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Hello. Welcome to the March edition. We have an article from Steve who has promised regular updates on the progress that Nancy and he are making, and the interesting stories they uncover. In fact, Steve has written an account for us of Gordon Dump cemetery. Keith has come up with an interesting slant on the life of Marie Curie. Please send any items of interest to me or Fiona for future newsletters.

Trevor

The Programme for 2014, so far

1st March Niall Cherry Gommecourt

5th April Peter Hart Bloody April (we think!)

10th May Tony Davies Tabley boys who never came back

7th June Bryn Hammond El Alamein – a First World War Battle?

5th July Liza Sentence The American First Nation in the Great War

2nd August TBC

6th September Nigel Crompton To be advised

Last month’s speaker – Martin Hornby

Martin came up from watery Somerset to talk to the branch about the “Victor” comic and its stories of WWI. The Victor was published in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The stories were probably taken from earlier titles in the Thompson stable, but in the case of the Victor they were told in comic strip format. Whoever was responsible for creating the stories had researched the medal citations, and the stories followed the citations very closely, commensurate with telling a tale that would keep the reader’s attention.

Steve and Nancy

Steve and I had agreed to meet up when he was visiting the CWGC cemetery at Puchevillers, where my grandfather is buried on the Somme. I had it in mind for the Spring, but it turned out to be the first week in February! My son-in-law, Neal, and I met up with Steve and Nancy at Puchevillers. Oh my gosh, it was cold!

Steve saying “thank you” at the grave of Private Robert McMullan, my grandfather.

Amongst the interesting facets of Puchevillers CWGC cemetery are:

  • Captain Marcus Goodall was a school friend of Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote an ode to his memory on hearing of Goodall’s death;
  • There is a headstone with an inscription recording that the soldier, Lance Corporal James Peak died 6th October 1916, lost his son Private John Alfred Peak on 1st July 1916 (and who is commemorated on the Thiepval memorial). Steve tells me that this is the first time he has seen a father and son mentioned like this on a headstone;
  • Private George Gibbard’s headstone records that his brother was killed in 1915 in the Persian Gulf. Prvate Thomas Gibbard is commemorated on the Basra memorial, which has inscribed on it the names of 40,500 Commonwealth servicemen who died in the Mesopotamia campaigns between 1914 and August 1921 and have no known grave;
  • Second Lt Herbert Walter Crowle has a non-standard headstone (he was Australian and the headstone was ordered by his widow and his brother by letter with a local French stonemason);
  • Second Lt Norman Emrys Evans was from Wynnstay Road in Old Colwyn, and was the son of the vicar;
  • Sergeant A Coleman served under that name as an alias, as his real family name was Crapp. You can see why he used an alias. He looks to have been a career soldier and served in the Boer War and on the Indian Frontier;
  • The bottom half of the main cemetery has many Australian casualties. It is likely the two casualty clearing stations at Puchevillers were used to deal with the casualties from the attack by the Australians on Pozieres in late July and early August 1916;
  • There is an extension to the main cemetery which lies outside its rectangular layout. The casualties are 1917 and 1918, and we surmised that they were from another cemetery that was “concentrated” into the main cemetery at some stage after completion of the main cemetery;
  • There is a brick archway between the main cemetery and the extension that looks reminiscent of the Thiepval memorial, and of course, Puchevillers is a Lutyens cemetery. Was this archway a “tryout” for Thiepval?
  • More generally, Steve told us that the contention that all the German graves were removed from all CWGC cemeteries in the Somme area is not true. However, the ones at Puchevillers were in fact removed as the German plot is empty, and indeed the one French grave was removed after the war as well.
  • I thought you might be interested to see a photo of some stuff that we found when out for a walk with Steve near Auchonvillers.
  • Found with its “friend” within two metres of the path, near Newfoundland Park; please note that the fuse is still there
  • The garden of a b&b in Auchonvillers Note the Bangalore torpedo”tubes” at the front
  • Marie Curie
  • Keith Walker

  • The Marie Curie cancer charity uses the daffodil as its emblem. This is, of course, the same emblem for St David’s Day, the day of our WFA Meeting, so I thought I would look at what Marie Curie did in the First World War.
  • Marie Curie was born Maria Solomea Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland on the 7th November 1867. She was educated at the clandestine flying university, Warsaw and the Sorbonne, Paris. She became a physicist and chemist.
  • She met and married Pierre Curie on the 26th July 1895. Marie became a naturalized French citizen. They had two daughters, Irene (1897-1956) and Eve (1904-2007).
  • At the start of World War One, Marie Curie saw the need for radiological units near the front line, so they could help the battlefield surgeons. She quickly put together some vehicles, auxiliary generators, and the X-Ray equipment. She developed the mobile radiography units at her own cost. All this was up and running by late 1914. At first, Marie Curie was assisted by a military doctor and her daughter Irene, who was only 17 years old at that time. In total, Marie Curie saw the installation of 20 mobile units and over 200 units in field hospitals in the first year of the war. At the same time, she was training other women as aides. The mobile units became popularly known as petites curies – “little curies”.

