After the Final Whistle

by Stephen Cooper

  On leaving university, Freddy joined his father’s printing firm and was ever present in three seasons for Scotland from 1911 to 1913, winning his final honours in 1914 against Ireland and in the England game at Inverleith. Eleven players competing that March day for the Calcutta Cup of melted-down rupees already walked in the valley of the shadow of death. Yet they feared no evil, as they were too busy playing the most exciting and closest fought game of the championship, with tries from Huggan and Will prompting a second-half comeback to a narrow, single-point defeat. It was not a vintage era for the Scots with only four of Freddy’s caps bringing victory. The origins of his ‘Tanky’ nickname are not as obvious as they seem, as Ernest Swinton’s armoured landship would not be invented until after his death, but he was undeniably physically robust. The versatile Turner played flanker for his country, which goes some way to explain his switch from hooker to centre for his club when the need arose.

  Turner prepared early for war, as so many rugby players did: he had enlisted with the Territorial 10th as a private and was gazetted second lieutenant in May 1912. Turner went to war on 1 November with (in its full Order of Battle) the 1/10th (Liverpool Scottish) Battalion, The King’s (Liverpool) Regiment, 166th (South Lancashire) Brigade, 55th (West Lancashire) Division. He wrote from France:

  We are not yet the finest battalion in the British Army, nor have we absolutely annihilated the Prussian Guard; all we have really done is to take our share in the discomforts and in some of the dangers of the campaign without grousing.

  His admiration for the Regular Army ‘Old Contemptibles’, who had borne the brunt of the German onslaught from Mons onwards, knew no bounds:

  Don’t believe all the yarns you see in the Liverpool papers about us. True we have had some hardships and not a little discomfort, but it has been a picnic by comparison with what the Regulars went through. They are a magnificent lot and one admires them more and more every day.10

  His own service overseas lasted ten short weeks. On 10 January 1915 in trenches near Kemmel, he was shot by a sniper while supervising a wiring party:

  After breakfast on 10 January 1915, he went down to the trench to look at the barbed wire he had put out in front the night before. On the way he looked up twice for a second and each time he was shot at but both shots missed. He then got to a place where the parapet was rather low and was talking to a sergeant when a bullet went between their heads. Lieutenant Turner said, ‘by Jove, that has deafened my right ear’. The sergeant remarked, ‘and my left one too, sir’. Turner went a shade lower down and had a look at the wire and was shot clean through the middle of the forehead, killing him instantly.11

  He was 26 years and 226 days old. His body was retrieved and buried by RAMC medic and double VC winner, Noel Chavasse, Surgeon-Captain to the battalion.12 Noel and his brother were both Liverpool players; Christopher, future Bishop of Rochester, played amateur rugby league for St Helens when a young curate and was barred from Union for life – both his God and the RFU move in mysterious ways. Turner’s was a mournful burial in pouring rain in the local Kemmel churchyard, but Chavasse and his detail did their best for Freddy:

  The grave, though baled out in the evening, was 18 inches deep in water. However it is quite the best cared-for grave in the churchyard and looks very pretty, with a nice cross put up by one of the other regiments in the brigade, and also a nice wreath.

  Poulton-Palmer, who had only four months left of life himself, wrote a fond encomium in tribute to his friend, fell-walking companion, team-mate, captain and adversary on the international field, and one of the many natural leaders who emerged from the rugby ranks:

  Those who saw last year’s England v Scotland match could realize what an anxiety to his opponents his peculiarly infectious power of leading was. His play, like his tackle, was hard and straight, and never have I seen him the slightest bit perturbed or excited; and in this fact lay the secret of his great power and control. His kicking ability is well-known, and his tenacious determination to stick it was well shown in the Varsity match of 1909, when he returned to help his scrum when in great pain, with one knee useless owing to a displaced cartilage.13

  Freddy’s older brother, Lieutenant William Stewart Turner, also with the Scottish, was killed in action five months later at Hooge, a few miles away in the small but horribly formed Ypres Salient, on 16 June; he left no trace of an earthly or watery grave and is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial. Although Freddy was buried with care in his ‘pretty grave’, the site was destroyed by later fighting around the church: his white CWGC stone, set apart from the main war graves section in the West Flanders churchyard, does not mark his grave but is a Special Memorial. But this does allow him the small consolation – and remarkable rugby coincidence – of being next to another local rival and internationalist, Percy Dale ‘Toggie’ Kendall, of Birkenhead Park and England.

  The glamour boys of Liverpool FC were not the only show in town: there was rugby across the Mersey too. Toggie Kendall, an Englishman with the Scottish, read law at Cambridge but did not get his Blue. While qualifying as a solicitor in London, he made his mark playing for Blackheath and the Barbarians before returning to his home club, Birkenhead Park. He was England’s scrum half in the early years of the new century, making his debut against Scotland in 1901 at the familiar Rectory Field. It was a wooden spoon game for England; with Oughtred, his half-back partner, he was ‘slow in getting the ball and uncertain in passing, they never really gave their threequarters a chance’.14

  Kendall skippered England in the same fixture two years later (a rare honour in only his third Test) in front of 25,000 at Richmond, to no greater effect, as the land of the thistle was then going through one of its purple patches. This time, however, the match was hard-fought, with the 6–10 result (and another spoon for England) only settled late on. His English side on both occasions featured Bert ‘Octopus’ Gamlin, not at number eight as you might expect, but at full back, where he was once reputed to have tackled two men, one with either hand, to earn his nickname. Percy’s only other cap – against Wales – was also a defeat. As the Wirral was in Cheshire, he represented that county on forty-five occasions, captaining the side against the All Black Originals at his home ground; as for most English sides in 1905, it was a crushing defeat but Percy was ‘energetic and extremely useful’.15 By 1914, the 35-year-old veteran was still turning out for the 3rd XV, helping them to 500 points in an unbeaten season, and coaching youngsters at Park.

