I’m too tempting a target, said General who shunned the Christmas Truce
Rio has carnivals, Pamplona its bulls. Denton? One train
AT half past nine this morning, flutter your thoughts toward the quietly admirable town of Denton, Lancs. Denton sits just south of Manchester and for much of the time does little to demand the nation’s attention. It pays its taxes. It rears its young to become good subjects of the Crown. It endures the rain with Lancastrian stoicism.
But on Fridays at 9.31am – not a moment sooner, and certainly not a moment later – something special happens in this unobtrusive corner of Eden. Rio de Janeiro has its carnival, Pamplona its bulls, Gloucester boasts the Severn Bore and Edinburgh its festival fringe. And Denton? Denton has its train.
‘Its train?’ you ask. ‘Just the one?’ I am afraid so. For as the House of Commons heard yesterday from Denton’s MP Andrew Gwynne, the town’s railway station is served by just ‘one train in one direction only once a week’. Mr Gwynne, who was intervening at Transport Questions, described this as ‘the most pathetic’ rail schedule in the country.
For once, the word ‘pathetic’ does seem apt. For is there not something almost poetically sad here? One train a week, without a return service? That’s not a transport service. It’s an existentialist debate. It’s a potential Samuel Beckett play. Some say that Beckett is dead, but how can they be sure? Perhaps he has simply been in Denton, waiting for the train, researching a sequel to Godot.
It should perhaps be admitted that Mr Gwynne, whose default setting is the loud, nasal wheedle, is not always the most reliable of witnesses. Westminster has many a hyperbole artist. The Labour benches, where he sits, are more than amply stocked with shroud-wavers and catastrophists. Few are quite as pessimistic as Comrade Gwynne.
For once, however, this most moansome of men does have a point. That modern Bradshaw, the National Rail Enquiries website, appears to show that should you wish to travel from Denton by train you have but one opportunity each week. It falls on a Friday morning, when the Stockport to Stalybridge service drops its petticoats there briefly at 9.31am. Passengers wishing to travel to Manchester Piccadilly are advised to ride all of five minutes to Guide Bridge, where they should change. So much went unspoken by Mr Gwynne yesterday. We ached to know more. Do crowds gather as the weekly train approaches Denton? Are there Railway Children scenes of excitement as it chuff- chuff- chuffs into view? Does the mayor – does Mr Gwynne, even – stand on the platform to greet those who alight with the intention of acquainting themselves with the Denton conurbation and all that she has to offer? If, that is, anyone does alight. And as the train departs, and the denizens of Denton adjust to the reality of another seven days without a locomotive, does the town succumb to Chekhovian melancholy? WHAT happens if a would-be passenger arrives a few seconds late for the weekly train? Does the guard stand firm and say, ‘Nope, sorry, mate, you’ll have to catch the next one’? To reach the station and to see the back of the 9.31 disappearing towards Guide Bridge must be damnably hard to take. We are talking Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, perhaps.
In my online researches I see that the weekly train has a name: The Denton Flyer. Passenger traffic is light. In one recent year there were just 30 ‘passenger entries and exits’, and yet, remarkably, Denton is only the third least-used station in the kingdom. Good grief: there are stations with even fewer customers?
There is an apparently active pressure group called The Friends of Denton Station – currently advertising for a group secretary – which discloses that in its heyday Denton offered 16 trains to London a day.
Transport Minister John Hayes, though a jovial and irrepressible presence, did not rise high to Mr Gwynne’s question. He shunted the matter into the sidings – treatment that, to Dentonians, will be only too familiar.
AS the artillery fell quiet, Tommies and German troops famously put down their weapons, emerged from the trenches, played football and swapped gifts in no man’s land.
But General Sir Walter Congreve, VC, shunned the Christmas Truce of 1914 – because he didn’t trust the Germans to resist shooting an officer of his high rank, a letter he wrote to his wife reveals.
Congreve, who led the Rifle Brigade, wrote the letter after visiting troops in a section of trench known as Dead Man’s Alley in northern France on December 25, 1914.
He describes what he saw there as ‘an extraordinary state of affairs’ and tells of troops and officers from both sides ‘walking about together all day giving each other cigars and singing songs’.
Congreve, then 52, who won his Victoria Cross during the Second Boer War in 1899 and was known as ‘Squibs’, adds: ‘I was invited to go and see the Germans
‘Shooting away all day’
myself but refrained as I thought they might not be able to resist a General.’
The letter came to light during research to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. It was donated to Staffordshire’s archive service by the Congreve family decades ago and was recently unearthed by researchers.
In the letter, Congreve, whose parents were from Stafford, shows little sense of lasting Christmas spirit towards the enemy. After being told ‘the best shot in the German army’ was among the cigar smokers enjoying the truce, he tells how he ‘devoutly’ hopes ‘we down him tomorrow’. The letter also illustrates the unofficial nature of the truce and how it was not upheld along the entire Western Front.
‘Next door the two battalions opposite each other were shooting away all day and so I hear it was further north, 1st R.B. playing football with the Germans opposite them – next Regiments shooting each other,’ Congreve wrote.
at Congreve,Harrow Schoolwho was and educatedOxford University, later lost a hand in action but survived the Great War. He went on to become governor of Malta, where he died in 1927 aged 64. His son Major William ‘Billy’ la Touche Con
greve was honoured with the VC after being killed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 – making them the only instance of a father and son in the same regiment to be awarded the Army’s highest military honour.
Historians say Congreve’s reasons for not joining in the truce were not without foundation.
World War One author Alan Cleaver said: ‘Some soldiers died on Christmas Day 1914. They got out of the trench thinking there was a truce and they got shot by Germans who didn’t want a truce. So it was a very courageous thing for them to do.’ Anthony Richards, head of documents and sound at the Imperial War Museum, said: ‘There are various accounts of the Christmas Truce story and this is a particularly interesting addition.’
The letter is being displayed at the council record office in Stafford.
The Advertising Standards Authority said there are no grounds for further investigating the Sainsbury’s Christmas TV advert recreating the 1914 truce which some viewers found ‘distasteful’. The watchdog received 727 complaints, but said ‘the ad is not likely to break the rules surrounding serious harm or offence’.