‘IT’S ALL SO SAD’
Kate’ s sorrow for the THREE uncles she lost in the Great War
EVEN amid the carnage of the ‘war to end all wars’, few families endured a loss as grave as that which befell Francis Lupton of Newton Park, near Leeds.
All three of his sons went off to serve King and country. All three were killed in action. And yest e r d a y, the scale of his grief was laid out in front of his great great granddaughter – the Duchess of Cambridge.
Just days ahead of the centenary of the Armistice, the duchess was at the Imperial War Museum yesterday – at her own request. Only a month ago, the museum received a bundle of letters which had passed through various branches of her family until a relative decided to entrust them to the IWM.
Having been raised on the heartbreaking history of her forebears, the duchess was very keen to see these new documents for herself.
Here was a story reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster Saving Private Ryan – about a man who has lost four brothers in the Second World War. Although based on a true story, Steven Spielberg’s multiOscar-winning film was fiction. This was a tale of true, unvarnished tragedy – one which now goes to the heart of the modern Royal Family.
The duchess had never seen photographs of her three great great uncles – Francis, Maurice and Lionel Lupton – until yesterday afternoon. She was particularly struck by the family resemblance in young Maurice. The boys’ mother Harriet had died in 1892.
Nor had she seen family heirlooms like the standard issue postcard from Lionel on July 16, 1916, telling his family: ‘I am quite well.’ Just hours later, he was killed by enemy shell fire.
‘It’s all so sad,’ said the duchess, her words tailing off.
Here, too, was the telegram from a certain Richard Noel Middleton, married to the brothers’ elder sister, Olive. He was serving on the same part of the Western Front as the eldest Lupton, Francis, when his brother-in-law went missing in 1917. Richard went out searching for him and, in all the mayhem, actually found his body.
He then had the grim task of confirming the news in a telegram to the family in February 1917: ‘Bad news. Francis body found. Killed instantaneously bomb.’
The stark brevity of the message stunned the duchess. ‘Hardly any words. It’s so bland,’ she sighed. ‘How sad.’
Richard and Olive, who were married in 1914, later produced a son, Peter Middleton, who went on to serve as a fighter pilot in the Second World War. His son, Michael Middleton, is the duchess’s father.
The news of Francis’s death, confirmed in that telegram from Richard Middleton, was followed by a special letter on black-bordered paper with a very familiar letterhead. ‘You might recognise the address, Ma’am,’ observed the IWM’s director, Diane Lees, lightening the mood.
The duchess nodded. Here was a letter from Buckingham Palace, signed by the Keeper of the Privy Purse, to Francis Lupton Senior in April 1917.
‘The King realises that this is the third beloved son you have given in your Country’s cause,’ reads the typewritten letter. ‘His Majesty trusts that you may be granted strength and comfort in the further sorrow which you have been called upon to bear.’
‘I’m sure so many families had these letters and sad stories,’ the duchess reflected. In fact, as the IWM’s head of documents, Anthony Richards, pointed out later, the poor Luptons were actually extremely unfortunate. ‘To lose all three sons was fairly unusual,’ he explained.
It may be more than 100 years since the brothers were killed yet there remains a timeless poignancy to this message of commiseration from George V to a bereft father in Yorkshire who would turn out to be the great great great grandparent of the future George VII.
The family had been granted the flimsy consolation of knowing that the bodies of all three of their sons were found, identified and buried in marked graves – unlike the hundreds of thousands merely engraved on memorials to the missing.
All three graves are lovingly tended to this day by the gardeners of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Despite the sombre nature of the visit, the duchess and her hosts were keen to touch on some of the lighter moments contained in the letters. In one of them, Maurice wrote about a soldier adopting a magpie as a pet. In another, he wrote home requesting a consignment of vegetable seeds.
‘A very Middleton thing,’ the duchess noted brightly. ‘My grandmother loved gardening. I’ve got a lot to live up to.’ Results have been mixed in the Kensington Palace vegetable patch, by all accounts. ‘You shouldn’t see my cauliflowers,’ the duchess added. SHE also read a letter from Maurice to his father, making light of life in the trenches – even though his trench occupied such a boggy bit of ground that ‘there is generally only about 18” actually dug and the rest is built up with sandbags or sods, to make a little place you can crawl into for protection from a shell or bullet’.
The same letter alluded to ‘a good wind blowing Germanwards which we always welcome as it prevents them using their gas business’.
‘What struck me was their positivity,’ the duchess remarked. ‘They’re so positive writing home.’
Maurice had been the first of the three brothers – all educated at Rugby and Cambridge – to be killed. A captain with the 7th battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, he was killed by a sniper in 1915, aged 28.
Younger brother, Lionel, was a lieutenant in the 28th Brigade Royal Field Artillery when he was killed at the Somme in 1916, aged, 24. Francis was the elder of the three, married and with a baby. He had risen to the rank of major in the 8th battalion West Yorkshire Regiment when he was the last to be killed, in 1917. Earlier, the duchess inspected the IWM’s new installation of the ‘Weeping Wave’ of ceramic poppies, part of the stunning installation Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red which was originally displayed in the moat of the Tower of London in 2014. She then toured the museum’s First World War Galleries, a subject close to her husband’s heart. He is the patron of the Imperial War Museum Foundation, the charity set up to raise funds for the galleries. Given the fate of the Lupton brothers, the IWM guides placed particular emphasis on the sections devoted to sniper fire and artillery.
The duchess was also introduced to a team of archivists from the British Red Cross at a section focusing on the legion of nursing volunteers who played such a crucial role in looking after the wounded.
They had included Olive Middleton, the duchess’s greatgrandmother. The Red Cross was even able to produce Olive’s record, showing that she had devoted 2,240 hours of service with the voluntary Aid Detachment (vAD) in Yorkshire.
‘That’s very special,’ the duchess told them. ‘It’s so lovely to hear.’
The story of the Luptons will now join more than 25,000 collections of family memorabilia held in the museum’s archives.
Alongside the newly donated letters and photographs yesterday, the museum had also produced the relevant pages from the regimental diaries of the brothers’ units on the days they died.
The appalling reality of life in the trenches was well and truly laid bare. The diary entry immediately prior to the loss of the last of the Lupton brothers concerns a Private Hill. On the same day, he ‘attempted to commit suicide by cutting his throat’.