephen Wynn)

The bodies of the crew were initially buried in the cemetery of the St Mary Magdalene Church in Great Burstead, with full military honours. The only grave with a name was that of the Zeppelin’s captain, Werner Peterson, as his was the only body that was identifiable, all the others were too badly burnt. Fifty years later in 1966 they were exhumed from their resting place and re-buried, not back home in their native Germany, but at the Cannock Chase cemetery in Staffordshire. This is the last resting place for the majority of German prisoners of war who died whilst in PoW camps in the UK in either the First or Second World Wars, as well as the crews of crashed German aircraft from the same wars.

There are 2,143 Germans laid to rest at the cemetery who perished during the First World War, five of whom have no known name. There are a further 2,786 from the Second World War, 90 of whom are similarly unknown. The cemetery, which only opened in 1964, was named Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof (German Soldiers Cemetery). It had been a royal hunting forest back in Tudor times and during the First World War home to two massive army camps, housing some 40,000 British soldiers.

The names of the dead crewmen from the crashed L32 Zeppelin were:

Werner PETERSON (Oberleutnant Zur See)

Adolf BLEY (Obersignalmaat)

Albin BOCKSCH (Obermaschinistmaat)

Karl BORTSCHELLER (Funkentelegrafieobermaat)

Wilhelm BROCKHAUS (Oberheizer)

Karl BRODRUCK (Leutnant Zur See)

Paul DORFMULLER (Maschinistenmaat)

Richard FANKHANEL (Obermaschinistenmaat)

Georg HAGEDORN (Obermaschinistenmaat)

Friedrich HEIDER (Oberbootsmannsmaat)

Robert KLISCH (Funkentelegraphieobergast)

Herman MAEGDLFRAU (Obermaschinistenmaat)

Bernhard MOHR (Obersegelmachersgast)

August MULLER (Matrose)

Friedrich PASCHE (Bootsmannmaat)

Karl PAUST (Obermaschinistenmaat)

Ewald PICARD (Obersignalmaat)

Walter PRUSS (Maschinistenmaat)

Paul SCHIERING (Obermatrose)

Bernhard SCHREIBMULLER (Steuermann)

Karl VOLKER (Obermaschinistenmaat)

Alfred ZOPEL (Oberbootsmannsmaat)

The same evening that L32 was shot down saw the demise of another of the new super Zeppelins, L33, which took part in the same raiding party. It was attacked by 2nd Lieutenant Alfred de Bath Brandon MC with such ferocity that he forced its captain, Alois Blocker, to crash land his airship near Little Wigborough, near Colchester in Essex. Earlier in the year De Bathe Brandon had also been involved in the demise of Zeppelin L15 on 31 March 1916, although it has always been open to conjecture as to who was ultimately responsible for bringing the aircraft down.

Sometime after 1932 De Bathe Brandon gave his own account of the fate of L15 and his part in it. He felt compelled to speak out on the matter after the Zeppelin’s Commander, Captain-Lieutenant Breithaupt, gave a lecture about it which was subsequently printed in The Listener magazine on 8 June 1932. His words cast doubt on De Bathe Brandon’s being the one responsible for shooting down his ship, and appeared to suggest that it was a ground based anti-aircraft battery instead.

Understandably somewhat annoyed at what can only be assumed was an unintended blight on his achievement, De Bathe Brandon gave his own account and stated:

‘I was always of the opinion that I brought down the L15. Officially the guns (ground located anti-aircraft battery) were credited with it. I got the credit publicly and was decorated for dropping bombs on it.’

Werner Peterson has been described as a gay youngster with a reputation of being the best ship-handler in the service. His first command was the Zeppelin L7, which was used for naval patrols over the North Sea. In June 1915, he took command of the L12. In August he flew on his first bombing raid over England. He got lost, like many other airship commanders, and he reported dropping a load of bombs on ‘Harwich’. In fact they fell in the sea off Dover. The ground-based defences opened fire and the ship received a direct hit. Because of the leaking gas the L12 came down in the English Channel. A German boat towed it to Ostend where it was destroyed by fire.

His next airship was the L16 and on 13 October 1915 the eighteen explosive and thirty incendiary bombs he believed he had dropped on Stratford, East Ham and West Ham killed nine people and injured fifteen. The following January the planned target was Liverpool, but he had to turn back for technical reasons.

Peterson claimed to have dropped two tons of bombs on ‘Great Yarmouth’ but ground-based reports only record that two bombs fell at Swaffham, some 43 miles away. At the end of March the bombs he dropped on ‘Hornsey’ actually fell north of Brentwood, in Essex. On 2 May the Zeppelin L23 dropped an incendiary bomb on an empty part of the North York moors, setting the heather alight. Peterson, following in the L16, unloaded his bombs onto open moorland, thinking that Stockton-on-Tees was ablaze. On his return to Germany he optimistically claimed ‘well-placed hits on buildings at the site of the fire, as well as clearly recognisable railroad tracks and embankments’.

The L32 was one of fifteen giant R-type Zeppelins, the first of which became operational at the end of May, 1916. These huge airships had an overall length of 644 feet, maximum diameter of 78.4 feet and had nineteen gas bags with a total capacity of nearly two million cubic feet of hydrogen gas. It had six engines. One was on the rear of the 50 foot long control car, two were amidships on either side, while the three-engine rear gondola had two of its propellers on struts to either side. On the top, near the bow, there was a machine gun to defend the airship against attack from aircraft.

Werner Peterson had assumed command of L32 on 7 August, his executive officer being Leutnant zur See Brodrück. The new ship was involved in patrols over the North sea during August and made its first raid on England on the night of 24 August. Because of strong head winds it was unable to reach London and bombed some ships off Dover before returning safely to Germany.

The following is taken from the Essex Police History Notebook number 7. ‘Somewhere over Essex’. The Zeppelin Raids on Essex by Martyn Lockwood.

‘The L33 was on its inaugural mission, but unlike L32, it managed to make it through the heavy anti-aircraft fire and to drop its bombs on London, killing a number of civilians in the process. It turned to begin its journey back home to Germany, crossing high above the Essex countryside. As it reached Chelmsford the already damaged airship was attacked by a squadron of night fighters flying out of their base at Hainault.

Kapitan Alois Bocker, the Zeppelin’s commander, managed to elude his attackers by having his crew jettison their machine guns and other non-essential equipment in an attempt to gain some much needed height. Bocker quickly realised his stricken craft was too badly damaged to make it safely across the North Sea and back home to its base in Germany.

Despite their best efforts to the contrary, the badly damaged airship continued to lose height and eventually crash landed near New Hall Cottages at Little Wigborough, on the outskirts of Colchester in Essex. In total comparison to the luckless crew of L32, all of the crew survived the impact unharmed. Safely on the ground they quickly set their airship on fire to save its design features from falling in to British hands. Fortunately they were unsuccessful in their attempts at destroying their airship and sufficient of it survived to be of valuable use to the British authorities in their own Zeppelin airship research.

Kapitan Bocker and his men marched off down the nearest lane not really knowing where they were heading, shortly coming upon Special Constable Edgar Nicholas cycling towards them, who had been attracted by the flames of the burning Zeppelin. He was initially startled by the sudden appearance of a large body of men marching along a lane at that time of the morning. Nicholas stopped and asked Bocker if he had seen a crashed Zeppelin. Bocker replied in perfect English that he hadn’t and then proceeded to ask Nicholas how many miles it was to Colchester. Apparently not realising he was speaking with the crew of the crashed aircraft he was looking for, he replied, “About six miles”.

Bocker thanked the shell shocked Special Constable and along with his crew, marched off. It’s not known for certain when Nicholas recognised his mistake but he quickly did and followed behind.

As they approached Peldon they were joined by Special Constable Elijah Traylor and Police Sergeant Ernest Edwards from Hatfield Broad Oak, who was enjoying a few days rest in the area. The men considered their next move and eventually decided to escort the Germans to Peldon Post Office where they found the local Constable, PC354 Charles Smith, who was busy trying to contact the military garrison at Colchester.

Even though PS Edwards was amongst their number, it would appear that it was actually PC Smith who took charge of the situation and formally arrested the German crew. Bocker asked Smith if he might use the telephone but the request was politely refused and he was told to march his men towards Mersea Island so they could be handed over to the military. PC Smith led the way assisted by eight special constables including Nicholas and Traylor. They were met on route by a military detachment and Bocker and his crew were formally handed over. PC Smith was rewarded for his prompt actions by being promoted in the field to the rank of sergeant by the Chief Constable Captain Unett, that very same day. He was also awarded the coveted Merit Star.’

Essex Police Force orders dated 24 September 1916 recorded the event:

‘PC Smith is promoted to Sergeant and awarded the merit badge for coolness and judgement in handing over to the military authorities the commander and crew of a Zeppelin.’

From that day onwards he not surprisingly became known as ‘Zepp’ Smith. He lived to the ripe old age of 94, passing away in 1977.

Sergeant Edwards, having handed over Bocker and his crew to Smith then surprisingly decided to leave him and the special constables to get on with it before returning home, despite being the senior rank present. When told of this the Chief Constable, Captain Unett sent Sergeant Edwards a short and very terse memo. ‘It is understood you did not accompany the escort to Mersea Island. Why?’ Edwards’ two page reply, the contents of which have not survived, appears to have saved him from losing his job. He eventually retired eight years later in 1924.

The newly promoted Sergeant Smith and the eight special constables were all presented with inscribed pocket watches for their actions that evening. The one presented to Edgar Nicholas can be seen in the Essex Police museum, together with other exhibits from that night in September 1916.

At nearby Little Wigborough a daughter was born to a Mr and Mrs Clark at about the same time as the stricken L33 Zeppelin was set alight. The doctor who delivered the baby, Dr Salter, also a Chief Special Constable, suggested to Mr and Mrs Clark that they might want to consider christening their newborn daughter, Zeppelina; amazingly they did just that.

In August 2013 there was a programme on TV’s Channel Four entitled, Attack of the Zeppelins. It explained how Germany’s Zeppelin programme affected the dietary needs of its people, a fact that was discovered by researchers for the programme.

These giant airships could only be built with the use of cow gut which made the cells that were then filled with gas to enable the Zeppelins to fly. Amazingly it took 250,000 cows to provide enough gut for just one airship. Although it had been known for some time about the use of cow gut by the Germans in the building of their airships, how that was actually achieved, wasn’t. It took a British engineer from Cambridge University, Dr Hugh Hunt, to work out exactly just how the process was possible.

With the use of so many Zeppelins by both the German Army and Navy, cow gut became just as important to Germany’s war effort as ammunition, so much so that Germany’s leader, Kaiser Wilhelm had to bring in a law which made it illegal for his people to eat their favoured bratwurst or any other kind of sausage. The same ban was also imposed on the German occupied countries of Poland, Austria and France.

CHAPTER 11

Private Albert Victor Cooke Royal Field Artillery

The War memorial in Billericay High Street at the junction with the lower end of Chaple Street, includes the names of sixty-two young men who lost their lives whilst serving their country during the First World War.

One of them was Albert Victor Cooke. There is nothing particularly outstanding about Albert’s story; he was an average young man, who was representative of his generation. When the call to arms went out, like thousands of other young men, he instinctively answered it.

Royal Field Artillery cap badge.

A private and a driver in the Royal Field Artillery (RFA), he was by all accounts a happy young man, full of hope and expectation for a bright future. At the outbreak of the war in 1914, Albert was just 16-years-old and lived at 36 High Street, Billericay with his parents, Mary and Edward Cooke, along with his three brothers and a younger sister. In the 1911 UK census the family are shown as living at 86 Tappersfield Road, Nunhead, Camberwell in south-east London which is where they moved from to Billericay some time after 1911. Albert’s father Edward, a telegraphic clerk, was not in good health which is the main reason why the family moved away from the East End of London, in the hope that by escaping the deprivation and squalor that was all around them, his health would improve in the clean fresh air of the Essex countryside and a slower pace of life.

Albert’s brothers were Isaac who was the oldest at 20, George (18), Charles (11) and his sister, Elizabeth, who was 14. .

Albert joined the army soon after his eighteenth birthday in 1916, becoming Private 147366 Cooke. After having completed his basic training, he became a driver with the Royal Field Artillery. It was whilst serving with ‘A’ Battery of the 14th Brigade RFA, that he was killed during fighting on the Somme on 11 May 1918, just six months before the end of the war.

As neither of Albert’s two older brothers, Isaac and George, appear on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website or on the Billericay War Memorial it can only be assumed that they both joined up but thankfully survived the war. Neither Isaac nor George appear on the Roll of Honour of the members of the Billericay reading and recreation rooms who enlisted in the armed forces during the First World War, although its more than possible that’s simply because they weren’t members.

After the war the family remained in Billericay and mourned Albert’s sad passing. When the War Memorial was unveiled in 1921 the rest of his family were able to walk the short distance to it from their home to pay their respects.

I’ve often thought what it must have felt like to have heard the sound of a bicycle rattling its way down the lane outside my home, only to look out of the window and see a ‘telegram boy’ propping his bike up against the white picket fence, realising he was just about to knock on the front door. What a truly horrible experience it must have been.

Throughout 2009/2010 I spent a year waiting to hear news of my own sons whilst they served six-month tours in Afghanistan. One was injured and the other was shot, but they survived and made it back home. I thank God every day for their safe return.

