by Sara Wheeler
He accepted the commission. At first the Royal Engineers refused to transfer him, but they eventually relented, and on 15 October he left Aldershot for good. It was an abrupt departure. He gave his motorcycle to his captain as a parting gift, and headed back to London. Farrer, it turned out, had been his benefactor. By chance he had met Lady Boothby, whose husband was a commander in the Royal Naval Air Service. Together with Captain (later Admiral) Murray Sueter, Director of the Air Department, Boothby was in the process of raising a division of men to take a fleet of armoured motor cars out to the front. Like Scott, as a young officer Sueter had specialised in torpedo work, and the pair had served together in the Pacific. When Scott was preparing to go south for the second time, Sueter had advised him on the doomed caterpillar motor sledges that were to cause so much anxiety in the Antarctic. As a result, Sueter had followed the progress of the expedition closely. So when Boothby mentioned the name Cherry-Garrard, Sueter immediately recognised it, and few commanding officers would have turned down one of Scott’s men. On 18 October Cherry was granted a temporary commission as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and appointed to the RNAS (Armoured Car Division).
He rushed around getting measured for his uniform. On 9 November he was promoted to the rank of temporary lieutenant-commander and posted to the command of No. 5 Squadron, Armoured Cars. Like most of the armoured car officers, he was not required to undergo the standard navy medical.
The Royal Naval Air Service had only recently been formalised. It was still regarded with grave suspicion by crusty naval officers who neither trusted nor believed in the utility of air power. Its most potent ally had been Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, who had supported it through difficult beginnings and encouraged it to grow. Within this nascent naval air organisation, the even more anomalous armoured car division had evolved as a result of Wing Commander C. R. Samson’s successes with motors in Belgium and northern France in the first weeks of the war. Operating out of Dunkirk, the swashbuckling Samson had led a small force carrying out reconnaissance missions by air and using cars to raid the German flanks by land. Observing the usefulness of cars for ground work, Samson had one of his vehicles fitted with a Maxim gun, thereby creating the first armoured car of the conflict. Churchill, alert to the potential of motorised instruments of war, authorised immediate developmental investment, and by the middle of September officers and marines were being enlisted for a modest armoured car force.
The first armoured cars looked like regular sedan convertibles with toughened bonnets. Josiah Wedgwood, an RNVR lieutenant-commander who trained with Cherry, was one of the first officers to take a squadron of armoured cars across the Channel. He was patrolling in one of his vehicles the day the Germans took Lille. ‘They called it an armoured car,’ he said. ‘I remember that the tyres were armoured, and so was the radiator, and the chauffeur sat in a sort of armoured extinguisher. But we were not armoured, and the armour elsewhere made us feel indecently exposed.’ By the end of 1914 the cars had evolved into the classic Rolls-Royce. It all staggered forward in a chaotic kind of way, like most things in that war; perhaps in all wars.
Cherry raised his squadron himself (one of his recruits was Petty Officer George Abbott, who had recovered from his breakdown), and headquartered it at Lamer, now colonised by platoons of starched nurses setting up their wards. The men were billeted in outbuildings and the officers in the house, and the cars themselves were kept next to the stables. The estate thronged with activity. When they had leave the men made sharply for the Cricketer’s Arms or the Bull, regaling the villagers with spurious information about the revolving turrets in their new Rolls-Royces. Cherry rushed between Lamer and an armoured car training ground near Goring-on-Thames. ‘We shall be ready to go over in three weeks,’ he wrote to Farrer in December, ‘but whether they will send us yet with the roads as they are is another thing.’ As the casualty lists in The Times grew longer, he felt that his absence was treacherous.
Life continued at Lamer, hospital and war notwithstanding. On 18 November Mildred married Peter Ashton, a Wykehamist from Lancashire. Evelyn liked her second son-in-law, despite his lack of funds. He had already volunteered, and the following year he served at Gallipoli (‘this damn peninsula’) with the Herefordshires. He went on to win a Military Cross and was mentioned in despatches four times.
