Tag: dorsets

Overwhelmed

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13th October 1914

The 15th Brigade resumed their attack along the canal at 5:30am. B and C Companies were sent into the firing line. D Company was put in support and A Company was held in reserve. A single machine gun was positioned in a cottage near to the lock.

The Dorsets moved along the canal bank keeping in line with the Bedfords to the north and the K.S.O.B. to the south of the canal. The early morning mist helped their movement and progress was good.

The German opened up a tremendous bombardment on Givenchy using heavy artillery. Smoke and mist and brick dust from the falling buildings drifted across the battlefield.

Bols couldn’t get in touch with either of the supporting units and it appears that the Dorsets then halted and prepared defensive trenches.

The situation became even more dangerous as the mist cleared. Rather than finding the K.S.O.B. on their right, the Dorsets found the enemy. Like yesterday, the Germans had excellent cover from the high bank which ran along the canal. They poured fire into the exposed troops. At the same time enemy artillery started shelling them from the north east.

The Dorsets’ single machine gun couldn’t help them. As it responded to the German rifle and machine gun fire it rapidly received return fire. The gun’s main operator was quickly killed. Any attempts to get the gun firing again were quickly extinguished by enemy snipers.

B Company were really catching it now and they quickly lost several of their officers. At around midday they began to withdraw. At this time the Germans found D Company in support with a Field howitzer battery. Some of 15th Brigade’s 18 pounders which had been moved up in support were also targeted.

Captain Ransome, seeing the severity of the situation, took the initiative and moved A Company back to a sunken road by the lock near Pont Fixe to form a rallying point. Major Saunders had been sent back to organise this and to ask for artillery support.

At this point things went from bad to worse for the Dorsets. The Bedfords withdrew from Givenchy, unable to withstand the bombardment that had reduced the village to rubble in a matter of hours, burying many of their men in the process. The Germans advancing, then immediately launched an attack on the left hand flank of the Dorsets.

At around 1:45pm C Company reportedly saw men approaching carrying lances. Nothing was done as they apparently thought they were French cavalry. Then more Germans, about a battalion’s worth, were seen approaching, some of them reportedly holding their hands up. Thinking they were surrendering, the Dorsets paused for a fateful moment. The Germans charged. These two strange mistakes proved to be disastrous, but it was a day where a series of events led to the Dorsets putting themselves into an untenable position.

The Dorsets had dug such deep trenches that they couldn’t get out quickly enough. The men of the left hand flank of C Company were totally overwhelmed. In the adjacent trench, men fought to the last man, Lieutenant Pitt was killed and Battalion Commander Bols went down injured, shot through the back and the arm. The remainder of the men tried to withdraw over open ground. They were quickly cut down by the German rifle and machine guns on the south bank of the canal.

The survivors ran back to the position held by A Company, helped in some part by defensive machine gun fire. The Germans overwhelmed the 18 pounder battery, one of the machine guns and pushed up to Pont Fixe. A Company held the line. Gleichen pushed two Companies of the 2nd Bn Devons into support them. They held onto this position for the rest of the day, under heavy bombardment.

Major Saunders assumed command of the Battalion. What was left of it.

The Dorsets’ losses were severe. The war diary reports 51 killled, 152 wounded and 210 missing. The official history reports 18 killed, 126 wounded and 284 missing. The CWCG lists 87 men killed on 13th October 1914.

They had lost 12 officers, killed or wounded. It was a dark day for the Dorsets.

The beginning of the end

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12th October 1914

II Corps, of which the Dorsets were part of in 1914, were the first British troops to be sent into the gap on the left hand edge of the French. To the north lay Flanders. The 7th Division had recently landed at Zeebrugge and was now moving south in a race with the Germans. They were moving towards a small town in Belgium called Ypres.

From the Dorsets at Béthune to Ypres in the north the land was flat and dotted with industrial activity, much as at Mons before. Into this gap poured the BEF and the Germans. This was known as the race to sea.

The British were attempting to pivot from Vermelles in the south and wheel around to the right, thus simultaneously relieving the French in the south and attacking the Germans to the east. The Germans had other ideas.

The 15th Brigade set off along the road to Festubert in heavy fog. Their ultimate objective was to take the town of La Bassée, which had just fallen into German hands, but their immediate concern was to hold the line between Festubert and the canal to the south.

At some point just before they reached Festubert shellfire caused them to halt. Gleichen detached the Dorsets from the 15th Brigade and sent them south to defend the canal as he had just been informed that the French Cavalry unit covering the canal was going to be withdrawn. The 13th Brigade were replacing the French south of the canal.

