No Man's World: Omnibus

by Pat Kelleher

  Linseed Lancer: Slang for a stretcher bearer of the RAMC.

  Look Stick: Slang for a trench periscope.

  Luftstreitkräfte: The German Airforce formed in October 1916, previously known as Die Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches, or the Imperial German Flying Corps.

  Maconachie: Brand of tinned vegetable stew. Made a change from endless Bully Beef, though not by much.

  Mills Bomb: Pineapple-shaped British hand grenade, armed by pulling a pin and releasing the trigger lever.

  Minnie Crater: Crater formed from the explosion of a Minniewerfer shell.

  Minniewerfer: German trench mortar shell.

  MO: Medical Officer.

  Mongey Wallahs: Cooks or chefs, from the French manger, to eat.

  Napoo: All gone, finished, nothing left. Mangled by the British from the French phrase, il n’y en a plus, or ‘there is no more.’

  NCO: Non Commissioned Officer; a sergeant major, sergeant or corporal.

  Neurasthenia: Contemporary medical term to describe emotional shell shock, less charitably seen as a ‘weakness of the nerves.’

  No Man’s Land: Area of land between the two opposing Front Lines.

  OP: Observation Post.

  QM: Quartermaster.

  Parados: Raised defensive wall of earth or sandbags along the rear of the trench to help disperse explosions behind the line.

  Parapet: Raised defence of earth or sandbags at the front of a trench to provide cover for those on the firestep.

  Part-worn: Clothing previously worn by another soldier, either deceased, ill or otherwise having no further use for it.

  PH Helmet: Phenate-Hexamine Helmet. Early type of full-head gas mask. Not so much a helmet as a flannel hood soaked in neutralising chemicals, and a mouth tube and distinctive non-return red rubber valve for exhalation.

  Picklehaub: German full-dress helmet, ornamented with a spike on top. A very desirable souvenir.

  Pip Emma: From the Signalese phonetic alphabet; PM, afternoon, evening.

  Platoon: A quarter of an infantry company, commanded by a Subaltern. Consisting of 48 men divide into four sections.

  Plum & Apple: Much derided flavour of jam because of the cheap and plentiful ingredients used by jam manufacturers on government contract.

  Plum Pudding: Nickname for a type of British trench mortar round.

  Poilus: Nickname for a French soldier, like the English ‘Tommy.’ From the French poilu, or ‘hairy,’ as French soldiers were often unshaven, unlike the British Tommy who was required to shave every day.

  Port: The left side of a vessel or ship.

  Pozzy: Slang for jam.

  Puttee: Khaki cloth band wound round the calf from the knee to the ankle.

  RAMC: Royal Army Medical Corps, often summoned with the wellworn yell, ‘stretcher bearer!’ Uncharitably also said to stand for Rob All My Comrades.

  Reading Your Shirt: The act of chatting.

  Red Tabs: Slang for staff officers, after the red tabs worn on the collars of their tunics.

  Revetment: Any material used to strengthen a trench wall against collapse; wooden planking, brushwood wattling, corrugated iron, etc.

  RFC: Royal Flying Corps of the British Army.

  SAA: Small Arms Ammunition; rifle and revolver ammunition.

  Sally Port: Small, hidden passage out under the parapet of a fire trench used for sorties into No Man’s Land.

  Sans German: Village of Saint Germaine, five miles from Harcourt Wood, behind the British lines.

  Sap: A communications trench that runs out from an already existing trench to an emplacement, kitchen, latrine or stores.

  Sappers: Generally, a private in the Royal Engineers. But in this case, a small dedicated unit formed by Everson from those men with a trade—bricklaying, carpentry, etc.—to perform a similar function.

  Scran: A general term for food.

  Section: A quarter of a platoon, usually consisting of 12 men under the charge of an NCO.

  Signalese: A phonetic alphabet.

  SMLE: Short Magazine Lee Enfield. Standard issue British rifle, with a 10-round magazine.

  Sponson: The side-mounted gun turret of a tank, taken from the naval term. The Mark I ‘male’ tank had no central-mounted roof turret, like later tanks, but two side-mounted sponsons, one on either side. Each sponson was armed with a six-pounder gun and a Hotchkiss machine gun.