By the end of the year, with both sides locked into a trench system trailing from the North Sea to Switzerland, none of the supposed ‘breakthroughs’ on the Western Front had come to anything. There had been no swift, decisive victories; just deadlock, and widows.
Armoured cars continued their good work in Belgium and northern France. They were deployed in the series of diversionary attacks launched by the Allies in March 1915 to break the stalemate: No. 2 Squadron, under Lieutenant-Commander the Duke of Westminster, participated in the unsuccessful attempt to drive the Germans back from the village of Neuve Chapelle. After this battle, Cherry’s squadron mobilised at last.
They arrived in France in April, a cruel month on the front. The armoured car division, spread across all the theatres of war, had swollen to nearly 200 officers, 2,000 men and 1,000 motor vehicles. The cars themselves were evolving rapidly: they now had more crew protection and were camouflaged. Some towed trailers loaded with three-pounder guns, and others had Vickers-Maxim machine-guns poking out of their revolving turrets. They had started to look vaguely like tanks on wheels. Most squadrons were attached to army corps in the line, but No. 5 and one other remained in Dunkirk, based in the northern suburb of Mâlo-les-Bains.
Cherry spent most of his time over the border in Belgium, driving staff officers around alongside columns of men trudging through the mist in their waterproof capes while lone farmers struggled to keep crops alive outside the little towns dumb with shock and damp. The flats of ploughed land were punctuated by windmills and the wooded ridges by grey-roofed châteaux that looked down on fields of cornflowers. Back in Dunkirk Cherry dealt with a daily stream of runners and their tiresome bureaucratic enquiries, and shuttled back and forth to the repair shop in a cavernous shed at the Forges et Chantiers ship-building yard near the brothels. Local kids hung around on the muddy cobbles of the docks, ogling the cars and angling for a tin of bully beef. At night, shells flickered in the sky above the black rows of willows and poplars, and in the thicket behind the mess a nightingale sang on in the clammy darkness.
Fortnum & Mason hampers arrived from Evelyn packed with goose-liver pâté, tinned butter, chocolate and other essential complements to the mess fare. Cherry drilled his men very early, after their bacon and eggs, and if there was nothing to do later in the morning there were impromptu football matches, the uneven pitch marked off by hedgy rolls of barbed wire. The men thought it was cushy enough. As for Cherry, the all-male communal life had strong resonances. He revelled in the ragging, the glow of physical fitness and the common purpose. But after what he had been through, there was something hollow about the military. It was as if the Germans were a manufactured enemy, compared with the Antarctic.35 He was sickened by the rhetoric of the English papers, which leant ever more heavily on the old public school traditions of loyalty, honour and chivalry. A stranger reading the Wykehamist , which many officers had sent out to France, would have thought the war was a knightly quest. But Cherry had discovered that life failed to fit the neat patterns of chivalric rhetoric, and he was never quite taken in by the team spirit of the Great War.
When Cherry’s division arrived in Flanders the Germans were trying to prise the Allies out of Ypres and push forward to the Channel ports. No reports have survived on the specific activities of 5 Squadron. Cherry almost certainly didn’t see any direct action, though his armoured cars continued their support work. Night after night throughout May news came in to the mess of British disasters at Aubers Ridge, Festubert and other godless places. Cherry could do little except look through the window and watch the light of star shells dilating against a sickle moon. John Buchan’s lon
g account of the Second Battle of Ypres in The Times (which praised the detachment of armoured cars that had assisted the cavalry) ended with the dying words of a Captain in the 9th Lancers. ‘Tell them I die happy,’ gasped the unlucky man. ‘I loved my squadron.’ Only according to Buchan he was not unlucky at all. ‘Has the whole duty, love and service of a regimental officer,’ he wondered, ‘ever been more beautifully summed up?’
