by John Fairley
Toplis need not have worried. Blackwell colliery had found its first decorated, wounded, home-grown hero, who had made it to a commission too. The very first night the colliery manager, John Thomas Todd, so far forgot the profit of his coal-owner and his own past quarrels with Toplis as to order up champagne for a toast at the Miners’ Club. Ralph Ward, George Ward’s nephew, from two doors up in Colliery Row, vividly remembers the handsome young charlatan accepting the glass of bubbly as though it had been his constant refreshment in the brief intervals between his glorious feats of arms. As the night wore on, and the champagne was transmuted into plainer beer, the members of Blackwell Colliery Miners’ Club became familiar with the intrepid but hopeless assault on Hill 70; the curtain of Boche machine-gun fire which had mown down the 24th Division in row after row; the diffident account of Captain Toplis’s encounter with a German pill-box; the lone return, through God’s good grace, with two wounded men, ten prisoners and a bullet wound in the knee to show for it.
Mr Todd made a gruff but affecting speech and invited the colliery’s most celebrated man to drill the local volunteers the following day. Toplis, when he woke up, dressed carefully for a visit to Mansfield’s only professional photographer. More than sixty years on, the portrait of the dashing captain still stares out in discreet confidence, a picture of a man sure of his background and role in life. The photographer put the picture on a little easel in his window with a carefully hand-printed notice, ‘Captain Percy Toplis, DCM, of Mansfield’, and sent a copy to the Nottingham Evening Post. It would be five years before it was to be printed – and then as a picture of ‘The Most Wanted Man in Britain’.
The evening of the great Blackwell Local Defence Volunteers’ drill in honour of Percy Toplis is a treasured memory to this day among those who had the privilege to see it. Ernest Leah met the hero and conducted him to the Blackwell Cricket Club ground:
‘He told us that he had been wounded on active service and that he was on sick leave. We believed his story, of course, about the wound, and he was given a chair from which to do his drilling. I can remember it as if it was yesterday, [him] sitting there about where the umpire usually stood.’
It was a motley crew which marched on to the field to greet the ceremonial drillmaster. Most wore their pit boots, the nurtured turf of the outfield having been willingly sacrificed to the exigencies of war. The odd khaki jacket was worn, acquired from returning relatives, and even, on this distinguished occasion, two full-dress uniforms with medals adorning two middle-aged Boer War veterans. They had both had their day at Ladysmith and drunk off it for fifteen years. But even they were subdued by the aura of more present dangers. Each man carried the long wooden handle used on miners’ shovels.
Toplis started gently. ‘Order arms. Stand at ease.’ (Page three of the Infantry Training Manual, 1914.) Not a flicker of inappropriate amusement as a man in the middle row promptly dropped his shovel handle.
‘Atten-shun. Slope arms. By the right, dress. Form, fours.’
Fully half a minute of hopeless muttering and muddle as the military men sorted themselves out. Ralph Ward got a shovel handle in the eye, but thought better of complaining in the presence of a veteran of Hill 70.
‘Right turn. Quick march.’ Toplis sent them away towards the square-leg boundary. ‘Left wheel.’
Away they went across the far end of the ground against the skyline dominated by the main Blackwell colliery spoil heap.
‘Left wheel. Left wheel,’ again. And then, ‘Halt,’ in front of the seated hero.
It was only now that the celebrated 18-year-old drillmaster realized that his two old foes were tucked away in the rear rank. And a night of champagne was not sufficient to anaesthetize the memories they brought back, or to buy off the months of victimization. As Ernest Leah remembers:
‘Percy reckoned his old boss, the mine manager, Todd, and the under-manager, Johnson, had given him a hard time as a lad, so he singled them out for some very hard drilling that night.’
‘Attention. Slope arms. About turn. Halt. Present arms.’
Inevitably, Toplis’s two victims, like most of their colleagues, were hopelessly behind.
‘Step forward, Todd and Johnson.’ Flushed with the indignity of it all, the two managers took a pace out of the line. ‘Left turn, quick march, halt, slope arms, present arms, about turn.’ Toplis forced the unhappy pair into a ragged demonstration of the entire army drillbook. Finally, like a ringmaster with the big cats, he ordered, ‘Attack position. Down.’
