The First Military Medal awarded to a West Yorkshire Regiment Soldier

 

1817 Private Arthur James Allen, 1/5^th Bn, West Yorkshire Regiment

The Great War was nineteen months old when the decision to institute a new medal as a reward for acts of individual bravery created the Military Medal. Until that point, the bravery of non-commissioned officers and soldiers could attract medals in the form of the Victoria Cross, for the very highest, most conspicuous levels of gallantry, or the Distinguished Conduct Medal for lesser acts of bravery or devotion to duty. At the lower end of the scale, the Mention in Despatches was a further reward, but at the time, there was no wearable emblem issued to those mentioned.

The London Gazette Announces the Institution of the Military Medal

The Military Medal would form the third tier of reward for those below commissioned rank in the Army. The precedent had been set with the institution, in 1914, of the Distinguished Service Medal for Ratings and Petty Officers of the Royal Navy, and the Military Cross for Warrant officers and junior commissioned officers, up to and including Captains, in the Army.

During the war, the Military Medal would become the most awarded medal in the British gallantry series, with over 115000 medals being awarded. Further acts of bravery could be rewarded with a bar to be fixed to the ribbon the medal was suspended from. One Australian soldier, Cpl Corey, added three bars to his Military Medal, signifying four awards.

The most junior soldiers of the British Army were not well paid; the basic pay of an infantry soldier amounted to a shilling per day. Additional increments in pay could be gained for good shooting, qualifying for good conduct badges, or by taking qualifications which made him a more versatile or valuable soldier. Those men who had seen their own personal gallantry rewarded with either a Victoria Cross or a Distinguished Conduct Medal also received payments in respect of those awards, both during their service, and in retirement. The VC attracted a £10 annuity, while the DCM recipient was awarded a 6d per day uplift in his pay while in service, or to his pension in retirement, or a one-off payment of £20 if he left the army without a pension.

Because the Military Medal brought its recipients no financial reward, it was greeted with scorn and scepticism by some Regular Army soldiers, who dismissed it as ‘cheap’, and criticised the government for ‘penny pinching’, and saw it as an excuse to award fewer DCMs, thus saving the extra payments the recipients received. It was not until after the Second World War that payments began to be made to the recipients of the Military Medal, but only those whose medals were awarded since 2^nd September 1939, leaving their Great War comrades without any financial reward.

The first awards of the Military Medal appeared in the London Gazette on 3^rd June 1916, and among them were the names of twenty-one soldiers of the West Yorkshire Regiment, nine of whom were soldiers of the Territorial Force battalions. While some of the awards were made for the reporting period immediately prior to the publication of the Gazette, it is known, largely thanks to the work of Howard Williamson, that many of the awards were retrospective and rewarded acts of bravery going all the way back to the beginning of the war. The first West Yorkshire Regiment soldier to be listed in that first Military Medal Gazette was a Territorial Force soldier, 1817 Private Arthur James Allen of 1/5^th Battalion, from York. His MM was awarded for his actions on 19^th December 1915, during the first use of phosgene gas by the Germans on British positions in front of Boezinge, north of Ypres in Belgian Flanders.

Most Military Medal awards published in the London Gazette are not accompanied by their citation – the story of the action for which the medal was granted. Occasionally an account of the action may be found in the man’s battalion, or unit war diary, or the diary of the higher formation his unit belonged to, but they are the minority. The citations which were written up and submitted for consideration were later collated and stored in a War Office archive warehouse in Arnside Street in Walworth, south London, but the building was bombed during the 1940 Blitz, resulting in the destruction by fire of the citations for the Military Medal, and millions of other documents. Because of this loss, it is now impossible to accurately tell the story behind the award of a Military Medal for most of those awarded. Perhaps the best source of information on the reasons why a soldier received a MM is the local or provincial newspaper, and it is the product of a combination of newspaper articles that provides the bulk of the story of the MM awarded to Private Allen.

