READER STORY
In an amazing feat of research, Bob Shaw created a fitting tribute to the grandfather he never knew. He told Claire Vaughan how he did it…
Bob Shaw created a fitting tribute to the grandfather he never knew
He was 30 at the time, although on his enlistment papers he said he was 25
WDYTYA? reader Bob Shaw has found 92 family members who died in the world wars and more recent conflicts during his research. It’s a shocking figure. But for some reason, it was the fate of Leonard Newitt – the grandfather Bob had never known – that really caught his attention. What started off as a “nice little project” gradually mushroomed and he didn’t stop until he had found out every last scrap of information about his grandfather’s untimely death in 1916 at the Somme. He uncovered the sort of detail most family historians only ever dream of…
Bob was raised by his parents, Elsie and Robert Shaw senior, and maternal grandmother, Mahalla – Leonard’s widow. Growing up, he knew little about his family. “They told me we were the last of the line. I accepted that, until 1999 when I finally decided I wanted to know a bit more. But by then they’d all died, so I had no one to ask.” He knew his paternal line hailed from the Birmingham, Sandwell and Smethwick areas. “The local archives there were invaluable in helping me put together my lost family.” Bob was heartbroken to learn that his paternal grandmother had lived in a house he used to pass by every day. “She died and I never met her – that was one of the hardest things.”
Mahalla spoke very little of Leonard. “My grandmother told me she never forgave him for enlisting just a month before my mother was born. He was 30 at the time, although on his enlistment papers he said he was 25.” She destroyed all the photographs of him, except one, adding further to his mystery.
Bob mentioned to his son, Andrew, that he was interested in finding out more about Leonard. Andrew found the records of Leonard’s burial in Rouen at the local archives (part of the library where he was then working) – and, from that point on, Bob was hooked.
Leonard’s life story
Soon he had pieced together Leonard’s life before he joined up. He had been born on 22 October 1884 in Wolverhampton to Alfred and Emma Newitt. He had two siblings: Alfred Edward ( born 1879) and Mary Ann (born 1882). He married Mahalla Mardles Phillips in 1901 and the couple had two children: Leonard, born in 1910, who sadly died aged 13 months, and Bob’s mother Elsie May, born in 1914. “From the census, I found out that Leonard was a house painter and that was about as far as I’d got,” he says. However, Bob did find Leonard’s name on a ship’s manifest travelling to New York. “He went on his own – I’ve no idea why, but it was definitely him.” Other than that, Leonard’s life was a complete blank.
Having reached a dead end, Bob accessed his grandfather’s service records on Ancestry and began to get stuck into this rich source of leads. They were the starting point for some amazing feats of detection and lateral thinking that saw Bob uncover the minutest details of his grandfather’s military career. “I went through his service records analysing all the dates, where he was and what had happened.” He discovered that Leonard
had enlisted on 19 October 1914 with the South Staffs Regiment giving his age as 25 years and 11 days. On 1 July 1915, he embarked from Liverpool on the
HMT Empress of Britain bound for Gallipoli landing at Cape Helles on 21 July. His battalion moved north on 6 August to Suvla Bay then, on 29 September 1915, he was transferred by the hospital ship Valdiva to Alexandria, Egypt, suffering from dysentery. From here, he was returned home on the ship Gloucester Castle.
I could work out what his regiment was doing at any given point
On 14 May 1916, Leonard was sent to the Western Front, his regiment arriving in the Somme area.
“I contacted the Staffordshire and Notts & Derby regimental museums to see what they could tell me.” They pointed Bob in the direction of the war diaries at The National Archives. “Looking at where Leonard was on the service record and then looking at the war diaries, I could work out what his regiment was doing at any given point.” Bob also accessed diaries for field ambulance units, clearing stations and hospitals. He went through the diaries covering the times Leonard would have seen action. “At each interesting event in these accounts, I attempted to find photographs or maps to enhance the text.”
There are three types of diary: regimental, divisional and battalion/brigade. The regimental ones just record general activities for the day, the divisional ones are more detailed and the brigade diaries give the most information of all. You are unlikely to see an ancestor’s name in the diaries, unless he was an officer.
