From Ice Floes to Battlefields

by Anne Strathie

  On 3 February Nelson and his men took part in an attack on the German front line east of Beaucourt. During the advance, which took place in the dark, contact was lost between Nelson Battalion and Hawke, which was on its flank. As a result of this and confusion regarding some orders, one Nelson company retired before being relieved by replacement troops.

  On the afternoon of 4 February, while Hawke and three Nelson companies were trying to capture a German machine-gun position, Edward Nelson was ordered to hand over to his second in command, Captain Griffiths, and report to Brigade HQ. When he returned just over an hour later he found that a small group of Nelson and Hawke men had seized the German position. Gains had been made but a further nineteen Nelson men had died and almost forty were wounded.

  In mid-March, the Nelsons marched for a week to new billets near Béthune, close to the Arras-Vimy Ridge.

  On the night of 4–5 April Able Seaman William Attwood of Nelson Battalion was found in the guardroom, dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Attwood, who had a poor disciplinary record, had recently been found guilty of ‘prejudicial behaviour’ and sentenced to three months of ‘Field Punishments’, which usually involved being tied up in front of fellow-soldiers (in the tradition of medieval stocks). When Attwood had initially been arrested Nelson (perhaps remembering his own reservations about Dyett’s state of mind) had asked for Attwood to be examined by the battalion’s Medical Officer to ensure he was fit to stand trial. The MO had found Attwood to be mentally unstable but not of ‘unsound mind’ or unaware of his actions. The enquiry into Attwood’s death established that he had shot himself while of ‘unsound mind’ but failed to establish how a loaded gun had come to be in his possession while he was under detention.

  During the following week Nelson and his men were held in reserve during Allied attacks on German strongholds around Arras; on one occasion they had been within two hours of being called forward but had been stood down.

  On 13 April Nelson was ordered to bring his men forward to the area north of Arras, where, following a night under canvas, they arrived the following morning. Within a few hours of arriving, at noon on 14 April 1917, Nelson was relieved of his command without prior notification or warning.

  Edward Nelson left for England that day. At Aubigny, north-west of Arras, he bumped into Arthur Asquith, who had recovered from his most recent injuries and was on his way to rejoin Hood Battalion.13 He was surprised at the timing of Nelson’s departure – and suggested that Nelson could always apply to ‘teach the Yanks’ who would soon be arriving to support the Allies on the Western Front.

  It was almost two years since the President of the United States had protested at the sinking of the Lusitania, with the loss of almost 1,200 passengers and crew, including over 100 Americans – and would-be Antarctic explorer J. Foster Stackhouse.

  America’s entry into the war might, as widely hoped, change everything on the Western Front – but Edward Nelson would need to wait until he arrived in England to see where his next posting would take him.

  In early April 1918 it was reported in The Times and newspapers all over Britain that former journalist and war correspondent Lieutenant Bertie John ‘B.J.’ Hodson had been killed in action in the Somme region. Hodson had signed up for active duty in 1915 after reporting from the Balkans, Antwerp, Ypres and the Dardanelles.14 When asked what regiment he wanted to join he answered that he would prefer to join one which was ‘fighting the Turks’. Despite his wishes, his first tour of duty with the Royal Irish Regiment had been in Ireland, following the Easter uprising. By July 1916 he was with the 1st Royal Irish Rifles on the Western Front. Within ten days of arriving he was shot in the head and shoulder and evacuated to hospital in Boulogne, but by September he was back at the front. Hodson died near St Quentin on 21 March 1918 whilst trying to defend a redoubt with greatly reduced forces.

  Reporters wrote warmly of one of their own.15 It was recalled that Hodson had helped operate a machine gun on the roof of his Antwerp hotel while Zeppelins passed overhead and had, whilst under fire, joined gunners at a heavy artillery position in Montenegro. One tribute mentioned that Hodson’s work had been highly praised by an eminent former war correspondent:16

  Lieutenant Hodson was responsible for a number of excellent messages from Belgium … One of these, which dealt with the fall of Antwerp, won warm praise from Mr. Winston Churchill, who agreed with one of the heads of the Press Bureau that both in matter and manner it might rank with the best written of official dispatches. The tribute, however, did not save it from the very liberal application of the Whitehall blue pencil.

