Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War

by Bill Lamin

  Harry’s older brother, Jack, as a schoolmaster, before he took Holy Orders.

  Connie (Constance Wilkinson Lamin) was, initially, something of a mystery. She was brought up by Harry and his wife, Ethel, as an older sister to their son Willie, but she certainly wasn’t his real sister.

  Willie, my father (whose memory, at the age of ninety-three, is no longer very reliable), has said that Connie was the daughter of a wealthy family in the town. As she was what we would now call disabled, these rich folks advertised in the local newspaper for someone to look after her. Ethel, Harry’s wife, answered the advert and brought up Connie as her own. This was the ‘official’ family story to cover up the embarrassing truth that Connie was actually Kate’s illegitimate daughter. The birth certificate I have obtained confirms this; it may be that the ‘Wilkinson’ part of her name came from the father, but if so, he did not stay to help raise her.

  It is difficult, now, to comprehend just what social and moral stigma was attached to illegitimacy in the first half – at least – of the twentieth century, or the lengths to which people would sometimes go to conceal such a birth. In an age when religious faith and regular churchgoing were the norms rather than, as now, exceptions, to bear a child out of wedlock all too frequently resulted in social ostracism – or worse – quite often at the hands of other family members. Then, too, contraception was uncertain even if it were available, and abortion highly illegal, resulting in desperate women finding themselves in the hands of unscrupulous and dangerous back-street practitioners. Little wonder, then, that Kate and her family chose to conceal Connie’s parentage. At least she was loved.

  Connie, the ‘daughter’ raised as their own by Harry and his wife.

  At that time, and quite apart from the disapproval she would have faced from many quarters, Kate would not have been able to pursue her successful career in nursing with a daughter in tow, and so it must have been – and was – very convenient for Ethel to take over the raising of Connie, while everyone in the know conspired to keep the truth of her parentage secret. It is likely that Kate helped Harry’s family through the difficult years during and following the Great War. If her daughter were living with Harry and Ethel, that would make a good deal of sense.

  As mentioned before, Connie was physically handicapped. She had cerebral palsy, a condition that usually occurs at birth. It may be that Kate, a midwife, tried to deliver her own child and suffered complications, but I have no information. Letters mention Connie ‘walking’, an odd reference to an unremarkable feat in a child that only made sense when I received her death certificate, which confirmed that she had suffered from cerebral palsy.

  The photograph here is of her and Willie, and since she was born in 1910, she was probably about eight when it was taken. Willie would have been two. Connie’s stance in the photograph apparently confirms the diagnosis of cerebral palsy and her consequent walking difficulties. Sadly, she died, aged nineteen, in 1929, and was buried on Christmas Eve in Ilkeston cemetery. Nearly twenty years later, Kate was buried beside her daughter, and only child, in the same grave. It is quite clear from his letters that Harry doted on Connie, and fretted about her condition.

  Harry’s wife, born Ethel Watson, was a local Ilkeston girl, the daughter of a plumber. They married in March 1914 in a civil ceremony in the register office in Basford, a suburb of Nottingham. As has been said, Harry’s occupation was recorded as ‘lacemaker’, while Ethel was simply listed as ‘spinster’. Their wedding took place some five months before the outbreak of war, a war about which Ethel never wanted to speak after Harry’s return from the front. She died in 1964, when I was in my teens. I remember her as a kindly, no-nonsense woman who made an amazingly creamy mashed potato.

  Harry’s wife – and the author’s grandmother – Ethel Lamin.

  William Lamin (Willie), my father, was born to Harry and Ethel in March 1916, two years after they had wed and almost a year before Harry joined up to fight. He grew up in Ilkeston and was a noted soloist, first as a boy soprano and then as a tenor, in the church choir for an astonishing seventy-five years. He became a successful textile salesman, and had a brush with the military in the Second World War, apparently missing being shipped to Singapore, and almost certain capture or death, by minutes. His transfer to the Army Physical Training (APT) Corps in Aldershot came through as he was on parade, ready to embark with the rest of his unit for Singapore. He was fortunate to spend the duration of the war as a PT instructor, remaining in England, for in February 1942, shortly after his draft arrived in Singapore, the allegedly impregnable fortress island fell to the Japanese, so completing their lightning conquest of Malaya.

  There was another son, Arthur, born in 1914. I have a baptismal certificate from the parish church in Ilkeston. No one alive can recall any mention of Arthur, and I assumed that he died in infancy. After a helpful reader identified the record of his death I was able to confirm that he did indeed die as an infant.

  Willie (now known as Bill) is, as I write, still alive at ninety-three and living in a nursing home in Derbyshire. Harry frequently mentions Willie in his letters, underlining what a terrible wrench it must have been to leave behind a baby son to go to the privations and horrors of the war.

  Willie knew Jack – his Uncle John – quite well, and always refers to him in a respectful manner. Jack was considered to be one of the successful members of the family, and officiated at Willie’s wedding to Nancy Elizabeth Satterthwaite in 1941.

