Captain Basil Maclear, who showed great coolness in handling the Reserve Company of the Battalion, which he was able to bring up almost intact under very heavy fire; and also the great power of command which he showed himself to possess when suddenly called upon to command the Battalion for four days during a trying situation.
He was the youngest of five sons who all served in the First World War; brothers Percy and Harry, both lieutenant colonels, were killed in action. Of the thirty caps won by Irish internationalists who died in the war, he collected over a third.
The 7th RDF joined the 10th (Irish) Division near Basingstoke for three months of more warlike training, including bayonet practice. After inspections by King George V and Lord Kitchener, the division received orders in June 1915 to sail for Gallipoli. D Company’s strength was 239 men; of those, 160 would be killed, wounded or taken prisoner and only seventy-nine would return intact. The Lansdowne club itself would lose thirty-nine of its members over the war, most of them with D Company. They embarked at Devonport in July. Salt-water baths, sea air and morning runs around the deck had them ‘in the pink’. The voyage was one of exotic discovery, with ice cold oranges from the refrigerator and stops at Gibraltar and Malta as they sailed to Alexandria. The ‘Dubs’ took their leave of Egypt with a rousing rendition of ‘Tipperary’. Their mood would soon change.
The British, ANZAC and French forces sent to Gallipoli were not only comprehensively outwitted by the Turks, but betrayed by an ill-conceived plan (of Churchill’s making) and the incompetence of their own leadership. The New Zealand commander of Irish parentage, General Alexander Godley, wrote to his cousin in Cavan, Lord Kilbracken, ‘I do not suppose in history, that anything so utterly mismanaged by the British Government will ever be recorded.’ The general himself was not above critical comment from those who served there: Wilfred Jesson of Rosslyn Park and the 5th Wiltshires, wounded and shell-shocked at Gallipoli, recounted of one silent night operation with bayonet only, no weapons fired:
The password and countersign were to be ‘Godley’ and ‘Success’. Of the four days operations which followed, perhaps ‘ungodly failure’ would be more appropriate.9
The ‘Dubs’ disembarked at Suvla Bay on 7 August, as dawn broke just before five o’clock, to the north of the tangled knot of hills and crests where the ANZAC divisions were still enmeshed. The morning of the landing was beautifully fine. Henry Hanna described the scene:
The naval guns were vigorously shelling the ridges round the Bay. The shells exploded with bright red flame edged with a black fringe of smoke, just like a tulip with the red leaves tipped with black. The noise was terrifying … as the light became stronger nothing was visible to the naked eye on the shore save the stretcher-bearers carrying wounded down the slopes of a hill.10
They arrived without maps or clear orders. They had no gunnery support as the division’s artillery had been sent to France instead. Water was in very short supply. The horrors of war soon hit the Pals: stretchers passed with blood-soaked burdens. In lowering the parapet of their trench they found it crammed with Turkish bodies, their stench overpowering as the heat rose; one was a young girl sniper, around her neck fourteen identity tags taken as trophies from dead Munster Fusiliers. Twenty-two of the Dubs died on the first day of the landing. Lieutenant Ernest Julian, shot in the back, was one of them. Another Lansdowne FC player, Lieutenant Ernest Weatherill, brought in five wounded men under fire.
Vital high ground at Scimitar Hill had been taken by England centre Jimmy Dingle and his 6th East Yorks, but his unit was ordered to vacate it to attack another height. The Turks retook it and enfiladed the Dubs with machine-gun fire, as well as the 6th Border Regiment of Jimmy’s Durham rugby friend, Nowell Oxland, who was killed.11 As the scrub on the hill burned and left ‘little mounds of scorched khaki’, Captain Richard ‘Paddy’ Tobin of Lansdowne FC wrote his last letter home:
I was out from 6am to 9pm. I got up into the firing line in a hail of bullets and dumped along the ammunition, but not without losing six more of the company. We had to dig ourselves in as the enemy were stronger than we thought.
A terrible battle was later fought over two days from 15 August at Kiretch Tepe, the ridge to the north of Suvla, where the beauty of the sea view ironically reminded the Dubliners of Killiney Bay. As the Turks sheltered behind a knife-edge ridge crest, hurling grenades, the Gunnings’ diary recorded:
Some of our fellows throwing back the bombs which the Turks threw over and which had not exploded. One fellow caught them like catching a cricket ball. Wounded and dead lying everywhere. The sun streaming down and not a drop of water to be had. Neither had we bombs to reply to the Turks and drive them out.12
One Private Wilkin caught and returned four bombs, but was blown to pieces by the fifth; the heroism was not recorded at the time as almost all the officers were killed, but Captain Kelly, 7th RDF, wrote of it in 1931.
