Michael George Stocks was born in November 1892 and was not the first of his family to attend Eton, his cousin Francis Ellison Levita had been an Eton scholar since 1903 and Michael followed three years later in 1906. The family wealth and prosperity were at their height when their paternal grandfather, Michael Stocks, returned from the battlefields of the Crimea and retired from the army. He married Jane Maceckran in 1863 and inherited Upper Shibden Hall and the family businesses on the death of his father in 1872. Major Michael Stocks, served as a captain in the 1st Royal Dragoon Guards and took part in the disastrous charge of British cavalry led by Lord Cardigan during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854. He also fought in the attack on the Redan and at Sebastopol where he received the Turkish Order of Mejide. He returned home a local hero after lengthy reports of his personal bravery in the battle were published in the Halifax Courier.
Not content to remain in the north he purchased the Norfolk estate and manor house at Woodhall, near Downham Market. Becoming lord of the ancient manor at Woodhall gave Stocks the pedigree he felt was missing from his life and an entry in Burke’s Landed Gentry. Major Stocks died five years after his first grandson was born and although his own son did not choose the army as a career, by insisting on his two grandsons being educated at Eton he left them a legacy that set both boys on their inexorable march to the Great War battlefields of 1914.
In the south aisle of All Saints Church at Kenley there is a memorial tablet to Laura Gertrude Tufnell who died aged 52 at Watendone Manor in 1911. The 1901 census describes her husband, Carleton Fowell Tufnell, as an insurance broker and underwriter. The Tufnell family lineage in Burke’s Landed Gentry begins with Richard Tufnell of Surrey who was MP for Southwark in 1640. Thereafter, through marriage and public appointment, the family wealth was accrued. Carleton Fowell was also a very capable county cricketer and after leaving Eton College in 1872 made several appearances for Kent County Cricket Club in 1879, taking fifteen wickets and scoring a total of 108 runs. It was at Watendone Manor that Carleton Wyndham Tufnell was brought up with his sister and three brothers and, as one might expect, followed his father and elder brother to Eton in 1905. The young Carleton Tufnell inherited his father’s sporting talent and soon established himself amongst Eton’s sporting elite, quickly surpassing the achievements of his elder brother, Neville Charsley Tufnell, who had made a name for himself as a sportsman before going up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1906.
At Eton if a boy excelled at games the world was his oyster. While the school was happy to reward mediocrity in the classroom the academic rewards were nothing compared to the prizes to be won by the sporting hero. Carleton Tufnell was certainly a sporting hero in the eyes of his peers; between 1908 and 1910 he played in the Field XI, Eton’s version of football, in 1911 he captained the Eton Cricket XI and was keeper of the Oppidan and Mixed Wall games from 1909 to 1910. Carleton Tufnell was also President of the Eton Society in his final year at the school. The Eton Society, or Pop as it became known, was founded in 1811 as a social and debating club. Membership of Pop is held in high regard by the student body particularly as election is by a ballot and carries a number of privileges which include a more ostentatious style of everyday dress. Pop is also the school’s prefectorial body responsible for internal school discipline and before corporal punishment was outlawed members of Pop administered such punishment on their peers.
By the early twentieth century the intellectual element of Pop with its debates and discussions had been largely replaced by the sporting elite of the school. Not so when the young Regy Wyndham was at the school; his only sporting accomplishments were riding to hounds and beagling, but he was a member of Pop in 1893. In one of his letters to his mother he wrote, with his characteristic indifference, of a forthcoming debate:
‘We have a debate tonight on a subject proposed by Donaldson: Whether the casino at Monte Carlo should be allowed or not. These may not be the exact words but its something like that.’
But by 1913, when Howard St George was elected to the Eton Society, the debating element had all but gone.
