Christopher Eric Pleydell Wilton - Essex Regt and Indian Army

 

I met and interviewed Christopher Wilton in Great Dunmow, Essex in April 1984. He was born on the Isle of Wight on the 12th December 1897 and enlisted, aged 18, in May 1916. This is what he told me. My comments in square brackets.



"I joined the Gloucesters because my parents, on the male side, came from Gloucester and we can trace the family back to 1310.

"My first experience as a rookie in the 3rd Gloucesters was having to peel a whole bag of potatoes and then the next day to cut up a whole bag of onions and to be yelled at by the local sergeant in charge of recruits. After that I was sent with a platoon that had about two weeks training, to Seaford where we were encamped. There I had my first experience of life in a hut with a sergeant who was very fond of showing how great he was. And it’s very interesting at this point, because many may not believe this, that I used to hear some of the older men say, “You wait till you get out to France my laddie, you’ll have one in your back.” And I understand that this quite often did happen.

"At college I had been in the Officers’ Training Corps so at least I did know something about squad drill and how to shoulder arms etc. Consequently there were a number of privates who had similar experience and we and they were selected for special training in the evening. Eventually I was sent to Keble College, Oxford to train as an officer cadet and we lived there just like the university students, of which there were a number still in college. I’ve no idea why I was chosen for Keble College; presumably because I could manipulate my rifle but maybe – and let’s be quite frank about this – maybe because my father who had been a major in the Isle of Wight Rifles, pulled a few strings. When the war broke out he was transferred to the Essex Regiment as a regular officer.

"Anyway, I passed out. I think there must have been a whole battalion there. There were a thousand of us. I was sent to Colchester where I joined the 3rd Essex, and then went on to Felixstowe. I know my first experience was having to go to the sergeants’ mess to taste the beer. I knew damn well I was looked at by the sergeants in a queer way as much as to say, “what the hell does he know about beer?” and it was quite true, I’d never had beer in my life before.

"Eventually I was posted with a draft to France. Mind you, this was after a total of nine months’ training in the army. We went to Boulogne and from there my first experience of French railway trucks was “Chevaux 8, Hommes 40”. We were sent up the line to a place called Mazingarbe and went straight into the trenches as far as I can remember. If you want to know where Mazingarbe is it’s near La Bassee and Bethune which is in Flanders, the west of the line. I remember walking from Mazingarbe to Bethune and literally not meeting a soul. I was allowed a day off to go and have a bath and I went to Bethune where there was a place which was an officers’ rest house and you could have a hot bath. I remember sort of living in that hot bath for two hours.

"Now I want to get away from the idea that life was awful. It wasn’t. As a youngster of eighteen, only recently out of school and some six months’ training as an apprentice in the Coventry Ordnance Works, I felt thrilled. This was a completely new life and I’ve often wondered what would have happened to me if there’d been no war and I’d just carried on with my apprenticeship. I don’t think I’d have made a very good engineer. Yes, down in the trenches life was not all that pleasant. Nevertheless, there was a certain air of expectancy.

"What I hated most was claustrophobia when living down in dug-outs. I was always scared that a bomb would drop in front of the dug-out and bury me alive. Now this nearly happened once in the trenches. I was a second lieutenant and was walking along with another officer and there was a blast. He had his head blown off and I was partially buried in a mound of dust and earth. But I recovered out of that.

"Of course one was scared, but not to the extent you might imagine. The one thing I was really scared of was the midnight patrol in between the lines in No-Man’s land. Everything’s dead quiet and you suddenly find this verey light which comes right over you and you’re all exposed unless you’re down in a shell-hole.  Those were my worst moments: going out on patrol at night time between our front line and the German front line and just getting into a shell-hole, trying to listen and see if there was anyone about. That was terrible. Living day in and day out, sometimes for about ten days before one took one’s boots off, and as a consequence of that, and later on wearing puttees, I have had osteo arthritis. It was all mud, thick mud.

"After I don’t know how many months I was eventually invalided out from the front line. It was called PUO: Pyrexia of Unknown Origin. What I was I still don’t know today, but I had to go down to Etaples where the hospital was situated and then I was returned to England to an officers’ hospital in Wimbledon. All of them had this PUO which was a temperature which would not come down, and aches and pains all over the body. Anyway, I was sent on a month’s holiday and then I returned to the Essex Regiment at Felixstowe and was sent out with a whole platoon to Palestine.

