ALL OUR YESTERDAYS One family’s devastating loss highlights the horrors of the Somme
Tolson’s older brother Gerald had with a Private Jepson which appeared to settle the matter as far as Whiteley Tolson was concerned.
According to Gerald, Jepson claimed that he had fallen into a trench and landed on “our dear Robert’s dead body. Robert was stretched out face downwards, arms extended. His body was cold and stiff and his eyes were cold.”
The only flaw in Jepson’s testimony was that not only was he shaky through lack of sleep and food – prior to the attack he and his comrades had been “in their trench all night standing in water. They had to attack without any breakfast, rum only being served out” but he had also been wounded three times and “admits he was too far gone himself and almost blinded by blood to make a careful examination.”
Nevertheless Whiteley wrote back to Gerald glumly: “It amounts to a sort of burial of our lad.”
The most likely explanation of the conflict in the evidence is that Robert did get back to the British trenches but was then buried by the earth moved by an exploding German shell. “Shrapnel and every kind of missile at the command of the enemy were bursting on every side,” one officer wrote to one of Whiteley’s daughters.
“The wounded who could not get out of the trench were liable to be buried as the trench was blown in. I am sorry to say that many were buried in this way.”
The proof that Robert was in fact dead was only discovered on March 13, 1917, more than eight months after he was killed.
It was sent to Whiteley Tolson in a letter Main image: British V111 corps soldiers in sunken lane in middle of no man’s land before July 1, 1916 attack on the Somme. from the battalion’s chaplain, which included the words: “I write you a few lines only to tell you sad news but perhaps it will bring you all some comfort.
“We found your son today on the battlefield and buried him there. We found some things on him. I picked up his gold watch. A handkerchief had been tied around his leg, evidently to stop the bleeding. His name is on this and on his watch. I read the burial service.”
In 1919 Whiteley’s brother, Legh Tolson, who was living at Ravensnowle Hall, made a gift of his house to the Huddersfield Corporation as a tribute and lasting memorial to his two nephews, Robert and his brother 2nd Lt James Martin Tolson.
James, who was just 20 when he was killed near Cambrai on October 20, 1918, just weeks before the war finished, had survived being wounded and gassed while serving with the Royal Field Artillery.
The house become the Tolson Museum which was officially opened in 1922. ■■The paperback edition of Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Somme: Into The Breach published by Penguin is out now priced £9.99 as is the updated 75th anniversary paperback edition of his Enigma: the Battle for the Code with new material added, published by Orion’s Weidenfeld & Nicolson priced £10.99.