I found out by telephone, on each occasion it was one of my sons on the other end of the line waiting to tell me the news. It was still a shock, but once I’d heard their voices, what I can only describe as a sort of calmness descended over me. One of the calls was from my elder son Luke who had been shot. He phoned me just as he was about to go into the operating theatre to have his injuries attended to, but despite his condition he still wanted to tell me what had happened himself, rather than have me hear it from somebody else. Luke went on to do two more tours of Afghanistan without any similar incidents, whilst my younger son Ross, did one more tour in the same theatre of war, also returning home safely.

After those initial incidents I would be lying if I said I wasn’t slightly apprehensive every time I received a phone call from them on their subsequent tours. An unexpected knock on the front door, especially in the evenings, caused a sudden dryness in the back of my throat. The look of relief on my face when it turned out to be nothing more than somebody trying to sell me something must have been confusing for whoever it was standing there.

CHAPTER 12

Corporal Oscar Sewell Ladbrook 16th Battalion The Welsh Regiment

Like so many other young men of his era, Oscar Sewell Ladbrook, willingly enlisted in the Army to serve his king and country. Initially he joined the local Essex Regiment whose headquarters were literarily just down the road at Warley on the outskirts of Brentwood. He became Private 35943 Ladbrook and settled in to his new life as a soldier. It isn’t known when or why, but sometime later he transferred to the 16th Battalion of The Welsh Regiment where he became Corporal 59887.

He came from a big family being one of six children, five of whom were boys. They were reasonably well off with Oscar’s father, Charles, being a hay and straw dealer, doing so well in fact that he could afford to have three ‘live in’ servants. Unfortunately Charles passed away in 1904 at the relatively young age of forty-three so it was then down to Oscar to carry on the family business.

When Oscar joined up soon after the outbreak of war, he was 28 years old, having been born in 1886. He was the eldest of the boys; his brothers were Joseph (26), Cecil (21), Percy (18) and Claud (16). All of them were old enough to have served during the war, but there is no sign of any of their names having been recorded on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. As with other similar stories in this book, that means they either served and returned home safely after the war, or that they simply didn’t enlist, which seems unlikely.

Oscar was killed on 27 August 1917 at the Battle of Langemarck, in Belgium. His name is included on the Tyne Cot Memorial at nearby Zonnebeke. He is also commemorated on the Billericay War Memorial.

The main Battle of Langemarck took place between 16 and 18 August 1917, and was part of the Third Battle of Ypres, more often known as Passchendaele. The Allied attack succeeded in the north, from Langemarck to Drie Grachten but early advances in the south on the Gheluvelt plateau were forced back by powerful German counterattacks. Both sides were hampered by the heavy rain, which was exceptionally bad for the time of year. It affected the British more because they occupied the lower lying areas and advanced onto ground which had been frequently bombarded by their own guns.

Langemark German Cemetery, Belgium. (Photo by Roy Facey)

There were a few lines about Oscar’s death in the Essex Weekly News dated 7 September 1917:

‘Corporal Oscar Sewell Ladbrook, Cardiff City Welsh Regiment, eldest son of Mrs Ladbrook, Crescent House, Billericay, was killed in action on 27 August. He was 31 years of age.’

One of the soldiers in Oscar’s section wrote a letter to one of his relatives outlining the details of how he died. Surprisingly enough the letter wasn’t written by one his senior officers, instead it was eloquently written by one of the young privates who he was responsible for.

‘Monday, September 10 1917

Mrs I Smith

Dear Madam,

Your letter requesting news of the unfortunate death of your brother Corporal O.S. Ladbrook, has been handed to me (Private W. Stringer) to give you what details I can.

I was in his section with seven others, and I feel sure I am voicing the general opinion in saying that we all found him more of a comrade than a commander. He was always ready with advice or assistance, to help any of us who cared to ask. At the time of his death he was about ten yards away from the shell hole in which I and two more were posted. He moved forward a little from the cover of his shell hole in order to give us the order of advance. As he rose to do so he was hit, either by a sniper or machine gun bullet. It is hard to say exactly which, as both were flying thickly around us. In either case his death must have been instantaneous and painless, and all that could be done for him was done, but it was to no avail. He died the death of a real soldier leading his men to the last, which anyone who knew him would have expected.

Only three of his section came safely out of the advance but we miss a good comrade and commander. I do not think there is any more to say, except that I am personally very sorry for his death, but at the same time proud to be in the section of one who met his death in so brave and fitting a manner.

I remain

Yours sincerely

W. Strainger’

The writing of a letter home to the next of kin on the occasion of the death of a soldier would usually be the responsibility of the battalion’s commanding officer or that of a junior officer serving under him. It is highly unusual for a private soldier to be tasked with such a heavy responsibility. Maybe because of the circumstances of Oscar Ladbrook’s death, it was felt that a colleague who was not only from the same section, but who was with him when he was killed, would be better suited for writing the letter. Reading his well structured and considerate prose it would appear that they picked the right man for the job. Private Strainger survived the war.

CHAPTER 13

The Sinking of the SS Transylvania

Between early 1917 and late 1918 the Mediterranean lines of communication for the British forces serving in Salonika ran from Taranto to Turin in Italy. As troop reinforcements were needed for the Salonika campaign, liners were often employed to carry these troops and one such liner was the SS Transylvania. With a top speed of 17.5 knots and launched in 1914 just before the outbreak of the war, the SS Transylvania had been built for the Cunard Steam Ship Company as a passenger liner. In May 1915 it was requisitioned by the government as a troop transporter and had accommodation for up to 200 officers and 2,860 men.

She was carrying nearly this number when she left Marseilles in France for Salonika, in Greece and Alexandria, in Egypt on 3 March 1917 with an escort of two Japanese destroyers, the Matsu and the Sakaki. We were not at war with Japan during the First World War.

At 10am on 4 May 1917 the SS Transylvania was near Genoa in Italy, when she was struck in the port engine room by a torpedo fired from the German submarine, U63, commanded by Kapitan Leutnant Otto Schultse. She immediately headed for land which was about two miles away and at the same time one of the two escort vessels, the Matsu came alongside to take off the troops, nurses and crew who were still on board, at great risk to herself.

In the meantime, the second escort ship, the Sakaki, tried to keep the submarine submerged. Twenty minutes later the U63 fired another torpedo, this time at the Sakaki, which took evasive action and avoid being hit, but inadvertently the SS Transylvania was hit for a second time. The explosion of the second torpedo was the killer blow for the Transylvania which sank very quickly soon afterwards. Lieutenant Brennell, one other officer and ten men of the crew along with twenty-nine military officers and 373 other ranks on board the SS Transylvania at the time, were lost, bringing the total to 414 who were killed as a result of the two explosions and the subsequent sinking of the ship.

The bodies that were recovered at Savona were buried two days later in a special plot in the town’s cemetery at Zinola. Others who lost their lives are buried elsewhere in Italy, France, Spain and Monaco. Also at Savona cemetery is a memorial with the names of a further 275 casualties whose bodies were never found and who have no known grave.

The wreckage of the SS Transylvania was finally discovered by the Genoa Carabinieri, on the sea-bed at a depth of 630 metres on 5 October 2011, ninety-four years after it had been sunk.

There were members of four different regiments on board the Transylvania that fateful day: the 3rd Hampshire Regiment, the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Royal West Surrey Regiment. There was also a solitary member of the Essex Regiment. Private 13096 Joseph Keeling of the 3rd Battalion the Essex Regiment had already had an interesting war. He had enlisted very early on in December 1914 and been sent with the rest of his battalion as part of the forces involved in the Gallipoli campaign. During some fierce fighting at Sulva Bay he had been wounded in August 1915 and sent home. His wounds were not serious and by January 1916 he had returned to the fighting only to be wounded again a month later.

Unfortunately there was no third time lucky for Joseph, he was one of the 373 soldiers on board the SS Transylvania at the time of her sinking. His body was recovered and he was buried in the Savona town cemetery in northern Italy, along with 274 others who perished that day. Joseph Keeling is also remembered on both the Billericay and Stock War Memorials.

Unveiling of Stock and Buttsbury War Memorial. (Courtesy of John Westwood)

CHAPTER 14

Those Names on the War Memorials

The six war memorials in this chapter are located within the space of five miles of each other, but the main one we will be focusing on will be the one in Billericay High Street. The other five are the Stock Catholic Church memorial, the one on the village green in Stock, the one in Little Burstead, the Buttsbury church memorial and the one in the porch of St Mary Magdalene Church in Great Burstead.

Two men are named on three of the memorials and another twenty-five are named on two of them. Looking at all the names collectively there are quite a few who have no obvious connection to the town, village or parish where their name is commemorated. By using these war memorials as an example, it is easy to see how difficult research on the subject can be. Most were erected in the early 1920s and those responsible for the names inscribed on them are long since dead. Records other than the memorials themselves are very rare to find and quite often all that is available, with no explanation as to what the criteria for inclusion on the memorial was. Time most definitely blurs the memory somewhat.

There are sixty-two names commemorated on the Billericay War Memorial of those who lost their lives in the First World War. They are listed here for years in which they were killed, and not alphabetically and there were no casualties listed for 1914.

Unveiling of Billericay War Memorial. (Cater Museum, Billericay)

BILLERICAY WAR MEMORIAL

1915

Robert Harold Jervis JOHNSON, was the first man from Billericay, whose name is recorded on the memorial as having been killed during the First World War. He was a Second Lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion of the Essex Regiment. He was killed on 13 March 1915 aged 21, just south of Ypres whilst attempting to capture a cottage. The bullet which took his life had ricocheted, probably off of a wall, killing him instantly. Eighty other men from Johnson’s 2nd Battalion were also killed in the same action that day. He was the son of Robert Baines and Florence Johnson of The Hope House, Little Burstead, Billericay, Essex. He is buried at the Calvaire (Essex Military Cemetery) in Hainaut, Belgium.

Harry TYLER, whose service number was 2322, died on 20 August 1915, aged 20. A Private in the 4th Battalion of the Essex Regiment, he was killed during the fierce fighting at Gallipoli. He has no known grave and is also commemorated on the Helles Memorial in Gallipoli.

Herbert William James FANE, service number S/331, was killed on 1 September 1915, aged 21. He was a rifleman in the 9th Battalion the Rifle Company. On the CWGC website he is shown as H.J. Fane, the son of the late James and Clara Fane, of 9 Piggott Street, Limehouse, London. Initially Herbert was wounded whilst serving in France before being brought back to Britain, where he later died of his wounds. He was buried at the City of London and Tower Hamlets cemetery. We can find no record of any connection between him, his family and the town of Billericay.

1916

A total of fifteen Billericay men were killed during 1916, three of them at the Battle of the Somme in July as the true effects of the war started to take hold.

Charles William ARGENT, whose service number was P/O11232, was a Private in the Royal Marines Light Infantry, and was on board HMS Queen Mary when he was killed on 31 May 1916 during the Battle of Jutland, aged 34. Again neither he nor any of his family seem to have had any connection with the town. His mother, who by now was Mrs Jeffery, having re-married, was shown as living in nearby Southend.

Percy Edward HISLOP, service number was 6696, was killed on 1 July 1916, aged 31. He was a Sergeant in the 2nd Battalion of The Border Regiment, the son of Hardy William and Marianna Hislop of Louisa Terrace, Mayland Road, Woodford, Essex. Percy arrived in France with his battalion on the 7 December 1915 and he was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. His body lies in the Dantzig Alley British Cemetery in Mametz, France. Other than Percy’s wife Beatrice coming from Billericay, they never actually lived there as a family, which once again throws up the question as to why he is included on the Billericay War Memorial.

Herbert Christopher SMITH, service number 1655, died on 7 July 1916, aged 39. He was a Lance Corporal in the 1st Regiment South African Infantry. Herbert was killed in fighting during the Battle of the Somme and has no known grave. He is commemorated on the Thiepval memorial in France. It is not known how he came to be serving with the South African Infantry.

Names on Billericay War Memorial. (Photos on this and following pages: Stephen Wynn)

George William SMITH, service number PS1915, died 15 July 1916, aged 24. He was a Private in the 16th Battalion of The Duke of Cambridge’s Own (Middlesex Regiment). He was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme and is buried at Delville Wood military cemetery in Longueval, France. George and Herbert Smith were not related to each other.

Arthur Frederick RAMSEY, service number B/1788, died on 15 August 1916, aged 25. He was a Rifleman in the 9th Battalion the Rifle Brigade. He is buried in the Guards Cemetery in Lesboeufs, France.

William James COPELAND, service number 43355, was killed on 18 August 1916 at the Battle of the Somme. He was aged 26 and a Private in the 2nd Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, the son of James and Alice May Copeland of Tye Common, Billericay, Essex. (Later of The Garage, Sun Street, Billericay, Essex). William has no known grave and is also commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in France.

John Spencer RICHARDSON, service number 426921, died of his wounds on 9 September 1916 aged 22. He was a Private in the 3rd Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. In May 1916 he was wounded and later that month, whilst still recuperating from his injuries, he contracted measles that had broken out amongst other members of his battalion and died. He is buried in the Puchevillers British Cemetery in France.

Richard WOOD, service number 21134, died on 15 September 1916, aged 23. He was a Private in the 32nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment). He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in France.

