Deborah and the War of the Tanks

by John Taylor

  Tensions in Ireland had been growing in the years before the war, with the Protestant community becoming increasingly isolated not just from the majority Catholic population, but also from the British government as it made repeated attempts to introduce home rule in the yet unpartitioned island. The Unionists, fearing their interests were being ignored, had formed a militia called the Ulster Volunteer Force to resist home rule, but with the coming of war they agreed to set their grievances aside, and the UVF became a ready-trained unit of the British army known as 36th (Ulster) Division.

  As a member of the local Presbyterian church, William Galway’s allegiances were clear, and in September 1914 he and his younger cousin enlisted together in 13th (Service) Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles, newly formed from the County Down Volunteers. The fact that both men had the same name and were in the same company might have caused confusion, but the younger William Galway failed to thrive in the army and suffered from a series of ailments during training, until he was finally discharged in May 1915 complaining of knee pain.24

  For all his flippancy, the older William was made of sterner stuff, and after training in Ireland and England he travelled to France with his battalion in October 1915.25 Unlike Territorial units from sleepy English shires, the army’s high command had no doubts about the fighting qualities of the Ulstermen, who came from what we would now call a tough neighbourhood, and were united by a common faith, a shared political ideology, and a fierce sense of pride. After a period of familiarization they were sent to hold a key sector of the line near the enemy stronghold of Thiepval, and remained there as preparations got under way for the enormous Allied push on the Somme in the summer of 1916.

  The opening of that offensive is generally regarded as the blackest day in the history of the British Army, but the heroic part played in it by 36th (Ulster) Division has entered the realms of military mythology. Rifleman William Galway’s unit, A Company of 13th Bn Royal Irish Rifles, found itself in the first wave of the attack against German positions on the gently rising ground north of Thiepval.

  Following a five-day bombardment, zero hour was fixed for 7.30 a.m. on 1 July – a propitious day for the Ulstermen, as it was the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne which had brought triumph for the Protestant King William. At 7.15 a.m., the men of the Royal Irish Rifles filed out of their trenches in Thiepval Wood and formed up in No Man’s Land. At zero the thunder of shelling was replaced by the rattle of small-arms fire and cries of ‘No Surrender’ as the attackers surged forward. The first two platoons of A Company reached the German front line with few casualties, overwhelmed the defenders, and moved on to seize the support trench behind. But the Germans were now emerging from their deep dugouts, and the second wave from A Company was caught in the open as it crossed No Man’s Land, losing a large number of men from machine-gun fire. The survivors then moved forward to the second-line trench, clearing the way with hand grenades. According to the battalion’s commanding officer, Colonel William Savage: ‘This trench was held for a considerable time, but owing to our bombs giving out & not getting any reinforcements we were ordered to retire back.’26

  To their right, the Ulstermen swept even further forward to occupy the complex of trenches known as the Schwaben Redoubt, but soon found themselves far ahead of their neighbouring units. Isolated and exposed to fire from both flanks, and in the face of determined German counter-attacks, they were eventually forced back to their starting positions leaving only a tenuous hold on a stretch of the German front line. The Schwaben Redoubt would remain in enemy hands for more than two months, until it was finally retaken by the Cambridgeshire Regiment, among others.

  For all their heroism, the Ulstermen had suffered a terrible defeat, though a glorious one. A message from Major-General Oliver Nugent, commander of 36th Division, was relayed to 13th Bn Royal Irish Rifles: ‘Ulster has every reason to be proud of the men she has given to the service of our country. Though many of our best men have gone the spirit which animated them remains in the Division and will never die.’27 The cost was summarized by the divisional historian: ‘Its casualties in the two days amounted to five thousand five hundred officers and other ranks killed, wounded, and missing. The whole Province was thrown into mourning for its sons.’28

  In William Galway’s company alone, the casualty return shows thirteen men were killed, thirty-four missing, and fifty-four wounded (including ten with shell shock).29 When the missing were accounted for, it turned out at least thirty-six men from A Company were dead.30 Among the wounded who made their way back to Thiepval Wood was Rifleman Galway,31 though the nature of his injuries is unknown. It was probably while he was recovering that the appeal came through for volunteers to join the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. Perhaps even his irrepressible sense of humour had been strained by the slaughter on the Somme, but whatever the reason, he transferred to the new unit on 19 October 1916, just over a month after the tanks had first gone into action.32

  From then on William Galway was separated from most of his fellow Ulstermen, and found himself in a very different unit dedicated to a new kind of warfare. It was not the last time he would come across 36th (Ulster) Division, though strangely enough, on the next occasion he would find his own life and those of his comrades were endangered by the actions of a small number of its men, who took a very different view of their obligations to the British Crown.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Sword of Deborah

  If the other crewmen had all the energy and some of the wildness of youth, the final member of Deborah’s crew who can be identified with certainty was a very different stamp of man. At thirty-six, Frederick William Tipping was considerably older than his comrades, not to mention many of their officers, and was the only crew member who was married with a family and an established position in life. The photographs show a lean, dapper figure in his clerk’s three-piece suit and collar and tie, complete with ornate watch-chain, or wearing a smart dress-coat; he looks as sober and serious as a Sunday sermon, apart from the cigarette or small cigar poised casually in his hand.1

