Large families were very much the norm, and mine was no different. I had some eleven aunts and uncles, and innumerable cousins. Throughout my childhood, an assortment of family members came to stay. There was Aunt Pat, a nanny to the wealthy, who came on many occasions but who would never take her hat off unless she was staying the night. Then there was Uncle Charlie, my father’s brother. He was a great gambling man and former apprentice jockey who, it was said, rode the great Fred Archer to a close finish. However, his career was short-lived, as he was warned off the course for deliberately losing a race after making a deal with some bookmakers. As a result, he was always broke, so one season he came to work at my father’s stables and lodged with us. Uncle Charlie had a fiery temper and could neither be told what to do nor criticised, and, as my father too was a bit sharp, it was an arrangement that could never work. On one occasion, my father gave Uncle Charlie half a sovereign, only to discover he had gambled it away. That was the last money he ever gave him. Uncle Charlie couldn’t stop the gambling habit and died in a workhouse some years later. Then came my father’s nephew, Sidney Clouting. He used to come down and spend his holidays with us, as well as occasionally helping out at the stables. He was the illegitimate child of my Aunt Nell, who was in domestic service when the butler got her pregnant. Money had apparently changed hands, and the scandal was hushed up, for, as an unmarried mother, she would never have got another job. Nell kept her job, and Sid was brought up by his grandparents, believing Nell was an aunt, and that his mother had abandoned him at birth. He was to die in the war, without Nell ever owning up to who she really was, although Sidney had his suspicions. Nell never got over the shock and died in 1929. Then there was Great Aunt Bessie, aged 103, on my father’s side. I do not recall ever meeting her, but, it was said, she had planted her own potatoes in 1903 but didn’t live long enough to dig them up. Lastly, there was Uncle Toby, a great character and a sergeant major in the Scots Guards. Even though he had been too young to fight in the Boer war and later somehow avoided the First World War, he nevertheless nurtured my interest in warfare.
From as far back as I can remember, I was crazy to be a soldier. As a child I brandished a wooden sword, with red ink spattered along the edges, and strutted around the estate like a regular recruit. I daydreamed about the heroic actions of former campaigns, and avidly read highly-charged tales of action in South Africa. At the annual village fair, known as The Club, rides on the roundabouts or shies at the coconuts always came second to the shooting range.
For a boy with army aspirations, five-shilling ‘Blucher’ boots were very important. Made on an army pattern, with hob nails and a broad toe cap, the boots were sold at the Crosskeys village shop, unstained and semi-watertight. Three days’ work was needed to change them from brown to ‘army’ black, either by working in spitblacking (purchased in cakes and wetted with saliva or beer) or with the liquid blacking from an ‘Everetts’ stoneware bottle, conveniently sold with a brush attached to the bottle’s cork so as to dab the paint onto the shoe before polishing. The hard work needed to properly prepare a pair of Bluchers was all part of military discipline, and the resulting glorious polish enough to make any sergeant major smile.
As soon as I was old enough, I bought an air rifle for the princely sum of three shillings and sixpence. This I had earned by becoming a company agent and hawking penny packets of flower and vegetable seeds door to door. Some ninety packets had to be sold to realise seven shillings and sixpence, which was then sent to the company in exchange for one of several gifts. There was never any question that I would choose the gun and I quickly became a dabster at shooting any number of sparrows tempted into our garden by bread for bait. Sparrows, as well as rooks and pigeons, were widely eaten and were caught in their dozens for home-made pies. In winter, when sparrows nested in haystacks, evenings were organised when the whole village turned out to catch them. Adults, armed with nets on poles, surrounded the stacks as boys flashed bicycle lamps into the hay, or beat tin cans. The clatter terrified the birds, flushing them out into the waiting nets, which were quickly brought round to trap them. My rifle made little further impression on their numbers but they were mine and they tasted better. I took them home, defeathered and held them by a toasting fork in the kitchen range, then ate them with some bread.