  Sarah Anne disappeared from the family records quite early on in my researches, and I had assumed that she had died, like her sister, Mary Esther. I later discovered, however, that Annie (as Harry refers to her in his letters) also had an illegitimate child, named George. He too served in the First World War and at some time afterwards emigrated to Australia. Annie later married – Harry’s letters make several references to her wedding – and lived to a ripe old age. I have now realized that she was my own ‘Auntie’ Annie whom I sometimes spent days with as a toddler in Ilkeston. I can just remember her death in 1953, aged seventy-nine, when I was five.

  These then are the main characters in Harry Lamin’s world, names that occur again and again in his letters. It is now time to turn to the man himself.

  CHAPTER 2

  PREPARING FOR WAR, FEBRUARY – MAY 1917

  HARRY, ETHEL AND THEIR nine-month-old son Willie received a Christmas message from the War Office in late December 1916. At twenty-nine and not in a reserved occupation (that is, a job considered vital to the war effort; those in reserved occupations were exempted from military service), Harry must have known that conscription was inevitable and imminent. The call-up papers would not have come as a surprise to him, although married men were not obliged to be called up until May 1916. By then, after more than two years of war and hundreds of thousands of casualties, the Army was facing a manpower shortage, for the flood of volunteers had all but dried up.

  Harry duly enlisted on 28 December 1916. He would have been given a rail warrant to take him to Rugeley Camp, on the eastern edge of Cannock Chase, in Staffordshire, where he was to commence his basic training, prior to selecting, or being assigned to, a regiment or corps.

  The extent and scale of that camp needs to be appreciated. A contemporary map shows around five hundred huts, eighteen parade grounds, a hospital and the railway branch line which connected the camp to the main line. With around twenty-five soldiers to a hut, the camp would have had a capacity of 12,500 men. That seems an enormous figure, until we realize that, not quite six months earlier, more than that number of British troops had been killed before breakfast on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. Many units would still have been short of men, even by December; some battalions had been shelled and machine-gunned virtually out of existence. In extreme cases they had been disbanded, and their remaining officers and other ranks assigned to other units. Rugeley Camp was there to satisfy the endless need for fresh replacements.

  Harry would have travelled
to Rugeley by train. Because the whole of the East Midlands was heavily industrialized, there was a concentration of railways, run by separate, private companies. As a result, there would have been an almost endless number of ways by which Harry could have travelled from his home to Rugeley. There were three railway stations in Ilkeston alone, one within a few hundred yards of his home, and two in Rugeley, with branch line that served the Army camp running about two miles (just over 3km) outside the town. Harry would have arrived, with a trainload of other conscripts, most unsure of what he was to face.

  Rugeley Training Camp in Staffordshire, as it was in 1917.

  Private Harry Lamin, from the squad photograph taken after his arrival at Rugeley.

  The camp was effectively a production line for soldiers. On arrival, Harry would have had his details checked, undergone a medical inspection and been kitted out, and would then have put on his new uniform for a squad photograph. Then he would have started basic training, which consisted of much ‘square bashing’ (eighteen parade grounds!) and physical training (PT). The general form would be recognized by any soldier who has joined up in the last ninety years. There would also have been classes in aspects of military training, and, for some conscripts, in even more basic education.

  Amazingly, Harry’s squad photograph from Rugeley has survived, although I was not aware of its existence until the summer of 2007, a year after the Internet version of this account was started. The picture turned up in a box of miscellaneous items at my sister Anita’s home. There are two versions now: the original print, faded, much battered and creased after ninety years of obscurity and neglect, and a second version that has been subjected to modern computer technology to ‘clean up’ the image and remove the worst signs of wear and tear (the photo had obviously been folded up quite small at one point).

  Harry, who is at the right-hand end the front row (see below), has his belt on upside down (or, just possibly, all the other conscripts have their belts upside down). This confirms that he must have only recently received his uniform and kit, for a few parades would have made sure that he got the belt right, drill sergeants being what they are. After my own, very limited, military training, there is still no way, forty years on, that I can wear any belt with the buckle on the right. It just feels wrong.

  The squad photograph, after enhancement to remove the creases and marks. Harry is at far right in the front row.

  The photograph also shows the considerable range of ages among the squad. Harry, at twenty-nine, certainly doesn’t look the oldest. One of the recruits has a wristwatch, a relatively new kind of timepiece that was much more useful in a trench than a pocket watch, but which would have been quite an expensive item for a private soldier. On first seeing the photograph I wondered whether the building with the stained-glass window in the background might still exist, but a quick look at satellite images on the Internet showed that today, there is hardly a trace of the original camp at Rugeley left. A recent newspaper article described how a replica of an original wooden hut had just been installed there as a museum piece.

  Harry would not have been at the camp for much more than a month when, on Wednesday, 7 February 1917, he wrote the first of his war letters to have survived, to his sister Kate.