[Palestine account not transcribed here]

"Whilst I was in the trenches in France a brochure came round saying, “Why not join the Indian Army?” It showed animals and tigers and all sorts of things and seemed awfully pleasant. I thought, well anything rather than this, and I put my name down and then forgot all about it. Then, all of a sudden, one day in March, the adjutant called out, “Wilton, you’re due in Suez tomorrow. Get cracking, you’re joining the Indian Army.” In those days we were running a kind of night express to Port Said and on to Suez and so I went and joined the boat from there.

"In France, on our right, was the Loos offensive. We had the Portuguese on our right and they suddenly disappeared. All I can remember of that is one mad rattle which never seemed to stop; machine guns and heavy artillery fire. It went on, as far as I can remember, for about three days. This is only hearsay but I’m told the Portuguese disappeared; they retreated. You can find that out from the archives, it’s well known. [This cannot have been the Battle of Loos as this took place in September 1915 and Christopher Wilton did not arrive overseas until April 1917.]

"I don’t think I was ever in a line that went right over the top and into the German line. I think at that time the sector was fairly quiet. We used to watch our planes go over quite a lot. In those days they were small bi-planes with an open cockpit.

"There was no boredom in the trenches. Nobody could be bored, there was too much going on all the time. It was very much a war of attrition. You had to go round inspecting and talking to the fellows. You see, we were always on the qui vivre. After all, you only had to show your head just a bit over the trenches and you’d probably get shot straight away.

"... the war made a man of me. I think it did a lot of good to us."

"Our trenches were quite good compared to some I’ve seen. Obviously if you were there you were continually keeping the trenches in good form, especially your places of look-out. The people who suffered the most were the married men who had wives and children, but for young fellas like me it was an experience. Quite frankly the war made a man of me. I think it did a lot of good to us to tell you the honest truth because we suddenly realised we were all the same. If that shell had your name on it, you’d had it, and that shell could also Tom, Dick and Harry next door.

"We were on parade in India on Armistice Day and General Rawlinson was inspecting us. Being adjutant I had a horse and I was in front. He came to me and said, “Well, Wilton, how did you get into the Indian Army?” I replied, “through the back door sir.” You see, unless you’d been to Sandhurst you weren’t considered fit for the Indian Army and that’s when things changed in the India Army. New gentlemen came out."

Christopher Wilton remained in the Indian Army at least until 1923 and possibly a good deal later. He married Marion Cooper in Bengal on the 8th April 1922. Christopher Wilton died in September 1984, just five months after I had recorded his First World War testimony.


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222179 A/Cpl Jack Edward Rose, Royal Engineers

I met and interviewed Jack Rose at his home in Chelmsford on the 9th December 1981. Born in July 1897 at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, by the time he attested as an 18-year-old under the provisions of the Derby Scheme in December 1915, Jack was living in Thetford, Norfolk and working as a telegraphist for the Post Office. I also found him on the 1911 census staying with his father (a licensed victualler), mother and sister at the Ship Hotel, Burnham on Crouch.

Thankfully, Jack's papers survive in WO 364 and in answer to question 9 on his attestation paper (Are you willing to be enlisted for General Service?) the following response was written: "Not joining under Group Scheme by command of Postmaster General, but coming under Director of Army Signals for Home Defence." The response was obviously not heeded as Jack was in France by 1917.

The transcript below is all that survives from my meeting with Jack Rose and I have added to this (in square parantheses) where additional information from his surviving papers adds to the picture. Jack Rose died on the 10th October 1985 aged 88. His two brothers, who joined the army in 1914, both survived the Great War.

"After I enlisted I reported at Norwich barracks and was sent to train with the wireless section at the Signals regiment at Worcester. [His attestation was approved at Worcester on the 2nd February 1917 and he was assigned to the Wireless Training Centre for the Royal Engineers]. We trained at Worcester and Morton on British field sets with a cat’s whisker receiver. There were no amplifiers in those days. The riding school section as also there and I could see that it was rough house and knew that if I joined that I’d be sent ot Mesopotamia or German East Africa, and I wanted to go to France.

