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Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… Various
substantial campaigns had reached the petering-out stage – though, given the
sense of inexorability about the war, it might be worth noting that as usual
such lulls didn’t spur anyone significant to say, “Let’s stop then!” Just
regroup and carry on…
Among
the week’s scattered events of interest: British warships shot down a Zeppelin
over the North Sea (May 14); the British Admiralty appointed a committee to
draw up a convoying plan for merchant ships to help protect them from U-boats
(17); to the Kaiser’s alarm, Honduras and Nicaragua severed diplomatic
relations with Germany (17 and 19; just in case – irony alert!); the US
Government decided to send an Army Division to Europe immediately under General
Pershing (19; it did begin at once, but took several months to complete its
assembly).
On
the Western Front the Battle Of Bullecourt ended when British and Australian
Generals ordered an end to their attacks (May 17). This “officially” ended the
Battle Of Arras (April 9-May 16; casualties 158,000 British, Anzac, Canadian,
Newfoundland and South African troops, 120-130,000 German). The French, seeking
to recover from their outburst of mutinies, replaced General Nivelle – whose
futile and bloody plans caused the insurrections – with General Pétain, hero of
Verdun, who became Commander in Chief of the Northern and Northeast Armies
(15).
Probably
by coincidence rather than instant leadership magic, the French promptly
advanced east of Craonne (17) and won a fight at Moronvilliers Ridge (20).
The
provisional Russian Government insisted they would make no separate peace with
Germany (May 19), even though they’re collapsing economy was rapidly
diminishing their military effort.
Further
winding down occurred in Salonika where the Allies abandoned their Spring
Offensive (15), although skirmishing continued.
For
the time being, full-on action persisted only at the 10th Battle Of The Isonzo
where the Italian Army advanced steadily towards Trieste despite stronger
Austrian counterattacks (May 19-20).
[Memoir background: my father, Lance Corporal Sam Sutcliffe from Edmonton, north London, under-age 2/1st Royal Fusiliers
volunteer and Gallipoli veteran [Blogs September 20, 2015, to January 3, 2016] had fought on the Somme Front
with his second outfit the Kensingtons (Blogs May 15 to September 25, 2016)… until
officialdom spotted his age – 18 on July 6, 1916, legally too young for the
battlefield – and told him he could take a break from the fighting until he was
19. He did so, though with an enduring sense of guilt. By December, 1916, he
ended up posted to Harrogate, Yorkshire, and re-allocated again, this time to the
Essex Regiment 2/7th Battalion, along with a bunch of other under-age Tommies training/marking
time – and in Sam’s case dicing with meningitis and other battle-fatigue enhanced
ailments – until such time as they severally became eligible for the trenches
once more…]
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last week, I left my father in Harrogate about
to be sent off on “a long route march” – and rather regretful that he had no
time to say goodbye to his new acquaintances, a circle of “wonderfully friendly
ladies” (no Frankie Howerd “oo-er” about it, Sam was a dedicated gent… and
virgin, brought up to believe in no sex before marriage!).
We’ll
catch up with him in a few weeks because, as I explained last week, Sam didn’t
actually write a year’s worth of blogs about 1917, so to speak, because his
break from the battlefield simply offered less volume of memorable material
(writing in the ’70s as he did, I can’t blame him for failing to consider his
son and editor’s online needs 40 years later). So, some retrospection.
The
theme for the next couple of months is The Making Of Foot Soldier Sam, the key
periods which, it seems to me, delineated the character of the young soldier
(and the rock-like old man I knew – I was born when he was 49): to sum up, on
the battlefield he was always afraid and never ran away; he frequently doubted
his officers’ strategies – especially the grandiose ones coming from HQ
Generals etc – but he never disobeyed an order. In his Memoir he wrote a substantial section about his childhood from dawn
of “consciousness”, aged about two in his case, to 16 when war loomed. But I
haven’t blogged this material because footsoldiersam.co.uk began in August,
2014, to mark the WW1 Centenary – that is, when he was just about to enlist in
the Royal Fusiliers.