Ernest Leah counted silently to twenty while the rulers of Blackwell lay prostrate in front of the new khaki khan from Colliery Row:
‘Then he made them run round the ground till they were exhausted. Percy, of course, was laughing his head off all the time.’
One evening had paid off a clutch of old scores.
King for a week at home, Percy Toplis left Mansfield determined that the real British Army would likewise bend a little more to his will. At the very least, France, its mud and its blood, was definitely out.
At that time in 1915, the newspapers were happily diverting their readers away from the unglamorous carnage across the Channel to the exotic tale of a triumphant little ‘side-show’ half the world away in Mesopotamia, or what is now Iraq. Major-General Townshend, replete with pig-sticking cavalry and the crack regiments of the Indian Army, was rolling up the dastardly Turks along the banks of the River Tigris. There had been a splendid old-fashioned victory in North-West Frontier style at Amara, and the papers carried tales of the troops basking in the sun and enjoying unspecified oriental delights in the bazaars of Basra and the Persian Gulf. To Toplis it seemed a sufficient contrast to Mademoiselle of Armentières and December in the trenches. It was fortunate for him that he only got as far as Malta and his night out with Private Ward before the news came through of General Townshend’s defeat, his surrender at Kut, and a four-week march of degradation and death across the desert to a Turkish prison camp.
The troop-ship turned round and returned to England. In future, ‘side-shows’ would have to take second place to the immutable collision on the Western Front.
Toplis returned in early 1917 to an England of bitterness and unrest, of strikes by the police and engineers, of one Member of Parliament, Sir John Jackson, caught out collecting £80,000 a year for himself through inflated contracts to the War Office, and of another, W. C. Anderson, demanding conscription of wealth and property to match conscription of men. Anderson’s fellow socialists, hot with the news from Russia, were planning a conference of the Second International in Stockholm to try and stop the war. While 20 million men endured the winter of 1916–17 in trenches the length of Europe, the newspaper The Call wrote:
The nations are still pursuing the insensate path for race suicide. The insatiable war machine still shatters and annihilates with a fiendish regularity. Whole battalions of fathers and brothers, enter the inferno and melt away like summer snow. Our streets are filled with the halt and the blind. A load of sorrow is accumulating in every home in the land.
Yet London continued to flaunt the delights of peacetime. The horse-racing fixtures continued, the clubs stayed open. Private Toplis, back from Malta and facing the inevitable return to France, once again got out his hero’s regalia and adjourned to the metropolis. Years later, after his spectacular death, an acquaintance remembered the consummate actor who had fooled them all in wartime ‘society’, and reminisced profitably about him to the World’s Pictorial News:
He would walk along the Strand with the air of a man with an important mission. I was with him one day when he stopped suddenly, turned round with a military air, and called out ‘Corporal.’ The non-com he addressed walked back. ‘Why didn’t you salute me?’ asked Toplis in an imperious manner. ‘I didn’t see you, sir,’ replied the man, saluting. Toplis, with a wave of his stick, snapped out ‘Then keep your eyes open in future, corporal,’ and passed on. I never saw anything done more properly. Not a shadow of doubt concerning the bon
a fides of the officer could have entered the non-com’s mind. I certainly had none.
The newspaper continued:
At this time Toplis was ‘carrying on’ in the West End. And he was ‘carrying on’ with a vengeance. To have heard him talk one would have believed him to have been a veritable hero.
He was a frequent visitor at a house in Maida Vale – a house that stands in its own grounds, and is owned by a wealthy clay merchant. The lady of the establishment was strongly ‘smitten’ by the charms of the ‘noble and gallant’ British officer who had achieved so much. She introduced him to her daughters and he took them out for motor rides and to theatres. The tale that he told her was that he had been trained at the Camberley School for Officers, from which he went out to India, and came back for the war. He further stated that he was the only son of a retired army general, who had fallen out with him, and that he found it necessary for the present to ‘exist’ on his pay. The name which served him on this occasion was Major Williams, and he frequently declared his intention of ‘going back to France and winning his spurs’.
