Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Captain Blackadder
HE WAS the comedy character who grew accustomed to rolling his eyes at the idiotic “cunning plans” constantly being devised by his long-suffering sidekick, Baldrick.
Yet, when Rowan Atkinson played the lead role in Blackadder Goes Forth – where he locked horns with Stephen Fry’s intellectually-challenged General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett – he and his fellow soldiers evoked pathos when they left the trenches and went over the top in what has been described as one of TV’s most memorable climactic scenes.
The conclusion testified to the futility of the conflict.
Yet genealogy experts discovered that a real-life Captain Blackadder from Dundee was a war hero, who was commended for his involvement in the Battle of the Somme.
Staff at Forces War Records were initially surprised to stumble across a Captain Robert Blackadder, who was born on January 14 1884 at Duntrune Terrace in Broughty Ferry, but the more they delved into his story, the more their admiration increased for the gallantry shown by this redoubtable man.
During Blackadder’s time in the city, he enlisted in the Army and joined the Queen’s Westminster Rifles as a rifleman in 1906.
He was in the ranks until 1911 and served as far away as India, but left the military and plied his trade as a chartered accountant until the outbreak of the First World War.
However, he re-enlisted on August 26 1914 for the 16th Battalion of the County of London regiment.
Despite being wounded by shrapnel twice in 1915, he quickly rose to prominence and became a captain, playing a pivotal role in the infamous Battle of the Somme at the age of 32.
Captain Blackadder was awarded the Military Cross for his service with the 151st Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery and commended for his “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty” during one of the bloodiest chapters of the protracted hostilities, in which both sides incurred grievous casualties without gaining any decisive advantage.
The losses during the battle were among the worst sustained in human history, with more than one million casualties, including the deaths of more than 300,000 men.
Blackadder was clearly a tenacious individual who was spared the fate of so many of his comrades as he continued his grim existence in the trenches.
He survived the war and moved to Sussex where he died in 1968, aged 84, but officials connected with the Forces War Records organisation have issued an appeal for distant family members to come forward with any further information which they can add to the archives.
Dominic Hayhoe, chief executive of Forces War Records, said: “As fans of the TV show, we wondered if we could find the military records of the other fictional characters’ namesakes so we challenged our team of professional researchers and military experts to find them.”
The group’s senior researcher, Tom Bennington, added: “There are similarities between the fictional Blackadder and real one.
“He did start a family after the war, although Robert Blackadder – like the character – entered it as a single man and without any children.
“They both worked their way up the chain of command with rapid pace and both served around the British Empire.
“It was fantastic to delve into these men’s backgrounds and it would be great if distant family members could come forward and help fill in any other blanks that still remain in their life stories.”
Interestingly, Rowan Atkinson, who played Blackadder, has also spent time in the City of Discovery while away from the fictional battlefield.
Atkinson has always been one of the most reclusive of public figures, determined to keep his private life exactly that.
So people in Dundee were