  37/74, M Coy, 15 Hut, 10th Training Reserves, Rugeley, Staffs

  February 7th 1917

  Dear Kate

  I was very pleased to receive your letter. The weather here is very cold and we don’t get much fire. We have been vaccinated this week well last Monday but we have to do all drills just the same. Ethel says Annie’s cold is much better. I can’t get a shut of mine but I am lucky to keep as well as I do. We have four blankets a piece and a bag of straw about 6in. from the floor on three planks to lie on. There are 29 in our hut and there only suppose to have twenty. I think it will be another five or six weeks before I get a pass I am ready for one anytime. Ethel says Connie and Willie are alright he will soon be a year old now and have two letters from Jack he seems to be getting on all right. We don’t get too much to eat, bread and jam dripping we have to do the cleaning in turns but the cooking is done at the cookhouse. I have not got any fatter yet I don’t suppose I shall do

  Will write soon

  With Love from

  Harry

  The letter to Kate, with its envelope, which is franked ‘Rugeley Camp’.

  Interior of a training-camp hut, c. 1917. The ‘bag of straw . . . on three planks’ on which the men slept can be seen at right; the stove and its chimney are at left.

  A recent drawing showing the construction of the type of hut only too familiar to Harry.

  The letter tells us a great deal. The troops lived in wooden huts. Each hut was about 60 feet (18 metres) long by 16 feet (5 metres) wide, with a cast-iron stove in the middle which would have provided the only heating. The straw palliasse on planks would have been a poor substitute for Harry’s bed at home, and he would certainly have needed the four blankets to keep warm, for the winter of 1917 was bitterly cold, and the huts draughty and lacking insulation.

  In time, the Army would replace many of its wooden huts with the corrugated-steel prefabricated Nissen hut, invented by a Canadian officer in 1916 and used in the First World War and, extensively, in the Second. At Rugeley in 1917, however, twenty-nine men in a hut designed for twenty illustrates the pressure to turn out replacement soldiers for the front line.

  Vaccinations – soldiers were inoculated against typhoid and paratyphoid on joining up. Whatever the controversy today over the use of vaccines, the insanitary conditions and poor hygiene of the trenches made such protection not just reasonable, but essential. Also available at the time was an anti-tetanus injection. However, this was generally administered after injury rather than as a preventive measure.

  The ‘pass’ Harry refers to would have allowed him a short leave at the end of the training period, prior to joining his unit on active service, probably across the Channel in France or Belgium.

  ‘Dripping’ is the residue of fat and juices that is left after meat has been roasted, poured into a bowl and allowed to cool and set, to be used again for frying or roasting. Before cholesterol and salt were identified as mainly harmful, ‘bread and dripping’ was a common snack, or even meal, in the industrial Midlands of England and elsewhere. I can remember enjoying it in the 1950s. The fat from the Sunday joint, with the wonderful brown jelly underneath it, was spread on to bread with a liberal amount of salt, and the slice then eaten. It had the merit of being full of flavour, cheap and quite nutritious, although probably not very healthy.

  In general, it would appear that the newly joined conscripts were not particularly well fed. The last line of the letter sums up Harry’s feelings with a touch of wry humour. We shall hear more of his experiences of Army food – always a preoccupation of soldiers – as his service progresses.

  The War Office specified the period of training for volunteer infantrymen in 1914 and 1915 as eight months. By the time Harry, a conscript, started his training, the desperate need for soldiers had reduced this period to around five months. Perhaps this reduction was not really a problem, as no amount of training could prepare these young men sent to the front line for what was to follow.

  As an extra detail at Rugeley at this time, the Army had built a replica of the Messines–Wytschaete Ridge in Belgian Flanders on the camp’s training grounds on Cannock Chase. The actual ridge lies a few miles to the south of the town of Ypres (Ieper), and in early 1917 was occupied by the Germans in well dug-in emplacements; Ypres itself was held by the British, who also occupied a ‘salient’ jutting eastwards from the town into German-held territory. The ridge was only a few metres high, but it was sufficiently prominent to dominate the plain, giving excellent views of the Allies’ movements and dispositions. For months, the British High Command had been making preparations to take this ridge, in order to deprive the Germans of their commanding view over the Ypres Salient. The mock-up on Cannock Chase was just a small part of the meticulous p
lanning that went into the operation. For Harry, the Messines Ridge was to be a significant element of his experiences over the next month or so.

  By May 1917, with his basic training completed, Harry was in France with an infantry battalion to which he had been assigned, from where he wrote both to his brother and to one of his sisters. Harry’s references in his letters to his location on the Western Front were always to France or, occasionally, Flanders (an area that in fact occupies parts of France, Belgium and Holland). He would have actually spent most of his time in Belgium, but that small country, so important in the history of the Great War, never gets a mention.

  Shortly after crossing the Channel, Harry wrote to his brother Jack.

  May 1917

  Dear Jack

  Just a line to let you know I am alright and that I have landed in France. The weather here has been very hot. Not at all a bad sort of place. There is a pretty town about two miles away on the coast but it is out of bounds. This is my address we have got to put it in the middle of our letter. I don’t know why. 33502 Pt Lamin West York Reg [West Yorkshire Regiment] number lines 33rd IBDAPO section 17 BEF France. No doubt you have read about the Arcadian going down. Well the draft to Mesopotamia which I should’ve been on had it not been for my teeth, was on it. I have heard from one that was on it. he was in the same hut as me at Rugely. I think they were about all saved. Write as soon as you get this letter as I should be going up the line of next week and perhaps get to a different regiment so write soon.