A section of armoured cars with Maxim guns was attached to two cavalry divisions near Ypres, constituting, according to Josiah Wedgwood, ‘the first mechanised cavalry’. The cars were now moving men between the forward, support and reserve trenches at times when telephone communication was cut and widespread gas prevented unprotected travel. One strategist, General de Lisle, reported to the Admiralty that the work of the cars attached to the first cavalry division towards the end of May had revealed that ‘in trench warfare and in any future advance these armoured cars would prove a most valuable addition to the cavalry division’. Despite their successes, once the battle lines had been established and the trenches dug, opportunities for vehicles that had to stick to roads were severely limited. By May several armoured car squadrons, Wedgwood’s included, had already left for Gallipoli and Egypt, where conditions were more suitable for wheeled vehicles. No. 5 Squadron was duly sent back to Britain to await instruction. ‘Thus at the very moment when the new armoured car force was coming into effective existence at much expense and on a considerable scale,’ Churchill concluded in a lengthy report written after the war, ‘it was confronted with an obstacle and a military situation which rendered its employment practically impossible.’
For most of June 1915 Cherry and his squadron were again headquartered at Lamer, now fully operational as a Red Cross officers’ convalescent hospital. Pieces of paper were glued to the old doors (‘WARD B’) and arrows stuck to the frames of the bemused ancestors, but Evelyn was in magnificent command, supported by grey-and-blue uniformed Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses including the eighteen-year-old Peggy. Mildred, Edith and Elsie were also living at home. Many patients were sufficiently convalesced for Evelyn to institute strict rules of conduct, and she summarily informed the hapless Peggy, for once in a position to have some fun, that Cherry-Garrard girls did not chase officers.
Almost all the other Antarcticans had joined up as soon as war was declared: even the 46-year-old Ponting applied for service as a field photographer. Atch, still examining Chinese parasites in September 1914, had been obliged to abandon Leiper and report for active duty. In 1915 he was despatched to Cape Helles on the Gallipoli peninsula with orders to investigate the fly-borne diseases that were affecting the troops. He later moved to the Western Front, served with siege-gun crews in Flanders and fought on the Somme, where he got a DSO. After a stint in northern Russia, in 1918 he suffered horrific injuries while serving on HMS Glatton in Dover harbour. The new ship caught fire and had to be torpedoed by a destroyer before her magazine went up. Briefly knocked unconscious by the explosion, Atch was blinded, burned and forced to pull shards of hot metal from his leg, yet by feeling his way between decks he rescued several other men before making his escape. He was awarded the Albert Medal, and partially recovered his sight.
Atch was not the only one to have a distinguished war. Campbell came out of retirement and returned to the navy as a commander. He was sent to the Dardanelles, where he won a DSO. Teddy Evans was also awarded a DSO for a bravura performance commanding the destroyer HMS Broke in 1917. Together with one other ship, the Broke engaged six German destroyers that were about to attack Dover. Three were sunk, and the others retreated. Evans, observing a number of Germans in the water begging to be saved, leant over the bridge and shouted, ‘Remember the Lusitania?’
Silas had joined the Royal Engineers as a second lieutenant and gone over to France at about the same time as Cherry. There he worked on the development of wireless techniques for the French army, was twice mentioned in despatches and won the Military Cross. He was a major before the war ended, and after being transferred to the General Staff as a staff officer in Wireless Intelligence, he was awarded an OBE. Priestley rose to the rank of major in the Royal Engineers and was mentioned in despatches like his old shipmate Silas, as was Gran, who flew for the Royal Flying Corps and was credited with the destruction of seventeen German planes. Cecil Meares, an intelligence officer for many years, also joined the Royal Flying Corps. He ended the war as a lieutenant-colonel.
When war was declared Deb had just returned to Australia for a scientific conference. On hearing the news, he sailed straight back to England on the same ship and joined up as a lieutenant with the 7th Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry. He was a major by 1915, served in France and Greece, and was invalided home in 1916 (a few months after he left, most of his battalion was wiped out). Deb quickly recovered from his injuries, and remained on light home duties for the rest of the war.