Thomas Robert PANNELL, service number 5777, was killed on 23 September 1916 aged 20 years. He was a Private in the 23rd Battalion of the London Regiment. His parents, Robert and Emily Pannell lived in the High Street, Billericay. Thomas was buried in the Dantzig Alley British Cemetery, Mametz, France.

William JARVIS, service number 40048, was killed on 1 October 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. Aged 34, he was a Private in the 7th Battalion of the Leicestershire Regiment. He has no known grave and is remembered on the Thiepval Memorial, in France. He was the son of John and Celia Jarvis of Burstead Common Road, Great Burstead, Billericay. When William enlisted he did so at nearby Warley, which was the home of the local Essex Regiment and where they had their headquarters. Strangely enough though he didn’t join them, but opted for the Leicestershire Regiment instead.

Arthur Henry LAVER, service number 40201, was killed on 16 October 1916 aged 26, a Private in the 2nd Battalion the Essex Regiment. He was the son of George and Hannah Laver who were living at Sudbury Farm Cottages, Little Burstead, Essex. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in France.

Henry BUSH, service number, 27323 was killed on 21 October 1916, aged 40. He was a Private in the 2nd Battalion the Essex Regiment and the son of Mr and Mrs Thomas and Emma Bush of Stock Road Cottages, Stock, Essex. The war diaries for the 2nd Battalion don’t show any casualties at all for the date Henry died, so he must have been wounded previously and died of his wounds on 21 October. In the three days between Wednesday 18 October 1916 and Friday 20 October 1916, the 2nd Battalion incurred thirty-three casualties of which two were killed as well as another three soldiers reported missing. This wasn’t down to enemy attacks, machine-gun fire or incoming artillery bombardments but from British artillery units getting their co-ordinates wrong and shelling their own front line trenches. So it would appear that Henry Bush was wounded by friendly fire on one of those days and subsequently died of his injuries on the 21 October 1916.

It is a strange anomaly that Henry is shown as having died of his wounds, which obviously indicates that he initially survived, yet he has no known grave and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in France, which is for soldiers whose bodies have never been found. Henry had a sister, Louisa, as well as two older brothers, James and John neither of whom are shown on the CWGC website as having been killed. There is a Herbert John Bush, who was also a Private (40137) in the 2nd Battalion of the Essex Regiment who was killed on 15 October 1916, just six days before Henry.

On Monday, 16 October 1916 the 2nd Battalion the Essex Regiment had taken over the front line trenches at Flers from the Lancashire Fusiliers. The war diaries of the 2nd Battalion show that on that day they incurred enemy shelling which resulted in one other rank being killed. Although not named in the war diaries, that soldier must have been John Herbert Bush as the war diaries do not show any fatalities having taken place on Sunday, 15 October 1916. In another twist John Herbert Bush is commemorated on the Wickford war memorial in Essex, which is a town approximately five miles away from Billericay.

William John LAVER, service number 13209, was killed on 23 October 1916 during the later stages of the Battle of the Somme. Aged 23, he was a Corporal in the 2nd Battalion of the Essex Regiment and was the son of Hannah Dora Laver living at Sudbury Farm Cottages, Little Bursted, Essex. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial in France. Arthur was William Laver’s uncle in the same battalion of the same regiment. Uncle and nephew died less than seven days apart in the same battle. Another member of the family, Barney George Laver was killed during grenade throwing practice in the UK.

Charles TUNE, service number 21866, died of his wounds on 6 December 1916. Aged 40, he was a Corporal in the 10th Battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Charles has no known grave and is commemorated on the Couin British Cemetery in France.

Jessie Alfred COPPIN, service number G/46389, died of his wounds on 19 December 1916, aged 31. He was a Private in the 13th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and was the son of Alfred John (deceased) and Catherine Coppin of Billericay, Essex. He is buried at Wandsworth Military Cemetery in London which suggests that he was initially wounded in action and because of the severity of the wounds was shipped back to Britain where he subsequently died.

1917

Silas George CHAPMAN, service number 102909, was killed on 28 March 1917. Aged 34, he was a Sapper with the 179th Tunnelling Company, Royal Engineers. He was the son of Mr and Mrs Sam Chapman of Norsey Road, Billericay, Essex. He also left a wife, Phoebe Clara Chapman of 59 Addison Way, Golders Green, London. They had two young children. Silas had five brothers who all served in the Army during the First World War. He is buried at Faubourg d’Amiens Cemetery in Arras, France.

Arthur Haydon LETCH, service number 766247, was killed on 9 April 1917 aged 20. He was a Private in the 20th (Central Ontario) Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. He is buried in the Ecoivres Military Cemetery in France. Arthur had emigrated to Canada with his parents when he was 11 years old, but he was born in Billericay.

Arthur Edward STEWART, service number 32955, died on 14 April 1917, aged 35. He was a Private in the 1st Battalion of the Essex Regiment. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Arras Memorial in the Faubourg d’Amiens Cemetery, France.

Frederick WALDEN, service number 29316, died of wounds on 16 April 1917, aged 28. He was a Private in the 1st Battalion of the Essex Regiment. He is buried in the Tilloy British Cemetery which is just outside the town of Arras.

Joseph KEELING, service number 13096 was killed on 4 May 1917, aged 29 and a Private in the 3rd Battalion of the Essex Regiment. He was the son of Peter and Mary Ann Keeling who at the time were living at Norsey Road, Billericay. Joseph was wounded twice before the occasion that led to his death. He was buried in the Savona Town Cemetery in Italy. The story surrounding his death can be read in the previous Chapter about the SS Transylvania.

William John PUNT, service number 75083, died of his wounds on 1 June 1917. Aged 37, he was a driver with the Royal Field Artillery. Before the war William and his family had lived at 4 Stanley Terrace, off Sun Street in Billericay. William is buried in the Barlin Communal Cemetery in France.

Arthur Wellesley WOLVERTON, service number 7936, died of his wounds on 4 June 1917, aged 26. He was a Private in the 65th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps. Arthur enlisted in the Army on 7 August 1914 at Warley on the outskirts of Brentwood. His two brothers also fought in the First World War, his twin brother Charles and their younger brother George. Although George was severely wounded on 7 December 1917 and returned home to Britain, it would appear that both he and Charles both survived the war, as neither of them appears on the CWGC website. Arthur is buried in the St Leger British Cemetery in France.

Harry KEELING, service number 32998, was killed 7 June 1917, aged 32. A Private in No 4 Company, 1st Battalion, New Zealand Expeditionary Force, he was the son of Peter and Mary Ann Keeling, of Gooseberry Green, Billericay. Harry is commemorated at the New Zealand section of the Messines Ridge Memorial, at West Vlaanderen, Belguim. He had enlisted in the New Zealand Army less than a year before he was killed.

Barney George LAVER, service number 40203, died on 22 June 1917 of injuries sustained in a training explosion, aged 31, A Private in the 2nd Battalion the Essex Regiment, he was the son of George and Hannah Laver who lived at Chapel Street, Billericay.

A newspaper article taken from the Southend Standard dated 28 June 1917 states:

‘An inquest was held on Saturday by Mr W. Brooks, coroner at the Cliff Military Hospital, Felixstowe, Kent, relative to the death of Barney Laver, aged 31 years, single, a Private in the Essex Regiment, whose home address was given as Rayleigh, and who died on Friday.

‘Second Lieutenant G. Wheeler, Essex Regiment, gave evidence that he was in charge of a party practising bomb-throwing, in which the deceased was included. He was instructing him in throwing a bomb from the trench over a bank about fifteen yards distance. The trench was about six feet deep. Deceased threw a bomb which did not clear the top of the trench but struck parapet and fell back in to the trench. Deceased then tried to get hold of it again, but he told him to run round the corner. The deceased ran, but the bomb rolled along, and before deceased could get away, it exploded. He found deceased was injured and attended him with field dressings and had him removed at once to the Cliff Hospital.

‘Replying to enquiries, the Lieutenant further stated that from the time the bomb was thrown till the explosion took place would be five seconds. The deceased had been to the front and been wounded. He had stated that he had experience of bomb throwing, and was given a lump of earth, which he cast all right.

‘He was instructed to throw the bomb in the same way, but he must have held it a little too long, or got nervous. It was the first time the deceased had been under his instruction in throwing live bombs. The party had been throwing for about half an hour when the accident happened.’

Herbert Arthur MEAD, service number 225540, was killed 9 July 1917, aged 32. He was an Able Seaman in the Royal Navy and was part of the crew of HMS Vanguard. There was an explosion on board the ship when one of its magazines exploded taking the lives of over 800 members of the crew, including Herbert. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Chatham Naval Memorial.

William Joseph Everett BARKER, service number 63735, was a Private in the 13th Battalion of The Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment). After being wounded on the first few days of the Third Battle of Ypres, he subsequently died of his wounds on 4 August 1917, aged 40. He had three younger brothers, Frank, Ernest and Harvey, none of whom appear on the CWGC website. They either survived the war or never enlisted, with the latter option being highly unlikely. Other than having worked in Billericay for a period of time after the turn of the century, William Barker had no real connection with the town. He was born in Burnham-on-Crouch and his mother was still living there after the war. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial, Ypres.

Frederick ASHBEE, service number 26040, was killed on 7 August 1917, aged 37. He was a Sergeant in the 126th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery when he died during fighting at the third Battle of Ypres. He was husband to Alice Elizabeth Ashbee who lived in Wiltshire. The previous Sergeant of the 126th Siege Battery, Charles James Percival Breach, had been killed a month earlier, on 5 July 1917. Frederick Ashbee’s only apparent connection to Billericay was that he might have been born there, but official records are unclear about this.

John CHAPMAN, service number 45798 was killed on 16 August 1917, aged 22, at the Third Battle of Ypres. He was a Private in the 2nd Battalion, the South Wales Borderers and the son of William and Maria Chapman of Bridge Cottage, South Green, Billericay. He has no known grave, but is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial in Belgium. John had seven brothers, William, James, Alfred, Frederick, Joseph, Robert and George as well as three sisters, Celia, Mary and Eliza. Three of these brothers were also serving in the Army and another was serving in the Navy.

Oscar Sewell LADBROOK, service number 54887, was killed on 27 August 1917. Aged 31, he was a Corporal in the 16th Battalion the Welsh Regiment. Oscar has no known grave and is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial in Belgium. A separate chapter earlier in the book gives more detail of how he died.

Lewis BAYLISS, service number 326107, was a Private in the 1st/7th Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Regiment. He died on 20 September 1917 aged 25. He was elder son of William and Sarah Bayliss, of Norsey Road, Billericay. He is buried at the Tyne Cot Memorial Cemetery in West-Vlaaderen, Belgium.

Percy James JEFFERIES, service number 235079, died on 22 September 1917. Aged 42 years he was a Private in the 5th Battalion Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. Percy was the son of John and Mary Ann Jefferies, who were living in the High Street, Billericay. He is buried in the St Sever Cemetery in France. He was originally injured in an explosion about a month earlier but subsequently died of his injuries and subsequent complications.

Tyne Cot Cemetery. (Photo by Roy Facey)

Frank Harry BRIGHT, service number J/54572 was serving as a ‘Boy 1st Class’ on HMS Vivid, when he fractured his skull in an accident. When he died on 27 September 1917, he was only 17 years old. He was the son of Frederick Sydney and Jane Bright of 6 Western Road, Billericay. Frank is the youngest person commemorated on the Billericay War Memorial as well as the Naval Memorial in Plymouth.

Thomas Frank HILLS, service number 40038, was killed on 6 October 1917 during the Third Battle of Ypres and was 36 years old at the time of his death. He was a Private in the 7th Battalion of the Leicestershire Regiment. At the time of enlisting he was living in Billericay. He has no known grave but is commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial, Belgium.

Joseph Peter HOWLAND, service number 27854, was killed on 18 October 1917 aged 38. He was a Private in the 2nd Battalion the Essex Regiment and was the son of Alfred and Mary Howland, of The Common, Billericay. He is buried in Dozinghem Military Cemetery, Belguim. One of Joseph’s brothers also served in the war and survived.

Albert SPELLER, service number 26674, died 24 October 1917, aged 28. He was a Private in the 10th Battalion of the Essex Regiment. In actions that took place on 22 October 1917, the 10th were involved in the capture of Meunier House and Tracas Farm, just east of Poelcapelle in Belgium. They sustained over 200 casualties that day. Albert was one of those wounded and died of his wounds two days later. He is buried in the Dozinghem Military Cemetery in Belgium.

John Ward BAYFORD, service number 51882, was a Gunner in the 2nd Siege Battery Royal Garrison Artillery. He was killed on 30 October 1917, aged 24. He was the son of William and Mary Ann Bayford of 8 Sun Street, Billericay. He is buried at the Dozinghem Military Cemetery, West Vlaanderen, Belgium.

Leonard Sydney PATEMAN, service number 200569, was killed on 25 November 1917, aged 20. He was a Private in the 1st/4th Battalion of the Essex Regiment. He was the son of John and Annie Selina Pateman, High Street, Billericay and was buried in the Ramleh War Cemetery in Israel.

