The Black Sheep of the Battalion - The Hero of Peter Pan

265616 Rifleman Charles Arthur Capp DCM, D Company, 1/7^th Battalion 

Overnight on the 8^th and 9^th October 1917, 1/7^th (Leeds Rifles) Bn, West Yorkshire Regiment moved from La Brique, where the battalion had rested, to take up it’s position in the line in readiness for the morning attack on positions in the vicinity of Yetta Houses and Peter Pan, on what is now Ravestraat, west of the village of Passendale, then known as Paschendaele. The action was to be a part of Battle of Poelcapelle, a phase of the Third Battle of Ypres, which has entered general consciousness simply as, ‘Passchendaele’.

The men of the battalion had found the move up to the line an exhausting one, and they arrived at their start line for the day’s battle already worn out. When the barrage that the battalion was to follow began to fall at 5:20 am on 9^th October, the men struggled to keep up with it due their fatigue and the heavy going of the already pulverised and soaked ground that they had to cross. As a result, the men lost their direction temporarily, but by the time they had passed the positions of Yetta houses and Peter Pan, they had largely rectified the error.

Lt Colonel Tetley, the battalion commander, moved his Battalion Headquarters up to a cluster of shell holes in the area of Calgary Grange, a wrecked farm a few hundred metres to the rear, where he and his HQ staff awaited information of the progress of the attack. At around 7:00 am, the wounded Lt Baldwin reported to his colonel that his company, the left of the attacking companies, was held up by machine gunners and snipers, and had been since the commencement of the attack. Baldwin went on to report that he had detailed two platoons to deal with the threat, but that they had failed in their task, suffering casualties as they tried.

Colonel Tetley had no further information with which to work, so he decided to go up to see for himself. He found the remaining men of three of his companies consolidating close to Yetta Houses. The men had crowded so closely together that the colonel immediately realised that a salvo of shells landing close by would inflict heavy casualties, and likely render his battalion impotent as a fighting unit. He gave orders that one of the companies should gather its men and withdraw to a pre-determined line some distance to the rear. The other company the battalion had sent into the attack, D Company, was off to the right, near Peter Pan, and was in touch with the neighbouring battalion, the 1/5^th Bn, West Yorkshire Regiment, commanded by Lt Colonel Bousfield.

Map taken from the War Diary showing the positions of Peter Pan and Yetta Houses.

Only two of Colonel Tetley’s officers remained at duty, the rest of them, and most of the senior non-commissioned officers of the front three companies had become casualties.

The enemy had made good use of every available position, and they poured machine gun and sniper fire into the ranks of the attacking Riflemen, but where the opportunities presented themselves to the Leeds men, they had inflicted casualties on the Germans.

One man, Rifleman Arthur Capp, rushed, and took on an enemy machine gun which had been mounted to provide dangerous enfilade fire on the battalion. As he dashed at the machine gun, alone, the German crew got away and made a run for it. Rifleman Capp attempted to turn the German machine gun on the escaping Germans, but he could not operate it, and chose instead to destroy it. His actions saved many lives as the gun had been particularly well situated.

For this act of extreme daring and courage, Rifleman Arthur Capp received the Distinguished Conduct Medal. The citation appeared in the London Gazette on 4^th April 1918.

"For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. During the advance he attacked single-handed an enemy machine-gun which was holding up the attack. He rushed the gun, dispersed the team, and put the gun out of action. He behaved with great gallantry on previous occasions."

Though he had had an episode where his colonel was undoubtedly glad to have him as a Rifleman in his battalion, Arthur Capp, the ‘Hero of Peter Pan’, was, under more normal circumstances, nothing less than an irritant in Lt Colonel Tetley’s side, and his string of military and civilian convictions was far longer than his recorded moments of glory.