  • There is a wonderful story of when Marie Curie turned up unannounced at the No 1 Belgian Field Hospital in the summer of 1915. The hospital was being set up in Furnes in an old asylum where the buildings were in a poor state. The hospital was run by the eminent British surgeon Sir Henry Sessions Soultar (1875-1964). Marie arrived and set up the X-ray unit. Sir Henry was very interested in the new equipment as he was an amateur physics buff.
  • The next day Marie X-rayed her first patient watched by Sir Henry and his staff and when the patient was moved to the operating room they were able to extract all the shrapnel fragments in one go. Previously surgeons had to wait and observe as the fragments made themselves evident through pain and infection. The patient therefore had to have multiple surgery to get them out.
  • Marie stayed at the hospital for several weeks. She helped the staff around the hospital as she was a competent engineer and mechanic, she got generators going, installed electric lights, and when a Belgian General was brought in wounded, she rigged up a telephone line to his bedside so that he could talk to the King and Army council. She was a truly remarkable woman.
  • In 1915 Marie Curie developed a treatment “radium emanation” for the sterilizing of infected tissue. It has been estimated that over one million wounded soldiers were treated with the X-ray units.
  • The 1914 version of a mobile X ray unit, with no lead shielding for anyone!
  • Marie Curie died on the 4th July 1934 from leukaemia, possibly from been exposed to the X-rays. She was buried at the Sceaux church Paris. In 1995, in honour of her medical achievements, her remains and those of her husband Pierre were moved to the Partheon in Paris.
  • Marie Curie was not honoured by the French for her war work, but her daughter Irene was given a Military Medal.
  • So, we will all be wearing our Daffodil’s not only for St David but for Marie Curie and her daughter Irene to remember their war work.
  • Gordon Dump Cemetery
  • Steve and Nancy
  • For all the cold and wet weather we have had on the Somme this year, the temperatures have not been too bad and as a result we have been able to keep the Pilgrimage “ticking over”. As I write, Nancy and I are very close to completing our 1916 burial ground Pilgrimage of the Somme battlefields and those adjacent in the Pas-de-Calais.
  • Our overall objective has always been to say “thank you” to the men commemorated on “Their Eternal Camping Ground”. However, our interest and inquisitiveness about the actual burial process and the burial grounds has also grasped our attention. This month’s contribution gives a flavour of this additional layer to our Pilgrimage…..
  • On a dry February morning we set off with packed lunch and flask to Gordon Dump Cemetery, about 700 yards due east of the Lochnagar Crater, La Boiselle. An earlier “recce” had confirmed that the long grass track was sound enough to allow me to wheel Nancy to the cemetery. The path is out of bounds to traffic; apparently last year a coach needed towing, after ditching! I can record Nancy did not present the same problem.
  • History
  • Shortly after Contalmaison was cleared of enemy troops in mid July 1916, Sausage Valley (Sausage Gully to the Australians) became the main infantry route for those units holding trenches south of Pozieres. The trench railway was extended to the head of Sausage Valley from Becourt Wood and shortly after divisional artillery occupied the ground in preparation for the Australian Corps assault on Pozieres (23rd July 1916).
  • “At dusk we reached Sausage Gully, a valley about 400 yards wide and about half a mile long, on the rise at the head of which ran the Contalmaison road. The gully, in addition to being the main avenue for traffic to and from the battle zone at this part of the front, was packed with artillery of every calibre, which kept up a continuous fire on the enemy. It was to this busy spot that the wounded were borne from the front line by stretcher bearers and transferred to horse and motor ambulances. The movement of men and transport gave the gully a scene of indescribable activity and the German artillery fire made it as unhealthy as it was busy.”
  • History of the 24th Battalion A.I.F
  • Australian soldiers in Sausage Valley. Painting by Frank Crozier (AWM archives)
  • It was around this time that the first burials were made, in what is now plot 1 of Gordon Dump Cemetery. Although there is a Royal Engineers grave from the 10th July 1916, it is likely that the first burials were Australian Artillerymen. They occupy many of the 93 original graves of plot 1 and coincide with their tenure in this sector; (roughly) 21st July – 3rd September 1916. Burials continued here through September 1916 – again mainly artillerymen – after which the cemetery was closed.
  • After the Armistice, a further 1583 burials were brought here from the immediate surrounding battlefields, making up the burials in plots 2 through to 10. There were no organised burial grounds concentrated in to Gordon Dump Cemetery; this does not mean that the men did not have a marked (and registered) burial.