  Fred Tipping’s life, and that of almost his entire family, revolved around the textile industry in the East Midlands city of Nottingham, and he seems to embody the prosperity and self-confidence of the workers who had seen their industry grow steadily during the previous century of peace. His father was a framework knitter, one of the hardy independent breed who had plied their trade in the region ever since the invention of a hand-operated machine that revolutionized the production of garments such as stockings, and who had woven the wealth of their city, row by row, on the clattering apparatus in the corner of their parlours. While hosiery remained a small-scale trade, the stocking frame used by the knitters had been developed into a machine for mass-producing lace and this was now the main local industry, satisfying the enormous demand from dressmakers and furnishers worldwide, and employing thousands of people – including Fred’s mother, who worked as a lace finisher or mender. Fred was brought up in the gritty suburb of Sneinton, where almost everyone worked in either mining or textiles, and it was not surprising that he found employment in the industry as a warehouseman, though his older half-brother Harry bucked the trend by training as a gas fitter.2

  In the summer of 1904, at the age of twenty-three, Fred married a local girl called Florrie, who worked – not surprisingly – as a lace finisher, and their first son was born before the year was out, followed at two-year intervals by two more sons. Fortunately, as his family grew, Fred seems to have gone up in the world, and by 1911 he had moved away from Sneinton towards the suburb of Carlton, and made the transition out of the warehouse and into the office to become a shipping clerk.3 Not only that, but he secured a post with one of Nottingham’s most prestigious firms, founded by the lace merchant Thomas Adams who combined business acumen with a philanthropic concern for his workers.4 Although Thomas was now dead, the company of Adams, Page and Co. had maintained his reputation and traditions, and continued to operate from t
he magnificent warehouse, complete with its own chapel, that he had built in the centre of Nottingham.

  With the coming of war, Fred Tipping does not seem to have been in any great hurry to enlist, which is understandable in view of his age and family responsibilities. We know little of his early military career, but when the war ended he was not entitled to receive the 1914–15 Star, the campaign medal awarded to those such as William Galway, Joseph Cheverton and George Macdonald who had served overseas in the first two years of the war. When he did enlist it was in the Royal Artillery, and a photograph shows him lounging cross-legged against a wall of sandbags, looking relaxed in his gunner’s uniform with spurs on his boots and a leather bandolier over his shoulder – both standard accoutrements for mounted troops.5

  The service cap at his feet displays the badge of the Royal Artillery with its battle honour ‘Ubique’, or ‘Everywhere’, reflecting the regiment’s participation in every major engagement involving the British Army. This was also the case in the First World War, so without knowing his battery or brigade number it is impossible to find out where he served. All we can say is he probably belonged to the crew of an 18-pounder, the quick-firing horse-drawn field gun that was the mainstay of his branch of the artillery, and at some point he transferred to the Tank Corps where his gunnery skills – and his maturity – would have been greatly valued. The photograph also shows him looking fuller in the face, reminding us that army life with its solid rations, fresh air and exercise brought unexpected health benefits for many who had been brought up in Britain’s industrial cities.

  However, it goes without saying that this was not always the case. Fred’s half-brother Harry enlisted in March 1916, and spent the summer in France with the King’s Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment). By the end of the year they were holding the line before Thiepval, the blasted hill that had been the crux of the fighting on the Somme earlier that year, and there he was killed a fortnight before Christmas, probably during routine shelling by artillery or trench mortars.6 For Fred Tipping, the war now had a very personal significance, and if the desire for revenge was in his heart, he was well-placed to exact it in his new role as a gunner in the Tank Corps.

  * * *

  We can name with certainty the commander and four crewmen of D51 Deborah, leaving a question-mark about three more crew members – including the driver, who was normally a sergeant or other senior NCO. Intriguingly, one man can be identified who took part in both the actions that involved D51, though there is no way of knowing whether he was in the crew of Deborah or another of No. 12 Company’s tanks. This was David Bertram Marsden, known as Bert, who had been born in West Yorkshire and spent his earliest years in a pit village where his parents ran a pub, before crossing the Pennines to settle on Merseyside. There he became a pork butcher, a trade that was dominated by émigrés from Germany, where the pig was devoured with gusto. Prominent among them was a dynasty called Dimler who ran a chain of shops across Liverpool and Bootle, and in 1911 Bert was working and boarding with the German-born Frederick Dimler and his wife at their establishment in the suburb of Walton.7

  Perhaps city life did not suit him, or perhaps he spotted a new opening, but after that Bert left Liverpool and moved north to a small town in Cumbria, where he set up as a pork butcher and began courting a local girl called Effie Grave. His family recall he was a keen motorcyclist,8 and this made him an ideal recruit when a new unit was formed called the Motor Machine Gun Service (MMGS) which operated motorbikes and sidecars armed with Vickers machine guns – a deadly combination under the right circumstances, but not under those now prevailing on the Western Front. Bert joined up in March 1915, and two months later he arrived in France with No. 9 Battery of the MMGS.9