Tufnell’s final honour was the award of the Victor Ludoram Cup in 1911 which is presented to the boy who wins the most points in school sporting events. Carleton Tufnell was the epitome of the public school sporting culture and rather appropriately his headstone in the Zillebeke Churchyard carries the epitaph Floreat Etona, an expression that not only describes the sporting ethos of Eton, but is also identified with courage and gallantry. When Lieutenant Robert Elwes rode to his certain death at Laing’s Nek in 1881 during the first Boer War his last words were reported to have been Floreat Etona. H Rider Haggard in his autobiography The Days of my Life remembers meeting Elwes at dinner the night before the British forces left Maritzburg:
‘The only name that I can remember is that of young Elwes, who within a week or two was to die charging the Boer schanzes and shouting “Floreat Etona!” I sat next to him at table.’
It leaves one to wonder if those same words were the last gasp of Carleton Tufnell when he fell in action on 6 November 1914.
The Perthshire public school, Glenalmond College, formerly Trinity College, lies on the River Almond near Methven and was the school chosen for William Sinclair Petersen. It was one of a number of minor public schools that were founded in the mid-nineteenth century and modelled largely on the successful system that had been in use at schools such as Eton, Harrow and Charterhouse. The culture of duty and service was embodied in the school motto, Floreat Glenalmond, an ethos that 157 former students took with them to their deaths during the four years of the Great War. The first of these was Lieutenant Colonel Alfred McNair Dykes who was killed commanding the 1st Battalion King’s Own on 26 August 1914.7 His obituary in the Glenalmond School Chronicle described his ‘sacrifice’ and thrilled the Glenalmond schoolboy readers with the account of Dykes falling in battle after shouting encouragement to his men. By the end of 1914 there were 113 old boys serving as officers in the army but by then the casualty figures included several more of the school’s former students.
William Petersen was born at Newcastle in July 1892 and was the only son of Sir William Petersen, the Danish born shipping magnate who was chairman of Petersen and Co Ltd, ship owners. Petersen was also founder and a director of the London-American Maritime Trading Company and a director of the Thompson Steam Shipping Company. He had also founded the Royal and Uraneum Passenger Line which ran between London, Canada and the United States. He married Flora McKay in 1889 and from 1917 until his death in 1925 he owned the Scottish island of Eigg where he kept a house and estate.
As the only son, William was brought up as heir to the Petersen shipping empire and from an early age travelled extensively worldwide on his father’s ships. After leaving Cargilfield Preparatory School he entered Glenalmond in September 1906; it was to be a relatively short stay as he was only on roll for two years before he left in 1908 to work with a private tutor in Dieppe. There, this charming and personable young man also became fluent in French before going up to Cambridge as an undergraduate in October 1910. Trinity College records indicate he gained his degree in History and Political Economy. In 1913 he continued his studies in Germany, adding the German language to those he spoke fluently.
The notions of duty and service, which were very much embodied within the core of the public-school ethos, were at their height at the turn of the twentieth century. Duty to one’s house, to the school and to country demanded fortitude, endurance and physical courage. Schools recorded and applauded the military achievements and sacrifices of former pupils and it went without saying that anyone making the ultimate sacrifice would be held in high esteem. 1914, and in particular the First Battle of Ypres, would provide the arena in which the sacrifice would begin.
Chapter 4
From Mons to Ypres
The lengthy Times leader of 5 August 1914 referred to the declaration of war on Germany as ‘momentous in the history of all time.’ Since 29 July, when all regu
lar officers and men were recalled from leave and officers of the Indian Army on leave at home were retained by the War Office and attached to other units, there had been a general expectation that war was imminent. This was further fuelled by army units on annual training being ordered to strike camp and return to their home stations and by the naval reserve being called out on 2 August. The rumblings of war continued to reverberate for another twenty-four hours until Asquith’s statement to the Commons on 4 August which was greeted with cheers from both sides of the House.
Despite the debate aired in the pages of the Times as to whether Great Britain should honour Belgian neutrality, the declaration of war was greeted in London with widespread public excitement and people took to the streets in an enthusiastic demonstration of public approval. There was a more subdued reaction at the Knightsbridge cavalry barracks where the Life Guards were quietly beginning to mobilize for war, those that remembered the South African War knew there was little to be jubilant about. R A Lloyd witnessed the public’s reaction in London with some bemusement:
‘it was difficult to recognise the reserved, highly respectable, live and let live Londoner of the 3rd of August in the wildly excited, cheering, bloodthirsty patriot of the 4th of August The ranting roaring mob that cheered and sang Rule Britannia in the streets little realised the extent to which the conflagration would spread.’1
To be fair very few had any perception of the extent to which the war would envelop people’s lives. Many of those who cheered the outbreak of war on 4 August would, before long, be in uniform themselves after answering the call to join Kitchener’s New Armies and those that didn’t would find themselves conscripted as the struggle moved into 1916. But in the heady days of August there was a general public assumption that Britain’s Regular Army would be dispatched across the Channel quickly, send the Hun packing and be home by Christmas.