So
I’ll start these excerpts with the Memoir’s
opening paragraphs, when the Sutcliffes lived in Manchester, or rather Salford
at the time of Sam’s birth (my father wrote the early chapters in the third
person, calling himself “the boy” and then “Tommy” – you’ll get used to it, honest!):
‘May I say straight away he became nobody of any importance**…
The child, the boy,
the youth, the man whose life I am going to talk about, think about, write
about… his earliest recollections are of several incidents which occurred in a
northern town – a dull, damp, depressing place.
He remembers
sitting on the floor of a kitchen with a lady – Mrs Rowbottom he called her –
giving him titbits as she proceeded with her cooking. Little sweet pastries. He
blesses the memory of Mrs Rowbottom.
He remembers too a
shop full of toys, particularly a drum — he was allowed to tap away on this
drum… He gathered that his mother owned this toyshop and life at the toyshop
went on happily for him…
Except for one
strange memory. As he learned how to feed himself and draw crudely with crayons
his mother noticed he was left-handed – “cack-handed” she called it. She didn’t
like it, the boy didn’t understand why, but she forced him to change, nagging
him, slapping his left hand away from the knife or the jam pot when his
mistakes had particularly annoyed her. Of course, he obeyed; he learned to live
right-handed. But, for a long time, it felt wrong.’
** I remember how that
first sentence delighted me when I first read it – as if Dad was handing me the
title to the Memoir, a phrase both
noting his own “ordinariness” and, accidentally or not, commenting on the way
World War 1’s trench warfare diminished millions of individual men, rendering
them down into cannonfodder.
But Sam experienced only a little of the
family’s security and wealth before their fortunes changed and they plummeted
towards what used to be called “ruin”…
‘So, 1900 it must have been***. The boy aged two, living in
Manchester with two brothers, one a couple of years older than him, the other
younger, a sister five years older, a mother and father**** an apparently
happy, comfortable home.
He remembers a
very pleasant outing, a visit to Belle Vue. Belle Vue – he didn’t know what it
meant or what it was, but he saw animals there, pretty things called deer. He
looked through the railings into their green enclosure… And fireworks, the
great firework display… bursting rockets, humming rockets, whistling rockets, a
lovely picture in the night. Such little things… they remain with him always.
Then experiences
of that sort became all too rare. It would have been a treat to see a smile on
mother’s face. He seldom saw that these days. He remembered her going round the
place singing and generally enjoying life. But all that was fading, replaced by
a heaviness, a constant worry and depression — resulting in perhaps rather
harsh treatment of the children at times.
The sad situation
arose because her father-in-law had died unexpectedly. Not many years out of
grammar school, in his early twenties, and there was her husband in charge of
this business: a works with a number of employees. A manufacturer of tiles and
all sorts of related fittings, kerbs and so forth, fashionable back then.
Coloured, beautifully decorated tiles sold all over the country. One large
London store placed a regular order.
Unfortunately, due
to his youth, pitchforked into becoming head of the family firm – the
proprietor – and, ill-equipped for the post, he could not exercise control over
his two younger brothers. It became known later that they had put stock to
wrongful use, disposing of it secretly and taking the money. Incompetence
further depleted the firm’s stocks when consignments were sent to places where
they shouldn’t have gone so no payment was received. And the new young boss’s
mother expected the same high standard of living she had enjoyed when her
husband was still alive; large sums of money, which should never have been
taken from the business, went to maintaining her in that style.’
*** My father dated this
period of his childhood memories a full four years later, but I corrected it in
the text to avoid confusion; information from the 1901 census and 1902 baptism
records prove his memory at fault, for once, by showing the family had moved to
London by then – I guess he made this mistake because he just couldn’t believe
he could remember anything with such clarity from the age of two… but he did!
**** My father was born
on July 6, 1898, at 53, Great Cheetham Street, Broughton, Manchester. In this
Memoir, he hardly used his siblings names (except for Philip/”Ted”/”George”, of
whom more later), but, as of 1900, they were: Dorothy (always known as “Ciss”),
born December 3, 1894, at 49, Great Cheetham Street; Philip Broughton, born
October 15, 1896, at 53 Great Cheetham Street (I don’t know why the street
number differs for Ciss’s birth – perhaps the family owned two adjacent
properties in their financial heyday); Frank Sidney (or Sydney, spellings vary
on official documents), born June 5, 1900, at 5, Vernon Place, West Gorton,
Manchester (see Afterword for a little more about him). Their parents were
Charles Philip, born April 29, 1864, at 132, Elizabeth Street, Cheetham,
Manchester, and Lily Emma, née Fleetwood, born August 18, 1872, in Lincolnshire
(though one record shows this as her baptism, not birth date; birth certificate
not retrievable) – they married on May 2, 1894, so Dorothy/Ciss must have been
born prematurely, maybe. Broughton was a prosperous part of Salford; I never
heard it mentioned that my Uncle Philip’s name came from his birthplace, I
understood it was a “family name”, but either could be true.
