A mother’s love knows no bounds
Newly released files reveal the lengths an anguished New Zealand mother went to in trying to get her son’s body home from the Western Front. Marty Sharpe reports.
Newly released files reveal the lengths an anguished New Zealand mother went to in trying to get her son’s body home from the Western Front.
Captain Richard Seddon is just one more World War I casualty buried in France, one of millions to have died in its bloodstained mud between 1914 and 1918. He lies beneath a slab of Portland stone, 76cm high, 36cm wide and 7.6cm thick, on the edge of a hamlet in rolling countryside.
In that respect he is entirely unexceptional.
In other respects, however, his story is remarkable. First, he was the son of New Zealand’s longest-serving prime minister, Richard ‘‘Dick’’ Seddon; second, he went to war at the age of 36 – well over the average age of 24; and third, he was the subject of a prolonged and heartbreaking attempt by his mother, Louisa, to have his remains brought home.
Louisa, 66 when her oldest son died, was not unique in wanting to bring Richard’s body home. Mothers and fathers across the Empire yearned to have their boys buried closer to them. But where others accepted the War Office’s dictum to leave them where they fell, Louisa did not.
Now, archive material newly released by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission shines a light on her bid to fulfil her son’s wish; that he be buried alongside his father.
Richard John Spotswood Seddon was born in Kumara, Westland, on May 29, 1881. One of nine children, he grew into manhood as his father led the Dominion from 1893 to 1906.
Richard had a lifelong interest in the military, and at 18 volunteered for the Boer War, an engagement that was strongly supported by his father.
He rose to the rank of captain and in 1901 was appointed military secretary to his father. In 1911, he went to England for further military training and briefly attended the London School of Economics before returning home in 1913, then resigning from the army.
His New Zealand military file makes for interesting reading. It includes correspondence between him and a senior officer over a spat about Seddon incurring expenses using a motor car when the officer says he should have used a horse. He also appears to have been remiss in reporting for duty on occasion. It’s fair to say his resignation was not unwelcome to senior staff.
Nevertheless, he re-enlisted in 1917 and sailed to war in March 1918.
Captain Seddon arrived in England in May 1918, went to France on August 7, and was killed two weeks later when a shell landed among his small group of soldiers. He was buried in an isolated grave where he fell. The war ended three weeks later.
The first piece of correspondence in the file is a handwritten letter from Seddon’s brother John, sent to the office of Graves Registrations a month after Richard was killed. John, who served with the Royal Field Artillery, wrote that he had found his brother’s grave, had erected a wooden cross at the site, and asked if a photo could be taken of the grave and sent to his mother.
John was told the Imperial War Graves Commission might try to find the grave when circumstances permitted.
In December 1918 the NZ High Commission contacted the founder and head of the commission, MajorGeneral Sir Fabian Ware, to say ‘‘the mother has expressed a very natural wish that the body be conveyed to New Zealand for re-interment by the side of her husband’’, and asking if that might be possible.
Ware responded two days later to say Louisa should be informed of the commission’s position, as outlined in the press, that all buried servicemen would remain where they were.
Ware added that, ‘‘privately’’, he did not think there would be many similar requests, though he anticipated receiving one from Princess Beatrice (daughter of Queen Victoria) for her son Prince Maurice.
There followed many months, then years, of correspondence in which numerous figures of high standing relayed Louisa’s fear that her son’s remains would be lost, and her strong desire to have him home.
The responses from the commission were typically curt and referred repeatedly to the policy of leaving the graves as they were. Reference was also made to a French decree that prohibited the removal of bodies.
Despite that, John Seddon told the commission he was heading to France, and, if permitted, would exhume his brother’s body and ensure its location was not lost.
John was told that if the body was not in a cemetery, he may be allowed to exhume it and move it to a cemetery. He had his brother’s remains moved a short distance to Hebuterne Military Cemetery, 20km southwest of Arras, in March 1919.
But Louisa, then aged 68, was not giving up. In July 1919, travel restrictions were lifted and civilians were allowed to enter the former conflict zones. Louisa was among the first to do so, one of some 60,000 people to search out their loved ones’ graves.