In 1908, I, like many of my friends, joined the rapidly expanding scout movement that had just been formed by Lord Baden Powell. Our local curate, the Reverend Finch, had formed the 1st South Down Troop with the help of Miss Betty Brand. No one knew anything about how a scout movement should work, the rules or the laws, so we all learnt together from the handbook written by Baden Powell. There were around twenty of us in the troop, mostly from Beddingham, Glynde and Firle schools, and being one of the oldest, I was made patrol leader straight away. The uniforms were provided free of charge and we met every Friday in a corrugated-iron hut at Glynde. Everything else had to be provided by us, so competitions were organised to make the things like stools that we needed.
Like all scouts, we had to learn to tie eight knots without looking, and then there were the badges for all the usual things such as cooking, gardening, cycling and riding. Quite often the Reverend Finch took us camping to Firle Park, just below Firle Beacon, or once or twice we went boating on the river Cuckmere near Alfris- ton. This was in a small boat which we pulled up the river until the tide turned, then we would float some three miles back down again.
The outdoor life always appealed to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed all my physical pursuits, riding, gardening, scouting. I disliked being stuck indoors and from four years old, when I attended Beddingham School, I found my education an uphill struggle. I did not stay long at the school, for soon after I arrived I was traumatised when a mad bull broke into the field where we were playing. It had broken out of a nearby farm and careered into our field, closely followed by several farmers running with pitch forks and shouting to us kids to ‘run, run!’ We scrambled through a fence, only for the bull to crash through the same fence farther up the field. Eventually the farmers cornered the bull between two carts and shot him, but the horror of the event stayed with me for years. Ironically, the field we had played in did not belong to the school, and normally the children played in the road instead. My mother disapproved of our having no playground and wrote to Mrs Weston, the headmistress, to inform her that she wished to move us to West Firle School in November 1905.
There were just three teachers at Firle Church School, one each for the three standards: Mr Price, headmaster and teacher of the senior class of some sixty children, Mrs Price, his wife, who took the twenty or so infants, while the twenty five or more children of the middle class were taught by a succession of supplementary teachers who were appointed only to resign a few months later.
Most of my school life was spent trying to avoid lessons as much as possible. I quickly got a reputation as a trouble maker, not in a bad way, for I was always considered the most polite child around, but because I simply would not pay attention. As a result I was always being kept behind after school to write lines for talking in class, and a week would never go by without my receiving the cane. Mr Price was a very nervous man who was always biting his finger nails (in reality he didn’t have any nails left to bite). Owing to this, he was always quick to resort to the cane for all manner of minor infractions, though I think he enjoyed meting it out anyway.
On at least one occasion, Mr Price had cause to beat me all the way round the school playground. Both boys’ and girls’ toilets were earthen privies, simply a shed the back of which opened up when it was time to shovel away the waste. There were no toilets in the modem sense, simply a seat and a round circular hole. This meant anyone daring enough to climb over a protective fence would be in an ideal position to open the back of the shed and see one, or more, round and somewhat vulnerable bottoms sitting there.
Attacking these bottoms with a handful of brambles was a favourite trick. The suddenness of surprise, the shouts and shrieks, made fo
r quite an amusing prank. Mr Price didn’t agree. It was Mrs Price who happened to be sitting there on my next forage, and as I scrambled back over the fence, it was her husband who was waiting for me with the cane. He was in a flaming temper and grabbing me by the scruff of the neck, proceeded to thrash me all the way down the school playground. Later that day my sisters told my father what had happened. ‘Oh, Mr Price didn’t half thrash our Ben in the playground, he was hitting him on his legs, bottom and back/to which my father remarked, ‘Perhaps if I knew what he’d done, I’d give him another one’.
Most lessons during the year were badly and haphazardly taught. My favourites were maths and history, largely because all other subjects were made so boring. A typical geography lesson might entail drawing a map of England with all the seaports or major towns, or, alternatively, a map of Sussex with all the main landmarks. Geography was just about bearable but spelling, my worst subject, often necessitated a nose bleed which I brought about by pinching my nose tightly and blowing hard. This resulted in my being sent to the cloakroom where I bathed a cloth in cold water from an enamel bowl, and held it to the back of my neck.