As for Tom Crean, he had left for the Antarctic the week war began. Shackleton had offered the services of his expedition to the war effort, but on the day the Endurance was due to sail, the Admiralty cabled back with the single word, ‘Proceed’. Crean’s former shipmate Lashly, now in the Naval Reserve, had signed up on HMS Inflexible. His ship was badly damaged in the Dardanelles, but Lashly survived, remaining in service until after the war ended.
At the end of June 1915 Cherry was summoned down to divisional headquarters at Wormwood Scrubs in London. He was there to demonstrate a prototype vehicle to an Admiralty committee developing an armoured landship capable of negotiating mud, barbed wire and trenches. The committee was chaired by the recently demoted Churchill, now Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the most senior supporter of the nascent machine (if his new armoured cars couldn’t go round the trenches, he argued, some method should be found enabling them to go over them). Caterpillar-tracked farm machines had been in use for some years (Scott’s motor sledges were an adapted version of the early tractor) and H. G. Wells had confidently deployed quasi-tanks on the page, but tracks had never yet been effectively used for military purposes (Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, dismissed the armoured tractor as ‘a pretty mechanical toy’). Caterpillar tracks were obviously ideal for trench conditions, and early in 1915 a specially formed RNAS squadron had carried out a series of experiments which would lead to the construction of a vehicle code-named the tank (to preserve secrecy it was disguised as a water-tanker). The project was based at the Scrubs, and there, because of his Antarctic experience with tracked motors, Cherry was asked to show off one of the machines under consideration, a tiny Killen-Strait tractor built in Wisconsin on three sets of tracks like a tricycle and equipped by the navy with a special net-cutter. While Churchill, the new Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, and a row of Admiralty brass hats looked on, the Killen-Strait ceremoniously clambered over piles of railway sleepers and barricades of scrap metal before making a final assault on a maze of barbed wire with the net-cutter. It was a vaguely farcical occasion, but they were on to something. In February 1916 the army ordered a hundred tanks, and in the autumn His Majesty’s Landships were deployed on the Western Front.
Cherry went back down to London at the beginning of July, basing himself at the Piccadilly Hotel while he tried to get orders for his squadron. The hotel was teeming with uniformed officers and the platforms of Victoria station were striped with rows of soldiers, asleep or sitting on their packs and smoking. Outside, men on leave walked the normal streets, absurdly conscious of the short distance that separated their two irreconcilable worlds.
Then, quite suddenly, he collapsed. It was his old colonic problem, first diagnosed as colitis mucous (‘contracted in his expedition to Antarctic [sic]’) and eventually as ulcerative colitis. In retrospect, he said he had known he was not well when the war started. ‘Before I had recovered from the heavy overdraft made on my strength by the expedition,’ he wrote in The Worst Journey, ‘I found myself in Flanders looking after a fleet of armoured cars.’
Ulcerative
colitis is a chronic inflammatory disease of the large intestine and rectum, its chief symptom being diarrhoea, often acute. Its cause is unknown, its cure uncertain even eighty-five years later; and it is highly unpredictable. It can extend through the entire large bowel and lead to thickening of the intestinal wall. Other symptoms include abdominal pain, weight loss, a high temperature and the emanation of startling gurgles from the stomach regions. Attacks can be triggered by many factors, including, significantly, anxiety, and the disease is often associated with nervous disorders.
At around the same time, Cherry’s unit was disbanded. It was a tremendous disappointment. The men were despatched to barracks to await billets elsewhere (many were shipped off to the front almost immediately) and the officers dispersed to other branches of the RNAS. In August the board of the Admiralty and the War Office agreed to put an end to the whole anomalous position of cars in an air service within a navy. All the armoured car squadrons of the RNAS, and all the other ground services that had grown up like ivy around it, were immediately transferred to the army.
For Cherry it was all over anyway. Conveniently, he now lived in a convalescent home. He kept his old bedroom, and had his own nurse, who happened to be particularly beautiful. But as he looked down from his window and watched the sweet chestnuts bloom in the park and the pipistrelle bats loop around the stable block, it seemed a bitter end to the summer.