Walter LEEDS, service number 62031, died on 18 December 1917, aged 20, at the Royal Victoria Hospital. He ended up in the Eastern Command Labour Centre Labour Corps, after initially having enlisted in the Essex Regiment before then moving on to the 35th Battalion Royal Fusiliers. He is buried at the Netley Military cemetery in Hampshire. It is not known how or why he came to have been hospitalised.

James HUMPHREYS, service number 12565, was killed 27 December 1917, aged 24. He was a Lance Corporal in the 9th Battalion of the Essex Regiment. He died of pneumonia at Shorncliffe hospital whilst his battalion was training in Shorncliffe in Kent. His brother David died of his wounds on 24 April 1917. They were the sons of John and Hannah Humphreys. David was married to Mrs H.A. HUMPHREYS who lived in the High Street, Billericay. David is buried at Bethune Town Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France.

1918

George LINDSELL, was Private 40084 and a member of the 10th Battalion of the Essex Regiment. He was killed on 11 January 1918 aged 40. Both of George’s parents had been dead for many years and he had never married. He is buried at the Dozinghem Military Cemetery in West Vlaanderen, Belgium.

Thomas Edward BARKER, service number 37335, was a Private in the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. He was killed on 22 January 1918, aged 31. He was the son of George and Julia Barker of Rettendon Common, Chelmsford and the husband of Lily who lived at Redmays, Western Road, Billericay. Thomas is buried at the Poelcappelle British Cemetery in West Vlaanderen, Belgium. We can only assume that Lily and their son, Gerald, moved to this address some time after Thomas was killed in action, because he is not shown on the Billericay War Memorial although it seemed appropriate to include him in this book.

Cecil James Lawrence WHITE, service number 608552, died on 21 March 1918, aged 34. He was a Rifleman in the 18th Battalion of the London Regiment (London Irish Rifles). He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Arras Memorial in France.

Edward William COTTIS, service number 69318, was killed on 28 March 1918 aged 38. He was a Private in the 1/2nd Battalion Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment). He was the eldest son of Mr and Mrs W.J. Cottis of the High Street, Billericay. Six months later Edward’s younger brother, Cecil, was also killed whilst serving in France with the 11th Battalion of the Essex Regiment in September 1918, just two months before the end of the war.

Harold Wolstan WEBSTER, died of his wounds on 12 April 1918, aged 28. He was a Major in the 497th Field Company, Royal Engineers and he was killed by a bullet wound to the stomach. He is buried in the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, in Belgium.

Alfred William AKERS, service number 43504. A Corporal in the 2nd Battalion the Essex Regiment, he was killed on 22 April 1918, aged 28. He was the son of William and Francis Jane Ackers. The family are shown as living in Laindon Common in the parish of Laindon. In addition to his name appearing on the Billericay War Memorial he also appears on the Laindon Church Memorial. His father was a Police Superintendent with Essex Police. Alfred had an older brother Frederick but as there is no sign of him on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) website, it is assumed that he either didn’t join up or if he did he survived the war. On the entry for Alfred on the CWGC website it only refers to his mother, Francis Jane Ackers, so the assumption must be that her husband William was dead by the time of Alfred’s death in April 1918.

William Thomas SCOTT, service number 26675, died 23 April 1918, aged 30. He was a Lance Corporal in the 10th Battalion the Essex Regiment. William was wounded in September 1916 when he was shot in the head but recovered to return to duty. His brother, Private A.C. Scott, also in the Essex Regiment, was wounded by being hit in the head by shrapnel. William is buried in the Hangard Communal Cemetery in France.

Albert Victor COOKE, service number 146466 was killed 11 May 1918, aged 20. He was a Driver in A Battery, 14th Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery. There is an entire chapter in the book concerning Albert. He was the son of Edward Lewis and Mary Ann Cooke and the family lived in the High Street, Billericay. He is buried in the Blangy-Tronville Communal Cemetery on the Somme in France.

Thomas Edwin SCALES, service number 16758, died of his wounds on 23 May 1918. A Sergeant in the 9th Battalion the Essex Regiment, Thomas is buried in the Mailly Wood Cemetery in France.

Frederick John PEASE, service number 242251, was killed on 27 May 1918, aged 20. He was a Private in the 1st Battalion, Sherwood Foresters (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment) and the son of Frederick and Elizabeth Pease. Frederick is commemorated on the Soissons Memorial in France.

Frederick Joseph REEVE, service number G/18752, a Private in the 7th Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment, died on 24 August 1918, aged 19. He enlisted at nearby Warley and is buried in the Meaulte Military Cemetery, France.

Herbert STEWART, service number 250466, a Sergeant in the 9th Battalion of the Essex Regiment, died of his wounds on 24 August 1918, aged 33. He is buried in the Daours Communal Cemetery in France. Herbert was actually born in Billericay’s Union Workhouse in June 1985, a true son of the town.

Frederick BAYLISS, service number 204909, was a Private in the 2nd Battalion the Northamptonshire Regiment. He was killed on 29 August 1918 aged 21. He was the younger son of William and Sarah Bayliss, of Norsey Road, Billericay, Essex. He is buried at the Vis-en-Artois Memorial Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France.

Ernest RILEY, service number G/18922, died on 18 September 1918, aged 42. He was a Private in the 6th Battalion of the Buffs (East Kent Regiment). He met his death by being shot through the heart. Originally Ernest served with the Essex Regiment, enlisting at their headquarters at Warley. It is not known why he transferred regiments.

Cecil James COTTIS, service number 350668, died 17 September 1918, aged 23. A Private in the 11th Battalion of the Essex Regiment, he was the youngest son of Mr and Mrs W.J. Cottis of the High Street, Billericay.

Joseph MARTIN, service number 15985, was killed 30 September 1918, aged 36. He was a Private in the 2nd Battalion Queens Own (Royal West Kent Regiment). Prior to being killed he had previously been wounded on three other separate occasions. He is buried at the Unicorn Cemetery, Vendhuile, France.

William George ELKINS MM, (Military Medal), service number 65630, was killed on 4 October 1918, aged 20. He was a Private in the 104th Field Ambulance Royal Army Medical Corps. He was the son of Thomas and Augusta Elkins of Norsey Road, Billericay, although when he enlisted he gave an address of 3 Stock Terrace, Stock. It would appear that the family moved there from Norsey Road in Billericay. William had two older brothers, Frank and Thomas who do appear on the CWGC website, so either did not enlist or if they did, they survived.

William was awarded what was called a ‘Card of Honour’ for gallantry and devotion to duty on 6 May 1917 while carrying out stretcher bearer duties near Arras. He had arrived in France with his comrades on 9 January 1916 and was awarded his Military Medal for ‘bravery in the field’ on 29 August 1918. He was killed along with two of his colleagues when a German shell exploded right on top of their position.

Harry George WELHAM MC (Military Cross), died on 4 November 1918. Aged 27, he was a Lieutenant in the 9th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. He is buried in the Wargnies-le-Petit Communal Cemetery, in France. When George originally enlisted he did so with the 10th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, affectionately known as the Stockbrokers’ Battalion.The citation for his Military Cross appeared in the London Gazette on 16 August 1917 and read as follows:

‘For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. During an attack he showed the greatest courage and skilled leadership, personally supervising the whole line of advance until he fainted from exhaustion. Later he took a platoon forward into shell holes during heavy bombardment, thereby saving many casualties.’

Percy John PATEMAN, service number 41106, was killed on 8 November 1918, aged 25. He was a Sergeant in the 15th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. Percy is buried in the Don Communal Cemetery, Annoeullin, France. Mr and Mrs Pateman were one of the many families who paid an extremely high price as a result of the First World War. Both of their sons were killed less than a year apart as well as their daughter’s husband, David Humphreys.

W. NEVILLE, is the name and initial which is recorded on the Billericay War Memorial in the High Street. On the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) website there are twenty-seven similar names. Of these there are only eleven direct matches with the name W. Neville. Having checked through all twenty-seven entries, not one of them has any direct connection with Billericay. To add to the confusion there is also a W. Neville shown on the Roll of Honour at the St Mary the Virgin Church in Little Burstead, but he is shown as having survived and returned from the war.

An article in the Southend Standard dated 9th January 1919 was headed, ‘Wickford Man Dies of Wounds.’:

‘Private W.A. Neville, Northumberland Fusiliers, of Chapel Road, Wickford, who was missing and subsequently reported a prisoner in Germany, is now reported by the German Government to have died of wounds.’

Checking those details on the CWGC website, there is a W.A. Neville showing as being a member of the 25th Tyneside Irish Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers who died on 21 March 1918. He does not have any known connection to the Billericay area and has no known grave. His name is commemorated on the Arras Memorial in the Pas de Calais region of France.

There is an Arthur Nevill commemorated on the Stock and Buttsbury War Memorial, just to make matters even more confusing. Checking those same details on the CWGC website, only one direct match comes up. Private G/9645 Arthur Nevill of the 4th Battalion Royal Fusiliers. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Arras Memorial in the Pas de Calais region of France. There is no connection shown between him and the Billericay or Stock areas.

To add to the confusion even further, when we added an ‘E’ on to the surname and so checked the name Arthur Neville, sixteen possibles came up, four of which were Arthur’s.

Private 1191 Arthur Neville of the 2nd Battalion the East Surrey Regiment was the son of Cornelius and Alice Neville who lived at Potash Road, Billericay, which is right on the border of Billericay and the neighbouring village of Stock.

This just goes to show how difficult it can be for historians to accurately research any individual from the past. All that is needed is for a name to be spelt slightly differently and total confusion reigns all around. It is quite possible that W. Neville, W.A. Neville, Arthur Nevill and Arthur Neville are one and the same person, but then they could just as equally be four separate individuals. On the balance of probabilities Arthur Nevill who is shown on the Stock and Buttsbury War Memorial is the same as Arthur Neville, whose parents lived in Potash Road in Billericay.

Unfortunately we do not feel it is possible to identify with any degree of certainty, the W. Neville who is recorded on the Billericay War Memorial. War memorials, although helpful, can also be very confusing simply because we do not now know what criteria was used to decide which names were recorded on them. Some families moved from their original address between the time when their husband, brother, son or uncle went away to fight in the war and when they were subsequently killed. Some will have been born in one location and then moved elsewhere, some will have had no loved ones back home to mourn or record their loss.

Here are a couple of examples of local men who don’t appear on the Billericay war memorial for reasons unknown.

William John BRIDGMAN, service number R/34334, was a rifleman in The Kings Own Rifle Corps. He was killed on 24 March 1918 aged 30. He has no known grave and his name is not recorded on the Billericay War Memorial. He is commemorated on the Pozières Memorial on the Somme in France. He was the son of William Hugh and Emma BRIDGMAN and the husband of Florence Jessie BRIDGMAN of Jessamine Cottage, London Road, Billericay, Essex. His home address is shown as being in Billericay and he lived in Billericay at the time he enlisted in the Army.

William REVENING, service number 10286, died on 3 August 1916 during the Battle of the Somme. He was aged 24 and a Private in the 8th Battalion the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment). William was living in Billericay when he enlisted at Southend. He was later promoted to the rank of Lance Corporal and first arrived in France in June 1915. Just over a year later he was dead, one of the many casualties of the Battle of the Somme. He is buried in the Pozières British Cemetery in France.

As is mentioned elsewhere in this book, there were no officially agreed criteria as to why an individual’s name was recorded on a particular War Memorial, it was purely decided by the individual or group who had raised the funds to pay for the memorial in the first place.

The unveiling of the Billericay War Memorial ceremony, took place on 16 October 1921. The unveiling was carried out by Major General Sir William Thwaites KCMG CB.

The memorial stands to the side of St Mary’s Church at the junction of the Billericay High Road with Chapel Street. The dedication service for the memorial was carried out by the Reverend S.L. Brown, who was the Rector of Fryering. Also in attendance were a band, a choir, local dignitaries as well as the friends and families of some of those who are commemorated on the memorial. From the looks of the heavy coats, hats and scarves that everybody is wearing in the photograph, it must have been a particularly cold day.

Billericay War Memorial commemorations on Remembrance Day.

The memorial, a Celtic cross, stands 14 feet high, weighs over two tons and cost £250, the cost of which was raised by public subscription.

General Thwaites had been commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1887. He went on to serve with the Royal Field Artillery during the second Boer War between 1899 and 1902. During the First World War he served in both France and Belgium, in 1915 he was made the Commanding Officer of the 141st Infantry Brigade and then in 1916 he was made the General Officer Commanding the 46th Infantry Division.

After the war in 1922, he became Director of Military Intelligence. He went on to hold many similar prestigious posts before finally retiring from the army in 1933. He died on 22 June 1947 aged 79.

Stock War Memorial

Below are the names of the thirty-seven men of Stock who lost their lives during the First World War. They are commemorated on the Stock War Memorial which was unveiled on 20 November 1920 by Brigadier-General Richard Beale Colvin CBMP. Fortunately there was no rain to spoil the special occasion, although it was a typical November day, cloudy, overcast and cold.

On this and the following pages are the names on the Stock Memorial. (Photo by Stephen Wynn)

Brigadier General Colvin, who had been born on 4 August 1856, was the MP for Epping at the time of the unveiling, a seat he held between 28 June 1917 and 6 December 1923. He certainly wasn’t afraid to ask some searching questions during his time as an MP. Hansard records that on the 15 November 1917 he asked a question in the House on behalf of Acting Sergeant Cecil Boulton of the 3rd Battalion The Essex Regiment, who had been acting in an even higher rank for ten months and when the period of acting finished he was told he had to hand back £21.6s.2d, a substantial amount of money then, especially for a man from the ‘other ranks’.

