the story behind the stories
The magnificent work of the volunteers is highlighted
OVER the last four and a half years the Loughborough Echo has published the stories of many of the town’s servicemen who gave their lives in the First World War.
These accounts were a by-product of a much larger undertaking – the editing and enlarging of the electronic Loughborough Roll of Honour
(www.loughboroughrollofhonour.com)
by Marigold Cleeve and Goff Sargent, a project which is still on-going.
Marigold researched many of the WW1 soldiers and she had the help of two others:
Dr. Karen Ette, who contributed 31 accounts for the period 1914-1917 and another researcher (who wishes to remain anonymous) who contributed eight accounts for 1914-1915.
Marigold Cleeve.
Marigold Cleeve graduated with a degree in Classics from Reading University and qualified as a professional librarian.
She has been a member of the Chartered Institute of Information Professionals since 1969. She worked for 29 years at the University of London Library initially as a cataloguer and on reference enquiries and latterly in charge of human resources and public relations as well as being the exhibitions co-ordinator.
For three years she was also warden of Canterbury Hall in the University.
She moved to Loughborough in 1996 and was appointed to a research post in Loughborough University. She subsequently became a lecturer in the Department of Information Science until 2008, specialising in information sources and searching and the management of academic libraries.
Since 1967 she has had over thirty papers published in academic information science journals.
Marigold has been a member of the Society of Genealogists in London for over 40 years and has completed a number of private genealogical commissions on a free-lance basis.
She has also published several articles in The Green Tiger, the journal of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment Association and has been a regular contributor to the Missing…and Found column in the Daily Mail.
She became a volunteer at the Carillon War Memorial Museum in 2011 and since then has edited and revised the text of the museum’s introductory booklet as well as answering enquiries from the public about servicemen.
Dr Karen Ette.
Karen Ette graduated from Loughborough University with an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English, Contemporary
Karen Ette and Modern, Creative Writing, which focused on Great War literature.
She has lectured on creative writing and is currently a Lay Chaplain at Loughborough University. Previously she worked in educational administration for many years and published a guidebook for students on how to complete UCAS forms.
She is a writer with Ruler’s Wit (www.rulerswit. co.uk) and has published work with them in Spring Tales, Summer Tales, Autumn Tales and Winter Tales.
They are currently working on two books about Loughborough’s Green Man, due for publication next year.
She has also produced several Christmas books including A Second Christmas Truce?, The Advent Calendar Recipe Book, and On Clouds of Words.
Karen has written introductions and chapters in books, published by Igloo: Comfort Food, Chocolate and Harold Shipman and has contributed articles to the following magazines: Your Cat, The Racing Pigeon, The Tiger (the magazine of the Leicestershire and Rutland Western Front Association) and Stand To! (the journal of the Western Front Association).
Karen’s website is: www. the-writers-secret-helper and she writes two blogs; one which is travel and food based: www. fancypanscafe.com and the other centred on WW1: www.battlefieldsandbeyond.com
As well as being a writer, Karen is a PTC trained, freelance proofreader and copy-editor. She is a member of the Leicester Writers Club. For the past seven years Karen has also been a judge for the BBC’s 500 Words competition.
Researching the servicemen.
The work on Loughborough’s WW1 servicemen proved to be very time-consuming as researching just one soldier could easily take up to three days.
Numerous sources were used to build up a picture of a man’s life, from church records of baptisms and marriages and national census returns to school, newspaper, probate, court and military records.
Servicemen and their families.
As the research progressed families of the past started to come alive, although long gone.
It was possible to learn what some of the soldiers looked like from their medical records (very few were over five and a half feet tall), where they lived and worked, where some of them went to church, what some of them did in their spare time (not always good things) and which ones had troubled backgrounds.
It was often tiny details that made the families so interesting: one soldier’s mother was called Truelove Jones, another soldier was married to a well-known Swiss artist, Marie Paschoud Hutchinson. Frank Hueck was the grandson of Charles Hueck, an unmarried cigar maker of Dutch origin from Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and Janey Bagagoine, a former black slave.
Tom Oliver was the only son of Alfred Samuel Oliver, one of the last Victorian and Edwardian naturalistic painters who exhibited seven paintings in the Royal Academy in London.
Many intriguing and some sad facts were revealed.
A Loughborough soldier often had six or more siblings and had lost his mother at quite a young age. John Thompson was one of 15 children. Frederick Tooley was one of 16 children whose father also bred prizewinning rabbits.
There were two instances of unintentional bigamy where the soldier’s father had vanished, been assumed dead and the soldier’s mother had married again. ( The soldiers’ fathers were found to be very much alive on official records in the USA and Canada.)
Dysfunctional families.
Some of the soldiers came from very troubled backgrounds.
Randall Henson and John Putt both had fathers who threatened to murder their mothers. Randall’s father was arrested and the police came after John’s father but he fled Loughborough.
Fred Hall was one nine surviving children of fourteen.
From his teenage years onwards Fred, who became a labourer, was often in trouble. Between 1900 and 1913 he appeared in court nine times for offences including assault, stealing, gaming in Packe Street on a Sunday, and poaching.
In his earlier court appearances he was fined various amounts but as he grew older the sentences included fourteen days hard labour and three weeks in prison.
Fred did well in the army, however, before he lost his life.