"We went to France in November 1916 and I ended up on a trench wireless on the Nieuport Front in Belgium. [Jack's papers note that he disembarked in France on the 20th August 1917].

"It was while I was at Nieuport in 1917 that I got gassed. We were in a dug-out under an old café in the town of Nieuport which was used as an infantry observation post and one chap failed to pull the gas blanket over the entrance. Well, we all got a dose of mustard gas that burnt all the skin off your fingers and affected your eyes. I was blind for three days and spent pounds on my eyes when I came out of the army but they’ve never been the same.

[Jack's papers note a spell in hospital between the 26th October 1917 and 3rd November 1917. In 1921, by now living at the Lion and Lamb Hotel at 25 Duke Street, Chelmsford, he submitted a claim for a pension as a result of conjunctivitis resulting from his gassing. He gave his regiment as "Royal Engineers, 2nd Army Signal Company. The claim was rejected. The watermarked but undated photo, copyright of The Francis Frith Collection, shows the Lion and Lamb Commercial Hotel in Duke Street, Chelmsford.]

 

"We used to do ten days in the front line, ten days in the second line, ten days with the heavy artillery and then ten days rest.

"After I’d been gassed we were sent back to base at Abbeville and it was while I was waiting to be re-drafted that I saw a wireless lorry in the yard. It had two eighty-foot masts made of steel which had a radius of eighty miles. It was a new thing to me and I asked the sergeant in charge if there was any chance of getting on the lorry because I was fed up with trench warfare. He asked me who I was, where I came from, gave me a test and then took me on. The trenches were jolly rough and I was glad to get out of it, I don’t mind telling you. It was much better when I got on the motors. You had long hours and all that, but it was altogether a different life.

"The weather though, didn’t change. At Nieuport it was all sand and at Arras it was mud. They were damned high trenches at Arras and you had to use a step ladder to get over the top.

"Christmas 1917 saw me and three German-speaking Poles in the Arras sector. We used to run out lines with a bayonet on the end to try and pick up conversations from the German trenches. It was a failure. They hoped to get a lot of new information but they didn’t get it.

"The Eiffel Tower used to broadcast news of the war in the early evening and we always used to stop our broadcasting and tune in to Paris. Then I’d make my way down to the sergeant-major and give him the war news for which I’d get an extra tot of rum and extra candles. At Christmas 1917 I was coming back from seeing this sergeant-major, making my way along the slippery duckboards, whena  blooming shell burst above and made me jump. I lost the pipe which my father had sent me and landed up in a shell-hole, waist-deep in water."

[Jack Rose’s two brothers who had joined up in 1914, both survived the war.]


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Stan Brown's Christmas Truce

I've featured Stan Brown before and you can read some about Stan's Great War and Chelmsford's Old Contemptibles by following the links. Now, The Daily Express and the Mail Online have both included snippets from the interview I conducted with Stan back in 1981 and the Express has also included some audio.



Stan was the second man I interviewed (the first was Harry Bardsley) and I used to pop in and visit him fairly frequently. The photo above was published by the Chelmsford and Essex Chronicle in 1987 shortly after Stan died at the age of 90; the last of Chelmsford's Old Contemptibles.



I'm very pleased that two national newspapers have run Stan Brown's vivid memories of the Christmas Truce and because of this, I can even forgive the Daily Express - just - for it's opening line that Stan Brown, "was one of the soldiers who swapped bullets for balls and met the enemy in no man's land for a festive game of football." He didn't, and that story is balls. The Express also appears to have contrived to use an extract from the interview that doesn't mention the truce at all. Never mind, it's good that Stan has now received national recognition - and as an added bonus, you also get to hear the eighteen-year-old interviewer chipping in.




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Veterans re-live life in the trenches

I thought it might be an idea to start integrating surviving video and audio of Great War Veterans and so here's the first such link courtesy of YouTube.



This link will take you to a 49 minute clip of veterans re-living their time during the First World War. Featured veterans in this programme are:



Norman Collins 1897-1998 (pictured above)
Jack Rogers 1894-2000
Dick Barron 1895-1999
Albert "Smiler" Marshall 1897-2005
George Louth 1895-2000
Robert Burns 1897-2000
George Littlefair 1896-1998
Arthur Wagstaff 1897-2000
Fred Francis 1894-1999
Tommy Gay 1898-1999


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Lieutenant Arthur Edward Slater, Machine Gun Corps

 

I met Arthur Slater on 5th October 1981 after he responded to an appeal for First World War veterans to come forward and tell their stories to a somewhat naïve nineteen-year-old.