  SRD: Supply Reserve Depot. The initials were stamped on official army issue stone rum jars issued to platoons, although the initials soon came to stand for other things like Service Rum Diluted, Soon Runs Dry or Seldom Reaches Destination.

  Stand To: Stand to Arms. Highest state of alert when all men should be ready for immediate action, weapons at the ready. Occurred regularly in the trenches at dawn and dusk to repel any attempted attacks. See also Hate, the.

  Starboard: The right side of a vessel or ship.

  Star Shell: An artillery shell consisting of a large magnesium flare and a parachute. Used for illuminating battlefields at night.

  Subaltern: Or sub; a commissioned officer under the rank of captain; first or second lieutenant.

  Tankodrome: A tank park and workshops behind the lines where maintenance and repairs can be carried out.

  Toffee Apple: Nickname for a type of British trench mortar bomb.

  Traverse: Thick sandbag partition built in trenches to prevent enfilading enemy fire and to limit the effect of any explosions. In fire trenches they were used to create fire bays. Also; purpose-built changes in angle of direction in any trench to achieve the same effect.

  VAD: Voluntary Aid Detachment, women volunteers providing auxiliary nursing assistance to the Red Cross and registered nurses.

  Very Light: A white or coloured flare fired from a Very Pistol. Used for signalling or illumination at night.

  Vickers Machine gun: Water-cooled, belt-fed machine gun. Heavy and bulky, but more accurate than the Lewis.

  Whizz-Bang: A German 77mm high velocity shell.

  Windy: Or to have the wind-up; apprehensive or anxious about a situation.

  Wipers: Tommies’ name for the town of Ypres, in Belgium.

  Woolly Bear: The distinctive smoke burst of a German high explosive shrapnel shell.

  BONUS CONTENT

  THE BROUGHTONTHWAITE MERCURY

  FAR FROM THE Front and the fighting, in the northern mill town of Broughtonthwaite, the Broughtonthwaite Mercury was the main organ of information.

  The newspaper kept the local population up to date on the war’s progress, alongside the seemingly banal incidents of everyday local life.

  It charted the formation of the Broughtonthwaite Mates from their early patriotic recruitment and followed their movements, publishing lists of the wounded, the dead as well as the honours. However, in 1916, the paper broke the news of the Battle of Harcourt Wood to a disbelieving community as the true scale of the tragedy became apparent.

  Broughtonthwaite Mercury 15.09.1914

  Broughtonthwaite Mercury 24.02.1915

  Broughtonthwaite Mercury 02.11.1916

  Broughtonthwaite Mercury 03.11.1916

  Broughtonthwaite Mercury 04.11.1916

  Broughtonthwaite Mercury 06.11.1916

  Broughtonthwaite Mercury 07.11.1916

  Broughtonthwaite Mercury 10.11.1916

  HARCOURT SECTOR MAP

  HARCOURT HOAXERS EXTRACT

  Arthur Cooke, whose childhood fascination with story of the missing Fusiliers grew into a lifelong passion, wrote one of the most popular books on the subject of the Harcourt Event, The Harcourt Crater: Hoax or Horror? Over the years, he amassed a large private collection of original documents and letters and memorabilia concerning the tragedy.

  The book itself, long out of print, looks in depth at the original War Office cover-up, examines the numerous conspiracy theories surrounding the mystery, and covers the relatives’ campaign for the truth, that continues to the present day, the files of the Committee of Enquiry into the Harcourt Even
t having been closed for an unprecedented one hundred and fifty years.

  In the section below, Cooke looks at some of the swindles surrounding the mystery, perpetrated by con men who claimed, amongst other things, to be Fusilier survivors or returnees, some of which were spectacular, others petty and despicable.

  An extract from Harcourt Crater: Hoax or Horror? by Arthur Cooke, published by Albion Amalgamated Press Ltd, 1973

  Reprinted with permission

  With the discovery of the Lefeuvre Find and the subsequent picture house showings of the Hepton Footage in 1926, the story of the Pennine Fusiliers once again ignited the public imagination. With the tantalising possibility of the missing soldiers being alive on some other world, here on this world the story of the Heroes of Harcourt took a darker, more sordid turn.