D Company was told that the only chance they had of keeping the hill was to charge the bombers. They fixed bayonets and ‘with a terrific shout rushed off to the top of the crest’, led by Captain Hickman, who was instantly killed. Machine-gun fire from the right flank killed or wounded almost everyone in the charge: only four were able to crawl back over the ridge to cover. Lieutenant Weatherill, hero of the first day and ‘a fearless leader and good friend to us all’, was killed on the ridge. Sergeant Charles Sawyer who was with him on the first day of the landing said ‘I can truly say that a more brave and cool officer never took men into action in that awful peninsula.’ Paddy Tobin was also killed, as was Lance Corporal Arnold Moss, 19, another rugby man, who had been recommended for the DCM for helping comrades under fire. Colonel Downing was wounded.
Under fire, the sectarian divide at home was forgotten as Father Murphy, 48, and Canon McLean, Church of Ireland and 60 years of age, held services together. One grateful Pal wrote, ‘Catholic and Protestant are hand in hand, all brought about by the gentleness and undaunted courage displayed by these two splendid soldiers of Christ.’ By 16 August Lieutenant Hamilton, a TCD medical student, was the only D Company officer left; when he was hospitalised the next day with a foot wound, Company Sergeant Major Kee took command for six weeks. Hamilton had seen too much: he became a chronic alcoholic, was court-martialled and dismissed. He returned to Ireland but never continued his medical studies; he never worked again and did nothing with his life. Ten of the thirty-nine Lansdowne men named on the club’s memorial died at Gallipoli. 250 current and former members in 1914 joined the fight; seventy-two did not come back.
The Dubs were withdrawn on 30 September with the 10th Division and reorganised at Salonika, where the stalwart Regimental Sergeant Major Guest received his commission. The Gallipoli remnants were hastily reinforced with raw recruits shipped out from Britain and Egypt but they were short of equipment, supplies and winter clothing: 7th RDF still wore shorts and pith helmets. The weather and local Greek population at Salonika were equally cold and hostile. November found the division in Serbia, holding the front between Kosturino and Lake Doiran, awaiting an assault by the Bulgarians. In a repeat of Gallipoli, the front line was in hill-top country broken by deep gullies, barren rock and scree, with scant cover from grass, scrub and stunted oak. When a raging Balkan blizzard struck, the exposed infantrymen, their health already weakened on the peninsula, collapsed; hundreds suffered frostbite, disease and exposure. Sergeant Richard Sealy Swan, a prominent Lansdowne player, was one of those to die.
Another man who, like Hamilton, saw too much of war for his own good was Jasper Thomas Brett. The trainee solicitor was a flying centre threequarter with Monkstown, who won his only cap on the wing for Ireland against Wales in the ‘battle of Belfast’ in 1914 (he also travelled to Paris as an unused reserve). It was Ireland’s last game of the championship, and at such a tender age he was surely to be capped again. War had other ideas. Brett enlisted in D Company, became a machine-gunner and as officers fell considerably faster than the resilient flies of Gallipoli, was commi
ssioned in the field in September. Salonika was the final straw that broke the mind of this 19-year-old lieutenant. He was hospitalised with ‘shell-shock’ in June 1916 at the Latchmere Hospital in Richmond, Surrey. On his release in January 1917, he returned to the family home in Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire). On 4 February, he found a dark railway tunnel that matched his state of mind and lay down on the rails; the 10.10 p.m. from Dalkey to Bray severed his head from his body. War had claimed another casualty, acknowledged by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 2011.
There were men too who died from across an Irish border yet to be created, like Irish cap Major Albert Stewart of North of Ireland FC, who died with Chavasse at Broodseinde in 1917. The 36th (Ulster) Division broke the rules and took their objectives on the first day of the Somme (the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne) before being forced to withdraw with grievous losses. Belfast’s Captain William Victor Edwards of Malone RFC, twice capped by Ireland, joined the 6th East Belfast Battalion of the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1914. He took command of ill-fated D Company, 7th RDF, on Boxing Day 1917, but was killed three days later at Deir Ibzia, Palestine.