Fortunately mobilization had been the subject of detailed military planning and practice and once the order to mobilize had been given, the process went remarkably smoothly. Most regimental depots had already anticipated the declaration of war and the pre-written telegrams recalling their reservists were stacked in boxes in battalion orderly rooms waiting to be dispatched. In at least one instance anticipation ran away with itself. At Portland, where the 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers were based, an orderly room blunder actually sent out telegrams in advance of the official order to mobilize which resulted in the switchboard jamming with the number of calls that came in from puzzled reservists and irate staff officers.
At Aldershot, the headquarters of the 1st Division received the order to mobilize at around 4.30pm on 4 August, the order being passed down to the four infantry battalions of 3 Brigade within the next half hour. As with the majority of the regular army battalions, 1/Gloucesters was very much under its war strength. Having returned prematurely from their annual training camp at Rushmore Bottom, the battalion began the business of exchanging peace-time equipment for war kit and preparing for the influx of reservists.
During the practice mobilization some six weeks earlier, the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Lovett, had established that at least nine officers and 600 reservists were required to bring the battalion up to a war-time establishment and there had been some discussion as to the quality and number of reservists that the battalion could immediately absorb into its ranks. The most useful would be those whose regular service had recently terminated and those who may have had experience in the more recent South African War, others who had been away from military service for longer would require a greater induction, while some would inevitably be unfit for front line duties. Almost as soon as the telegrams had been dispatched the Gloucesters reservists began to turn up, the first being 28-year-old Corporal Reginald James Minahan – who managed to make the journey from London to arrive that evening.2 Over the next three days reservists poured in and by midnight on the 7 August, 1/Gloucesters was fully mobilized and awaiting brigade orders to move. Many of the reservists were rejoining the same companies in which they had served as regulars and were able to quickly renew the bond of command with officers and NCOs.
The actual number of reservists that were required by the Gloucesters to bring them up to war strength in August 1914, raises the question of how ‘regular’ the regular army of 1914 really was. Clearly it was the reservists who made up the greater part of the fighting strength of the 1st Battalion, a factor that was in evidence across all of the regular battalions of the BEF, which was of course exactly why Haldane had created the reserve in the first place. The late John Terraine estimated that in most of the British battalions that left with the original BEF in August 1914, reservists amounted to fifty per cent of the total strength, while overall, the proportion for the whole BEF was sixty per cent.3 However, despite their hasty return to the colours and the inevitable protests from sore feet, the reservists were soon to demonstrate their mettle in the most trying of circumstances.
As one of the four company commanders of 1/Gloucesters, Captain Robert Rising would be relying on the mettle of these men in the coming weeks and months and took full advantage of the time left before departure to hone the men’s shooting skills. Movement orders arrived all too quickly and in the early hours of Wednesday, 12 August 1914 the battalion joined 3 Brigade and left Bordon for Southampton to embark on the SS Gloucester Castle for Le Havre. Arriving on French soil just after midnight the next day, they were some of the first British troops to set foot in France on a war footing since Waterloo.