  Bertie John ‘B.J.’ Hodson, who left a wife and two young children, had come a long way since he and Harry Pennell had met in Akaroa in April 1912.

  Notes

  Information sources include Swales, Sellers (Hood Battalion, Death for Desertion, RND Journal), Page, Freyberg, service and other publicly available records.

  1. F.S. Kelly’s journal entry (unpublished), 1 March 1916 (information from Thérèse Radic).

  2. F.S. Kelly’s journal entry (unpublished), 3 March 1916 (information from Thérèse Radic).

  3. Confirmed by a member of Nelson’s family (2014).

  4. Kelly, Kelly’s War, journal entry of 6 17 May 1916 (pp. 212–13).

  5. Sellers, Hood Battalion, p. 168; Page, p. 86. Nelson’s presence is mentioned by Kelly in his journal entry of16 September 1916 (Kelly, Kelly’s War, p. 261–2).

  6. Page, p. 87.

  7. A.P. Herbert went on to become a famous writer, humourist, satirist and Member of Parliament.

  8. From General Sir Ian Hamilton’s dispatch of 11 December 1915.

  9. Sellers, Death for Desertion, p. 52.

  10. The attack on Beaucourt is described in considerable detail in Freyberg, chapter 6.

  11. For full details of Dyett’s court martial see Sellers, Death for Desertion, chapter 3.

  12. It has been suggested that Haig had decided to make an example of an officer as there had been complaints from other ranks that officers were more likely to receive clemency if given a death penalty.

  13. Page, pp. 109–10.

  14. James W. Taylor (2002), The 1st Royal Irish Rifles in the Great War, Dublin: Four Courts Press, p. 260.

  15. Information from Hodson’s obituary in The Times, 12 April 1918.

  16. Evening Telegraph & Post, 12 April 1918, quoting the Daily News.

  15

  Of Scientists, Sailors and Shackleton

  Raymond Priestley had joined London Regiment’s Wireless Section as a Second Lieutenant in September 1914; following spells in Bury St Edmunds, Beccles and Bewdley, he found himself working in Worcester, about 10 miles from his family home in Tewkesbury.1 Priestley modestly claimed that he had only been offered his current post as second in command after the previously favoured candidate had crashed a ‘borrowed’ army motorbike, broken his arm and been disciplined for the unauthorised removal of the motorbike.

  Priestley’s brother-in-law, Silas Wright, had spent much of the war in the wireless section of the Royal Engineers, working in France on the development of wireless equipment which could be used to communicate between trenches.2 Wright’s work had gone well from a technical standpoint but his promotion to lieutenant had been temporarily delayed after his instructions to his men to drive in the centre of the road (rather than risk ‘ditching’ their vehicles and damaging costly radio equipment) had resulted in a chauffeur-driven staff car being ‘ditched’ instead.

  Wright, knowing that Cherry-Garrard enjoyed receiving news from other ‘Antarctics’ and sometimes needed cheering up, wrote to him from France:3

  Am searching diligently now for places where we come nearest to the Bosch trenches … Have seen none of the Expedish since leaving England almost a year ago … Give me, I beg of you of it, (as they say in Turkey?) the address of old Atch – he seems to have been having a feeble time too. Ray Priestley is still cursing me for letting him in to wireless but has a prett
y fair job now at Worcester – where the Worcestershire sauce comes from y’ know. I must drop a line to old Penelope now that I know his address. Ray is all over himself now he is a prrroud father. Hustle up and get well, old man. Will hope to see you in die grezt ADVANCE.

  In early July Wright wrote again:4

  Sorry to hear you are still groggy. I didn’t realize last time I was over that you were not up or I’d have made a desperate effort to come over and see you …

  Damn the great push – they never push where I am. Hear from Atch occasionally. Saw Meares a little while ago &, of all people, Prof. David. He is a proper sport – out here with the Aust. Miners as a major & still his same old self.

  It’s very sad about Penelope. Next to Dr. Bill [Wilson] he’s the finest I ever met …

  It’s damned hard lines for you being laid up this way, but there’s no use worrying about ‘being out of it’. I’ll bet you are doing much more useful work than I am at least … Well, Cherry, here’s to a speedy recovery. Keep Cheery and live up to the name anyway.