  • The Burials
  • On post war exhumation almost two thirds of these temporary graves had been destroyed and their temporary markers lost. Failure to identify the soldier from his tag or personal belongings would necessitate the serviceman to be buried as, “An Unknown Soldier of the Great War”. The fact that so many of the unknown burials at Gordon Dump have regimental identification and are buried alongside those men who were fortunate to have been identified could indicate that many battalion fatalities were buried together, exhumed together and buried together.
  • The fastidious work of the exhumation teams in their quest to identify exhumed remains means that instead of rows and rows of Unknown Soldiers you have small groups of regimental burials; some known, some unknown but partially identified with regimental badge and others with their date of death.
  • The cemetery plan from the register; two long rows in plot 1 contain the original burials. The uniformity of the other plots is always an indication that these graves were concentrated post war. Special Memorial headstones are positioned at the rear and either side of the Great Cross. A further post war change, moved the entrance from that shown on the plan to where the black arrow points; the track had fell in to disuse.
  • The concentrated plots are numbered two through to ten; plots two through to five are mostly of equal size and row numbers. However, the later plot numbers (seven to ten) extend the full length of the cemetery.
  • It is generally accepted that the cemetery plot numbering follows the chronology of the exhumation parties’ burials. This is not the case at Gordon Dump. Plots two to five have a similar burial layout; a high level of unknown partial headstones with progressively lower dates in the later rows. By and large these are men from the 34th and 21st Divisions that attacked here on the 1st July 1916; 34th Division towards Contalmaison and on their right flank the 21st Division who attacked north of Fricourt.
  • The much smaller Plot six, in front of the Stone of Remembrance, does not follow the earlier or later plots and is almost exclusively soldiers from the 34th Division, known and unknown.
  • The largest plots (seven through to ten) have a similar layout, again suggesting that they were laid out by row rather than by plot. The burials are more varied than the earlier plots, indicating a wider and later search area, although the regimental identification on the partial identified is constant throughout all the concentrated plots: Royal Scots, Middlesex, and Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry being the most numerous. Plot eight contains the highest concentration of unknown burials, possibly the last burials made here.
  • A typical row of burials in Gordon Dump Cemetery, men of the 4/Middlesex, some partial identified with their regimental badge engraved on their headstone.
  • On the 1st July 1916 the 4/ Middlesex (63rd Brigade, 21st Division) went over the top in the first wave…..
  • “Two companies attempted to crawl forward in to no man’s land five minutes before zero hour, but were forced back by machine-gun fire. One minute before zero, they attacked in earnest and despite machine-gun fire reached the German support line. Small parties totalling 40 men in all, reached the sunken road. The survivors of the rear company only got as far as the German front line, but consolidated their position and repelled three German bombing attacks”
  • The above account is from “The Somme, The Day By Day Account”, by Chris McCarthy
  • This action took place two kilometres south west of Gordon Dump Cemetery and from the burial register seems to have been the limit of the search area. The 10/West Yorkshire battalion that attacked on the right flank of the 4/Middlesex suffered the highest number of casualties on the 1st July but have only four men buried in Gordon Dump Cemetery. However, there are fifty seven known and an unspecified number of unknown burials of the 4/Middlesex.
  • Special Memorials
  • Almost all burial grounds that have large concentrations from battlefield clearance have a section of the cemetery dedicated to “Special Memorials”. These take the form of the usual headstone, but do not have burials beneath them. They were created for several reasons:
  • 1. Graves (within the cemetery) destroyed by shellfire. Usually inscribed “Known to be buried in this cemetery”
  • 2. Remains unable to be found on exhumation from another burial ground; usually marked with Duhallow Stones.
  • 3. Remains known to be buried in the cemetery but whose location is unknown .
  • The third group can be loosely labelled as administrative errors. Either the original burial (made in the cemetery) was not registered with the Graves Registration and Enquiries (G.R.E,) or the exhumation process was not adhered to and the grave was not marked accurately as it was moved in to the cemetery.