The ruins of Poelcapelle (Poelkapelle) main road into Poelcapelle from Langemarck (Langemark-Poelkapelle) 13 September 1917. Photograph taken under close German observation (IWM image Q3027)

Charles Arthur Capp had been born in Leeds in mid-1893, the eldest child of Noble Arthur Capp, from Elveden in Suffolk and his wife Elizabeth. Noble Capp worked as a Warp Dresser in the worsted trade at Holbeck Mill. By 1911, the family numbered five children, plus their parents, and they lived at 13 Purton Street, Dewsbury Road, Hunslet in South Leeds. Arthur Capp had found work as a coal ripper at a local colliery, and his younger brother, Albert, was a brewery bottler, possibly at the Tetley Brewery, a short tram ride away from their home.

At the age of 18 years old, Albert left the brewery to join the Army, enlisting in 2^nd Battalion, Durham Light infantry, and soon after, Arthur did the same, enlisting in Leeds on 6^th March 1913, also to 2^nd DLI, with the number 11563. He described himself as a boilermaker on enlistment. He stood 5’3” tall, had a fresh complexion, brown hair and brown eyes.

On 27^th June 1913, after only three months into his army service, and very soon after joining his battalion at Whittington Barracks, Lichfield, from the depot, Arthur Capp went absent without leave. He was arrested the following day by civilian police and was charged and tried for stealing a box with money. The crime was classed as a felony, and on his conviction at Colchester, he was committed to HMP Ipswich for a month’s imprisonment, with hard labour. He was released and returned to duty with the battalion on 30^th July.

Ten days after returning to duty, he went absent once more on 9^th August. Next day, the police arrested him, returning him to the detention cells of the guardroom at Whittington Barracks on 11^th August. A lapse in vigilance and security allowed Arthur Capp to escape, but he was promptly arrested once more by the civilian police, who kept hold of him and charged him with the offence of stealing clothes, sending him for trial the same day. Again, on conviction, he was sent to HMP Ipswich, but his sentence had been increased to one of three months with hard labour.

During his prison sentence at Ipswich, the army discharged him in consequence of being convicted by the civil power of a felony., covered by paragraph 392 (x) of King’s Regulations.

The corner of Purton Street, Hunslet, where the Capp family lived

On his release from prison in Ipswich, Arthur Capp returned to Leeds, where it appears that he found employment as a carter. By 3^rd January 1914, however, Arthur Capp had stolen the horse his employer entrusted to his care, as well as the horse’s harness equipment. He stood trial in front of the Recorder of Leeds at the Leeds Police Court on 31^st March 1914, where he pleaded guilty and received a sentence of six months imprisonment with hard labour in HMP Leeds, at Armley.

It is likely that the Great War had begun when Arthur Capp walked out of Armley Jail, and by the middle of October, he had enlisted into the 1/7^th Battalion, the Leeds Rifles. His previous military training, wasted though it was the first time around, may have helped him to get through his recruit’s training quickly enough to be included in the battalion when it left the UK for France in April 1915 to begin it’s service on the Western Front.

The Prison at Armley, in Leeds in a postcard from the early 1900s 

Nothing is known from primary sources of the early war service of Arthur Capp, and the battalion War Diary is unusually brief, frustratingly so at times. Arthur Capp isn’t mentioned in any capacity, good or bad, and it is to the register of Courts Martial that we must turn in order to learn that he was sentenced to 42 days Field Punishment Number 1 on 30^th November 1915 after being found guilty of the military offence of ‘Quitting his Post’, an offence that carried the death penalty as it’s maximum sentence. The conviction by Field General Court Martial, convened at Clairmarais, Northeast of St Omer in France, also caused the 1914-15 Star that he had qualified for (when this medal was instituted in December 1918), to be forfeited. That he didn’t receive the maximum of 90 days, is somewhat surprising, however, he may have submitted compelling mitigation at his trial.

Field Punishment came in two degrees of severity, Number 1, and Number 2.

A soldier sentenced to receive Field Punishment Number 1, could, unless otherwise directed by the court, be:

A. Kept in irons.

B. Attached by straps, irons or ropes for not more than two hours in one day to a fixed object. Must not be attached for more than three out of four consecutive days, or for more than 21 days in all.

C. Made to labour as if he were undergoing imprisonment with hard labour.

If the battalion was on the move during a soldier’s period of Field Punishment, section B. would not be carried out, but the soldier would be treated like a Defaulter, and would be assigned extra fatigue duties. He would also be expected to carry his weapon and all normal marching order when on the move, which a soldier sentenced to detention would not be allowed to carry.