 

Arthur was born in Beckenham, Kent on the 27th November 1895 and was studying at King's College, London when duty called and he enlisted in the army. On the 1911 census for England and Wales he appears as a fifteen-year old living at 201 Mackenzie Road, Beckenham with his parents and 20-year-old sister, Mary Elizabeth Slater, an elementary school teacher for Beckenham County Council.  I believe that Arthur was already a member of the Officer Training Corps at King's College and he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Devonshire Regiment, arriving in France in July 1916 where he joined the 7th Battalion.

 

"On 20th September 1916 we boarded one of the London buses which had been brought into war service and travelled up to Mametz which was the British front line. Our objective was to march into the fortified village of Ginchy, and the Staff thought it would be a walk-over. They said the wire would all be cut by the artillery fire but as it turned out, the wire was still uncut and there were machine guns firing down on us from Delville Wood as we were advancing.

 

"We'd assembled at Mouquet Farm just as it was getting dusk, and spread out in a long thin line ready for the attack. We didn't have time for rum so we passed it from hand to hand over the battleground. The ground wasn't too uneven and the advance would have been relatively easy had it not been for the machine guns. I got a bullet in my left leg straight away and fell down into a shell-hole. I'd got what they called, "a Blighty" and I was sent home."

 

While he was recuperating, impressed by the machine guns he had seen in France, Arthur applied for a transfer to the Machine Gun Corps and this was duly sanctioned. He now found himself serving with the 9th Division and left Folkestone for France on the 28th May 1917. It was at Passchendaele though, later that year, that his war ended.

 

"We were waiting for relief somewhere between St Julien and Zonnebeke and came under artillery fire. I was sheltering with about a dozen other people in a part of a German trench when a shell landed about twenty yards away. A piece of shell case came flying in and smashed me in the left knee-cap. I was the only one injured. 

 

"They put me on a stretcher but I couldn't be taken down that night because the shelling was too bad. Instead, I spent the night in a pill-box which didn't do me much good. The next morning they tidied me up a bit at the Casualty Clearing Station near Ypres and removed the piece of shell case. They gave it to me later and I kept it in a bag for several years.

 

"I was put on a hospital train for Rouen and was unconscious for two days due to loss of blood and the morphine I'd been given. In fact after I'd recovered I had to undergo a course of treatment to cure me of my addiction to morphine.

 

"The terrible thing was that I had gangrene in my leg and because the arteries were absolutely rotted with it, it had to come off. A nurse had to press down hard on the pressure point in my groin to stop me from bleeding to death. In fact, matron thought I was going to die. They sealed up the arteries but didn't make a very good job of the stump which is why I've got a very uneven stump and practically no leg at all.

 

"By February 1918 I was recovered, but I didn't get my discharge until 1919 when I was given a job in the Civil Service as an air commissioner."

 

Arthur Slater died in 1982.

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29241 Pte Leonard Watts, Suffolk Regiment

I met and interviewed Leonard Watts on the 19th October 1981. He was born in Little Waltham, Essex on the 17th May 1897 and was working as a gardener before he joined the army.  He mentioned to me that he had joined the army in May 1916 and his regimental number confirms this. He would have been nineteen years old and whilst it is possible that he was conscripted, he may well have volunteered the previous year under the Derby Scheme; a lot of Suffolk Regiment men with numbers in this range were Derby Scheme volunteers.

Having trained for almost a year, Leonard found himself taking part in the Battle of Arras, going over the top on the 9th April 1917.

"When it came to the Push we had to go over whether we were trained or not. I got blown over once or twice while going forward and there were more bloody machine guns firing at us than there were rifles. You had to keep down, and you got along more by crawling and rolling than you did by standing upright."

He came through that attack unscathed but was wounded a couple of days later.

"The bullet went into the top of my shoulder and came out over the plate. A mate stopped to dress my shoulder on the battlefield and then I walked up the trench towards the CCS, up to my waist in slimy mud, treading on tins and old bits of rubbish at the bottom. I was then passed on to another station for the walking wounded before being moved to a hospital near Rouen. I had a little operation on my 20th birthday."