  • As my knowledge of the burial process builds, this third group is of great interest. At Gordon Dump there are thirty four special memorials erected to men “Believed to be buried…” The register informs the visitor that they are buried under unknown headstones and so fall in to either group 1 or 3 above. There are nine unknown burials in the original plot; so these are the only burials that could have been destroyed by shellfire. The remaining graves fall in to group 3.
  • Amongst the Special Memorials are nine adjacent headstones of officers from the 9th & 10th battalions King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLI), dated 1st July 1916. These battalions attacked on the left flank of the 4/Middlesex and the other ranks are well represented in the cemetery. Why have they not got a known burial?
  • An additional headache for the exhumation teams of the Graves Registration Units (G.R.U) was the erection of memorial crosses by the soldiers unit, as an act of remembrance, either in addition or substitution to the soldiers place of burial/death. Army orders instructed memorials erected in burial grounds to remain separate from the burials. Again plenty of opportunities for confusion of the burial and registration process!
  • Later this year, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission soldier’s burial and exhumation records will be available on-line, along with Verification Forms that were completed by the soldier’s next-of-kin. The burial records will detail where the soldiers’ remains were exhumed from (trench map reference) and hopefully help us to understand many of the Special Memorials within the cemeteries.
  • Gordon Dump Cemetery is described as a concentration burial ground, but the partial identifications, regimental groupings, the high number of known 1st July 1916 burials (310) and the limited search area for burials suggests this to be a battlefield burial ground.
  • The view across the upper ground of Sausage Valley towards the original cemetery entrance. Sausage Valley was named from a German barrage balloon tethered above the valley. The cemetery name was originally known as Sausage Valley Cemetery and later adopted the title Gordon (or Gordon’s) Dump Cemetery; perhaps in memory of a fallen soldier? A trench railway once ran across this ground, and perhaps was the limit of the boundary wall of the cemetery.
  • Joint visit to Belgian memorials
  • Before Christmas, David Cameron and the Irish Taoiseach (pronounced “tea-shock”) Enda Kenny together visited Irish and British sites of WWI interest. It is great to see the joint history of both countries playing a positive part in their modern relationship.
  • RIR cap pin and body found at Ulster Tower
  • The roadworks near Thiepval village have uncovered a body with an RIR cap badge beside it. It is likely that the soldier was killed by a mortar round. It seems improbable that he can be identified. The French road crew also hit an old gas shell with their digger, which ruptured causing an emergency but no-one seems to have been injured, thankfully.
  • Two ladies commemorated
  • The CWGC web site recently featured two ladies who were killed in WWI. They are both buried at Etaples CWGC cemetery.
  • Dorothea Crewdson was a VAD who died of peritonitis in March 1919. She had served for four years and was in her early thirties. Her diary that she kept during the war has just been published as a book, “Dorothea’s War”, edited by a nephew who is too young to have known her. Indeed, he did not know of the existence of the diaries until he was clearing his father’s effects after he had passed away. The diaries are now in the Imperial War Museum.
  • Betty Stevenson was a YMCA ambulance driver who was killed in May 1918 at the age of twenty-two when caught in the open with colleagues during an air raid. The French government awarded her a posthumous Croix de Guerre avec Palme. In 1920, her parents published a book on her exploits, based on her letters that she sent home to them and her diaries, “The Happy Warrior”, which is also the inscription on her headstone at Etaples.
  • Betty was given a military funeral. She was laid to rest, “her face towards England, a soldier among soldiers.” Her friend Olive Stewart-Moore described the service in a letter to Betty’s mother:
  • We all went to the soldiers cemetery and lined up at each side of the little
  • chapel, and waited there till they carried her out, with a Union Jack rolled
  • round just like a soldier. We went up and put our flowers and our love on
  • the top, and the little procession started on its way down, the chaplain in
  • his white robes in front, soldiers wheeling the little carriage; and the bugler;
  • and then we came in twos. I walked directly behind with Effie, and then
  • the drivers, and Lady Cooper and Mr Scott, and all the others.
  • The Burial Service was read and the 90th Psalm, and the chaplain spoke a
  • few words, telling of her work, and how she had died for her country like a
  • soldier. It was a beautiful and touching service, and was attended by her
  • fellow-workers, people from Boulogne, her soldier friends, and the French