Arthur Capp next appears in official communications when his name was published in a War Office casualty list dated 4^th January 1916, and it is possible that he was wounded when the position men from the battalion were holding at La Belle Alliance was shelled on 28^th December 1915, though the battalion diary does not record any casualties on that date. It is equally as likely that he may have been wounded on any one of the nightly working parties that the battalion was tasked to find in order to support the units in the front line trenches when they were in reserve on ‘rest’. 

Once fit, Arthur Capp returned to his battalion, and presumably stayed with it as it moved to the Somme in preparation for the major Anglo-French offensive, the infantry element of which began on 1^st July, though it was preceeded by a week long intensive artillery offensive. At the very beginning of the offensive, the division to which 1/7^th Leeds Rifles belonged, the 49^th (West Riding) Division, was held in reserve in Thiepval Wood behind the 36^th (Ulster) Division which was tasked to attack uphill towards strongly fortified German positions on Thiepval Ridge. The Ulstermen made an admirable advance and succeeded in penetrating the German line in several places, but it came at a terrible price in the lives of the men who attacked. As a result, later in the day, the Riflemen from Leeds were brought forward to support beleaguered men from the North of Ireland.

One party of Leeds Rifleman, under the command of Corporal George Sanders, from Holbeck succeeded in entering and holding a portion of the fearsome Schwaben Redoubt, where they stayed for 36 hours, beating back numerous attempts by the Germans to get rid of them, until the Ulstermen came to their relief. In recognition of this action, Cpl Sanders received the Victoria Cross and an immediate promotion to the rank of Sergeant, and some of the surviving Riflemen with him were rewarded with Military Medals. The Victoria Cross to Cpl Sanders is, and was at the time, hugely controversial in the battalion, and the circumstances surrounding that controversy will be explained in a future blog post.

By the beginning of September, the battalion was out of the line and in reserve at Martinsart Wood, but half the battalion left for Forceville, leaving the other half to continue providing working parties for a further two days, rejoining the battalion on 10^th September. It appears that Rifleman Capp was one of those men left working, and that he was wounded while doing that work. His name appears in a casualty list dated 14^th September 1916. Though the local newspapers reproduced the casualty lists, none gave any further details of a wounded local man. As a result, nothing is known of when Arthur Capp returned to the battalion.

What is known is that the battalion had found its way back to its old sector from the early days of its war and the men provided the garrisons for the trench networks around Laventie, La Gorgue, and Fauquissart, where they had been in mid-1915. On 25th May, the battalion came out the line to undergo a program of training, and this relative period of settled existence out of the line appears to have given Rifleman Capp the incentive to get away on his own initiative, but ultimately he must have been caught. Being twice wounded and twice recovered did not lessen his appetite for trouble, and on 31^st May 1917, he was back in front of a court martial board, this time for absence and breaking out of camp, and for disobedience. For this offence, he received fifty-six days of Field Punishment Number 1.

Instructional drawing showing how to restrain a soldier undergoing Field Punishment Number 1

The battalion continued its period of training through into September 1917, having moved up to the coast a short distance inside Belgium from its border with France. The men moved into camp in the sand dunes at Ghyvelde and spent an entire month in relative comfort and safety. In a rather curious, but unknown episode; the circumstances are not recorded, something must have gone wrong for Rifleman Capp during this period of training as his name appears for a final time in the casualty lists, this time one published on 10^th September. The wound for which he was listed must not have been particularly serious, because on 29^th October, only three weeks after his courageous solo attack on the German machine gunners at Peter Pan, he was once more facing a Court Martial.

Rifleman Capp was charged with Desertion, another purely military crime for which the death penalty was a sentencing option upon conviction. With his already quite appalling record of absences, Arthur Capp can be considered lucky not to have been awarded a death penalty for his crime. Instead, he received a further period of 90 days Field Punishment Number 1, the maximum penalty allowable in this form of punishment.