Prior to becoming a Conservative MP he had been a Colonel in the British Army in 1901 when he took command of the Essex Imperial Yeomanry in South Africa, during the Boer War of 1899-1902. The Yeomanry had been raised as mounted infantry to deal with the highly mobile Boer Commandos. Members of the Imperial Yeomanry were all volunteers skilled both as horsemen and marksmanship, and had the nickname of the ‘Rough Riders’.

He had also held the positions of both High Sheriff and Lord Lieutenant of Essex, the latter at the time of his death in 1936.

On 24 November 1920, just four days before he presided at the unveiling of the Stock War Memorial, he asked another question in the House, this time of the Secretary of State for India. The question concerned pension rights for officers who had served as part of the Indian Army. The Secretary of State for India at the time was Winston Churchill. Brigadier General Colvin died just before his eightieth birthday, on 1 January 1936.

Here are the names of the men of Stock who fell during the First World War and who are commemorated on the village war memorial:

Stanley BACON

Victor PLUME

Fredrick Isaac CAPON

William Walter PLUME

Robert John CARPENTER

Herbert PRECIOUS

Frederick CLIFFORD

William PRECIOUS

William George ELKINS (MM)

Harry REYNOLDS

Rae Adam ELLIS (Capt)

John REYNOLDS

Charles Geoffrey EVANS

Frank RIDGEWELL

Charles EVANS

John RIST

Arthur Newstead FALKNER

Herbert STEWARD

Charles N. FULBROOK

Albert William TAYLOR

Pendarves C.F. GIBSON

Alfred Edward THOMAS

Horace GOULDSMITH

Harold Robert THOMASON

Harry HOWLETT

Harry TYLER

Reginald JARVIS

William WATTS

Joseph JENKINS

Charles Frederick Norman

Harry KEELING

WEBB

Joseph KEELING

Harry WEBB

George LOW

Bernard WEBB

John Alworth MERIWETHER

Walter WHYBRO

Arthur NEVILL

Walter Joseph WRIGHT

William PARKER

[The names of both Joseph and Harry KEELING are also recorded on the Billericay War Memorial. It is interesting that two communities only a couple of miles apart both want to claim the men as their own. There are two addresses shown on the CWGC website, one in Norsey Road and the other in Gooseberry Green, both are quite clearly in the curtilage of part of Billericay, so it is not clear how their names came to be recorded on the Stock War Memorial as well.]

The Reverend Thomas Joseph Osborn, who had previously lived in Stock whilst the rector of the village’s All Saints Church, had by the time of the First World War, already moved to Middlesex. Whether that was to work at another Parish or to retire, is not known. He lost his son, who was also Thomas Joseph Osborn, when he was killed on 4 July 1916 at the very beginning of the Somme offensive. Thomas enlisted at St Pancras in London and became a Rifleman in the 16th Battalion of the Prince Consort’s Own Rifle Brigade and was 38 years old when he died. Although he was born in the village of Stock, at the time of his death his home address was 39 Grafton Street, New Bond Street, London, W1. He left behind a wife, Florence Osborn (formerly Clarke).

Thomas is buried in the Béthune town cemetery in the Pas de Calais region of France, which is situated 29 kilometres north of Arras. There are 3,004 Commonwealth soldiers from the First World War buried there, including eleven with no known identity.

One has to wonder how the Reverend reacted when he heard the tragic news of his son’s death. Did it make him question his own Christian faith and beliefs?

We photographed Stock War Memorial early one June Sunday morning. There were clear blue skies, not a cloud to be seen and the sun was already up and working its magic. Not even a car passed by whilst we were there, it was as if time had stood still and we had been transported back to a bygone era. The quaint old buildings didn’t look like they had changed much from when they were first built and the village still had a pleasing picture post card appearance about it.

On the other side of the village is the picturesque All Saints Church. In the graveyard there is only one of those whose name is recorded on the war memorial, Walter George Whybro who was killed on 4 September 1916. He was 23 years old and a driver in the Royal Army Service Corps. The fact that he was buried locally indicates that he had been wounded and returned to England to for treatment, only to die subsequently.

Walter G. Whybro. (John Westwood www.stock.org)

his gravestone. (Photo Stephen Wynn)

Little Burstead War Memorial

The War Memorial in Little Burstead is carefully positioned on a neatly maintained island in the middle of the road, right in the very centre of the quaint old village. There are eight names commemorated on it of those who lost their lives during the First World War. At the bottom of the 12-foot high Celtic cross is a base that has the following inscription engraved on it.

‘Sacred to the memory of the men of Little Burstead who made the supreme sacrifice in two World Wars that we might live in peace and freedom. Their names will live on forever.’

The names of those remembered on the memorial are as follows:

G. COE

A. LAVER

R.J.H. JOHNSON

F. PEASE

W. JARVIS

J. RICHARDSON

W. LAVER

W. RIPPER

Interestingly six of the names on the Little Burstead War Memorial, are also recorded on the Billericay War Memorial, only G. Coe and W.Ripper are not. J. Richardson and W. Jarvis are also recorded on the St Mary Magdalene Church porch plaque in Great Burstead which goes to show just how much of an inexact science, the naming of individuals on war memorials actually was. You would however think that as a new memorial was erected, somebody would have at least thought about checking on others in the surrounding towns and villages to ensure there was not a duplication of the names.

The War Memorial at Little Burstead is lovingly maintained by local residents for the benefit of all. It was unveiled on Saturday 18 June 1921 by Major Bowen DSO, who at the time was the Commandant of the Essex Regiment Depot at nearby Warley. The Reverend Leonard Payne gave the blessing during a dedication service. There was also a guard of honour as tradition demanded on such auspicious occasions. The Last Post, the National Anthem and Reveille were all played by a lone bugler.

Little Burstead War Memorial. (Photo Stephen Wynn)

On the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website W. Ripper is recorded as Thomas William Ripper, service number SS/109685 and he was a Stoker 1st Class in the Royal Navy. He was serving on the Cruiser, HMS Hawke, when on 15 October 1914 it was struck by a torpedo fired from the German U-Boat, U-9. Thomas was one of the 497 men, along with the ship’s Commander, Captain Hugh Williams and twenty-six other officers who perished when one of the ship’s magazines, which had been struck by the torpedo, exploded.

HMS Hawke, an Edgar Class Cruiser, was first launched in 1891. Between 1897 and 1898 it was involved in action in the Mediterranean during operations that led to the pacification of the island of Crete. During this time it was used as a troop carrier for Greek soldiers. On 20 September 1911 Hawke was involved in a collision with the White Star Liner, RMS Olympic in the Solent whilst undergoing steam trials after having been refitted.

At the outbreak of the First World War its Commander was Captain Hugh P.E.T. Williams. The Hawke became involved in various operations in the North Sea. On 15 October 1914 it was sailing in unison with its sister ship, HMS Theseus, when it was inadvertently torpedoed by the German Submarine, U-9. It would appear that the torpedo that was fired by U-9 was actually intended for the Theseus, but it missed, hitting the Hawke and igniting one of the ship’s magazines which caused an enormous explosion, literarily ripping the ship apart.

Buttsbury War Memorial

Even though the war memorial in the village of Stock is officially the Stock and Buttsbury War Memorial, Buttsbury has its own memorial in the form of a Roll of Honour at Buttsbury Church. Not surprisingly, every name that appears on it is also included on the one in Stock. Here are the sixteen names recorded on it:

Stanley BACON

Harry KEELING

John CARPENTER

George LOW

Frederick CLIFFORD

Arthur NEVILLE

Charles FULBROOK

Herbert PRECIOUS

George HUME

William PRECIOUS

Reginald JARVIS

John REYNOLDS

Joseph JENKINS

Harry TYLER

Joseph KEELING

Charles WEBB

Stock Catholic Church Memorial

The church is situated off a road in the middle of the village’s narrow High Street.

The following five names all appear on the war memorial inside the church. The five men are named on the memorial because they regularly attended Sunday services there before going off to war. All five men are also commemorated on the main Stock war memorial which is less than a mile away.

Joseph JENKINS

Bernard WEBB

John MEREWETHER

Harry WEBB

Victor PLUME

Repetition seems to have been a regular theme when it came to the recording of names on First World War memorials, especially when it comes to the Billericay, Burstead and Stock areas. There are some names that appear on three out of the four memorials.

St Mary Magdalene Church Porch Memorial – Great Burstead

When I went to see this memorial I initially walked straight past it. I continued on into the church thinking it must be on one of the inside walls instead of the porch. I walked round twice and still I couldn’t see it. Confused, I purchased a pot of blueberry and apple jam that was for sale at the back of the church and as I left I spotted the memorial which consisted of two shiny brass coloured tablets low down on the right hand side of the porch.

The left hand tablet had the following quote on it.

‘To the glory of God & sacred to the memory of the men of Great Burstead who gave their lives for king and country in the Great War, 1914-1918.’

The following names are recorded on it.

ACKERS, A.W.

HILLS, T.F.

CHAPMAN, J.

HORNSBY, E.

COTTIS, E.W.

JARVIS, W.

COTTIS, C.J.

JEFFERIES, J.P.

COPELAND, W.J.

MARTIN, J.

MEAD, H.A.

STEWART, H.

PATEMAN, P.J.

STEWART, J.A.

PATEMAN, J.S.

TUNE, C.

RAYMENT, J.W.

WALDEN, F.

RICHARDSON, J.

Seventeen of the nineteen names which appear on this memorial are also commemorated on the Billericay war memorial. The only names which don’t are those of Rayment, J.W. and Hornsby, E. Edmund Mark Wiffen Hornsby, Private G/67440 of C Company the 6th Battalion The Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment was killed on 29 August 1918 aged 19. He was the son of William and Mary Ann Hornsby of South Green, Billericay. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Vis-en-Artois Memorial, Pas de Calais in France. The memorial has the names of 9,854 names of British, Irish, South African, Canadian, Australian and New Zealanders who fell in just three months between 8 August and 11 November 1918.

Edmund had three brothers, Christopher, Frederick and Herbert as well as two sisters, Edith and Mabel. Christopher Wennel Hornsby, Edmund’s elder brother, was also killed during the war but is not recorded on any war memorial in the United Kingdom, which shows how difficult it was to properly record the names of those killed during the First World War on the correct war memorials. He was a Staff Sergeant (Service number S/1309) in the Royal Army Service Corps (Supply Office) and was 30 years old when he died on 12 November 1920 in Hong Kong. By this time his parents, William and Mary Ann Hornsby had moved back to Corringham in Essex. Christopher is buried in the Sai Wan War Cemetery in Hong Kong. Edmund’s two other brothers, Frederick and Herbert also served their country during the war but survived and returned to their families.

On the same porch memorial in St Mary Magdalene Church are the names of H. Coldwell (Vicar), H.H. Vose and F.W. Faber (Church Wardens). These are located at the bottom of the right hand side tablet. Over time I believe this has caused some confusion, with some readers taking this to mean that they also served and were killed in the war. Having searched the CWGC website this seems not to have been the case and these were simply the names of the vicar and church wardens at the time the memorial was placed in the church porch.

CHAPTER 15

Campaign Medals, First World War

This chapter looks at the main campaign medals that UK military personnel were awarded for their service to king and country during the First World War 1914-18. They were earned the hard way and commemorate some of the bloodiest battles in the annals of British military history.

There were six individual campaign medals as well as the silver war badge which was first issued on 12 September 1916. It was originally issued to both officers and men who were discharged or retired from the military as a result of either sickness or an injury which had come about as a direct result of their war service. In April 1918 the eligibility for receipt of this badge was amended to include civilians serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps, as well as female nurses and other related staff.

The medals were:

The 1914 Star.

The 1914-1915 Star.

The British War Medal 1914-1918.

The Allied Victory Medal 1914-1919.

The Territorial Force War medal.

The Mercantile Marine War medal 1914–1918.

Combinations of some of these medals had humorous nicknames, for example, the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal 1914-1918 and the Allied Victory Medal, became affectionately referred to as ‘Pip, Squeak and Wilfred’ after the characters in a comic strip which appeared in the Daily Mirror newspaper at the same time. Pip, Squeak and Wilfred were a dog, penguin and a young rabbit respectively. The combination of the British War Medal 1914-1918 and the Allied Victory Medal became known as ‘Mutt and Jeff’

The 1914 Star, which was also known as ‘Pip’ or the Mons Star, was established in April 1917 for those who had served in France or Belgium between 5 August 1914 and midnight on 22 November 1914. All recipients of this medal also received the British War Medal 1914-1918 and the Allied Victory Medal. In total 378,000 1914 Stars were awarded. Personnel who were part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) also became known as the Old Contemptibles after a derisory remark said to have been made by the German Kaiser about Sir John French’s ‘contemptible little army’.

The 1914-15 Star was established in 1918 for those who had seen service from the beginning of the war, up to and including 31 December 1915. Individuals who were eligible for the 1914 Star were not eligible for this medal. In total 2,366,000 1914-15 Stars were issued. The only difference between the first two awards was the scroll in the middle of the medal. The earlier one simply had ‘1914’ on it and the latter had ‘1914-1915’.