  • sent a French Staff Officer from G.H.Q., to pay his respects with the others;
  • he stood, a splendid figure, and saluted as she was carried by.
  • We did not have a hymn as it was a military funeral, but it was a beautiful
  • service, and we had some verses which I have marked in my Bible to show
  • you. And then at the last the bugler sounded the Last Post, and there was
  • not a dry eye amongst us all, and I held on tight to my courage, and prayed
  • so hard for you. Then they lowered her gently in, and we stepped forward
  • and sprinkled her little bed with flowers.
  • Dear it was beautiful, and it is a lovely spot with the river and the sea, and
  • the woods all over the other side. She went home with all her courage, and
  • a smile on her dear lips, and her lovely soul had gone without suffering.
  • CWGC cemetery in Poland
  • The CWGC are asking for families of casualties located in a cemetery in Poland to contact the CWGC. The local cemetery at Lidzbark Warminski contains 39 prisoners who died in captivity (in what was Germany at the time). In the 1980s, the condition in the cemetery deteriorated and the CWGC abandoned the graves. However, access to the cemetery has been improved and the CWGC are to start renovating the British graves in March, with the full co-operation of the Polish local council.
  • The Gardening Club
  • The Daily Telegraph had a feature recently concerning some members of the Royal Horticultural Society at the time of WWI who did not have to pay their membership fee. The reason was that they were internees in Ruhleben, near Berlin. They were civilians who had been caught in Germany when the UK entered the war. Conditions at the camp were not easy and gardening was one way of creating food supplies.
  • The camp has been somewhat forgotten, not least as the internees were reluctant to talk about it after the war, as it seemed a soft existence in comparison with the horrors of the trenches.
  • Incidentally, the Daily Telegraph bizarely refers to internment camps as being “popularised” by the British during the Boer War. I take it that the Telegraph has not talked to any Afrikaners, whose feelings were still so strong at the time of WWI that there was an armed rebellion against South Africa entering WWI on the British side. Indeed, many Afrikaners were subsequently imprisoned in South Africa in WWI when they refused to be conscripted.
  • WWI museum in Kansas City
  • The American WWI museum in Kansas City has anounced a program of conferences and events to increase its profile within the United States, leading up to the centenary of the US entering WWI in 2017. It is worth noting that there is no national WWI memorial in Washington DC, though there are other WWI memorials there, and that Kansas City, Missouri is the national WWI museum, largely because the good citizens of that town thought to create it in the 1920s.
  • Casualty figures are not accurate – they are too low
  • Professor Antoine Prost, a French historian and professor emeritus of history at the Universite de Paris, has been researching WWI casualty figures and concludes that the accepted figures are too low, including the British ones. In particular, he refers to inaccuraccies regarding prisoners who died, deaths from sickness, deaths from injuries especially those occuring after month or years, and uncertainty regarding the figures for the missing.
  • In the same article, Jay Winter, professor of history at Yale, argues that shell shock cases were grossly underestimated and were probably closer to 20%, rather than the 2% to 4% often quoted. For example, he states that veterans with physical injuries were rarely if ever assessed as having any psycological injury. This does not add up, especially as in WWI the conditions and stress were even more intense than in later conflicts. (Caroline’s professional comment on this is that psychological injury would have been very poorly understood by many doctors of this era).
  • Letters from an RAMC captain
  • Recently spotted by Mark was a feature in the “Daily Mirror” that concerned the letters written by RAMC Captain John Bates to his fiancee. He served with the 8th battalion the Black Watch and was wounded at the Battle of Bazentin Ridge and awarded an MC. He writes:
  • “I was in a trench when a high explosive shell exploded above our head. My servant, a yard on one side of me, was wounded and my orderly, a yard on the other side, was killed outright. I then jumped into a shell hole to attend to two wounded fellows. I went back to the trench 20 yards away to fetch some gauze and while I was getting it an enormous shell landed in the hole I had just left and blew the two wounded men to bits and killed my corporal.”
  • Captain Bates was wounded again later in 1917, returned to the UK and then served in the Military Hospital at Colchester. He married Alice and became a GP in West Malling in Kent. They had two sons who both became doctors. Two grandchildren also became doctors, and one of them is a consultant at Ysbyty Gwynedd in Bangor.
  • Trevor Adams trevormcmadams@gmail.com