  Cherry-Garrard also heard from Frank Debenham, who told him that, compared to France, there was ‘not much happening’ in Salonika, where the city was protected by a huge barbed-wire fence known as the ‘Birdcage Line’.5

  In August 1916 Debenham’s regiment was sent to join some 40,000 British and French troops in the countryside around Lake Doiran, on the Bulgarian border. Shortly after Debenham helped capture a Bulgarian position, he was badly injured by a shell, which landed beside him and exploded. His hearing was also damaged and he was diagnosed as suffering from shell-shock. He was sent for treatment in England where, while recuperating, he began spending time with Dorothy Lempriere, a fellow-Australian who was also living in England. After they became engaged Debenham asked Cherry to serve as best man at his wedding, which would take place in the New Year.6

  Cherry had been taking an interest in the increasing use of tanks on the Western Front. These cumbersome, armour-plated vehicles with caterpillar tyres bore a family resemblance to the motorised sledges which had been on the first stage of the South Pole journey in 1911. While Cherry had been driving his armoured cars, he had been asked to come to London to give his views on a prototype being developed by RNAS engineers at Wormwood Scrubs.7 Army leaders on the Western Front now set great store on armoured tanks which could drive across trenches and might break the current deadlock.

  In early November 1916 Terra Nova veterans Tom Crean and Alf Cheetham returned to Britain from what Shackleton had, before leaving, described as ‘white warfare’.8 Crean sailed back to Britain in company with Thomas Orde-Lees, Frank Wild, Leonard Hussey, James McIlroy, James Wordie, George Marston, Alexander Macklin, Reginald James and Robert Clark. The ship’s passenger records showed their most recent residence as ‘Sea’ and their destination as ‘HM Forces’.9 When Alf Cheetham returned with fellow Terra Nova crew member Thomas McLeod, Charles Green, Albert Holness and Walter How, the passenger list showed their prior residence as ‘Antarctica’.

  Cheetham had, in his absence, gained another daughter, Ella, who had been born six months after he left on the Endurance; his eldest daughter, Caroline, had also given him his first grandchild. But Alf’s second son, William, was presumed to have gone down with his ship, the collier Adriatic, which had been lost with all hands at the end of October, after apparently being struck by a German torpedo in the North Atlantic. William had been 16 years old.

  Cheetham and Crean were, everyone knew, lucky to have returned alive and well from Shackleton’s latest expedition. After the Weddell Sea had frozen early, the Endurance had become trapped in the pack-ice. She had gradually been crushed and had, in November 1915, sunk beneath the ice.

  Shackleton and his men had dragged their three lifeboats, the James Caird, Dudley Docker and Stancomb Wills, to the edge of the ice, then sailed to barren, uninhabited Elephant Island. Shackleton, Crean, Timothy McCarthy, Frank Worsley, Harry ‘Chippy’ McNish and John Vincent had then rowed the James Caird almost 800 miles to South Georgia. After sending a wireless message to England, Shackleton had then set about relieving Alf Cheetham and the other men on Elephant Island. By the time he reached them they had been there for four months.

  After ensuring Crean, Cheetham and their shipmates were safely on their way to England, Shackleton and Worsley sailed to New Zealand from where they planned to rescue members of the Ross Sea party, who had been left stranded after the Aurora had broken away from her Cape Evans moorings and been driven north by the pack.

  Winston Churchill, who had authorised the departure of the Endurance in August 1914, was now commanding a regiment on the Western Front. He let it be known that he ranked the rescue of a few men from the land of penguins well below the needs of injured soldiers and the families of those who had died in the war.10 Cherry-Garrard wrote to The Times with assurances that the Ross Sea Party would find the Cape Evans hut well stocked with sledging biscuits, pemmican and other necessities.11

  When Shackleton and Worsley arrived in Wellington they found the British, Australian and New Zealand governments had collectively spent £20,000 on repairs to the Aurora. Joseph Kinsey had been authorised to appoint Mawson’s Aurora captain, John Davis, as commander for the relief voyage. Shackleton protested but failed to convince Kinsey to appoint either Worsley or his own Aurora captain Joseph Stenhouse instead.