The man who first called out the Lansdowne Road recruits would also die, this time on his own doorstep. While the young and fit went away on active service, the older members formed a ‘Dad’s Army’ home guard under the direct command of Frank Browning, now 47 years of age. They became part of the Irish Auxiliary Volunteer Training Corps (IAVTC), ‘an organisation for gentlemen of above military age’, known in Dublin as the ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’ because of the initials GR (Georgius Rex) on their armbands. They wore a motley array of uniform and civilian clothes and carried dummy rifles.
On Easter Monday 1916, news reached them on a march of a rising in the city. As they returned to Beggar’s Bush Barracks and crossed the Mount Street Bridge, they were mistaken for real soldiers and came under fire from Irish Volunteers on Northumberland Street. The rebels ceased fire when they realised that, although carrying rifles, the VTC men had no ammunition, but not before Browning and three others were fatally wounded. News of this attack on elderly unarmed men did little for the popularity of the Rising in Dublin, which was ruthlessly put down. Inevitably, there were rugby men on both sides and Kevin Barry, of University College Dublin Rugby Club, died in the cause of Irish independence.
Frank Browning died two days later. On his gravestone, erected by the IRFU in Dublin’s Dean’s Grange cemetery, not far from Jasper Brett’s, the inscription reads: ‘He will live in the memory of all as an honourable comrade and distinguished sportsman.’
Notes
1 From ‘Ireland’s Call’ by Phil Coulter, 1995.
2 Wisden shows him making over 2,000 runs in 1889.
3 London Gazette, 2 October 1915.
4 Dublin Evening Mail, quoted in Henry Hanna, The Pals at Suvla Bay.
5 Irish Times, 1 May 1915.
6 Later Reid successors included Irish Presidents Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese.
7 Grierson, Ramblings of a Rabbit.
8 E.A. Rolfe, Old Bedfordians Year Book, 1929.
9 Unpublished account in The Final Whistle: The Great War in Fifteen Players.
10 Henry Hanna, The Pals at Suvla Bay (Ponsonby, 1917).
11 The stories of Dingle and Oxland are told in The Final Whistle.
12 Quoted by Henry Hanna.
11
Wales
Ei gwrol ryfelwyr, gwladgarwyr tra mad,
Dros ryddid collasant eu gwaed.
Its valiant warriors so gallant and brave
For freedom their life’s blood they gave.
Rugby in Wales was always a different ball game. The earliest green shoots may have sprung from the same social roots as England, Scotland and Ireland: schools like Llandovery and Cowbridge Grammar followed the English public-school model and the professional classes led the founding of clubs along the southern coast at Neath, Cardiff, Swansea and Newport in the 1870s. But black gold in green valleys drew a massive influx of workers to the pits and collieries as coal production boomed in the following decades. Working class they were, but these immigrants from England’s southwest and rural Ireland did not come from traditional association football hinterlands. With no shadow from soccer falling over its fields, the sapling rugby grew strong; its physical grunt matched the tough and often brutal life of the miner.
The popularity of rugby amongst the hardworking-class also fostered a pragmatic approach to amateurism. If the pits worked six days a week and Sunday was sacred for chapel, then broken-time payments and expenses for Saturday and midweek games were necessary to sustain players and their families. Although the amateur principle was staunchly upheld by the Welsh Football Union (WFU, as it then was), an official enquiry in 1907 admitted that some clubs ‘were in the habit of paying and receiving hotel or travelling expenses in excess of the sum actually disbursed’. The WFU itself tried to buy a house for its greatest player, Arthur Gould; when the Scots and English objected, Wales withdrew from the International Board and fixtures rather than accede to pressure.
Rugby’s devotees also faced religious opposition. The Welsh Revival of 1904 led by minister Evan Roberts railed against violence and drunkenness in sport: ‘even an ape would not disgrace itself by seeking pleasures in kicking a football’. Tens of thousands were converted to his cause; Senghenydd RFC was forced to disband, for want of players. But rugby soon developed its own brand of religious fervour as its followers flocked to worship of an afternoon, and it became the pastime of the people. The Senghenydd club reformed and was sanctified by tragedy when five of its players were among 439 dead in Britain’s worst-ever pit disaster in October 1913. The South Wales mining community led hard lives and they could be forgiven for playing hard too. It did, however, gain them a reputation, as Henry Grierson remarked of the Welsh:
A wonderful race and they have the love of the game in the blood, and though in the past their play has sometimes left something to be desired in the matter of cleanliness, I am convinced that they are improving yearly in this respect, as is also the sportsmanship of their crowds.
