Khartoum 1929, Part 2

I posted earlier about Walter's last tour of duty, Khartoum. He continues his description of his time there:

General Gordon’s Palace was close by to our barracks, and a guard was always on duty there. That was where he was assassinated by the Dervishes. Lord Kitchener took out an Expeditionary Force to avenge his death, and that is how the Battle of Omdurman was fought. The Mahdi, or the “Mad Mullah” as he was known by, was [?] Lord Kitchener relieved Khartoum from the Dervishes. I had performed guard duties many times during my tour of duty there. It was a very impressive place to look over. All kinds of weapons hung on the walls, and the broad steps leading down to the ground floor where General Gordon was speared to death. He was a very religious man. There are many homes names after him which are solely used for the widows and the children of soldiers who have served in the British Army. The Gordon Boys’ Home, so called.

In February 1930 our regiment entrained for Port Sudan to go on board the troopship Devonshire. I am quite accustomed to life on these vessels. We carried out physical exercises on deck to keep fit and carry out marching and running exercises around the decks. In our spare time, we used to play various games. Housey Housey, or Bingo as it is called now, and an old soldiers’ game, Crown and Anchor. That was a game I avoided. The weather was very rough at this time of year. The old ship kept tossing and pitching, and it was difficult to keep on one’s feet. It was a healthy trip though, and everyone was glad when we landed in Southampton.

I had been abroad from 1919 September to March 1930. 10 ½ years.

So Walter's army days were numbered as he landed in Southampton - he would officially re-join civilian life in June 1930. (Wonder why he avoided the "old soldiers' game, Crown and Anchor"? I can't find out what it was, exactly.)

Here's a famous account of the death of General Gordon written in 1914 by Alfred Egmont Hake and a brief biography here.

Alfred Anderson

Alfred Anderson, sited a couple of weeks ago here, has died at age 109. He was the last man alive to remember the famous Christmas Truce of 1914. You can read more of his remembrances here and here.

Walter mentions Christmas 1914 only in passing:

And at Christmas 1914, we were in a village called Kemmel, where we were found accommodation in the farmhouses and outhouses of the villagers. It was on this day that Queen Mary’s gift boxes were issued to us containing pipe and tobacco. I didn’t smoke, so I kept mine in my kit.

Then he moves on to 2nd Ypres and the gas masks.

Anyway - salute to you, Alfred Anderson. Rest in peace.

Khartoum 1929, Part I

Sennar Dam (Sudan), constructed 1925

By 1929 Walter's service years were coming to an end. May and the boys (Doug and Ron) sailed back to England to settle in before Walter's tour of duty was set to end in 1930. Walter's final posting was to Khartoum:

Khartoum was a sandy and hot place situated on the banks of the White and Blue Nile. Omdurman was on the opposite side of the river, but several miles away. We were plagued with locust swarms. They settle down on the ground, and eat anything they can see. When you walk on them it had not effect. The Kite Hawks used to have a good feed from them though.

The battalion was taken on a train journey to Sennar to see the wonderful Sennar Dams which supplied the cotton fields with water. We watched the Sudanese labourers threshing the raw cotton with their feet and sticks, until all the hard brown seeds fell away on the floor, which was gathered up for making of oil. The cotton fields looked just like a snow covered area. After the pulping, the cotton went through several processes, until at the end, it was pushed into a big hydraulic press, and made into bales of cotton ready for export. The locust raids were the danger. Aeroplanes used to go up and intercept the swarms of locusts with “killer spray,” and they used to disintegrate, thereby lessening the threat to the crops. It was a very interesting tour going around the Sennar Dam and the cotton factory to watch the cotton from its raw state to the finished article, in the form of bales of compressed cotton.

As I've mentioned before, Walter had a head for facts and one of the things that made him so interesting to me (besides just being a nice fellow) was that he never lost his intellectual curiosity about the world around him. Whenever I'd visit him at the Royal Hospital, he'd regale me with the history of the grounds or Sir Christopher Wren's chapel. His letters provide an accurate, unusual perspective on the world in which he travelled. I never doubted the facts in his letters - and my research via the internet and at various locations in England proved my trust well-placed.