  Those that came back from the war faced some tough choices. The post-war period was hardly a land fit for heroes. Unemployment was high and many were forced to make a living in whatever way they could. However, there are always those willing to take advantage of people more vulnerable than they are. For those that had turned to a life of crime, the resurgence of the myth of the Pennines was a golden opportunity.

  If the film footage, documents and letters of the Lefeuvre Find had appeared from nowhere, then why couldn’t the men reappear, too? It was certain that a great many relatives wanted to believe that such a thing might be possible. Unscrupulous men used this forlorn hope, preying on the desperation of grieving families.

  Most were opportunistic chancers, trying their luck. They would turn up on a doorstep claiming to know something of one of the missing, citing amnesia or shell shock as the reason for their inability to come sooner. Eliciting sympathy by pretending to be down on their luck, they would claim to know the whereabouts of some magically reappeared letter or memento that, for a small remuneration, could be acquired. Many desperate folk were happy to give to them, only to find the money and the man vanished never to return. It was an old trick, but one that had found a new seam to mine. Many of these con men were minor crooks with no ambition beyond the next mark. Others were more calculating.

  Duncan Thorpe turned up on the doorstep of Dorothy Ashworth in Kendal in September 1920. Née, Farley, she had been brought up in Broughtonshaw and had once been engaged to Joseph Knowles a Private in ‘B’ Company of the 13 Pennine Fusiliers who had been listed among the missing in 1916. Upon hearing that Thorpe had known her fiancé, she invited him in. Thorpe, who had lost a hand during the War, would claim that he lost it at the very moment that the Pennines vanished. It had been severed, he said as he reached out as Knowles and the other Fusiliers were abruptly transported to another planet before his eyes along with his hand, leaving the rest of him behind.

  He inveigled his way into Ashworth home despite the initial objections of Mr Ashworth, and became a lodger, preying on Dorothy’s feelings for her first fiancé. He stayed there for many months, working his way into Dorothy’s affections. Only when Dorothy discovered she was pregnant by him and that her savings were gone, along with Thorpe, did she realise the truth.

  Thorpe was caught some months later, attempting a similar fraud on another woman.

  But perpetrating a hoax on one person at a time only brought small rewards. Some hoaxers had loftier ambitions. One such man was Ernest Naylor. After the war, Naylor made a comfortable, if disreputable living as a spiritualist medium, claiming that since a shrapnel injury to the head during the war, he was now able to hear the voices of the dead. To that end, he could ‘help’ the grieving contact those who had died in the conflict. He made a good living and achieved a certain reputation.

  Now, with the sensation of the Hepton Footage, he decided to modernise his act and turned to ‘science’ to do so. He claimed to have invented a radio device which he could use to communicate with the distant world upon which the Pennines had found themselves.

  After the sensation of the Hepton Footage swept Britain, playing in picture houses up and down the country, Naylor said that he had presented this device to the War Office to allow them to communicate with the men. They, apparently, declined his offer. Having done all he could to help, he now felt it was his patriotic duty to offer the same service to those engaged n a personal search for the missing – for a small remuneration of course.

  In many ways, he used exactly the same tricks as he used as a spiritualist. However, instead of channelling spirits himself, he claimed his device did the job for him. Following in the footsteps of Nikolai Tesla, who back in 1899 said that he had received radio signals from Mars, Naylor said that after years of painstaking scientific research he had succeeded in constructing an extraordinary machine through which he could receive “cosmic radio” transmissions. The machine itself was said to have consisted of a large brass and walnut veneer cabinet full of valves and tubes, a great horned speaker, and great lengths of aerial. As his reputation grew, so did the size of his “cosmic radio.”

  Heard though the contraption, the voices were faint and crackly and their content hard to decipher, but they were definitely northern voices that sounded as if they had travelled a great distance. Those that heard them were thankful for even that.