  On 20 December 1916 Davis and Shackleton sailed south on the Aurora, leaving Worsley and Stenhouse to return to Britain to sign up for the war. By New Year’s Day 1917 the Aurora was through the pack and heading for Cape Evans to rescue the Ross Sea Party.

  On 26 December 1916, Cherry-Garrard learned that his cousin Reginald Smith had jumped to his death from a second-floor window of his London home.12 Smith, whom The Times described as ‘a wise and generous publisher’, had been suffering for some time from overwork, stress and insomnia. Cherry, other family members and close friends, including Oriana Wilson and Kathleen Scott, attended a private family funeral on 29 December. In early January Cherry, other family members and luminaries from publishing, legal and other circles in which ‘Reggie’ had worked and moved joined family members for a memorial service.

  As there was no one within the family who could replace Reggie within Smith, Elder & Co., an approach was made to John Murray, a long-standing friend and associate whose family owned an even longer-standing publishing house.13

  At the inquest it had been suggested that Reginald Smith had been feeling depressed about the war. Cherry also sometimes found it difficult to be on the receiving end of what sometimes felt like a constant stream of bad news.

  Teddy Evans appeared to thrive under the pressures of war. By early 1917 he was in command of HMS Broke, which had been transferred from the Grand Fleet to the Dover Patrol after Jutland. The Broke’s six guns and four torpedo tubes were a welcome addition to the fifty-vessel Patrol, which had recently been supplemented by monitor ship HMS M24, a heavily armed vessel commanded by Victor Campbell.14

  In early 1917 German ships began probing the defence systems in the Channel. On the night of 20 April, Evans (on the Broke) and Commander Ambrose Peck (on the Swift) were patrolling near the Channel barrage.15 When they saw flashes they realised that a squadron of German destroyers was bombarding Dover. As Broke and Swift headed towards the direction of the flashes the German ships slipped away. Evans and Peck resumed their patrolling but when they saw five or six German destroyers just east of Dover they headed straight for them. As German gunners and Peck’s men exchanged fire Evans swung the Broke round until she was at right angles to the line of German vessels and prepared to ram one of the destroyers.

  When his first target was hit by a torpedo (probably from the Swift), Evans redirected the Broke at G42, the next German ship in line. When the Broke rammed into the side of G42 she was travelling at almost 30 knots an hour. The Broke continued to move forward, with G42 attached to her bow. As flames from the Broke’s damaged fore area spread across to G42’s deck, some German sail
ors tried to escape by clambering onto the Broke’s deck. They were soon driven back by Broke crew members wielding pistols, bayoneted rifles and cutlasses which Evans had issued from a stock of weapons he kept under lock and key.

  As Evans tried to pull the Broke away from the now-sinking G42 another fire started in the boiler-room. By now a second German destroyer, G85, was beginning to sink. Some of her sailors jumped into the water; others clung to the deck and made it clear that they were willing to surrender. When a German sailor fired at the Broke’s bridge Evans ordered his men to return fire and to torpedo G85.

  During the hand-to-hand fighting, which lasted less than ten minutes, twenty Broke men had died and another thirty had been wounded. Peck, who had only lost one crew member, transported all the captured Germans back to Dover, leaving Evans to anchor his now powerless ship and wait for a relief vessel to take his dead and wounded ashore.

  The next day, after the Broke had been towed into Dover, Evans visited his wounded men in hospital. The bodies of the German sailors who had died in the raid were transported slowly and respectfully through the streets of Dover, followed by a procession of their captured comrades (accompanied by armed guards) and 300 British seamen, including some from the Swift and the Broke. A bugler from the Marines played the ‘Last Post’ over the mass grave in which the Germans were buried. A single wreath, placed on behalf of the Dover Patrol’s commanding officer, bore the inscription ‘A Tribute to a Brave Enemy’.

  That afternoon crowds lined Dover’s streets as the funeral procession for seven of the Broke seamen passed. The cortège, headed by a gun-carriage and military band, was followed by Evans, Peck and members of their ships’ crews, officers and men from other ships of the Dover Fleet and men from Dover garrison.