1914 Star.

1914–15 Star.

British War Medal.

The British War Medal 1914-18, which was also known as ‘Squeak’, was established by King George V in 1919 to mark the end of the First World War and to commemorate an individual’s service to his king and country. The qualification to receive the medal was extended up to 1920 so as to include post-war mine clearance and service in Russia during 1919-20. There were a total of approximately 6,500,000 British War Medals 1914-1918 issued. The Mercantile Marine War Medal 1914-18 was established by the British Board of Trade and was awarded to members of the Mercantile Marine, which was the forerunner of the Merchant Navy. It was awarded to those who had served on one or more voyages through a danger zone during the period 4 August 1914 to 11 November 1918. A total of 133,135 of these medals were issued.

The Victory Medal 1914-19, which was also known as ‘Wilfred’, was established in 1919 to commemorate the Allied victory over Germany and her allies. There were approximately 5,725,000 British Victory Medals 1914-1919 issued.

The Territorial Force War Medal 1914-1919, which was established on 26 April 1920, was only issued to members of the Territorial Force and Territorial Force Nursing Service. The criteria for being awarded the medal required its recipients to have been a member of the Territorial Force on or before 30 September 1914 and to have served in an operational theatre of war outside the United Kingdom between 5 August 1914 and 11 November 1918. Approximately 34,000 of these medals were issued which makes it somewhat rare when compared with the other campaign medals awarded. An individual who was eligible to receive the 1914 Star or 1914-15 Star could not then receive the Territorial War Medal.

Mercantile Marine Medal.

Victory Medal.

Territorial War Medal

All campaign medals had the recipient’s service number, rank, name and unit inscribed on the rim.

Besides campaign medals that were awarded to all individuals who reached a certain criteria, there were numerous different medals which could be awarded for acts of bravery across all three military services, thirteen in total. This did not include being mentioned in dispatches. To be ‘Mentioned in Despatches’ an individual needed to have carried out a noteworthy act of gallantry or service, which by its very achievement meant that the act fell short of deserving an award of a gallantry medal. A ‘Despatch’ is not a medal, it’s an official report usually written by the recipient’s senior commander in the field.

The criteria for most gallantry awards depended on rank, for example some were unavailable to other ranks. However the Victoria Cross, the highest British and Commonwealth award for acts of courage or valour in the face of the enemy, is available to all ranks. It sits on the same level as the George Cross which is awarded if the act of valour is not in the face of the enemy. It is also possible for the medal to be awarded to civilians if at the time their act of bravery they were under the orders and control of the military.

The Victoria Cross was established on 29 January 1856 during the Crimean War on the orders of Queen Victoria. The first ever award of the medal was on 26 June 1856. During the First World War a total of 615 Victoria Crosses were awarded for acts of valour. Originally the Royal Warrant for the medal did allow for its being awarded to recipients posthumously. Although this was not officially changed in the warrant until after the First World War, a quarter of all recipients who were awarded the Victoria Cross during the First World War, were killed as they carried out their act of valour, the standard for its award being so high.

Victoria Cross.

CHAPTER 16

Life on the Western Front

Life on the Western Front for a soldier was varied for many different reasons. It was affected in different ways and times by the weather, the fear of death, the trenches, the constant noise of artillery fire, the smell, death, hunger, disease, fatigue and the constant desire to be back home with loved ones. Just to make matters worse, they had a war to fight as well.

The first major use of poison gas by German forces on the Western Front was on 22 April 1915 at the second Battle of Ypres. Five hundred canisters of chlorine gas were released from their front line trenches. By July of that year the Germans had replaced the canisters with deadly artillery shells that contained both phosgene and mustard gas, a lethal cocktail by any stretch of the imagination. What made mustard gas in particular such a callous killer, was that it was both odourless and colourless and by the time defending troops realised what was going on, it was quite often too late.

The British Army did not start using gas until October 1915. There was always an element of risk attached for whichever side used it. If the wind was blowing in the wrong direction when it was released, then the gas could quite easily blow back on to the defending troops.

The introduction of gas as a weapon wasn’t a particular winner for either side, but it was still an effective tactic to a degree. Troops having to wear and fight in a gas mask would do so with great difficulty which resulted in a massive reduction in their mobility and overall effectiveness.

There were an estimated one million casualties as a result of the use of gas by both sides on the Western Front.

British Machine Gunners in gas masks. (From a contemporary photograph)

British involvement in the assaults on Gallipoli was not the best advert for how to fight a war. Initially in 1915, 70,000 British troops were sent out to the peninsula, but by 25 April 1915, mainly because of the cavalier and out-dated tactics employed by the allied commanders, 20,000 of them had already been killed. The numbers of British troops in Gallipoli increased steadily until there were half a million men involved in the fighting, such was the determination of the British government to bring matters to a successful conclusion.

On 6 August 1915 a second assault on the Ottoman defences by the British failed and by January the following year all British troops were evacuated from the area.

Winston Churchill, a strong advocate of the Gallipoli campaign as First Lord of the Admiralty, resigned at the end of November 1915, took up a commission and went to France as a battalion commander.

The 2nd Battalion, the Buckinghamshire Regiment or as they were more commonly referred to, the 2nd Bucks, were a reserve battalion and were raised at Aylesbury on 26 September 1914 by Lieutenant Colonel H.M. Williams. They became part of 184 Infantry Brigade. Towards the end of April 1915 they were detailed to work on the London defences and were allocated to the section of Mountnessing to Billericay, the brigade’s headquarters being located at nearby Epping.

The battalion was employed in the digging of trenches, some of which still remain in Norsey Woods. The quality of their work was specially commended by inspecting officers. They were only in the area for about three weeks before they were deployed elsewhere. Whilst stationed at Billericay they were suddenly called upon, with only one hour’s notice, to picket all the roads that were heading in the direction of London between Mountnessing and Billericay and Pitsea and the coast near Southend. No reason was given for this sudden request.

Politicians believed that the war would be over by Christmas 1914. This was borne out by the fact that in the first budget of the war, which was presented to the country on 16 November 1914, no new taxes were brought in even though some of the existing ones were raised slightly.

Even though the First World War had been raging since the death of Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914, the last six months of that first year saw some heavy fighting:

16 August 1914. The Germans took Liège in Belgium.

20 August 1914. The Germans took Brussels in Belgium.

23 August 1914. The Battle of Mons.

26 August 1914. The Battle of Le Cateau.

5 -10 September 1914. The Battle of the Marne.

October 1914. The First Battle of Ypres.

25 December 1914. An unoffical truce took place between British and German troops in no man’s land on the Western Front. It remains to this day a remarkable feat of humanity in a time of war, not just because of the truce but because of the physical meeting of troops from both sides in no man’s land, the swapping of items and the football match that reportedly took place. Once it was over, they then went back to job of trying to kill each other.

Pay for soldiers ranged from one shilling and three pence up to ten shillings and six pence a day, depending on what branch of the military a man was in and what qualifications he had. Typically a soldier agreed to sign up for three years or as long as the war lasted.

Going over the top. (From a contemporary postcard)

The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) fought heroically throughout 1914, but at the battles of Mons, Le Cateau and first Ypres they incurred massive casualties. The Battle of Loos in Belgium, part of a French-British offensive in Artois during September and October 1915, wasn’t a British military success story either.

The year 1916 was crucial with the strategy of attrition quickly becoming the normal way of life on the Western Front. It was a year that saw many long drawn out battles resulting in a very high number of casualties on both sides for very little actual gain in land; this was particularly the case with both the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme which coincided with the first major battle of Kitchener’s New Army volunteers, which included Pals units, friends who had joined up together and in many cases would die together, part-time territorial forces and regular army soldiers, which all made up the BEF.

The prelude to the opening of the Battle of the Somme saw a massive artillery bombardment by the British starting on 24 June which lasted for over a week, during which time 1.7 million shells were fired. It is estimated that thirty per cent of them failed to go off, which was just one of the reasons why the deep German dug-outs and German defensive positions remained intact, ready to repel the British attacks across no man’s land which almost always followed such bombardments.

Then on 1 July 1916 there was a massive infantry assault by wave after wave of men. On that first day alone the British incurred 57,470 casualties – 20,000 more than the entire population of Billericay (2011) – of whom 19,200 were killed, another 2,152 were missing with the rest having been wounded. It remains the worst day in the history of the British Army.

British and German wounded. (From a contemporary postcard)

The Battle of the Somme – actually twelve distinct battles in the overall campaign – lasted for 142 days until 18 November 1916. British casualties totalled some 415,000, of whom 127,751 were killed, nearly 900 men for each day of the battle, whilst the German casualties were estimated to have been in the region of 650,000. France incurred 200,000 casualties. Of those killed 72,085 have no known grave and are commemorated on the Thiepval memorial on the Somme in northern France.

General Haig’s diary entry for 2 July 1916, the second day of the Battle of the Somme, read as follows.

‘A day of downs and ups. The Adjutant General reported today that the total casualties are estimated at over 40,000 to date. This cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged and the length of front attacked.’

Arrogant, out of touch, staggering, unbelievable and inhuman are just a few words which immediately spring to mind. To most people the first day of the Somme would be nothing more than an unmitigated military disaster and a total waste of human life.

In human terms the Battle of Verdun between 21 February and 18 December 1916 was the most costly of the entire war. Germany and France collectively suffered nearly one million casualties. Conservative contemporary estimates suggest that nearly 750,000 men were killed in the fighting. Most of those died as a result of artillery fire rather than rifle or machine-gun bullets.

(From a contemporary postcard)

A landmark moment in history occurred on 15 September 1916 when the British used tanks operationally for the very first time at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, although with mixed success. It signalled the end of the cavalry’s role in warfare. By 1916 horses as in cavalry units had had their time. At the outset of the war, horses were in great demand and were used for most things. Shock cavalry raids, reconnaissance, medical support, pulling artillery pieces. Mechanised transport was still in its infancy at the outbreak of the war. In the four years from the outbreak of war in 1914, through to the end of 1918 Britain would have used a staggering one million horses in its war effort.

In 1917 the Battle of Arras took place in April and the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) between July and November 1917. British forces were now exhausted and were close to running on empty. A winter of reorganisation and regrouping was needed and an injection of Allied strength which came across the Atlantic.

America entered the war on 6 April 1917 and between April and October 1918 1,600,000 American soldiers arrived on the Western Front. They were young, fit, well fed, fresh and they undoubtedly made a big difference to the eventual outcome of the war.

The use and understanding of aircraft as an offensive weapon only really happened late on during the war in the early part of 1918. On 1 April 1918 the Royal Air Force (RAF) was formed out of the Army’s Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS).

After beating back a last massive German attack throughout the Spring of 1918, on 8 August 1918 the British Army went on the offensive at Amiens followed by the Hundred Days push to victory. The gallant efforts shown in the latter stages of 1918 by those brave young men after four years of bitter fighting seem to have been largely forgotten in an historical sense. Theirs really was a remarkable feat of steely determination and a dogged willingness to overcome and to never give in.

Then after four years of fighting the end of the war came suddenly on 11 November 1918. An armistice was agreed between the warring factions which saw Britain and her allies emerging victorious whilst Germany and the other vanquished nations which had sided with her, had to deal with the stale taste of defeat.

Weather wise November 11 was a lousy day, being both cloudy and overcast on both sides of the English Channel but the state of the weather paled into insignificance when compared with the end of the war and what that meant to everybody. The war was finally over and at long last people could start to rebuild their lives. For some that would be easier to achieve than for others, but the post war era saw a different world emerging, where social change would be more pronounced than it had ever been before. People generally wanted to be part of those new and forward thinking changes.

The end of the war saw celebrations taking place all over Britain. There were impromptu street parties in most towns and villages. Crowds gathered outside 10 Downing Street and Buckingham Palace in London, which went on late in to the night just as they had done on the very first night of the war four years earlier.

Never had two wartime celebrations been so totally different in what they stood for. The excitement of venturing in to the unknown at the outbreak of the war had been greatly overshadowed by the relief and happiness that the fighting was finally at an end. It would be down to history to record and determine the price that had been paid, and although it would be a price that could never be repaid, it would never be forgotten.

CHAPTER 17

Life in the Trenches

Billericay still has its very own trenches in Norsey Woods. Today they are part of a nature trail in a local wooded conservation area. In the First World War they were used for training purposes for the numerous regiments that would subsequently have to go and fight in the trenches of the Western Front, as well as forming part of the North London defence system, which had been put in place in case Germany decided to invade.

Life in the trenches was not an experience for the faint hearted. They were dirty places with very little in the way of home comforts to soften the discomfort of the cold and rain. There were no baths of course and soldiers on either side rarely had the opportunity to change their clothes whilst engaged in the front line trenches. It was a stressful existence at the best of times, with the possibility of death an ever-present companion for all those concerned.

How bad the conditions were at any given time, rather depended on the severity of the weather. Soldiers lived with lice and rats hand in hand with the feelings of fear and of being homesick for their loved ones. It was physically and mentally demanding on minds and bodies. Some became broken men through the rigours of days and days of constant German shelling, wondering if today was going to be their day to die.