Such inadequate teaching continued all year until two weeks before our exams, when life became not worth the living. For those fourteen days, Mr Price would cram us with exam information. He was well aware that Church School inspectors would come round to check on the results and it had to look like we had been taught properly. It all added up to a ridiculous situation. He was a very busy man but his fingers were in too many other pies and eventually he was sacked.
My education was markedly backward for my age. Because I was mischievous, Mr Price would always find a reason to send me out of the class and I was chosen for many shopping trips for the headmaster’s wife. The village shop was a good half a mile away and I gratefully accepted the errand for the chance to get outside and into the open. Often I would return only for Mrs Price to say she had forgotten such and such, ‘Do you mind going back?’ Well, of course I didn’t. I took other jobs too, from scrubbing, then swilling out, the boys’ toilets on a Friday afternoon (after which I could go home early) to looking after his garden. Apart from the general foliage, Mr Price’s garden also held seven or eight bee hives and in May, as the bees began to swarm, he would send myself and classmate Harold Clark to claim them for his hives. This was an important moment for the headmaster, for until the bees were ‘claimed’ they were anyone’s property. With a key and a tin can at the ready, Harold and I would follow the swarm until it settled around the queen bee, then, as one of us tapped the can to signal our claim, the other would run and tell the headmaster. He would abruptly halt the class, collect his smoking outfit, skip and handbrush, and join us at the swarm. We would then watch as he smoked the bees into stupefaction before sweeping them into his skip and carrying them off to his hive.
Heartily tired of school, I jumped at the first legal chance to leave, when I asked dad if he would allow me to do just that on my fourteenth birthday. To my great annoyance my father refused, as I had no job to go to. However, my plight lasted just one month, for one of father’s friends wrote and asked if I would like to be taken on at Colonel Campion’s stables at Hassocks, near Brighton. Colonel William Campion was a local magistrate and brother- in-law of Charles Brand.1 He was somewhat older, in his midseventies, an old soldier of several campaigns including the Crimean and the Indian Mutiny. As it turned out, his head groom required a stable boy, so without much ado my father gave me permission to accept the job and so leave school. That Monday I went to school for the last time to tell Mr Price I was leaving. ‘Goodbye, Clouting, good luck and I’m damn glad to see the back of you.’ I took it as a compliment, for no one was as glad to get away from that school as I was.
I left school on a Monday and, after packing and saying goodbye to my parents, left home that following Friday. The twenty-five- mile journey to Hassocks negotiated, I arrived at the Campion estate to be put to work under Costick, the head groom, and in times gone by an old stable mate of my father’s. Costick had briefly been a trooper in the 5th Lancers, but had hated it so much that he bought himself out just as soon as he could. He was scathing about my obvious enthusiasm to join up, and wouldn’t hesitate to tell me, often, that army life was no land of milk and honey. ‘Well, boy, you think you’re going into the army? You won’t stick that for long,’ he once said, on hearing me drum my fingers, military style, on a bucket.
At Hassocks I worked alongside another stable boy called Fred. Fred had a slightly mysterious background that I never did fathom. He was married, I believe, but was not meant to be; whatever the potential for scandal, everything about his personal life was kept quiet. In spite of a certain distance between us, Fred and I got on well and often we would ride out on exercise together to Danny Park near Thursbury Point, I on Colonel Campion’s horse General, Fred on Speckles, a horse belonging to the Colonel’s daughter. I worked a seven-day week, with Friday evening off to go to the scouts and Saturday evening off as of right, when I might go to the cinema at Hassocks or Hurstpierpoint. Work was hard but steady, and life by modem standards uneventful.