  By coincidence, the same month saw a turning-point in the war with the sinking of the liner Lusitania by a U-boat with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives. The deaths of so many civilians triggered a wave of anti-German outrage in many British cities, not least Liverpool which had been Lusitania’s destination. The obvious targets for revenge were the German pork butchers whose shops and homes were systematically ransacked, including Bert Marsden’s former workplace, after which the mob turned its wrath on other businesses with foreign-sounding names, and finally on butchers’ shops in general to ensure no Germans had been missed. An unsuccessful attempt was made to burn down the residence of the Dimler family’s patriarch, and shortly after this two of his relatives enlisted in the Royal Artillery and served abroad before being discharged, almost certainly because they were regarded as enemy aliens.10

  Meanwhile the riots were brought under control after around 200 shops had been looted, and many people of German extraction were interned, partly for their own protection. There must have been plenty of opportunities for enterprising Britons to step in and replace them, but many – including Bert Marsden – were now preoccupied with a higher form of butchery.

  As for the MMGS, by the time it reached the front line it had been made virtually redundant by the stagnation of trench warfare, and instead of speeding round the battlefield on motorbikes the men found themselves in static emplacements, providing anti-aircraft defence or long-range overhead fire. As they struggled to establish a role for themselves, the battery’s War Diary often descended into chit-chat: ‘Men all comfortable. Played rounders in evening. Held an impromptu concert’, reads one entry. There are updates on people’s health and activities: ‘Lieut Croxford very seedy’; ‘Went up to trenches and got very wet’; ‘Men helped farmer to cut wild oats in fields but did more damage than work’. There was also a visit from two nurses which ended with a ‘very jolly tea’.11

  And so it dragged on, the most common entry being ‘Nothing to report’. On 1 July 1916, that day of catastrophe for the British Army, No. 9 Battery remained in camp, building a road and playing cricket. It was clear this could not go on for ever, and the diary concludes with a curt entry at the end of 1916: ‘Battery disbanded on Nov 14th.’12 The MMGS had run out of road, or rather had not found enough roads to run on, but at least it provided a trained cadre of men who were transferred more or less wholesale to another unit with an equally uncertain future, namely the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. These were the motor machine-gunners who Major Watson described as ‘smart fellows, without much experience of active operations’,13 and among them was Lance-Corporal Bert Marsden. He was married to Effie Grave while home on leave, and the wedding photograph shows he lost none of his smartness once he was in the uniform of the Tank Corps.14 At the same time, his new posting would bring far more experience of active operations than he would have imagined, and his new bride would have wished.

  * * *

  We have had an instructive afternoon in Oosthoek Wood, and it is fascinating to see the crewmen and to watch them at work, though frustrating that we cannot speak to them – since they are merely ghosts, or to use a less emotive term, projections of the past, and if we were to approach them they would vanish for ever, and we would be left alone among the dripping trees.

  Suddenly, interrupting our reverie, there is a loud, resounding thump in the woodland a few hundred yards away, followed by a long drawn-out crashing and splintering as shrapnel and clumps of earth strike the surrounding trees, bringing down some large branches. The noise of a shell exploding is familiar from countless war films, but nothing prepares us for this, which is deeper and more visceral than we would expect – as much a physical sensation as a sound, and filled with menace. We expect to see people running for cover, but none of the crewmen appears to take the slightest notice, either out of familiarity or bravado, and we are left wondering if this was also a product of our imagination, until a plume of dirty smoke slowly unfurls above the trees.

  It seems the German gunners have woken up and decided it is time for a fresh attempt to destroy whatever is concealed in the woods. Sure enough, the first explosion is followed by two more, though they are thankfully further off and more muffled, and this suddenly seems like a good time to break off our researc
h and return to La Lovie to digest what we have learned.

  It is only when we are back on board the lorry and heading away from the tankodrome that we realise with a jolt that in our haste to leave we completely forgot to look at the front of the tank to see if it did indeed bear the name Deborah. Despite racking our brains, we cannot be sure, though it seems more than likely that this tank had the same name as the later D51, since the name and crew number normally went together. Sadly there is no way to confirm this when we get back to camp, since the only document that records the tank’s details does not mention her name.15

  In fact, the practice of naming tanks had begun with their first appearance in battle, sometimes preceded by ‘H.M.L.S.’ (‘His Majesty’s Landship’) to emphasize the nautical conceit, and this was gradually formalized with every tank christened according to the letter of its battalion. The source of the name Deborah is unknown: the obvious assumption is that the tank was named after someone’s wife or girlfriend, but this is unlikely since the name was relatively uncommon, and in 1900, for example, it was given to fewer than 100 baby girls.16

  The most likely explanation is that the name was inspired by the Bible, where Deborah was a warrior prophetess who led the Israelites to victory over the Canaanites with their 900 chariots of iron, and whose song of battle is recorded in the Book of Judges: ‘So let all thine enemies perish, O Lord: but let them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might.’17 For Shakespeare, the name encapsulated feminine power: ‘Thou art an Amazon, and fightest with the sword of Deborah’.18