On 16 September 1915, the German Army began to dig in on the high ground of the Chemin des Dames ridge on the north bank of the river Aisne. They dug defensive trenches with the intention of securing their position and preventing any further withdrawals. This was the beginning of trench warfare and marked the change from a mobile conflict to one of a static deadlock between the opposing forces. Gradually this brand of warfare was replicated across the entire Western Front from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border for the remaining three and a half years of the war.

(From a contemporary postcard)

In some places the front line trenches of the opposing sides were 100-300 yards apart, in other areas it was no more than thirty yards, which meant they were so close they could lob hand grenades into each other’s trenches. During the Gallipoli campaign, this tactic was heavily employed by both sides.

There was no official stance on how deep or wide a trench should be; that was something which had simply evolved out of a desire to stay alive and to make the best of a bad job. Front line trenches were usually about 12 feet deep and would take on average 450 men 6 hours to dig a trench 275 yards in length. Because of the close proximity to each other the trenches had to be dug from the bottom up, whether it was night or day

Life in the trenches was never going to be easy. Even in the chaos of battle the soldiers still had to follow a daily routine as well as dodging enemy bullets and shell fire. The trenches had to be maintained otherwise they would quickly deteriorate and end up offering little or no protection from the enemy. A well maintained trench could literarily mean the difference between life and death.

A soldier in the trenches would begin his day about one hour before sun up with the morning call to ‘Stand to’. He would man the fire step with his bayonet attached to his rifle in case of a dawn raid from the enemy. Dawn raids were common in the trenches, but as both sides were prepared for their eventuality, the tactic was somewhat futile. After the ‘Stand to’, the soldiers would be issued with a tot of rum before cleaning their weapons which was then followed by the morning inspection by senior officers. With the inspection over it was time for breakfast, unofficially in quieter sectors breakfast time in the trenches was a time of ceasefire which both sides would respect most of the time. After breakfast the soldiers would then face an inspection by their commanding officer, this was followed by the daily chores including the refilling of sandbags, the repair of the wooden duckboards on the floor of the trench and the draining of trenches if there had been heavy rain overnight. The least popular job of the day was the cleaning and repair of the latrines. It certainly did not pay to annoy the sergeant who decided on which duties each of his men would be allocated.

Having a routine was important for a soldier’s morale and their overall wellbeing. Without it there would have been boredom as well as the real risk of mass ill-discipline. During the afternoon, the men took it in turns to man the fire step which was just another term for, ‘guard duty’. The lucky ones who were not chosen for this duty were allowed a period of time to themselves to either catch up on some sleep, read and write letters or enjoy some games amongst themselves although movement was restricted in the trenches and the fear of becoming the victim of an enemy sniper was ever present. Snipers on either side would open fire at the slightest sign of any movement in an enemy trench, so making sure they were in cover at all times was something a soldier had to constantly think about. Forgetting could have fatal consequences.

As the darkness of the evening approached the men were put on their second ‘Stand to’ of the day with bayonets fixed in preparation for any surprise attacks by the enemy. Evening time was when the trenches came to life and were a hive of activity. Some soldiers were sent to the rear trenches to bring up much needed supplies of food, ammunition and water.

A soldier’s period of guard duty on the firing step was for a period of two hours before being replaced by a colleague, this was mainly to ensure that those on guard were fresh and alert at all times to the possibility of a surprise German attack. No matter how tired a soldier was, falling asleep whilst on guard really wasn’t an option if they wanted to stay alive. If discovered in such a state by an officer the punishment could see the offender face a court martial, the ultimate penalty for such a transgression, being death by firing squad.

Sleeping soldiers in a captured German trench while one keeps watch. (From a contemporary postcard)

Sometimes small parties of men led by an officer would be detailed to carry out a night patrol into no man’s land under cover of darkness. This could be to repair breaks in the barbed wire or to try and overhear enemy conversations in the hope of picking up a snippet of useful military intelligence. Some patrols were tasked with capturing an enemy soldier so they could be interrogated for information.

The Germans would send out similar patrols which meant there was the real possibility of meeting each other in no man’s land. If this happened the options were either to ignore each other and carry on with their respective patrols or engage in hand to hand combat. Opening fire on each other was usually not an option as this would result in machine gun fire raking across no man’s land from both sides, the outcome being the possible death of all concerned.

Night time, with the cover of darkness, was when troops were replaced with fresh troops from the rear support trenches. This would be carried out in plenty of time for the daily routine to begin all over again the next morning.

An Army chaplain tending British graves. (From a contemporary postcard)

CHAPTER 18

Internment Camp – Billericay

The topic of prisoner of war (PoW) and internment camps is one that has not been that widely discussed in relation to either world war. Records of the camps from the Second World War are generally more plentiful and would appear to have been better kept than those of the First World War. This may be due in part to the level of secrecy and restrictions which were imposed by the government of the day and included matters on which the press could report. During our research we have not found one newspaper article in relation to there ever having been an internment camp in Billericay.

During the First World War there was an Army camp in Mountnessing Road opposite the junction with Station Road, where different regiments would come to train before going off to fight on the Western Front. However, one historical fact we had never heard about was that there had been an internment/PoW camp in the town which opened on 22 February 1918. The location of this camp was the Billericay Union Workhouse. On 7 May 1918 a visit was paid to the camp’s internees by Dr A. de Sturler from the Swiss Embassy in London. Below are the contents of the report he submitted on 10 May 1918 in relation to his visit:

Direction:

Captain J. Powell, who is the Commandant of the Rochford PoW camp, visits the Billericay camp at intervals. Sergeant Wakefield is in charge of the German PoWs; Dr Shackleton, who is the local General Practitioner in Billericay, acts as the camp’s physician.

PoWs:

Combatants. There are forty German military personnel held at the camp. Gef. Karl Gorges is the PoW camp leader, as well as being the interpreter and the clerk.

Description:

The PoW camp occupies part of Billericay Union Workhouse. It has independent blocks surrounded by courtyards.

Housing:

The PoWs are housed in three spacious dormitories with eleven men residing in one of them, thirteen occupying another of the dormitories and fourteen men in the other one. Each man has a usual regulation bedstead, a straw mattress, a pillow and four blankets. Each dormitory has gas lighting and open fireplaces for heating. There are large dining and recreation rooms where the PoWs eat their meals.

Sanitary Arrangements:

There were separate blocks for the ablutions and bathroom as well as the drying room. There were also latrines in the courtyard and the PoWs do their own laundry. There was hot water readily available, and the drinking water was good and plentiful. All of the sanitary installations were adequate, clean and in good working order.

Nutrition:

The kitchen had one boiler and all the necessary apparatus in a special block in the courtyard. One of the German PoWs was acting as the cook. All of the PoWs get the increased rations for working PoWs. There was no specific area set aside for use as a canteen in this small camp.

Work and Wages:

The PoWs work in agriculture for local farmers. Their wages are 1d per hour, and they work eight to nine hours each day and do a six-day week. The camp’s clerk gets 3/- a week from the British Government, the cook gets 3/- a week from the other PoWs. Men work in groups of seven. Those allocated to do work which is more than three miles away from the camp, travel there by train.

Medical Information:

The PoWs’ general health was very good. There had been no reported cases of sickness since the camp opened. If any of the POWs becomes seriously ill, provision has been made for them at nearby Warley hospital as well as at Colchester Hospital. Dr Shackleton, the local Billericay GP visits the camp on a daily basis. On day of my visit the weather was bad, so all of the PoWs were seen indoors and all of them were in good health. None were suffering from insufficient nourishment.

Recreation:

The Camp’s Commandant, Captain J. Powell applied some weeks ago to YMCA and Dr Markel’s Relief Agency for books and musical instruments for the PoWs, but nothing has been received yet.

Religious Service:

A representative of the YMCA visited recently the camp and held a religious service and showed the PoWs some pictures.

Discipline:

The camp’s Commandant Captain J. Powell, informs me that all of the PoWs are well-selected, well-behaved and no trouble at all to the camp authorities.

Resumé:

There were no complaints received from any of the PoWs. There was no barbed wire to be seen anywhere in or around the camp. The accommodation where the PoWs are housed is of an excellent standard. All of the PoWs are engaged in wholesome work outdoors in the open air. The PoWs are treated in a considerate treatment manner by their British captors, and all in all it has to be said that this is a well-appointed camp.

A couple of points are worth highlighting here, under the section in the report on how the PoWs were housed it described how the men were split into three dormitories of fourteen, thirteen and eleven. That is only a total of thirty-eight, yet under the heading of PoWs in the report, it said the camp contained forty German PoWs. Maybe the other two had escaped and the authorities simply hadn’t worked it out!

Secondly, in Mary Needham’s paper entitled, ‘Billericay at the outbreak of the First World War,’ remembering of course that Mary was the daughter of the Billericay Union Workhouse Master and lived there with her mother, father and sister, she makes no mention of the German PoWs having ever stayed there. Her paper describes life in Billericay throughout the entire four years of the war and beyond. She mentions British officers having being billeted at the Workhouse, so why she hasn’t mentioned the PoWs isn’t known.

Different organisations were involved in the visiting and inspecting of all such camps to check on the wellbeing of those being detained, whether they were military personnel or interned foreign civilians. One such organisation was the Directorate of Prisoners of War, which had been set up in February 1915. Its first Director was Lieutenant General Sir Herbert E. Belfield. One of its members, who was authorised to make unannounced visits to camps throughout Britain, was an American, Mr J.B. Jackson. In February 1915 he visited twenty-two separate locations, including nine ships, some of which were moored in the River Thames near to Southampton, with another two moored at the end of Southend-on-Sea pier. The names of these two ships were the SS Saxonia and the SS Ivernia. They were used as PoW ships at Southend from December 1914 through till May 1915. Ironically at 10.12am on 1 January 1917 the SS Ivernia, having finished her stint as a PoW ship, was torpedoed by a German U-Boat, U-47, just off of the coast of Greece whilst en route to Alexandria and sunk within the hour. One hundred and twenty of those on board the Ivernia perished. This included thirty-eight members of her crew as well as eighty-four soldiers.

Her main distinguishing feature was her funnel which at the time was the largest that had ever been fitted to a ship: 60 feet from the deck to the top. A road in Walton, Liverpool is still named after the ship.

The decision to use ships as ‘camps’ was taken because the government was running out of other suitable accommodation to hold them in because of the ever increasing number of German PoWs that were coming under their control. There were approximately 26,000 internees in these camps, the majority of whom were foreign civilians. The use of ships for this purpose was stopped by June 1916.

A few days after hostilities began in August 1914, alien nationals from countries who were considered to be enemies of Great Britain were ordered to register at their nearest police station. Many Germans, who were gainfully employed before the war began, suddenly found themselves out of a job as the backlash of British national fervour towards them began. One interesting fact was that at the beginning of the war there were in the region of 70,000 German subjects living in Britain, yet only 20,000 of them were ever interned.

In August 1914, and mainly to comply with the terms of the Hague Convention, the Prisoner of War Information Bureau came in to existence. Its first leader was Sir Paul Harvey. The department dealt with all requests from the German government requesting information about the wellbeing of its troops that it believed had become prisoners of the British.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), whose headquarters were in Geneva, also sent some of its members to pay unannounced visits to the British camps. These visits were an extremely important aspect of the war no matter which organisation carried them out. It was imperative that Germany knew that her captured soldiers, sailors and airmen who were being held in British camps were been well looked after, to ensure the wellbeing of British PoWs being held by them.

By the end of the war the number of camps had risen to over 500. Although the numbers of civilian detainees had reduced slightly to just below 18,000, the total number of military personnel who were been held as prisoners of war, had risen to just over 120,000.

Despite the large number of camps throughout Britain the Red Cross visited very few: Hollyport, which was for German officers, Queensferry, Dyffryn in Wales and the camp in Dorchester. It also visited PoW ships at both Southend and Portsmouth. Those at Southend held both military as well as civilian detainees.

Under the terms of the Hague Convention it was permissible to use captured enemy combatants to work, but only the ‘other ranks’, not officers. The work could not be excessive or have anything to do with the war effort and whatever work PoWs carried out had to be paid for at an agreed rate. The work varied and mainly depended on where they were located. It wasn’t until the summer of 1917 and then only because of an ever-increasing food and labour shortage, that the British government eventually decided to put German PoWs to work. By the end of the war there were approximately 100,000 PoWs carrying out paid work; 30,000 of these were employed working on farms and gathering in the crops.

Most German PoWs were more than happy with their overall treatment whilst they were detained in British camps but whether that was the conditions within the camps, the food they were provided with or how they were physically treated by their guards is not known. The soldiers who guarded these camps were from the Royal Defence Corps.

CHAPTER 19

Those Who Returned

In 1918, England was made up of only 16,000 towns and villages which by today’s standards had relatively small populations. At the start of the First World War, Billericay was no more than a village community with a population of about 2,000. Nearly one hundred years later in 2012 Billericay had become a large sprawling town and its population had risen to around 37,000 people.

Research by historian, Tom Morgan, found that of those 16,000 communities only fifty-two of them did not lose a single young man throughout the entire four years of the First World War.

One such community was that of the ironically named village of Upper Slaughter in the Cotswolds. Thirty-six of its young men went off to fight in the war and every single one of them came back alive. Not surprisingly in the circumstances, it doesn’t actually have a First World War memorial, but what it does have is a plaque commemorating the names of those thirty-six young men who all returned safely to the community. The plaque hangs in pride of place in the village hall.