11th month, 11th day, 11th hour

"By the hundred thousand young men have died for the hope of a better world They have opened for us the way. If, as a people, we can be wise and tolerant and just in peace as we have been resolute in war, we shall build them the memorial that they have earned in the form of a world set free from military force, national tyrannies, and class oppressions, for the pursuit of a wider justice in the spirit of a deeper and more human religion."
- from The Guardian, 12 November 1918

Though we no longer call it Armistice Day, let us not forgot why we mark this day 87 years later:

The scribes on all the people shove
And brawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.
- from At Calvary near Ancre, Wilfred Owen

Bert Wildgoose, 1889-1915 - died at Battle of Aubers Ridge

Walter Wildgoose, 1st Lincolnshire 1908-1915 (+1921-1930), Machine Gun Corps 1915-1921 - Mons, Le Cateau, Aisne, 1st and 2nd Ypres

Tallow chandler, fellmonger, and whitesmith

As I work on a fictional version of Walter's story, I have to stop down occasionally to do various types of research. Right now, I'm concentrating on location descriptions - major settings like Sheffield, Aldershot, Lucknow, or specific settings like Ivy Cottage on the workhouse grounds.

While researching place names and photographs from turn of the (20th) century Sheffield, I found a list of trades and professions and the people practicing them in Sheffield around 1822 (well before Walter's time, but possibly still relevant in 1905). Some of them required a dictionary to find out what they were; some were more obvious. Here are my favorites:

• metal button manufacturer
• bone scale cutter (can't find a definition of this, but every Goggle listing mentions Sheffield, so I assume it had something to do with the cutlery trade)
• beadle and gaol master
• whitesmith
• soap boiler
• tea pot handle maker (guess someone else made the actual pots and put them together)
• tallow chandler
• dealer in bone and horn dust
• fellmonger
• smith and farrier
• fancy case maker
• penknife cutter and grinder

There were no Wildgooses listed for any of these trades/professions; I just found them interesting.

I also ran across a few surnames that will definitely make it into the book:

• Abbershaw
• Dewsnap
• Staniforth
• Ibbotson
• Sneesby
• Heppenstall
• Cockerton

Very literary names. Obviously, "Wildgoose" wasn't so out-of-the-ordinary.

The disadvantage of the uniform

I am currently reading Lyn Macdonald's 1914 and came across a passage a couple of days ago about how the men changed out of their uniforms to meet friends, go to pubs, etc., because a regular soldier was thought of as a bad sort. Walter wrote about this in one of his letters:

When I was in Aden, Charles Bissell wrote to me and told me of his marriage with Annie, and he was settled down in a cottage near Richmond Hospital in Old Deer Park Gardens. It was at this address I got to know my future wife, who was Charles’ sister May. I used to escort her back to Kew Gardens to her place of work, and during my nine weeks’ leave from Portsmouth, I got friendly with her. I sued to go and visit her parents in Richmond, but she didn’t like me going there in my scarlet tunic, as she said it would be detrimental to her business as a boarding house. So May asked me to buy some civilian clothes. (Soldiers those days, Mary, were looked down upon as no good, as it was so until the Great War of 1914 broke out – then it was a different story. “When war is on, and danger nigh, God and the Soldier is all the cry, but when War is over and all things righted, God and the soldier is always slighted.” – Rudyard Kipling.) I returned to Portsmouth to my regiment (this is now 1913 January).

With such general disrespect for the uniform pre-World War I, I find it interesting that Walter would wear the scarlet tunic to have his picture made with May a couple of years before they married.

Why no mention of the 1918 influenza pandemic?

With all the recent information about the 1918 flu pandemic (because of a potential bird flu pandemic), I wonder why Walter never mentioned it in his letters.

He was in England from May 1915 (foot injury at 2nd Ypres) until September 1919 when the Machine Gun Corps left for India, so he was in the thick of the flu crisis. How were his and May's families affected?

I'm surprised Walter didn't catch it, since he seemed prone to every other thing flying through the air during his lifetime (diphtheria, typhoid fever, various war injuries). Perhaps no one close to him was affected, so it didn't warrant a mention. Still, I wonder.

More World War I reading

Last month I posted a list of books on The Great War that I'd read to help with my writing of Walter's First World War experiences. One of the books I mentioned was Max Arthur's Forgotten Voices of The Great War. Today's Guardian has an article by Arthur called "Lest We Forget," which includes a series of interviews with the few remaining veterans of WWI. Here are a couple of snippets:

Henry Allingham109 (born June 6 1896)
Air mechanic, Royal Naval Air Service:

I got up in the night, took a couple of paces and fell straight into a shell hole. It was absolutely stinking. There was everything in there, you name it - dead rats, no end of rats. You know what they fed on in this hole? The bodies of the boys listed as missing.