There was none who knew better than he the art of disguise. He was fully as skilled and adept as Charles Peace, whom he copied in many ways. Then he always went about fully armed. Once at a London night club he had a dispute at cards and drew a revolver, which he declared he was quite prepared to use. He terrified everyone, and one man afterwards described him as ‘a fellow who stood with tilted chin and blazing eyes, the very picture of animated fury’.
Again, in a house off the Euston Road, when challenged by a man who threatened to rob him, he fired two shots at a mirror which stood over the mantelpiece. Indeed, there never was a time when he was not prepared to shoot.
The boy from Blackwell was now just 19, and doing well. But though he had been absent without leave for weeks on end, he was not yet ready to risk the firing squad and to desert his unit. The assembled might of military justice still seemed a formidable deterrent, the twin sirens of ‘society’ and ‘socialism’ not yet loud enough for him to dare everything. All that was to change in March 1917. And it was the vast British Army base camp at Étaples in France, later his scene of triumph, which was first to be his education.
Despite his truancy, the army considered a draft to France sufficient retribution for his absence without leave. Toplis and his detachment of the RAMC marched the twenty miles from Boulogne to Étaples through a doleful and unbroken colonnade: hospitals, cemeteries, prisoner-of-war camps – sentinels of death, signposts to the fate that awaited the new detachments.
At Étaples, however, he found a new tense and aggrieved atmosphere among the 20,000 troops. The lingering, subservient, patriotic acceptance of the crusade against the Boche which Toplis had known at Loos had given way to mere endurance of a war that might not only not end wars, but would, apparently, never end itself. On the first day there he saw Australians rampaging through the camp after a drinking bout, insulting the Military Police and cutting free the victims of field punishment, tied to gun wheels by their wrists. In the Salvation Army hut there was talk of front-line pacts with the Germans. One story from the Somme told of a sentries’ truce: ‘We were in a sap,’ went the tale, ‘with a German observation post only five to six yards away when we heard some shouts of, “English, English.” We talked and agreed to a form of armistice – so we shot to the right and they to the left.’
And then there was a seductive encounter with a deserter, brazenly queueing up for his food from the hospital mess: ‘Oh, there’s dozens of us round here. They haven’t got a clue who’s real and who isn’t. There’s food on tap, plenty of blokes with money in their pockets, and always a chance of wriggling your way back on a boat to Blighty.’
Astonished, Toplis learned that there were whole communities of deserters in the woods and sand-dunes between Étaples and the once genteel watering place of Le Touquet.
‘They make a few sorties, but they hardly ever catch anyone. Safest place is right here in the camp, of course. Providing you’re carrying a chit of paper!’
When, in March 1917, Private Toplis left Étaples for the doomed attack at Arras, he was already set on a new and extraordinary path which was to lead him to challenge the invisible panoply of the British Army, its caste system and tradition, and ultimately to threaten even its ability to launch one of the great battles of the war.
5
The man who was to confront, and be crushed by, Percy Toplis, had had all the privilege and protection denied to his adversary. Brigadier-General Andrew Graham Thomson, Royal Engineers, Commandant of the base camp at Étaples, France, had been privately educated by tutors and moulded by the manners of mid-Victorian England. Where Toplis had been reared in the poverty of the coal-fields, tempered by his clashes with authoritarian justice in Nottinghamshire, and taught resource and resilience in the tempestuous years before the outbreak of the war, Thomson had sailed almost untroubled through the sheltered waters of an army officer’s career in that gallant era when the Empire was at its zenith.
In appearance, character and background, Thomson was not unlike his commander, Field-Marshal Haig. He had the same full-moustached, implacable expression. Like his Commander-in-Chief, he sprang from a Scottish upper-class family and displayed the same quality of stubbornness and inflexibility. Like Haig, he had served as a junior officer in the South African War. And he shared his commander’s love of the cavalry. But of the working classes, who were to form the bulk of the soldiers under his command in France in 1917, he knew almost nothing.