Leonard's medal index card notes a second regimental number - 70167 - and his entry on the British War and Victory Medal roll notes three battalions of the Suffolk Regiment: the 2nd Battalion, 9th Battalion and 11th Battalion.

Leonard Watts died in January 1995, a couple of months short of his 98th birthday.

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98530 Pte Ernest Needham, 7th Sherwood Foresters

I interviewed Ernest Needham in Loughborough in 1984; a period of fond memories for me where days were spent fine-tuning my darts and snooker skills, and occasionally attending the odd English literature lecture at the university. I forget now how I made contact with Mr Needham; almost certainly through word of mouth, and I interviewed him at his home at William Street on the 20th June 1984. What follows are extracts from that meeting.

"My name is Ernest Needham and I was born on the 27th August 1899 in Shepshed, Leicestershire. I enlisted with the 7th Sherwood Foresters in September 1917 and later on I was transferred to the Guards at Pirbright in Surrey.

"We had about eight weeks training on the machine guns and then… I was a volunteer.  I volunteered. My mates were all going and somehow I were getting a bit left behind and I wanted to go with them and I went up to the commanding officer… I had to be took up to him and I volunteered for France and he says, “the next draft as goes… now” he says, “you want to go don’t you?” (because I was only eighteen), I said, “yes, I’ve made my mind up ‘cause me mates is all going” and I says “I want to go and I’m a volunteer.” So he says, “right you’ll be on the next draft.” And I went from Pirbright." [This was June 1918 according to surviving papers]

On going over the top:

"You didn’t have time to have no feelings. It were hell. I could see bullets striking under my foot from these machine guns as we were running along somewhere [on] open ground.  I could see the bullets; the dirt flying up… I felt a brush on my jerkin from a bullet and of course it ripped my jerkin and all. That were when the weather was starting to get a bit cold because we had jerkins on and that.

"We were in action and we’d come up, up to them and they said there were a man wounded out there and I could hear him shouting.  And I says to the sergeant, I says I’m going to fetch him in. He were sort of wounded and he couldn’t speak very well and he says, shall you?  I says, yes.  And I went and he were a big chap, a guardsman.  I got my hands… and I had to drag him and he kept swearing and playing up, you know, with the pain, but I could see the bullets striking under my feet and I got him in.

"This were at daytime in broad daylight. Well we had an officer who were very strict, very disciplined. And we come out the line and I fell asleep – I were young – fell asleep in an old trench, and they said the officer wanted me. He’d heard about me fetching this… and he wanted to know something. I told him and when I was leaving him instead of me saluting him I didn’t salute him… I always reckon it were through not saluting… he were very strict and disciplined – he took my name like…

"Aye, I should have had a medal for it, no doubt about that… [I brought him in] all that swearing, well he were in such pain… you don’t know what you’re saying at the time [unclear] you could see the dirt rising as the bullets were striking the ground. I said, don’t worry, you want me to get you in, do as I say. And of course, as soon as I got in towards the lines, the other chaps took him off and he was soon whipped on a stretcher and away. And this officer come to see me about it and I always think it were through not saluting him…

"I had two brothers killed in France, and another badly wounded. There were four of us. My oldest brother were a professional footballer [with Nottingham Forest] but as luck had it, when he were a little lad he hurt this arm and he always carried it so and that were the reason he didn’t go. One day when he went for his medical, who should be on the Board of doctors that day but the Notts Forest football club doctor. So when he saw George he says, what are you doing here George? Well he said, same as the others. Well he says, I don’t think you’ll pass… He says, you’ve been before for medical ain’t you.? So he says, is there anything as you can do? Well he says, you’ll have to go through with your medical but when you’ve had it, come and see me and I’ll see… Well when George went to him he said, you’d like to go George? You’d have been gone before now but [I’ll make this medical the final] and you won’t have to bother again."

32825 Pte Owen Needham of the 6th Leicestershire Regiment died of wounds on the 29th April 1917 aged 19. His brother, 155761 Pte Frank Needham of the MGC died of wounds on the 5th October 1918, aged 23. Both brothers are commemorated on the Shepshed war memorial.

Ernest Needham died in July 1992 at the age of 92.


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