James and Alice Kelly, the parents of Ernest Kelly, were frequently summoned to court for various offences such as throwing manure into the house of John and Harriet Middleton and for striking John Middleton on the head with a kettle, for obstructing the footpath in The Rushes and spitting in the causeway.
Alice Kelly was also convicted twelve times for being drunk and disorderly, for common assault,
obscene language and other offences.
Ernest was eventually sent as a child migrant to Canada.
He enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, was wounded at the Battle of Courcelette and died shortly afterwards.
Multiple losses.
Several families such as the Taylor family of the Bell Foundry, and the Haigh, Bacchus, Collumbell and Barsby families lost two or more sons in the war. Mrs Biddles lost her husband and one son. Mrs. Joynes (née Chambers), who had seven brothers, only had two brothers left by the end of the war.
Boy soldiers.
Loughborough had some boy soldiers such as George Ireland who turned up in France aged 16, was sent home, went again and was killed.
When Charles Ernest Bailey enlisted he was only just 16, although he gave his age as 17. He was posted to the 2nd Leicesters in the Persian Gulf and was 17 when he died in Mesopotamia.
Using an alias.
Four men from Loughborough enlisted under an alias, complicating the research process.
John William Adcock, for example, served as ‘John Arthur Jennings’. He appears to have changed his name after his wife left him and he then lived with Anna Caroline Olsen, a Norwegian domestic cook described by the military authorities as his ‘unmarried wife’.
When Arthur Newbon attested for the Leicestershire Regiment he was rejected as being ‘of defective physique’ and ‘not likely to become an efficient militiaman’.
Nothing daunted Arthur changed his surname from Newbon to Newman, attested at Hounslow for the Middlesex Regiment and was accepted.
Over 100 regiments.
In World War One Loughborough men served in over 100 different army regiments and some were also transferred to other regiments later in the war.
If a soldier moved from one regiment to another and his service record had not survived the only way of establishing when he moved was by analysing his service numbers which changed with each move. (Only about one third of WW1 soldiers’ records have survived, the remainder having been lost in a fire in WW2.)
Of the Loughborough men who lost their lives sixteen were in the Navy or the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and their records showed that most of them were unable to swim. Five men were with the Royal Flying Corps which became part of the RAF in 1918. The remainder (571) were with the Army.
The war diaries.
The war diaries of the Army battalions (now held by the National Archives) proved crucial to the research, particularly when a soldier’s service record had been lost.
All units of the size of an infantry battalion, cavalry regiment, artillery brigade and above were obliged to maintain a day to day record of their movements and activities. Junior Officers wrote these records and they were checked and countersigned by their superiors.
The diaries were a key resource for determining the details of the activities of a given unit and thus establishing where a
particular soldier would have been at any given point. Relatives frequently ask about a soldier’s whereabouts in the war, particularly if they are planning an itinerary to visit the places where he served.
It was found necessary to read the diaries in conjunction with a good detailed map or with reference to Google Earth.
Place names often presented difficulties, particularly in Flanders and in former Mesopotamia, some names having changed. Officers also sometimes wrote a place name down as they thought they heard it pronounced, rather than an accurate version.
Some of the diaries were written in pencil, some with pen, but very rarely typed. In some the officer’s handwriting was very challenging. Occasionally the diary pages were slightly charred or blood-stained.
On the whole the accounts tended to follow a pattern, which sometimes made interpretation easier. What was surprising was how much the battalions moved around between the Ypres Salient and the Somme, their routes being meticulously recorded.
Some of the officers clearly gained a degree of satisfaction writing the accounts and gave detailed descriptions of the weather and conditions in the trenches and billets; other officers wrote very terse notes.
Sometimes the handwriting abruptly changed and it emerged that the original writer had been killed or wounded.
The diaries of the Batteries of the Royal Garrison Artillery and the Brigades of the Royal Field Artillery caused many problems, mainly stemming from the organization and reorganization
of batteries and brigades during the war.
Reading the war diaries was often a fairly pedestrian business but every so often there was a note of something just a bit different. October 1917 produced two examples:
One note reported that the Germans were dropping sweets laced with arsenic from aeroplanes and the other that an intrepid reporter from the Nottingham Guardian who was wearing a three-piece suit had unexpectedly turned up in the front line trenches at Cambrin amid the trench mortars, whizz-bangs etc.
Other details which emerged from the diaries included how the average trench tour lasted four days, but some lasted as long as 15 days, how officers occasionally blew themselves up when demonstrating explosives, how the German Army stepped up its use of poison gas towards the end of the war, and how frequently the tanks broke down.
The soldiers’ Christmas dinner was usually roast pork, concert parties (including those of Lena Ashwell) were often held, and football matches and boxing competitions frequently took place when the men were resting from the trenches.
Hazards of warfare such as trench foot, scabies, and dying of TB, meningitis, malaria or dysentery featured in the diaries as did the world-wide flu epidemic of 1918. One Loughborough soldier was one of 613 who died of heatstroke in Mesopotamia in the summer of 1917.
Research results.
The WW1 research has already produced several results.
The first was the discovery of 114 men whose names were not included on the Carillon. This was remedied in November 2018 by the unveiling of a new memorial to be placed inside the Carillon Tower.
Secondly, two members of one family, who were unaware of the existence of each other have now met up and exchanged family memories. Thirdly, the number of inquiries about soldiers received by the Carillon War Memorial Museum has noticeably increased.