  In the early days, he travelled around in a van purchased specifically for the purpose. He declared that it contained equipment important to the reception of the cosmic radio signals. Driving from house to house, he performed his service for those who wanted it. It wasn’t cheap. With a great deal of theatre, he would set up his cabinet in the house making a great show of plugging in cables that he would run out through the door to the van in which he had yet more “equipment.” On top of the van, he would erect a large aerial.

  Inside the motor van, he had an accomplice sat hunched in the box that he claimed to be the cosmic radio receiver. One of the cables would be a small tube through which the accomplice would speak, his distorted voice emitted from the speaker horn. He could have half a street paying money to gather in a front parlour, straining to listen to barely audible voices, while he fiddled with dials and made other adjustments to capture the interplanetary signals.

  Later, he expanded his act to take in musical halls. His equipment became bigger and more impressive. He began to use specially prepared gramophone records, along with accomplices to deliver “messages” from the Fusiliers. He soon began claiming that he was experimenting on transmitting “cosmic radio” signals, too and inviting volunteers to take part in his experiments by speaking into a large, specially constructed microphone.

  His luck ran out when, during a performance at the Tiverston Empire, the theatrical electrics of his great “cosmic radio” caught fire. The assistant within the “machine” (who turned out to be double-amputee invalided out of the army after losing both his legs, and was therefore small enough to fit inside the box) broke character and shrieked as the fire spread and the audience evacuated the theatre. Although the damage to the theatre wasn’t severe, in the aftermath Naylor’s machine was discovered to be a fake, containing no great scientific equipment and certainly none capable of receiving or transmitting any kind of radio signal.

  One of the most audacious hoaxes, however, occurred in early 1927 in Piccadilly Circus, London. On the night of Friday February 18 , London was smog-bound, choked by a thick acrid cloud of smog. Around half-past ten at night, a huge flash of light, diffused by the sickly yellow smog, briefly lit the area just as the theatres were emptying and the crowds were hurrying home. It was accompanied by a loud bang, followed by what onlookers described as a scream. From the direction of the display staggered a man in a soldier’s uniform, the uniform of the Pennine Fusiliers. Wearing a gas hood, and armed with a rifle, its bayonet fixed, the soldier staggered about as if drunk or disorientated, approaching alarmed theatre goers, his voice indistinct beneath the gas helmet.

  A crowd soon gathered as the soldier took cover by the statue of Eros, warning people to stay back and refusing all offers of help. When the police arrived, Constable William Higson, who had served with
the London Rifles, diagnosed the signs of shell shock in the man, eventually calmed the soldier down. Convincing the mysterious Tommy that he was indeed in England and safe, the man surrendered his rifle to Higson. Taking off his gas helmet and standing to attention, he gave his name and rank as Dewhurst, Cecil, Private, ‘A’ company 13 Battalion, Pennine Fusiliers, before collapsing. Although Dewhurst was indeed on the list of the missing, he had no known living relative to confirm the fact, his mother dying of tuberculosis some years earlier and his father in a tram accident a short time after.

  His dramatic appearance caused a sensation and the newspapers clamoured for interviews. Initially, Dewhurst was put up in a police cell and seemed happy with the arrangement before the London Illustrated Graphic and Chronicle paid for him to be moved to a comfortable hotel. They also paid him for his story.

  For several weeks, his tales of survival on the planet Oordia and the peoples that the Fusiliers met there gripped readers.

  Even those suspicious of his story, devoured the account for any information they might possibly corroborate; familiar names or facts they knew about the “Mates.” Some people even wrote to the papers saying that they recognised him and he was indeed Cecil Dewhurst. Three weeks later, the hotel room was empty but for a note, stating that, with regret, Dewhurst had to return to Oordia. The paper proprietor’s suspicions were immediately roused since the money, too, had gone.

  It was only when an old lag recognised a photograph and later identified “Dewhurst” as one Arthur Rees who he had known in prison, describing a particular tattoo on the man’s back, that the truth was revealed. Constable Higson recognised the description of the tattoo from the soldier’s time staying in the police cell and “Dewhurst’s” real identity was confirmed. The paper put out a reward for Rees, but to no avail. He had gone to ground, probably fleeing to Europe.