Lieutenant Colonel Tetley recorded in his diary that there was indeed a suspended death penalty already hanging over Rifleman Capp before his exploit at Peter Pan, and that another conviction for a capital crime should have been the end of him, but due to Capp’s bravery in action on 9^th October, this suspended death penalty was quashed, and in time, the account of the offence was expunged from Capp’s record.

Officers and men who witnessed Capp’s solo routing of the German machine gun position at Peter Pan thought it well worthy of a Victoria Cross, but Lt Colonel Tetley felt he could not forward such a recommendation in respect of a man with such an awful record of military crime. Capp would receive the DCM instead.

The Distinguished Conduct Medal

Meanwhile, Albert Capp, Arthur’s brother, whom he followed into the Army was fighting with his battalion, 2^nd Battalion, Durham Light Infantry. His battalion was in action northeast of Ribecourt on 21^st November 1917 when Albert Edward Capp was killed in action. His body was not immediately recovered, but he was later identified, and his remains were concentrated into Fifteen Ravine British Cemetery at Villers-Plouich, a short distance to the south of where he was killed.

In his final appearance before a war time Court Martial, this time for the dual charges of Absence and Breaking Out of Camp, as well as Escaping Confinement (he was in confinement for an unknown reason). Convicted once more, on 29^th June 1918, it seems the military authorities had exhausted their patience with Rifleman Capp. He was sentenced to 18 months in military detention with hard labour. It may well be that just as Capp was in Prison when the war began, he was also in prison when it ended. 

When the war ended, the army faced the enormous task of returning hundreds of thousands of men to civil life with as expeditiously as was possible. Lt Colonel Tetley and his staff would be faced with the task of prioritising which men they should released from service first and decide upon an order for disembodiment (the Territorial Force’s method of standing men down from active service) in a descending order of merit. For many men it would be a straightforward process, if lengthy and prone to causing frustration and upset among those who felt they were being unnecessarily delayed in getting home. The army designed a system whereby men would be discharged according to their civil occupations in order to get the country back on its feet as quickly as possible. Whatever the battalion commander might have felt about Rifleman Capp, Capp was not disembodied until 13^th February 1920.

If the Army thought it was rid of a disciplinary nightmare, it was wrong. Arthur Capp re-enlisted into the Royal Army Ordnance Corps on 20^th February 1920. It may well be that he had realised that his civil record of convictions, and his terrible record in the war, could not be rectified by his possession of a Distinguished Conduct Medal.  His prospects of securing a decent job in the post war Leeds would have been extremely small, especially as many of the officers he would have come into contact with during it were members of companies across the city with the power to offer or deny employment to any applicant.

King George Docks, Hull in the 1930s

The army gave him a chance to create for himself a future where his past needn’t necessarily count against him. It might have done just that if he hadn’t been convicted by a military court at York on 11^th May 1921 on charges of Desertion and the Loss of Public Property or Equipment. For these crimes he was awarded 56 days detention, with the attendant stoppages of pay. 

Arthur Capp left the army and moved to Hull, gaining employment in the docks as a keelman. He married Edith Walmsley in late 1924. Together, they had a son, also named Charles Arthur, in 1928. 

The marriage was not without its trouble, and he abandoned Edith and his young son to fend for themselves, and so it was that, in July 1931 he was brought before Hull magistrates at the police court to answer for it. He was sent to prison for a month with hard labour. Whether this episode was the catalyst or not, it appears that there was a reconciliation between Arthur Capp and Edith, and the family was reunited, living at Salisbury Terrace in Hull. 

Docks have always been a dangerous place to work, and on 17^th October 1931, Arthur Capp was seriously injured in an accident at work. He was part of a team unloading tiles from the hold of a ship. The first load of tiles, weighing 17cwt was almost clear of the ship when the rope attached to the hook of the crane snapped, showering loose tiles on the men below. Arthur Capp was hit on the leg and was taken away to Hull Royal Infirmary, where his shattered leg was set and cast in plaster. The bone refused to heal, and the break was recast. Mrs Capp, who had known her husband since 1918 said that she had never once known him to get ill, but after the accident his health broke down and he contracted pneumonia. He was admitted to Beverley Road Institution where the pneumonia did not respond to treatment, and Arthur Capp died there four days later at the age of 38 years.