Before dawn on 19^th December 1915 phosgene gas was released from a network of cylinders and pipes from German positions near Wieltje, and the cloud it produced was rolled across to British lines by an easterly breeze. The alert British sentries had raised the alarm when they saw flares rise from the German lines, and shortly before the gas was released. Along the line, the Germans opened a sustained period of small arms fire against the British across no man’s land, which was, in places, only 20 metres wide, but except for a few isolated sections of the line, there was no infantry attack to follow the gas. Where German infantrymen did advance towards the British line they were mostly shot down before reaching it. A patrol of about thirty Germans did enter the British line, but they were immediately overwhelmed, either being killed or captured.

A Map of the Canal Area dating from early 1916

Despite the alertness of their sentries, the West Riding Division suffered many gas casualties, not only in the front line, but the support and reserve line too. A notable exception was the 1/6^th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, from Bradford. That battalion’s Gas Officer was known to be extremely thorough in his training of the battalion in anti-gas measures and ensured that their drills to fit their gas helmets became second nature. His obsessiveness in his role, which had brought him into conflict with his chain of command, paid dividends and ensured that gas casualties in his battalion were much fewer than in neighbouring battalions.

Private Allen’s company was in reserve trenches some 200 metres behind the front line during the gas attack, and as the Germans had not followed the gas up with an infantry attack, his company was not called forward during the day. Instead, the men remained in position and sheltered as best they could from the constant artillery barrage the Germans had put down throughout the day. As dusk fell, he was among several men who volunteered to go forward to search for casualties. The last of the daylight was gone by the time Arthur Allen and his friend had found a stretcher, and as they made their way to the front line, the German shells continued to fall all around them. When they reached the front line, they found that the trenches had been destroyed in the barrage, but there was no shortage of casualties to choose from. The Advanced Dressing Station at Essex Farm was very badly damaged, so the men were forced to convey their casualty to Hospital Farm, where the division had another dressing station established. Arthur Allen and his friend had made the journey through a continuing artillery barrage, and though gas was no longer being actively released, it had settled onto the ground. Every time the men took cover, throwing themselves down, they would transfer gas droplets onto their uniforms and inhale gas in the air. Nevertheless, Private Allen and his friend returned to the front line to collect another casualty, returning to Hospital Farm with him.

Altogether, Private Allen and his friend had been at their work for more than four hours and were exposed to gas and falling shells throughout that time. They had covered more than ten miles, and potentially saved the lives of two men. That they would have been exhausted from their efforts is beyond question.

The PH Helmet, Introduced in October 1915

Despite the fact that Arthur Allen’s exposure to gas did not immediately incapacitate him, it did cause him to be admitted to the Field Ambulance a week later. He was transferred to a base hospital at Le Havre before being sent back to England. He remained in hospital for three months, but when he was released from hospital, he was not fit for immediate further service on the front line and was transferred to the newly formed Royal Defence Corps. The Corps was tasked with guarding and security duties at important installations such as ports, railways, and munitions factories across Great Britain. By the end of the war, more than half of the Royal Defence Corps was employed guarding Prisoners of War.

Arthur Allen was promoted to Lance Corporal, and served at Lincoln Barracks, which was used as the regimental depot of the Lincolnshire Regiment. He was presented with his Military Medal by Colonel George Ivatt, the Commanding Officer of the depot, at a specially arranged parade. The recruits going through their training were formed up, and L/Cpl Allen was marched out to the front of the parade. Col Ivatt addressed the parade and gave an account of the action carried out by L/Cpl Allen before pinning the medal to Allen’s tunic, following up with a warm handshake. The newspaper report states that Arthur Allen’s parents and his fiancée were among the guests invited to witness the parade, although the ‘parents’ are more likely to have been his aunt and uncle, who had raised him since childhood (Arthur Allen’s birth mother had died in 1909).

Arthur Allen continued to serve with the Royal Defence Corps in England until at least October 1917, when the York Herald ran an article when a second member of his family, a cousin was also awarded the Military Medal. Despite being cousins, Arthur Allen had been brought up in the same household by Ernest Allen’s parents since childhood, which caused some people to mistake them for brothers. Ernest Allen served with the 21^st Battalion (2^nd Tyneside Scottish), Northumberland Fusiliers, and had been in France since January 1917. He was decorated for bravery during the Third Battle of Ypres, more commonly remembered simply as ‘Passchendaele’. It is interesting that the newspaper article was published three weeks before Ernest Allen’s MM was promulgated in the London Gazette.