So there I was, in this filthy great big hole. I decided to take a chance and I moved to the left. If I'd gone to the right, I don't know what would have happened. It was shallow and I managed to get to my feet, and I tried to climb out. I tried several times, but no joy. Somehow, though, and I don't know how, I heaved my belly up on to the side, and I could just pull myself out. I was soaking wet, right up to my armpits, but I had to stay where I was until daylight. I didn't dare move again. I wore that kit until it dried off on my body.

Alfred Anderson 109 (born June 25 1896)
Sergeant, 5th Battalion (TA) Black Watch

Conditions in the trenches were terrible. We slept on sandbags and there were rats everywhere. They used to gnaw through the phone cables so our communications were cut off. We often had to stand up to our knees in water and I got trench foot.

As well as normal duties, I was detailed to look after one of the officers - Lieutenant Bruce-Gardyne - and when he went away on a course, I was posted for a while as batman to Captain Fergus Bowes-Lyon, the brother of the late Queen Mother. He was from Glamis, which isn't far from my home in Newtyle. I really regret that I never got to meet the Queen Mother and tell her about my time with her brother before he was killed at Loos in 1915. He was a fine young man. A meeting was mooted once when she was at Glamis, but she took ill and it never happened.

Harry Patch107 (born June 17 1898)
Private, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry

Last year I went back to Ypres, where I met one of the last surviving German veterans of the war, Charles Kuentz, who was 107. It was very emotional. We had both been on the same battlefield at Pilckem Ridge. For a while I hadn't wanted to meet him, but I got a letter from him in Germany and he seemed like a nice man and I decided I would meet him. He was a nice man and we talked, then we both sat in silence, staring out at the landscape. Both of us remembering the stench, the noise, the gas, the mud crusted with blood, the cries of the fallen comrades. We had both fought because we were told to. Sadly, he died a year after I met him.

Click on the article's link in the first paragraph to read the complete interviews. By the way, one book that I left off last month's list is Tommy by Richard Holmes. It's another one I picked up in England when I was there in May, but it's readily available here in the U.S.

The Death of George V and a Trip to Westminster Hall

Walter's letters always go into some detail about events surrounding the death or coronation of the monarch (Victoria, Edward, George V). When Victoria died and Edward VII crowned, Walter was still in the Sheffield Children's Homes and wrote about the school trip to Firth Park for the coronation celebration. By the time Edward died, he was in the Lincolnshires and had the role of honor guard in London. Now, he was a civilian paying respects to the monarch in a different way. He relates the events of 1935:

Our King George V passed away and “he laid in State” in Westminster Hall. Ron was now nine years of age. It was a holiday for all the schools, and I told May I would like to take Ron to see the King lying in state. So off we went. He was full of excitement, and I took some sweets and a few sandwiches for us to eat, as I knew it would be a long wait. And so it was. I told Ron to be patient and think of all the other people who were also waiting. It was a nice day. The queue began to move slowly forward, until we reached the portals of the Hall, and what a solemn ceremonial silence and splendour. Life Guardsmen surrounded the coffin on the catafalque and so immobile like statues. Ron couldn’t take his eyes off them, and slowly, we filed out in the sunlight again. “There you are, Ron. That is a sight you will never see again.” He was pleased I brought him to see the sight of our late King. He told his mother all about it and I told him that I am going to take you to see the funeral next Friday, and you will like that.

May and I took Ron on the bus to Hyde Park Corner, and we made tracks for the East Carriage Drive opposite all those large hotels. We got a position right on the edge of the footpath, and Ron had a little camp stool to sit on. It was a long wait, and then we heard the mournful dirge of the Dead March, and then the cortege came into view – a gun carriage the coffin draped with the Union Jack, and the King’s decorations and headgear, with the Prince of Wales so lonely walking bareheaded, and behind him, all the foreign royalty walking along so slowly. (I didn’t envy them either, with their knee boots and spurs. I guess there were some sore toes that day.) So that was another page in Ron’s memory. Doug was still working at Coppens and he stayed at work.

Walter was keenly aware of history, whatever the stage of his life or the circumstances in which he found himself. He was eyewitness to remarkable events in the first half of the 20th century.