Before her visit a letter was sent from the office of Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George, to his under-secretary for war, Sir Herbert Creedy, in which it is stated that Lloyd George had been approached by a ‘‘pathetically anxious’’ Louisa, who was willing to pay for the transportation of her son’s body, and inquiring whether this might be an ‘‘exceptional circumstance’’ in which the body could be returned home.
The letter was met with the familiar refrain: no.
In July the commission received a letter from a military attache´ at the British embassy in Paris, to say he had received a visit from Louisa – the ‘‘wife of an important personage in New Zealand’’ — who was most anxious to obtain permission to ‘‘move her son’s body and take it with her when she goes’’.
The following month she wrote personally to Ware, saying that before Richard sailed from New Zealand he had told her that if he died at war he wished to be buried at home with his father.
She wrote a similar letter to NZ’s high commissioner in London, Sir Thomas Mackenzie, who contacted Ware to say he supported her wishes.
In September 1919 Louisa met Ware. A letter in the file says they took a long walk.
In a letter to Louisa a short time later he wrote: ‘‘You know how deeply I sympathise with you in your failure to obtain what you want and what you think right . . . But I still cannot think you would wish exceptional treatment to be given in one case when it has to be refused in so many others.’’
She appears at that point to start acknowledging that her son’s body would not be coming home. In December she wrote to Ware that he had been ‘‘very kind and helpful to me in respect of my mission’’, and if there ever came a time when bodies could be removed from France to New Zealand she trusted he would inform her.
In 1921, Louisa’s daughter Phoebe Dyer took up the cause. She travelled to France to see the grave and also to beseech the authorities to change their minds.
A handwritten note by principal assistant secretary of the commission Lord Arthur Browne noted that Phoebe was pleased with the condition of her brother’s grave but continued to press for his body to be returned. After being informed of all the arguments as to why this could not occur, Phoebe said she wanted to petition the king.
In August 1921, a month after Phoebe’s grave visit, Prime Minister Bill Massey wrote to Britain’s secretary of state for war, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, to say Louisa was still ‘‘most anxious’’ to have her son buried in the family grave in Wellington, and requesting that her wish be fulfilled.
By this stage Ware’s patience was running thin. In an internal letter he says the rule applies to all buried soldiers and ‘‘if an exception is made in one case it will, of course, have to be made in many’’.
Curiously, he also said the commission was not in a position to rule out the possibility that – once its work was completed and there were fewer such requests – the bodies could be repatriated. This had been expressed verbally to Louisa, but ‘‘it is perhaps wiser to say nothing of the kind on paper’’.
‘‘I have seen her and her daughters and other relations many times on this question,’’ Ware wrote.
But Louisa did not stop there. The next year Ware received another letter from Mackenzie, informing him that Louisa had learned of the repatriation of some soldiers’ bodies, and was as anxious as ever to have Richard’s brought home.
Ware’s letter in response included brief formalities then cut straight to the chase. ‘‘In no single instance has an exception been made by the commission,’’ he wrote.
He noted that Princess Beatrice had spent two years trying to have the body of her son Maurice repatriated, and in that case the commission had made it clear it was ‘‘not prepared to deviate from the line of policy laid down’’.
In mid-1922, Louisa contacted the commission, through the NZ high commission, to say a recent photograph of Seddon’s grave showed that rose bushes she had planted beside it appeared to have been removed. Urgent inquiries by the commission revealed that one bush had died and one was dying, but two were still alive.
About this time New Zealand’s attorney-general, the future prime minister Francis Bell, wrote to the commission to say he had been asked by Louisa to intervene in regard to the ‘‘special privilege’’ she had been granted by Ware to have the body repatriated. The commission told Bell that no such privilege or promise had ever been offered.
In 1925, Louisa’s daughter Louisa Morice visited the grave. She appears not to have sought the repatriation of his body, but was granted permission to take home two temporary wooden crosses that had stood above it.
Successive years saw no easing of Louisa’s attempts to bring the body home. In mid-1926 Ware wrote that he had hoped demands by families to have soldiers’ bodies repatriated would have died down ‘‘and this has happened except in a few cases like this’’.