Of the fifty-two communities who didn’t have any of their young men killed in the First World War, fourteen of them also didn’t lose anybody during the Second World War either. Upper Slaughter wasn’t one of them, and neither was Billericay.

One of the reasons that some communities lost large numbers of their young men was because of the system of Pals regiments, which encouraged friends, colleagues and relatives to join up and fight side by side. Although seen as an extremely useful recruitment tool by the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, the down side was that in some cases the entire adult male population of a village could be wiped out in a matter of minutes, decimating communities in the process, potentially for generations to come. This factor was becoming more and more of a political issue as thoughts turned to what life would be like after the war and how communities would be affected if they had little or no adult male population. The Pals system of recruitment was finally phased out by the government in 1917.

Billericay has the names of sixty-two men commemorated on their First World War memorial, each of them having paid the ultimate price, but there are also at least thirty-six men who returned to their families after the war. Little Burstead has eight men commemorated on its First World War memorial, but at least thirty-two returned safely home. The nearby parish of Buttsbury and Stock had at least fifty-nine of their men return to their respective communities after the war.

Sadly it appears to have been the men who were fortunate enough to have returned home, who are the ones who seem to have been forgotten over the years, not by their own communities of course, but by the wider population. In memory of those fine young men who returned after the war and then stoically got on with their lives helping to rebuild this country, we have recorded their names here. If we have inadvertently left anybody off these lists, then we unreservedly apologise.

The names of the men from Billericay who we know of that returned after the war, are:

The men from Little Burstead who returned after the war are recorded on a Roll of Honour which hangs in St Mary the Virgin Church in the village. The name F. PEASE appears on the roll twice. The problem is that one entry shows him as having survived the war and the other shows him as having been killed. We are assuming that the two entries are for the same person and this is simply a mistake.

As we have already seen in the chapter on memorials, there is also a great deal of confusion surrounding the identity of W. Neville.

Frederick Pease was a Private in the 1st Battalion the Sherwood Forresters (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment). His service number was 242251. He was killed on 27 May 1918 and is remembered on the Soissons Memorial, Aisne, France.

At the end of April 1918 five divisions of Commonwealth troops that were part of IX Corps were posted to the French Sixth Army in this sector to rest and refit following the German offensives on the Somme and Lys. Here at the end of May 1918 they found themselves facing an overwhelming German attack which, despite fierce opposition, pushed the Allies back across the river Aisne to the Marne, having suffered some 15,000 fatalities.

The IX Corps was withdrawn from the front in early July, and replaced by the XXII Corps, which took part in the Allied counterattack that by early August had driven the Germans back and recovered the ground which they had previously lost. The Soissons Memorial records the names of some 4,000 officers and men who were killed during the battles of the Aisne and the Marne during 1918. Frederick Pease is one of them.

The named men from Stock and Buttsbury are those who returned to their families and communities after the war.

Eight families were fortunate enough to have had two members of their family return to them. Another one had three and in the case of the Collard family, five members of their family all returned home after the war, four of them, Frank, George, Leonard and Henry, all brothers. The name G. Hare is recorded twice so we are not sure if that is a mistake or whether it is two people with the same initial.

CHAPTER 20

Military Service Tribunals

There is a prevailing misbelief that ‘conscientious objector’ was a generic term to describe anybody who tried to avoid military service during the war. This wasn’t the case. There were in fact only 16,500 men who were officially classed as conscientious objectors, nearly all of these were because of religious beliefs where the act of having to take another human life, for whatever reason, was an anathema.

Men who were due to be called up were able to appeal to a local Military Service Tribunal for exemption from military service. There were only five grounds on which an appeal could be made. Being a conscientious objector was one of them, the others were if an individual was employed in work deemed to be of national importance, if they had been classified as being medically unfit for military service by a doctor, if by enlisting, their business would be adversely affected or if the man’s family would be caused unreasonable domestic hardship.

By the end of June 1916 around 750,000 had enlisted in the army, whilst at the same time a similar number of men had appealed against their conscription to a Military Service Tribunal. This showed by way of direct comparison that support for the war was far from being universal.

Conscription came into effect on 27 January 1916 with the implementation of the Military Service Act. If anybody had any doubts or needed reminding, Britain was on a total war footing with Germany and her allies. This also allowed individuals the right to refuse to carry out military service to such an extent that they didn’t even have to perform alternative civilian service or serve as non-combatants in the army if they could convince a Military Service Tribunal that their reasons for not doing so were strong enough. Any government department could also issue certificates of exemption for individuals or bodies of men in their employ. A certificate could be absolute, like a ‘get out of jail free’ card, it could be issued with certain conditions attached or it could be temporary. It was incumbent on the individual to whom the certificate of exemption was issued, to inform the authorities of any changes in their circumstances that might alter the conditions or the requirement for the exemption to remain in place, which would have then made them liable to be called up. Failure to do so or lying to obtain the exemption could result in either a fine or a term of imprisonment for the individual concerned.

After the war the government made a rather strange decision when it instructed Local Government Boards to destroy all materials which they had in their possession connected to any of the war-time tribunals. No satisfactory reasons were ever provided for this decision. Some of these records still exist today as some were officially retained by the authorities as a benchmark for possible future use, whilst others survive simply because some areas resisted the instruction to destroy them.

Having searched the National Archives database for Military Service Tribunals, even though quite a few records have survived, it would appear that none of those are for anywhere in Essex. How many men from Billericay, if any at all, applied for certificates of exemption during the First World War, we will never know, but with nearly 750,000 such applications having been made and with only 16,000 areas existing then, there is every possibility that at least some did.

Some conscientious objectors were sent to prison for their beliefs rather than agreeing to enlist in the army or even accepting that they should be made to carry out alternative forms of work for the war effort. After the war, some were punished further by not being allowed to vote for up to five years. Others faced the same dangers and showed the same courage as combatants when they acted as stretcher bearers. In fact the most decorated other ranks soldier in the First World War was, a stretcher bearer. William Harold Coltman was a Lance Corporal in the 1/6th North Staffordshire Regiment. His committed Christian beliefs would not allow him to kill another human being, so accordingly he did not fire a single shot or kill a single German soldier, but still he managed to win all of his medals for acts of bravery when treating and recovering wounded colleagues form the battlefield. On more than one occasion these heroic acts were carried out whilst being under enemy fire, such was his bravery.

In a two year period between 1916 and 1918, he was mentioned in dispatches, awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal twice, the Military Medal twice and the highest award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross. He was also awarded the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal 1914-19, as well as the Croix de Guerre from the French. In 1937 he received the King George VI Coronation Medal and during the Second World War he became a Captain in the Home Guard earning the Defence Medal 1939-45. He was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal in 1953 as well as the Special Constabulary Long Service Medal making a total of twelve medals.

Below is the citation for the his Victoria Cross, which was presented to him by King George V at Buckingham Palace on 22 May 1919:

‘For the most conspicuous bravery, initiative and devotion to duty. During the operations at Mannequin Hill, north-east of Sequehart, on the 3rd and 4th October 1918, Lance Corporal Coltman, a stretcher bearer, hearing that wounded had been left behind during a retirement, on his own initiative, went forward alone in the face of fierce enfilade fire, found the wounded, dressed them, and on three successive occasions carried comrades on his back to safety, thus saving their lives. The very gallant NCO tended the wounded unceasingly for forty-eight hours.’

CHAPTER 21

The Police

In 1914, Essex Police, or rather Essex County Constabulary as it was then called, had 450 Police officers at its disposal. A total of 153 were either recalled to the colours or left to join the Army of whom twenty-four were killed. Colchester Borough also had its own Police force which consisted of only twenty-five officers, two of whom were killed on the Western Front. Southend Borough Police had only begun policing operations on 1 April in 1914 with one chief constable, one chief inspector, seven inspectors, eleven sergeants and eighty constables. Most had transferred from the Essex County Constabulary and had been stationed within the Southend Borough at the time of its formation and simply transferred across. In effect it was business as usual.

Only four months later war broke out and of the forty-two Southend Borough officers who enlisted in the Army, nine of them were destined to pay the ultimate price and never return.

The turnover of police officers throughout Essex had historically always been relatively high from the early days in the 1840s, mainly due to the constant struggle to find a suitable standard of candidate. Many had previously been soldiers and hailed from all corners of the realm. This was a time when being a Police officer didn’t pay particularly well, an average of twenty-five shillings a week about eight shillings more than an agricultural labourer.

Quite a few police officers were sacked for disciplinary misdemeanours such as, ‘leaving their guard in company with a prostitute. Drinking on duty, being under the influence in one’s lodgings, falling asleep on duty and failing to turn up for work’.

Billericay Police Station with Sergeant’s house next door. (From a contemporary postcard)

There were main Police stations in such towns as Brentwood, Colchester, Southend, Chelmsford, Braintree, Clacton and Grays, although constables usually covered a particular parish or village which generally was where the officer lived, although the first official Police station in the county of Essex was located in Billericay and was opened in 1841. The building which housed the Police station still stands to this day and is currently a restaurant. Number 94 High Street, Billericay was built in 1830 at a cost of £800, originally for use as the Market House and an Assembly Room that could be hired out for private functions. In 1841 part of the Market House was rented to Essex County Constabulary for £8 a year, as a Police station and when the need required, where criminals could be kept under lock and key.

The original use of the premises as a Police station was only ever intended to be temporary, but in 1903 the property was purchased by the County Justices for £935, after refurbishments were carried out, it continued as the Police station and also became the local Magistrates Court. In 1939 the Police station and the Magistrates court moved to its current location at the top end of the High Street.

The building to the right hand side of the old Police station is now owned by a local estate agent. It was originally the local Police Sergeant’s house, whilst the town’s constables had to lodge at a building on the opposite side of the road, which is currently being used as a bank.

Pay and conditions around the outbreak of war, were already a major issue amongst many police officers. When war was declared one of the first casualties was the recently awarded weekly rest day for police. With the introduction of the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914 some very strange rules and regulations that came with it. In September 1914 police officers were tasked with visiting anybody who kept pigeons, and once having released their birds, they were to note which way they flew, with particular interest to be shown if they headed off in the direction of enemy held territory. As the keeping and racing of pigeons was a popular past-time this decision not surprisingly met with some strong objections. In May 1915 it was decided that owners of pigeons could clip the wings of their birds in the presence of a police officer who would then come back and visit them on a regular basis to ensure that the bird’s feathers had not grown back enough for them to be able to fly again. In February 1917, hare coursing and whippet racing were banned where attendance at such meetings was likely to adversely affect munitions production.

As inflation soared throughout the war, the metal content of both gold and silver coins became more valuable when melted down than the actual face value of the coins. It was becoming such a problem that for the first time ever, the Bank of England issued one pound notes and ten shilling notes late in 1914.

Police morale became so low that some 6,000 Metropolitan Police officers went on strike on 30 August 1918 for better pay and conditions. With the war entering its fourth bloody year and finally balanced at a critical point, many criticised and condemned their actions as being insensitive to the greater good of the nation. There were others who commiserated with their situation, understanding the very real hardships which men who undertook their particularly stressful occupation, faced. Attempting to pay the greatly inflated everyday prices of 1918 on a 1914 pay packet was nigh on impossible, especially as food prices during the same period had risen by 130 per cent.

The walk out lasted for less than twenty-four hours after Prime Minister Lloyd George, who had been in France when the strike had been called, arranged for a meeting with the executive of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO). The hastily arranged meeting resulted in the strike coming to an immediate end and police officers receiving an increase in their wages of thirteen shillings, which equated to a thirty per cent pay rise. The speed at which this situation was resolved and how much was conceded to the police was a reflection of just how serious a situation the government was in. No police officers from Essex were involved in either the 1918 strike or the subsequent one the following year in 1919.

Afterword and Acknowledgements

We have enjoyed researching and writing this book and hope that in some small way we have managed to provide you with an insight into what life was like between 1914 and 1918, both on the Western Front for a soldier in His Majesty’s armed forces, as well as back home in Billericay for their loved ones waiting patiently for their return.

We would like to thank and acknowledge the following people and organisations for their assistance in the compilation of this book, either by allowing us to reproduce photographs or to refer to their written material.

Where we haven’t been able to trace owners of individual pictures or documents and obtain such permissions from them, we apologise, but would point out that we have made efforts to do so.

Tim Soles – A letter from the Front www.sole.org.uk/morefles.htm

Richard Hacken – Bingham Young University www.byu.edu

Paul McCormick. www.loyalregiment.com

Becky Wash (Curator) www.essexpolicemuseum.co.uk

Chris Brewster (Curator) Cater Museum Billericay

Bibliography

Billericay – A Pictorial History, Roger Green

The Fate of the Zeppelin L32, C.E. Wright

Billericay at the outbreak of the First World War, Mary Needham.

World War One – An Illustrated History, Lloyd Clark.

Wikipedia www.wikipedia.org

Billericay Times – Images of the 20th Century, Ted Wright.

The National Archives www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

www.newspaperarchive.com

Commonwealth War Graves Commission www.cwgc.org

The First World War Story www.bbchistorymagazine.com

Prisoners of War in British Hands during WWI, Graham Mark.

Attack of the Zeppelins Channel 4 documentary