From the sympathetic obituary written about him in the Royal Engineers Journal of June 1926, it is evident that, next to officers and horses, Thomson had, earlier in his life, been most at ease with natives. The obituary, or memoir as it was called, was, inevitably, written by a fellow general, Sir Elliot Wood, KCB. It is almost silent about Thomson’s service in the First World War, saying only that he had to come home after a serious breakdown in health, but is by contrast fulsome about his early career. The memoir reads:
He was commissioned R.E., in January, 1877.
In 1879, as 1st Lieut., he joined the 17th Fortress Company at Aldershot and proceeded to Malta the following year, where he made his mark in work and sports.
He was one of the R.E. officers’ team which beat the combined garrison at football, and one of the three 17th Co. officers who beat all comers at Water Polo. He became a useful polo player, and had an uncommonly good barb which he ran in the races.
Sir Elliot then lists a roll-call of the obscure glories of Queen Victoria’s soldiers: the Egyptian campaign of 1882, the skirmishes at Hasheen and Tai Mai, the victory under Sir Garnet Wolseley at Tel el-Kebir, the Suakin campaign in the Sudan.
The enemy were all around Suakin, and Thomson’s company had to look out for itself. Here he was equally as successful with the native labour parties as he was with the Egyptian.
On returning to Suakin from home in June, 1885, a crowd of Thomson’s old working parties clustered round him with every manifestation of delight at seeing him again – and, indeed, they had a name of their own for him.
Mentioned in Despatches, gaining a clasp, Thomson received the brevet of Major for his services, immediately on his being promoted Captain.
It is an almost idyllic picture of the dashing empire-builder. But ‘uncommonly good barb’ horses and a way with native labour were to prove poor accoutrements when, at the age of 59, it came to a contest with the tough young champion of new politics and old resentments. And such lessons as the army had taught Andrew Graham Thomson were to make him even more aloof and inflexible, ill-suited material to face the fury of the new soldiers.
For Thomson’s career had begun to go wrong nine years before. In September 1908 he had been given the coveted job of Commandant of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and the rank of full colonel to go with it. It was near enough to London to keep his gregarious wife Annie in touch with London society, and close enough to the War Office to keep them cognisant of his
talents. Best of all, Thomson could play the experienced, heroic but warm-hearted father-figure to his young officer cadets. There is no doubt that he was respected, even held in affection, by his cadets.
The Thomsons threw parties and entertained widely. Within two months of her arrival at Woolwich, Annie Thomson was the star of the Academy’s play Our Boys, and won a rave review: ‘The hit of the evening was the rendering by Mrs Thomson, the wife of the Commandant, as Belinda, the loyal little lodging house slave.’ Her husband, too, basked in the company of these young cadets, mostly themselves sons of officers and ‘gentlemen’.
During the long, hot summer of 1911, he issued the unprecedented order that parades could be held in shirt-sleeves. He generally relaxed discipline, sponsored end-of-term dances and encouraged the Academy’s dramatic society.
But after three halcyon years at Woolwich, Thomson received, out of the blue, a mortifying public rebuke from which he was never to recover. The British Army too were to suffer for the few harsh words spoken that summer’s day in 1911. No less a person than the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John French, had come down for open day at ‘The Shop’, as Woolwich was known. And suddenly, in the midst of the expected speech of platitudes about the loyalty and patriotism expected from the cadets, Sir John launched into a fierce attack on the conduct and discipline of ‘Shop’ pupils. With Thomson standing beside him, he demanded a return to proper standards of dress, more drill, an end to the hectic social life at Woolwich, and less leave.
The wounds of this onslaught went deep enough to be remembered even a generation later when the history of the Woolwich Academy came to be written. And the effect on Thomson was traumatic. Never again would he permit himself the smallest sympathetic indulgence for the troops under his command, nor the slightest deviation from King’s Regulations. Before long, Thomson was replaced as commandant at Woolwich. He consoled himself in the company of family and old friends. His brother-in-law, Major Addison Yalden Thomson of the Cameronians, was a former tea planter in India, a director of several public companies and a master of hounds with a large estate at Thorncombe, Crowcombe, near Taunton. He also owned a small island off the northern shores of Scotland. Although Thomson owned a sixteen-room house in London, 72 St George’s Square, Westminster, and was a member of the Junior United Services Club, he spent most of his time with the major, riding and hunting.