All governments in the Commonwealth had agreed to the nonrepatriation policy, he said, though he noted two recent cases where ‘‘Canadian families have had their sons’ bodies stolen from the graves in France and taken back to Canada’’.
‘‘This is causing us intense trouble as the French police are naturally taking action against them,’’ he said.
In another letter, written in 1928, he said Louisa ‘‘never neglects an opportunity of raising with anyone whom she may come across connected with the commission the question of bringing her son’s body back to be buried in New Zealand’’.
If a concession was made in any case it would embarrass the government of Canada, where the call for returning soldiers had been greatest, due largely to the fact that its neighbour, the United States, had repatriated its ‘‘relatively small number of dead’’.
Ware said Louisa might be reminded that by accepting the decision she would be ‘‘helping others and helping the Empire’’.
‘‘I cannot help thinking that Mrs Seddon may wish to feel that she is at one with some mothers in other parts of the Empire, who long, also, to have their dead back, but feel that all should bear their disappointment alike.
‘‘And let her remember that her son rests in a cemetery surrounded by men from all parts of the King’s Dominions who fell beside him in the common sacrifice and rest under a common guardianship.’’
It seems unlikely that Louisa would ever have taken any comfort from Ware’s suggestions.
She died two years later, in 1931, aged 80. She is buried alongside her husband and daughter Mary in the family tomb beneath the Seddon memorial at the entrance to Wellington’s Bolton Street Cemetery.
Also in the tomb is Richard’s wooden cross, which his sister Louisa brought home from France.
The final letter in the file is dated June 1, 1939, three months before England and France declared war on Germany. It was sent by the commission to another of Seddon’s sisters, Jane Bean. She had recently visited his grave and was concerned at its condition. The letter reassured her it was weathering normally and was due for renovation in 1940-41.
A countryside scattered with graves
More than three million soldiers were killed on the Western Front.
For many, there was nothing left to bury. The remains of many others were never found, or were beyond identification. More that 500,000 Allied soldiers killed in World War I have no known grave.
The countrysides of France and Belgium were scattered with hastily dug graves, created by soldiers using makeshift crosses or sticks or a rifle with a helmet atop. Many graves were lost in subsequent fighting.
Sir Fabian Ware, the British civil servant and businessman turned wartime ambulance commander, began marking and recording graves in 1915. Two years later he founded the Imperial War Graves Commission.
The commission successfully pushed for expropriation of land for cemeteries in perpetuity. The land was often at what had been medical ‘‘clearing stations’’ where many had died and been buried in rows.
After the war, soldiers buried in isolated plots or small groups were exhumed and reburied in one of the cemeteries.
Early in the war it was decided that all fallen soldiers would remain in the cemeteries and could not be returned to their home nations.
Commonwealth governments agreed to this decree, which was brought about partly due to the logistic and health concerns of transporting so many corpses, but also due to cost.
The governments were not interested in paying for exhumations and removals, and did not believe it fair to grant permission to those families who could afford it, when the cost was beyond the reach of many others.
The decision prompted heated and emotive exchanges from families who wanted the bodies repatriated. Louisa Seddon was far from alone in this regard, though few if any mothers persisted to the lengths she went.
Soldiers of all ranks would be treated equally when it came to burial in the official Commonwealth graves. Each would receive the same headstone, and these would appear in rows in cemeteries built to resemble English country gardens.
There are now 940 Commonwealth World War I graveyards in France and Belgium, from Tyne Cot near Passchendaele, home to 11,954 burials, to dozens of tiny battlefield cemeteries.
They are cared for by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, successor of the Imperial War Graves Commission, which operates in more than 23,000 locations in more than 150 countries and territories.
Last month the commission released more than 1000 previously unpublished archive files containing letters from the families of the WW1 dead. They are available through a portal on the commission’s website.
The commission’s chief archivist, Andrew Fetherston, says the lengths Louisa went to were ‘‘a sad reminder of how long it took families of the war to find closure. Some sadly never got the answers they were looking for’’.