Heading along the tow path on the north side of the canal, the Dorsets arrived at Pont Fixe, a bridge between Givenchy on the north and Cuinchy on the south. Some books claim that there is a village called Pont Fixe here but I cannot find any mention of this. I think it simply comes from the geographical name on a map. Pont Fixe just means a fixed bridge. I’ve included a later British trench map which clearly marks Pont Fixe as the same as the existing bridge.

Image of a map of Cuinchy showing Pont Fixe
Map of Cuinchy showing Pont Fixe

It was immediately obvious that the French had left too soon and the Germans were now attacking along the canal, trying to squeeze between the French and British lines. Bols ordered Frank’s A Company to cross to the south and move eastwards along the canal. D Company were to move along the north edge of the canal. Bols positioned one machine gun in an unfinished factory by the north side of the bridge which began strafing Germans gathering in some brickstacks and railway lines to the south east. B and C Companies were held in reserve.

A Company made good progress at first. A high bank immediately to their right shielded them from the advancing Germans. The war diary reports that they “inflicted severe loss on Germans north of Cuinchy.”

D Company, more exposed as they moved along the open fields north of the tow path, were suddenly sitting targets. Accurate fire poured into them from Cuinchy village in the south west, from the high bank to their south and also from the brickstacks and a large railway junction to the south east. Several men fell in the crossfire. At a farm just 180 metres east from the bridge their CO, Major Reginald Trevor Roper, was shot in the head. He died shortly afterwards.

The Dorsets didn’t get any further. B and C Companies entrenched in a rise by the farm where Major Roper had died. A Company returned to Pont Fixe with D Company and Battalion HQ and billeted for the night.

The Dorsets were in a precarious situation. They were in touch with the 1st Bn Bedfords to the north, but to their south the situation was uncertain. The 15th Brigade were massively overextended, occupying a 2 mile line above the canal from Festubert. An untroubled sleep that night would have been very difficult.

The Dorsets’ war diary reports 11 killed, 30 wounded and 3 missing. The CWGC reports 13 dead for that day, but only 11 of them are buried in the vicinity of Pont Fixe.

A move towards hot water

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11th October 1914

You’ll be relieved to see that it’s a quick post today as I am massively short on time. This daily posting is proving very tricky indeed!

The Dorsets left their billets in La Thieuloye at 7:50am and marched to Béthune. Two outpost companies (B and C) were pushed on along the canal running east out of the city. They took up a line from Gorre to Ferme du Roy which I’ve marked on the map in blue.

The rest of the Battalion billeted in the streets in the city.  The Brigade Headquarters were stationed at 34 Grand Place, a wine shop by strange coincidence, and they enjoyed “a lovely hot bath, provided by a marvellous system of gas-jets which heated the water in about five minutes”.

I demand to have some booze

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10th October 1914

After more waiting, and much to-ing and fro-ing, the buses finally arrived at about 2:30pm and took them via the town of Saint-Pol-sur-Termoise and dropped them off at their billets in La Thieuloye.

The BEF was hurtling towards the west now as fast as they could go. It was hoped they could reach Lille in time, which was about 40 miles off to the north east, but Gleichen wasn’t so sure. He had witnessed thousands of young men streaming to the west away from the possibility of being interned by the advancing Germans.

Frank was known as Biddy or Bid. Nicknames are cryptic, often born from the language a group of friends or family form through familiarity. Sometimes they came from acronyms of initials (see my theory about the origins of Auntie Muff yesterday). Biddie certainly isn’t that. His initials are AFC. So where did it come from?

Biddy is an old 16th Century name for baby chicken. The origin is suggested as perhaps imitative of the chicken, so perhaps it was used as a calling sound when feeding them. A chickabiddy is an affectionate term for a small child. I think this is the most likely origin of Frank’s nickname.

Strangely enough, Biddy came up again when I was looking up references to Frank’s mention of the word “lizzie”.

“No cold tea out here or little drops of lizzie (?), could do with a drop of cold tea now.”

I’ve previously opined that cold tea was beer. I’ve subsequently read that it referred to brandy. I must opine less. But I think it’s a pretty interchangeable phrase.  Here, Frank’s probably referring to the hard stuff. I initially thought that lizzie was some kind of Babycham. But I am pretty sure it’s a reference to Lisbon wine, which was some kind of very cheap fortified wine or at least a collective noun for any cheap wine. Empire Wine is often mentioned. Wine of such unconscionable filth that they could only sell it back in Britain. It’s fair to say that cheap wine was popular in Edwardian times. It was perfect for getting drunk really quickly, which tends to be a good property for booze. Britain in the early 1900s is no different from today when it comes to drunkenness.