It was not all gnarled pit props and hard centres, as the professional and commercial classes were also caught up in a common passion. Welsh rugby had its share of Varsity Blues like Clem and Bryn Lewis of Cardiff, and Oswald Jenkins and Horace Thomas of Swansea. Thomas Jones, secretary to Lloyd George, proclaimed ‘a game democratic and amateur is a rare thing – a unique thing to be cherished’. The sportsmanship and passion of their crowds was unique: huge numbers squeezed into Welsh grounds. At Cardiff 47,000 watched the All Blacks and 45,000 saw the Springboks at St Helen’s; Twickenham, even in Wavell Wakefield’s mid-twenties pomp for England, only drew 35,000. Only Londoners ogling New Zealand’s unshrinkable underpants at Crystal Palace in 1905 matched Welsh rugby congregations.
There was too a fierce national identity regularly asserted in rugby against the English rulers and rival Celts; from 1900, Wales won six of twelve Triple Crowns in its first ‘Golden Era’. Pride was redoubled when Wales offered almost the only isolated pockets of resistance to defy the colonial invaders: famously against the All Blacks in 1905; Cardiff against the 1906 Springboks; Wales again, Llanelli, Cardiff and Swansea against the 1908 Australians; Newport and defiant Swansea once more against the 1912 Boks. The 0–11 Welsh defeat by the earlier South African team was taken heavily and many international careers ended that day at St Helen’s. Tom Richards, musing on the upright Māori against the Welsh Guards at the front in May 1916, seemed to have forgotten his Wallaby touring experiences of 1908: ‘The Englishman, though, always stands up better and finer than the Welshman, but the Colonial is vastly superior to any of them.’
Not on your watch, Tom. Fuelled by hwyl, Welsh clubs triumphed where national sides had failed: a distinctive ethnic Welsh culture rolled calon, colliery, chapel and choir into one powerful ball, melded with ancient mythology. It was at rugby Tests in 1905 that ‘Hen wlad fy nhadau’ (‘Old land of my fathers’) was
first sung and became an unofficial Welsh anthem, first alongside ‘God save the Prince of Wales’ and, since 1975, proudly sung alone.
Five Cardiff men heard referee Gil Evan’s whistle in all three games against the best teams in the Southern Hemisphere. One was John Lewis Williams: ‘Johnnie’ was a flying winger, ‘a universal favourite with the crowd’ according to the South Wales Daily News, and a man that opponents like Tom Richards would seek out at the front in wartime. He scored seventeen tries in as many matches for Wales, and was leading try-scorer with 1908’s Anglo-Welsh side that failed to impress Richards. After four seasons with Newport, he switched to his hometown Cardiff club, forming with Wales centre Rhys Gabe a sparkling partnership, ‘the very acme of polished cleverness in all they did’, and playing 199 games. In 1905, he scored thirty-five tries in Cardiff’s blue-and-black jerseys and twice faced the fearsome All Blacks (for his club and Glamorgan), although the Welsh wing berth went to match-winner Teddy Morgan. Johnnie made his international debut a year later at St Helen’s against the Springboks, playing outside Gabe; the 11–0 defeat wasn’t a great start, but it was one of only two Wales Tests he would lose. Welsh honour was salvaged from the mud by Cardiff three weeks later: Boks’ full back Arthur Marsberg graciously shook Johnnie’s hand after he was left for dead by his try in the momentous 17–0 victory.
Johnnie was prolific in 1907: he scored a hat-trick for Wales against Ireland, a feat he would repeat in 1910 and also ran in five tries for Cardiff against the Barbarians. The following year he did the same to Blackheath, in front of Lloyd George, who declared rugby ‘an extraordinary game … more exciting than politics’ (but then so is drying paint). He then scored the final Welsh try of a triumphant season in which the red shirts won a fifth Triple Crown and carried off a first-ever Grand Slam (if you count France, which officials then did not). After such heroics, the 1908 Anglo-Welsh tour down under is largely (and best) forgotten, although Johnnie notched a dozen tries. This was the year when anti-British articles by the Kaiser, published in the Telegraph, amplified distant rumblings in Europe.
After the Final Whistle Page 19
