Starting Out

My interest in the Great War was sparked many years ago. Too many to be able, now, to put an accurate estimation of a date on it, but it would be fair to say that I was a very young child, and certainly more than 40 years ago.

Which came first I, don't know, but I became interested around the same time as I was first shown the medals that my mum's mum, my nana, kept in a McVitie & Price biscuit tin in the bottom of her wardrobe. The tin, with nothing by which to date it has on it's lid, a scene of children playing soldiers, presumably the children are Regency and their imaginary soldiers were Marlborough's men.

Inside was a carefully cut red brown insert of felt, on which sat the medals of her husband and her father in law and her brother in law. They were my Granddad, my Great Granddad and my Great Uncle. Lou, Andrew and Syd.

Though the medals had probably gone for years without being viewed, they were not unloved and forgotten. There was no rummaging needed for my nana to get them out that first time she showed them to me. She knew exactly where they were and could easily lay hands on them.

Despite me having followed my nana upstairs to her bedroom to get this tin of medals, this was no place for her to prise the lid off. We went back downstairs to the dining room table, a large solid thing with a drop leaf at either end, covered with a protective mat underneath the table cloth. The table was, in effect, the hub of the house. It was where meals were eaten, where she would sit to read her post and the newspaper. It was where she and her two adult daughters, who'd never left home, would conduct the household financial affairs. It was the games centre, and many a raucous game of cards was played out on that table cloth. It was also a dog grooming surface, and where broken gadgets and tools would be inspected and either repaired or condemned as 'had it'.

The dining room table was, then, the natural choice for the opening of the tin in my presence for the very first time. Behind the chair where my nana sat, was (and still is) a large, dark wood dresser, the contents and adornments of which have barely changed in forty years. My nana kept a drawer in the dresser. There was no lock on the drawer, but it was her domain and you didn't go into it without express instruction to get something for her. I should explain that my nana was not a fierce lady, despite the associations that go with having red hair. She was a gentle woman, not afraid to show affection, of which there was much, and very slow to anger, but the respect people had for her meant that in her house, her word was as good as the law.

She asked for the glass. It was a magnifying glass that Sherlock Holmes himself would have been pleased with. A heavy 4 inch lens, in a steel surround, mounted on an ebony-like handle and kept in a chamois pouch. I can describe it with such accuracy because that glass still 'lives' in the same drawer all these years later, and despite having been dead since 1993, the drawer is still 'Nana's drawer', although one of her daughters has become its custodian.

Once the glass was placed to the side of the tin, it was time for the big reveal. She had a knack, did my nana, of making the family's youngest members feel as important as the eldest, and she did this by involving us, by asking our opinions on the burning questions of running the house, and by asking us to help her do things which she said she couldn't, even though we knew full well that she could. so it was that she feigned an inability to remove the lid from the biscuit tin, before pushing it slightly in my direction and asking me who, despite there being enough chairs for everyone present, was hovering at her left elbow in the small boy sized gap between nana's chair and the French window.

'Would you be able to open the tin?' she said, 'I don't want to break my nails.' She didn't have a vain bone in her body, and as an enthusiastic gardener, probably accepted chipped and broken nails as an occupational hazard. But having said that, she still carried the clues of her youthful beauty, still sported a flicker of red in her hair, and her eyes were as alive as her brain was sharp. I remember trying the tin, and really feeling that the lid was stuck as it didn't move, and my effort to get into it had reversed the domed lid with a metallic pop. Maybe she was afraid for he nails after all?

Encouraged by my nana and two aunts, I tried again and this time the lid came away.

Inside lay the treasure. The medals. The object of my fascination. Under nana's direction I lifted out the medals. The Great War medals that had belonged to my Granddad, Lou (Actually Frederick Louis, but everyone in the family had referred to him as 'Lou'), and my Great Uncle Syd, who in the tradition of the family had the entirely different names of Andrew Cyril, although because his father was also called Andrew, it's easily understood why they used a different name for him. Those medals, both 1914 - 15 Star trios, were unmounted and lay in the tin with their long silk ribbons as fresh as the day they were issued. I lifted them out singly and placed them with exaggerated care on to one of the sea-grass place mats on the table. Next to be removed were the medals belonging to Syd and Lou's dad, Andrew, my Great Granddad. Andrew was an old Empire Soldier who fought Imperial Wars in the name of Queen Victoria, and very briefly her son Bertie, King Edward VII. Those were the Egypt Medal with a bar reading 'Tel-El-Kebir' fixed to it, The Queen's South Africa Medal, with bars for 'Cape Colony' and 'South Africa 1902'. Next was an Army Long service and Good Conduct Medal, and finally a Bronze Khedive's Star. They were mounted as he wore them, the ribbons grubby and frayed, and the medals were tarnished. Of course, at the time, I knew none of this at the time. I probably wasn't even 7 years old then, but I was instantly fascinated by them.

I was already a bookish child, with a mum that read avidly, so I was already familiar with the library in the village. The library was organised to keep the kids occupied while their parents pored over the soft-backed fiction section, which took up more than half the shelf space. the children's books were in shelves behind the librarian's desk where she could keep an eye on us and make sure we behaved. Shoehorned in between was the 'Reference' section, and in there was a run of 'Observer' books. Amongst those was number 55, 'The Observer's Book of British Awards and Medals', and I fell on it like the other kids fell on Dr Seuss.

