The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Friendship across oceans rekindled 100 years later
Family of New Zealand war hero reconnected with descendant of woman who welcomed him into her home after front-line horrors
A friendship between a Fife family and a New Zealand war hero, born out of the unimaginable horrors experienced on the front line in Europe during the First World War, has been rekindled more than a century later.
Adrienne Rodgers is the granddaughter of 2nd Lieutenant Allan Richmond Cockerell, a New Zealand soldier who answered the call to fight in a war on the other side of the world, and whose bravery, it is believed, earned him a nomination for a Victoria Cross in 1917.
This week, she stepped through the door of 8 Victoria Street in the Fife village of Newport.
The house was once the home of the Mackie family, who had offered her grandfather respite during leave from the mud, bombs, trenches and sheer hell that has come to be known as Passchendaele.
Just a week before, Adrienne knew nothing of the act of kindness and camaraderie shown by the Fife family, other than a mysterious contact card with name of Miss Jessie Mackie, which had remained with her grandfather his entire life.
A chance conversation with Jane
Robinson, a researcher at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, resulted in some tantalising new information about the unexplained card.
For Adrienne and her husband, on holiday in the UK, found it was Jane’s dogged research that had directed them to Scotland.
“We have always wondered about the Jessie Mackie calling card with the Fife address, found in my grandfather’s personal effects, but knew nothing more,” said Adrienne.
“However, we know it must be of huge value to him as he’s kept it all his life.
“Most intriguingly, Jessie is what he had named his daughter when he returned to New Zealand after the war, and that was my mother.”
Jane’s detective work located the house in Newport and Mackie descendent Gordon Mackie, who lived just a short distance away in Monifieth.
Several phone calls later and with the home’s current owners, Robert and Rona Britton, more than willing to open their doors, a meeting was arranged, rekindling a friendship spanning 103 years between the ancestors of two families from opposite sides of the world.
“We can only assume that Allan was invited back to Scotland as an act of camaraderie to escape the awful experiences of the war,” explained Adrienne.
“He fought first in Gallipoli and then Passchendaele, and must have been incredibly tough for a young railway porter from Otago who served throughout the Great War.
“His bravery at Passchendaele earned him the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) but we’ve been told it had been suggested his endeavour in storming a German gun position had been worthy of a Victoria Cross.
“However, we believe his superiors reduced that to the DSO, as it was believed that as an officer, it was his duty to go over and above.”
War records confirm the extent of his bravery.
October 12 1917 marks the darkest of days for New Zealand during the First World War, with 847 of its soldiers killed in the mud and rain of Belgium in a single day.
That day, Lt Cockerell, a second lieutenant in the 8th company of the Otago Battalion, having lost his commander, took charge, while facing heavy German fire.
Cockerell “found himself alone and unsupported in this wilderness of shellholes,” as the official history of the Otago Regiment has it.
Continuing to drive forward, he captured 40 Germans in a trench before overpowering troops at one of the German blockhouses. Joined by Private George Hampton, who had a Lewis gun, the two men attacked the second blockhouse.
Now with 80 German soldiers captured, Cockerell and Hampton joined the remnants of an Australian division to bolster support.
Needing to rally reinforcements, Hampton volunteered, but was killed along with three others after crossing about 180 metres of open country.
Lt Cockerell survived that day and the bloodiest episodes, only to be informed later that while his older brother Dave had survived, his younger brother Jim had been killed that same morning.
The Otago Regiment history talks of Lt Cockerell’s “extraordinary individual effort” that led to the award of the DSO, “rare for an officer of his rank”.
“Like most who experienced that war, I don’t remember him ever talking about it, but letters sent from the front to his future wife, Gladys, he talks of the sheer hell of what he experienced.
“Jessie, we have now learned, was in her forties when my grandfather arrived and we presume became something of a mother figure to him in that short time here. Certainly she must have made a lasting impression,” said Adrienne.
Now, three generations and a century on, Adrienne and Gordon were back in Fife rekindling that forgotten relationship between the two families.
“It’s fascinating and something I knew nothing of at all, “said Gordon.
“It’s amazing to think that simple act of hospitality influenced his life and that we are in that very house celebrating it once again.”