The quality of Lisbon wine was debatable and its reputation for potency didn’t stop here. Not strong enough for the real diehards, it was often mixed with cheap alcohol like methylated spirits to produce a truly lethal drink called “Red Lizzie”. Yes, that’s the stuff you clean your brushes with. When produced from red wine it was know as, wait for it, “red biddy”. Was Biddy a massive booze hound and that’s how he got his nickname? Had he accidentally signed up after a weekend of  too many red biddies?

Red biddy was a drink of legend that by the Second World War had largely vanished from pubs and was made at home. It rendered the drinker blind drunk and often mad. It wasn’t surprisingly compared to absinthe that so afflicted Parisians in the 19th Century. Government laws like the 1937 Methylated Spirits Bill tried to control this dangerous substance, and this report by the Medical Officer of Health for Wandsworth in 1936 highlighted the concerns that many social organisations, such as the Salvation Army, lobbied the Government with.

The Government are still struggling today with adulterated alcohol. A 2008 Guardian article highlights the rise in theft of alcoholic sanitisers from some London hospitals. It is used as a base for “the street drinkers’ favourite ‘red biddy'”. Delicious and health conscious too!

The great Kingsley Amis recommends red biddy as part of a decent breakfast in his booze-befuddled novel Lucky Jim.

The three pints of bitter he’d drunk last night with Bill Atkinson and Beesley might, by means of some garbaged alley through the space-time continuum, have been preceded by a bottle of British sherry and followed by half a dozen breakfast-cups of red biddy.

I prefer Alpen.

Let’s leave this subject with this fine English gentleman describing the appeal of pure alcohol very eloquently.

Dial M for Muff

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9th October 1914

The confusion continued for the Dorsets. At 5pm. leaving behind their transport, they marched to Haravesnes, about 5 miles to the north east. They were supposed to then be picked up at 7pm by motor buses, or omnibuses as the Dorset war diary calls them. But they never arrived. Here the war diary and the official history of the Dorsets differ for the first time. Going by the other regiments’ war diaries and Gleichen’s account, it seems that the Brigade either billeted or bivouacked in Haravesnes overnight.

It would have been easier for them to march to their destination. They were losing precious time as we’ll see tomorrow.

Gleichen is not happy with the buses, and narrowly avoids being flattened by one of them.

I had, by the way, an extremely narrow escape from being killed that night. I had been lying down just off the road, when it struck me that I should find out more of what was happening and going to happen if I went to the head of the camion column and interviewed the officer in charge. It was a tramp of a mile or more through the 14th Brigade, and I found out something of what I wanted; but when I returned to the bivouac I heard that, not two minutes after I had started, a motor-bus had swerved off the road and passed exactly over the place where my head had been. It very nearly went over St André and Moulton-Barrett, who were lying a few feet away, as it was.

Today I have been looking at Lilian M Webster and tried to find out if she is the mysterious Muff from Frank’s letters.

In the 1911 census, Lilian Webster is listed as daughter of Matthew and Phoebe Webster. Lilian is 22. Matthew is 72 and Phoebe is 69. Did Phoebe have a later baby at the age of 47, nine years after their last baby Herbert Arthur? It’s certainly possible but also highly unlikely. Looking further back at the 1901 census Matthew and Phoebe are living at 60 Mordaunt Street with their granddaughter, Lilian M Pearson, aged 12. Is this the same person? Is she their daughter or their grandchild. What’s going on here?

Matthew and Lilian’s first child, Lilian “Lily” Emily Webster, was born in 1865. She married William James Charles Pearson in 1885. They are listed as living in Mordaunt Street in Brixton, presumably with her parents at number 60. In 1889 along came Lilian May Florence Pearson. I had her written down as Lilian Maud but that now appears to be wrong. Today I found her marriage certificate from 1915 and her name is listed in full there, as well on her husband’s next of kin form when he joined up with the Army. Unfortunately, the trail goes cold for both her parents at this point and I cannot find any mention of them after her birth. I haven’t done nearly enough research yet but is their disappearance connected to the fact that she move in with her Grandparents? Why does she change her name in the 1911 Census, or is that just a clerical error? Where did they go to? Did they die or emigrate, or am I just missing them in the records? As ever, turning these stones leaves more questions than answers.

I have one idea though. Look at her name: Lilian M F Pearson. The middle initials are MF. Is this Muff? This is what I guessed at yesterday. My doubts remain though. She could also be May, a character as yet unidentified in the letters to his sister if you look back through the archives. But May seems to be a friend of Mabel’s rather than a cousin. And May and Muff are often referred to separately in the same letter. Meanwhile, I shall just keep turning those stones.

Tomorrow we’ll look at the possible origins of Frank’s nickname and his favourite tipples.