Bob also dug around for press clippings to flesh out Leonard’s experiences. He says: “I managed to get a lot of material from the New York Times. They have a terrific amount of coverage and seemed to have reporters everywhere. Reports of the day’s events on the battlefield were printed the following day or the day after. “It meant I could see where Leonard was and the conditions he may have been living and fighting under. It put you there – right in the middle of things.” He scoured bookshops too – in person and online – for any regimental histories and read them from cover to cover. From the original information Andrew had found, Bob knew that Leonard had died on 3 October 1916 and was buried at St Sever Cemetery in Rouen. He went to pay his respects in 2001. “We toured across the Somme area and into Belgium where his regiment had fought and got a feel of the area. All I could think was ‘what the hell were they fighting for?’ They were there for months and months and moved forward one yard, then were pushed back two. It seemed fruitless to me.”
His meticulous research revealed that during the first day of the Somme offensive on 1 July 1916, Leonard’s battalion, 1st Battalion South Staffs, were involved in the attack on Mametz. Here he was wounded in the face, and taken to the 21st Casualty Clearing Station, then the 23rd Field Ambulance, to be patched up and sent to the hospital at Rouen.
On 7 July, Leonard was sent to No 1 Stationary Hospital at Etaples, a large hospital and military depot on the coast. From here, he was re-assigned to the 11th Nottinghamshire & Derby ( Sherwood Foresters) regiment and ended up back on the Somme.
But what really bothered Bob was what had happened to Leonard in the days leading up to his death, and how he’d made his final journey from the Somme to the hospital in Rouen where he died.
Wounded in action
He discovered that at 3pm on 1 October 1916, his regiment attacked the village of Le Sars on the Albert-Bapume Road. The men were vulnerable with only a frontage of some 300 yards and two trench systems to capture, which were being heavily defended by enemy fire from the houses in the village and the trenches of the 4th Ersatz Division.
It was during this attack that Leonard was critically wounded by gun shots to both legs. “From what I can work out,” says Bob, “this may have been due to machine-gun fire, as the diaries report of rifle and machine guns being in the facing houses.” The diaries of the 69th Field Ambulance gave Leonard’s likely evacuation route: partially by stretcher back to Martinpuich, then by trench
tramway down to 6th Avenue Trench and then by Horse Ambulance to ADS Contalmaison. Bob assumes he was then taken by ambulance to Dernancourt/Edge Hill Clearing Station some eight to ten miles behind the front line.
Here, Bob hit a brick wall. Leonard must have travelled on one of the many hospital trains to Rouen, but which one?
He puzzled over this for a long time, going back over his previous research to see if he’d missed any clues. He reread the letters sent to the family after Leonard was injured. “One sent on 2 October stated that he was in hospital. The postmark, which was R6, was allocated to the units on the Somme, so he was probably in a field hospital at that point. A letter dated 3 October from a Kathleen Allsopp, Assistant Matron at the hospital in Rouen, says that they were looking after him there.” A further letter dated 3 October broke the news that Leonard had died and included the details. The Rouen hospital diaries confirmed the date of his death.
Tracing a military career
Bob decided on a two-pronged attack. Armed with the timings of Leonard’s admission and death, he worked backwards to try and pinpoint the ambulance train his grandfather had travelled on. Then he had a bright idea. He accessed Kathleen Allsopp’s service records and to his delight found that, at the time of Leonard’s death, she had worked alternatively between No. 6 Gen Hospital and No. 7 train. Bob looked at the times No. 7 train had been running that day. “They just about fit in with times and dates for Leonard’s hospital admittance – so, while I can’t be 100 per cent sure it’s that train, it’s as close as I’m going to get.” Solving the ambulance train puzzle finally brought Bob’s research to a conclusion.
A couple of errors in the records almost scuppered Bob’s chances of completely closing the book on Leonard’s military life though. “In the UK Soldiers Died in the Great War 1914-1919 – the official record of everybody that died – the death location and theatre of war for Leonard was recorded as being ‘at home’.”
Bob also spent several years searching for Leonard’s name on a war memorial. He’d looked at the memorial books for Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Smethwick previously without luck. “I just happened to be in the local archives one day when the Smethwick memorial book was open and immediately his number jumped out at me from the page, but the name wasn’t Newitt, it was North – his name had been wrongly recorded.”
Finding Leonard’s name in the hospital diary meant a great deal to Bob. “I know it sounds a bit strange but it was really special to see it – because other ranks’ names rarely appear in the documents you come across. It also helped me to work backwards to uncover his exact route from the Somme. Discovering that was my most satisfying find. Every time I found something new and got it confirmed, it felt great.
“It’s good to know that I’ve managed to piece together a period of time in my grandfather’s life and produce a dedicated tribute to him. Because of the intense research, I feel a lot closer to him. It’s brought him back to life in a way.”