The move to Gorton may have represented their
first small step in the process of “coming down in the world”. Next, into a
proper working-class terrace:
‘The boy found they were living in a much poorer area. A row
of houses, small*****. Going out of the back door one came to a long,
continuous yard common to all the houses. No dividing fences at all. Privies
against the yard’s rear wall. The people were kindly to him and his brothers
and sister. But worry and anxiety hung over all. Each day seemed dark and drab
and dull in a heavy way, which only the weather in a Northern industrial town
can contrive. So oppressive to a child.’
***** The census of March
31, 1901, shows they then lived in Albert Place, Longsight, Manchester. I have
read that the neighbouring districts of Gorton and Longsight could apparently
both be described as “middle-class” around that time, but that’s a
generalisation even if correct.
But family life really approached the
“falling-apart” stage when Sam’s father suddenly vanished, without farewell
that he recalled. But his mother told the children he had gone to London to
look for work:
‘Sad news, this, for the boy because he really loved his
father, even though he’d only seen him at bedtimes. Sometimes father would join
the children as they were prepared for bed and the boy remembered a cot in
which he had slept in earlier days, made of ironwork, though similar in design
to the wooden cots of today. For some reason the boy recalled standing up in
it, calling out, “Father! Father!” And father came. Said the things that
fathers said to their children and laid him down, comforted. Off to sleep the
boy went.’
However, soon the family followed him into the
unknown – although Sam quite liked the look of it, at first:
‘Soon a great bustle of activity. Packing. Everything being
loaded into cases, boxes, crates. He saw all this going on and, before very
long, off they all went to the big railway station and soon boarded a train.
Full of excitement now, of course, headed for London, for the big town where
their father was, leaving that drab place. And, on that account alone, feeling
much happier than they had done for some time.
At one point on the
journey a railway official came into the carriage and inspected tickets. He
looked at mother – they were alone in the compartment, mother and the four
children – and he said, “I quite understand, short of money, eh? Can’t pay for
tickets for all of them. Well, where you think it’s necessary – and if we stop
at a station – put two of the children under the seat… Do as I say. That will
help.” And so they followed that procedure. As stations approached or the train
slowed down, the younger two brothers would pop under the seat.
The boy remembers
the clothes he wore that day. He heard later that it was called a Little Lord
Fauntleroy Suit. Nice, green material. Green velvet. A long jacket, a belt,
knickers to the knee and a hat – a sort of Tam O’Shanter – all of the same
cloth. He particularly remembered arriving at the London station and looking at
this suit of his and feeling quite proud of it.
They all climbed
into a horse-drawn cab at the terminus, their bags piled up beside them, and
off through the busy streets – seeing all these carriages and big wagons drawn
by numbers of horses. Horses everywhere. Splendid sight. Temporarily at least,
life seemed to be on quite a prosperous plane. It wasn’t so really, of course.
They just had no other means of transporting the family and baggage across
London.
They went into a
big building, a hotel right down in the East End, a district called the
Minories*****. They were shown to a room with only two beds in it for the five
of them. A temporary arrangement mother had made. She said she had rented a
flat on the outskirts of the city, but they couldn’t move in for two or three
days. The excitement of watching the comings and goings occupied the time they
remained there. Then once more to a horse-drawn cab – their last ride in such a
vehicle for many a day. The journey took an hour or so — the children peering
about all the way, everything around them of interest.’
******
The
Minories: a district (former parish) and street near the Tower of London.
All
the best –
FSS
Next week: The Making Of
Foot Soldier Sam, 1900-1904 Uprooted 2: new beginnings in London – poverty,
hunger… and the wrong accent!
* In his 70s, Sam
Sutcliffe wrote Nobody Of Any Importance,
a Memoir of his life from childhood
through Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras 1918 and eight months as a POW to the 1919
Peace parade.
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