In the summer of 1912, I heard that Charlie Brand had died from the effects of a riding accident. I didn’t go to the funeral but, in keeping with the close-knit community, the coffin bearers came from the estate employees, and included my father, Mr Weaver, and Mr Hayter, the butler. A month later, much of the estate was sold at auction, including some of the horses, and although my father remained at Beddingham, the writing was on the wall. The shock of Charlie Brand’s early death at fifty seven was compounded at the reading of the will, for news quickly spread that he had left just £4,000. Clearly his wife’s money, Vanderbilt money, had underpinned life at Little Dene for all those years.
In early July 1913, I finally resolved to join the army, so I gave notice at the stables, and returned home. At this time the Sussex Yeomanry were about to go to camp, but still needed someone to drive the officers’ ‘Maltese’ mess wagon. News was that I intended to join up, so on the basis that this job would be good experience for me, I was asked if I would report to the Yeomanry’s adjutant in Chichester, whereupon I would be given this wagon to drive. Our local butcher was lending a horse to the Yeomanry so I set out on the forty-five-mile journey, stopping off for a couple of hours at a pub so I could water and feed the horses. The job lasted two weeks, throughout which I watched the manoeuvres, following the territorials wherever they went, ready to supply the officers with food from the wagon. I was paid, though only a few shillings, for it was the experience that mattered. The manoeuvres were filmed and made into a short feature entitled something like ‘A day out with the Sussex Yeomanry’. Shortly after, it was shown at the cinema in Lewes, where I made my cinematic debut, briefly appearing aloft on my wagon, much to my and my sisters’ delight.
NOTES
1. Colonel William Henry Campion (1836–1923) married Gertrude Brand in 1869. She was the daughter of the 1st Viscount Brand, a former Speaker of the House of Commons, and sister of the Honourable Charles Brand (1855 – 1912).
CHAPTER TWO
Crazy to be a Soldier
Ben
I was still only fifteen years old when I came home from Colonel Campion’s stables in July 1913, so it was necessary for me to get into the army any way that I could. The artillery was calling for boy trumpeters and, as I wished to work with horses, joining a battery appeared to be my best chance.
It was while I was weighing up my options that an officer, Captain Carton de Wiart of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, visited the stables. Several officers from this Regiment regularly came over to the Brands’ while they were stationed at Brighton, for Charles Brand was the Master of the Southdown Fox Hunt, and had a string of hunters these officers could borrow.
My father would drive down to meet the officers at Glynde train station, bringing them back to the house so that, as a youngster, I saw men such as de Wiart and Major Tom Bridges, another 4th Dragoon Guards office
r, as I helped around the stables with the saddles and harnesses.
‘I see your boy’s home,’ de Wiart observed. ‘What does he want to do?’
‘He’s intending to join up,’ my father replied, ‘he’s talking of the artillery.’
I was told that de Wiart exploded at this. ‘He doesn’t want to be a bloody gunner. Tell him he can join my Regiment, the 4th Dragoon Guards. I’ll ensure he is looked after.’
That evening my father passed on the news. ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ he cautioned, ‘but don’t expect me to buy you out if you don’t like it. I haven’t got the money even if I wanted to.’ I did not need a second invitation. The following morning I went to enlist in Lewes, where a recruiting sergeant, dressed in khaki but sporting a broad red sash across his chest, made me welcome. After one or two informal questions, he began to put my details in his ledger. It was necessary to conceal my age so I could enlist as an eighteen-year-old, but in my excitement I told him I was born on September 15th 1895.
‘Well, you’re not eighteen, then, are you?’ Lying did not come naturally and I sheepishly corrected myself.
He didn’t care. The general rule was that if you were big enough, you were old enough, and if you were old enough, you were big enough; as far as he was concerned he’d got another recruit and that was all that mattered.
‘What regiment do you wish to join?’ he asked rhetorically. I put forward the 4th Dragoon Guards, whereupon the sergeant promptly put me down for the infantry. The standard height for the cavalry was five foot seven, he said, and, as I was nearly five foot nine, it would be better if I went into the foot guards.
‘But the Dragoon Guards are already aware that I am to join them,’ I said, stretching a point.
‘Then I’ll have to fill out a special application because you are too tall,’ the sergeant said, irritated.
Teenage Tommy Page 2