And so it began. I suppose, for ease, I was drawn towards the Granddad I'd never met, but whose widow and children were available to talk about him. No one could call these chats research, but I soon learnt that my granddad had suffered for much of his life with a bad chest after being gassed, and that he'd brought a piece of Belleek pottery back from when he served in Ireland. This plain, small china cauldron sat on the dresser behind my nana's chair. Apart from that I, and they knew nothing, although one of my aunts remembered that whenever they went to the coast to see some other relatives, they would always bump into someone who'd been in the Army with their dad. Even when they ventured to the Norfolk Broads in the mid 1950s, a 'Hullo Fred' came from an approaching boat as they cruised along. Another old soldier friend from years back. And it seemed, everyone outside the home knew him as Fred.

I continued my visits to the library and borrowed everything I could that related to the Great War. My next-door neighbour across the drive was a veteran of that war. We called him Granddad Cook, but I never did find out what regiment he'd been in. All that remains in my memory about him are the scars he had in his arm from where he was shot twice. Down the road was an old man who walked his West Highland terrier past my house who I'd say hello to. Or rather, I'd have to shout hello because he was deaf, and used his walks to give his ears a rest from his hearing aids. He'd been a soldier too, in another unknown regiment.

Around this time, the derelict old Hall, a once imposing farm house, was demolished to make way for a sheltered housing complex, and when it was completed, my nana became a regular at the bingo nights, but she was never keen on going to the nights when cards were played. They mustn't have been as exciting as the games at her house. On occasion, I was allowed to go when it was time for my aunt who drove to collect her. How many of her friends were veterans of the Great War it is impossible to say, but I think it is reasonable to assume that many of them would have been.

I was fascinated by these people. They didn't speak to me abut their war; I was just a kid, but in my head I imagined that these old men were the same men as I'd seen in the pictures in the books I'd brought home from the library, or had saved my meagre pocket money to buy. Granddad Cook could have been the man I'd read about who had been wounded in some filthy Flemish swamp, but had dragged himself back to be bandaged and sent off to hospital.

Interests, like people evolve and develop. I had begun collecting medals before I turned 10 years old. Unbelievably, by today's standards, I was allowed to go into Leeds on the bus with friends, and every now and again I bought a medal. Usually a Victory medal, usually for no more than £1.00. If I was lucky, I might have enough to get a British War Medal. or a Star. Places to buy medals were common in those days. There was a couple of stalls on the Market that sold them, and there were also a few proper shops too.

Running in tandem, but quite separately, was my interest in the war. I bought, and borrowed books to read, but as far as I knew then, there was no way of bringing the two streams of interest together. I had no idea that I would, one day, be able to research the men whose names were impressed into the medals I'd collected. It was a state of ignorance in which I stayed until a while after I'd joined the Army myself. I'd been a cadet in the Leeds Rifles for a few years, and the adult instructors there knew of my hobbies, but were themselves equally as ignorant. I still didn't know that my own granddad had been a Leeds Rifleman. As far as I knew, going from the details on his medals, he had been an ordinary Private soldier in the West Yorkshire Regiment.

I joined the Army as an Apprentice Tradesman, a junior soldier in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, when I was 16. After the initial basic military training, I went into a two year programme of education and trade training, and this brought me into contact with the instructors of the Education Wing, some of whom shared my interest in the history of the Great War and medals, and it was them that gave me some insights into how to go about researching the men named on the medals I had. What those education officers showed me and the people they introduced me to enabled me to find things out that I'd never known before. I was able to request copies of records from The Public Records Office, and slowly but surely, a whole new world opened up in front of me.

To my delight, in 1990, the Second in Command of my company, a Late Entry officer of the Blues and Royals (he was the last serving survivor of the Blues before their amalgamation), and the Company Sergeant Major, who was a Coldstream Guard, organised a company exercise to the Somme. On that trip, we visited some of the well known sites, which are often dismissed as 'Touristy'. We went to Vimy Ridge, and some of the main spots on the Somme, and I hung on every word the guide said. Unfortunately for us, it seems the guide was making up much of what he'd told us, but at the time it didn't matter. I was on the very battlefields where my granddad might have been.

I've been a regular visitor to the battlefields of the Western Front ever since then. I was fortunate to be stationed in Germany for 3 years, and it was relatively easy to get on a train or hitch a lift, and a few hours later find myself in Ypres, or Albert, or St Quentin, or Arras or a dozen other places where the soldiers of the British and Empire Armies trod all those years ago.

Moving forward to the present time, my methods of getting to the battlefields are more comfortable and more direct, and I no longer need to throw a sleeping bag down in the corner of some remote field. I don't often refer to myself as a battlefield tourist these days either. I'm more student than tourist, a researcher, even. And sometimes I'm a guide for others who have a desire to know about what their own relatives did during their service in the Great War. What I definitely must deny is any expert knowledge. When you've been doing something for 30 years, something is bound to sink in, but my knowledge pales when compared to many other people with similar interests.

What follows in this blog will be stories of individuals and groups of men who served in the Great War. The central theme will be men who served with the Territorial Force battalions of the West Yorkshire Regiment, either in the 1st West Riding (later 146th) Brigade (49th (West Riding) Division), or the 2/1st West Riding (later 185th) Brigade (62nd (2nd West Riding) Division.

It is not intended to be an academic history of the Brigades, nor will I write about the men and their units in anything akin to chronological order. It is a blog mainly for making a record of my own interest, but if others find it of interest, that will be a most welcome by-product of an hour spent at the keyboard.