At Knightsbridge barracks former officers and men of the Life Guards were not slow to respond to the order to mobilize. Arriving with the main body of reservists were several retired officers who, regardless of their age and lengthy absence from military service, wanted to get back into uniform and fight. One of these was Regy Wyndham, now aged 38, who had managed to secure a commission in the Lincolnshire Yeomanry and, with some considerable string pulling, was now attached to 1/Life Guards with the rank of lieutenant. His commission had been considerably eased by the family connection; two of his younger brothers were currently serving officers with the regiment and his father, Lord Leconfield was a former officer of the same. Regy Wyndham’s first appearance at Knightsbridge caused a few eyebrows to be raised, Lloyd remembered the occasion well:
‘In the very first days of mobilization we were startled by the appearance of an officer who had come back from retirement dressed in a rig-out which was a sight for the gods. His khaki jacket fitted him where it touched him; his riding pants were of coarse material, baggy, and reminiscent of knickerbockers at the knees. He wore in addition a pair of thick greased hob-nailed ankle boots, rough puttees, and a cap from which the wire had been removed and which looked as if it had been slept on. On his Sam Browne belt was a stout iron hook from which dangled a pair of hedging-and-ditching gloves. Before he had advanced ten paces inside the barrack gate he was unanimously christened “Sinbad the Sailor”. The nickname seemed to jump to the minds of all those who saw him, and Sinbad he remained. In spite of his weird uniform, Sinbad was a fine soldier and a fine gentleman. When somebody chipped him about his turnout, I heard him reply in the deep deliberate voice with which we were soon to be familiar: “My dear sir, you’ll all be dressed like this, or worse, before Christmas.” He was right.’4
Another officer who was returning from the reserve list was the grandson of the Earl of Dartrey, Captain Richard Long Dawson, who, after leaving Sandhurst, was Gazetted second lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards (3/Coldstream Guards) in 1898. The family had a long connection with the Guards, Thomas Vesey Dawson was killed at the Battle of Inkerman while serving with the Coldstream Guards as a lieutenant colonel and his uncle, Major General Vesey John Dawson, another Coldstream officer, had recently retired from the army after a career that saw active service with the Nile Expedition of 1884, and command of the newly raised Irish Guards in 1900. In 1906 he commanded 15 Infantry Brigade at Belfast and later the 2nd London Division of th
e Territorial Force. Dawson’s father, Hon Richard Maitland Westenra Dawson, who was a captain in the 92nd Highlanders, once served as ADC to the Governor of South Australia, Sir James Fergusson. In 1872 Fergusson named a new township supposedly after Lady Jean Maitland, the wife of the First Lord of Kilkerran, it remains some coincidence that his ADC was also called Maitland. Today Maitland remains an isolated settlement that still struggles to raise its population above 1,000.
Like many of his generation of officers, Richard Dawson fought in the South African War and after returning to England was promoted to captain in 1903. Towards the end of 1906 ‘Dick’ Dawson was in Egypt on the Mounted Infantry Course which kept him away from home for over four months. On his return to London he resigned his commission in March 1907 to devote more time to running the family estate at Holne Park in Devon after his father became ill. Today Holne Park House is a hotel and sits in 90 acres of grounds and gardens on the southern slopes of Dartmoor with the scenic River Dart running through it but in 1914, the Dawson family lived very comfortably on the estate with eleven servants attending to their needs. The youngest of the household servants was Arthur Pearce who is described on the 1911 Census as a Hall Boy.5 He later joined the Devonshire Regiment and sometime afterwards transferred to the Army Service Corps.
Receiving his orders to mobilize, Captain Richard Dawson was ordered to report to the 4th (Reserve) Battalion of the Coldstream which was being formed at Windsor. The barracks at Windsor, built to house 750 men of all ranks, was now expected to provide accommodation for well over 2,000 men returning from the reserve list. The role of the reserve battalion was to supply replacement drafts to the regular Coldstream battalions when the need arose, but convinced the war would be over before Christmas, Dawson and his fellow officers did not expect to be called upon. The adjutant of the 4th Battalion, Major Sir George Arthur Crichton, himself a reservist, was an old friend of Richard Dawson and since June 1913, a relation through marriage when he married Lady Mary Dawson. George Crichton and Richard Dawson fought together with the Coldstream Guards in South Africa where Crichton was wounded. Aware that his father was a sick man, Richard Dawson was nevertheless shaken by the news of his death which reached him at Windsor on 7 August. Richard Maitland Dawson, had hung onto life long enough to see his only son return to active service.
Aristocrats Go to War: Uncovering the Zillebeke Cemetery Page 8