York Herald Supplement, 27th October 1917, Ernest Allen (Left), and Arthur Allen (Right) Both Received the Military Medal

Between October 1917, and April 1918, Arthur Allen was assessed to be fit to return to the front line, and he was duly transferred back into the West Yorkshire Regiment, although this time, he was posted to 1/7^th Battalion (Leeds Rifles), and a place was found for him in B Company. The battalion had very recently received drafts of new men, most of them under 20 years old, and there had been no time to fully integrate them into the battalion before it went into action between Bogaert Farm and Pick Wood on Wytschaete Ridge, south of Ypres, during the Battle of the Lys. The fighting came just a week after Field Marshal Haig had issued his famous ‘Backs to the Wall’ special order of the day in view of the renewed and dangerous German advances. On 16^th April 1918, the Germans emerged from thick fog, undetected by the Leeds Riflemen until they were practically surrounded and overwhelmed. Arthur Allen was wounded in the head but lived to be picked up off the battlefield by the Germans as they continued to advance. Despite being an experienced and decorated fighting soldier, Arthur Allen was still only 19 years old.

Devastation at Kemmel in 1918

Arthur Allen was evacuated for treatment for his head wound and would later be held in a prison camp near Minden in northern Germany. At the end of August 1918, he was transferred to Chateau d’Oex in Switzerland and interned there under an agreement between the UK and Germany, brokered by the Red Cross. To have been considered as a suitable candidate for transfer, his head wound must have left him in a condition which rendered him unfit for any further fighting, and in need of further treatment which could not be provided in a prison camp in Germany, due to there being a shortage of doctors not engaged in duties closer to the front lines. He was repatriated at the end of the war and reached England on 9^th December 1918. He was granted two months’ leave, following which he was disembodied – the term used when Territorial Force soldiers were released from full-time service.

The former Sanatorium at Chateau d'Oex, where Arthur Allen was likely to have been interned

Arthur James Allen was born on 18^th May 1898, in York. He was a son of James and Sarah Ann Allen. James was a boilersmith, and given that the family lived in the Bootham area of York, it is likely that James was employed by the North Eastern Railway company. Sarah Allen died in 1909, leaving James to bring up his family alone, and by 1911, Arthur Allen is shown as living with his Uncle Harry and Aunt Elizabeth in North View, in Holgate.

Despite being underage, he was only 16, when war was declared, Arthur Allen quickly enlisted into the 5^th Battalion, the West Yorkshire Regiment, which was headquartered, and maintained three companies at the Colliergate Drill Hall in York, just two weeks into the war.

When the main body of the battalion embarked for France in April 1915, Arthur Allen did not go with it. He was sent out to France on 29^th May, just after he had turned 17.

After his repatriation from internment in Switzerland, Arthur Allen was assessed for a pension which commenced on 4^th April 1919. In 1920 his degree of disability was put at 40%, and he received a weekly pension of 16 shillings, which was not far short of what a railway labourer might earn, so it appears that his pension was an acknowledgement that he was unable to work. A slight improvement over the year saw his disability downgraded to 30%, and his pension was reduced accordingly to 12 shillings per week.

Dennison Street (right) in the Groves Area of York

Despite his disability, and his inability to work, Arthur Allen was able to live independently, and he lived in Kingsland Terrace in Holgate until he married Lucy Ethel Dykes (née Burrill), a widow, in 1930, when the couple moved into a house in Dennison Street, in the Groves area of York.

In 1924 Arthur Allen was one of two ex-servicemen who were elected to become Freemen of the City of York as representatives of all the citizens of the city who had served in the Great War. The other man was George Thomas Welborn DCM, MM, a former sergeant in the Middlesex Regiment who was from Clifton.

Lucy and Arthur Allen did not have children together, and Arthur Allen died in 1936 at the age of 38. Lucy married James Bolton at the end of 1937, and the couple remained together until her death in 1978.

Arthur Allen's Military Medal and 1914-15 Star Trio of Medals awarded for his bravery and service in the Great War