  In the pre-war years of mounting military tension, Kendall had served as colour sergeant with the Liverpool Scottish Territorials. Despite his age and being father of two children, he did not hesitate to re-enlist within twelve hours of the outbreak of war. He was commissioned in October and went over with Cunningham and Turner in the first contingent on the Maidan. The manner of his death on 25 January, a fortnight after Freddy Turner, was singularly unlucky. Noel Chavasse described it in a letter to his father, the Bishop of Liverpool: ‘He was in a safe part of a trench giving orders to a Corporal, when a bullet struck the branch of a tree above the trench and glanced down upon him. Three minutes later he was dead.’

  Although high-explosive shells obliterated their graves and churned their bones into Brooke’s ‘richer earth’, Tanky and Toggie have some dignity in Kemmel Churchyard cemetery: their twin memorials acknowledge their last resting place – which is more than was accorded to many soldiers of the Great War. Shoulder to shoulder, they both carry the legend, ‘Known to be Buried in this Cemetery’, and – touchingly for two renowned sportsmen from the same field – ‘THEIR GLORY SHALL NOT BE BLOTTED OUT’,16 the standard phrase for destroyed graves proposed by Rudyard Kipling from one of his raids on the Apocrypha.

  Liverpool’s class of 1914 still had more men to bury and to honour. Scrum half Captain George Davey, MC, also with the Scottish, was one of only three 1st XV players to resume rugby after the war. Full back Eric Hamilton Cowan, a lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, died in February 1
916, after an operation in Canterbury. He was buried in Toxteth Park Cemetery with full military honours; his brother George or ‘Pinkie’ survived until 1985. Charles Hill mobilised with 9th KLR in August 1914, and won both an MC and Bar in 1918, first leading a trench raid, later taking company command when his superior was killed and ‘consolidating the captured position under very heavy fire’.17

  The prolific try-scoring winger Captain Robert Jackson, MC, initially of 4th KLR, later with the Royal Artillery, was also prolifically wounded, with three wound stripes on his sleeve, before dying from his fourth in November 1917. He lies in Dozinghem Military Cemetery, one of three with mock-Flemish names (with Bandaghem and Mendinghem) that serviced the massive hospitals near Poperinghe. His wing partner Tommy Lloyd, also of 4th KLR, was wounded in France, and could not return to frontline fighting. This did not stop him having a busy war: he helped evacuate the Serbian Army from Albania to Salonika, served in transport in Mesopotamia and Italy and was awarded the DSO (as well as the order of St Sava from the grateful Serbs). He would be Intelligence Officer for the ‘Dambusters’ 617 Squadron in the next war, and was killed in a flying accident in 1944. Captain John Edgar Ross, also 4th KLR, a Barbarian and Scotland reserve, was killed in April 1916 and is buried at Bethune. Tracey Fowler served as Sub-Lieutenant, RNVR, and Lieutenant James Clegg, transferred from 13th KLR to the King’s African Rifles in East Africa; both survived. James Gibson Grant battled enteritis and influenza before resigning his commission in 1917 due to persistent ill-health.

  No club in Liverpool was immune from the ravages of war. Aliens RFC (precursor to today’s Sefton RUFC) was founded in 1907; not by extra-terrestrials, who would not fathom the Laws of Rugby, however advanced their technology, but by a group of schoolteachers who all came from outside the city. One player who sounded suspiciously alien at the time was Hubert von Mengershausen: this threequarter and Manchester University medical student actually came from Natal, South Africa, whither his German father had emigrated after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War. A house doctor at Manchester’s Ancoats Hospital, when war broke out his application for an RAMC commission was refused because of his German surname. Curiously, Swedish doctor Rudi von Braun of Barts’ and Rosslyn Park encountered no such problem and served in Gallipoli and France. The Aliens’ minute book records the names of sixteen members killed and missing, noting: ‘It is a singular fact that every one of our fallen playing members had occupied the full back position.’ It still is one of the most dangerous places on the pitch.

  England rugby and the Liverpool Scottish would suffer again – a double blow on a single day in 1916 on the Somme, though not on the notorious 1 July or the terrible 15 September, but almost exactly midway, on 9 August at Guillemont. On that day English rugby had two locks broken in battle: Noel Slocock of Liverpool and Lancashire, and John Abbott ‘Jack’ King of Headingley and Yorkshire. The men of the White Rose and the Red would both be dead ‘where poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row’.

  Christmas-born Slocock was christened Noel by his reverend father. A growing reputation for line-out work at Liverpool FC, while working in the city’s cotton trade, brought the call for his England debut against the touring South Africans at Crystal Palace in December 1906. Farcically, in a clerical error, the letter went not to Slocock, but to Guy’s Hospital medical student, Arnold Alcock – a right ‘cock-up’ by the RFU, not a conspiracy. Noel had the consolation of facing the Springboks for Lancashire the following week; Arnold was never heard of again.

  On 5 January 1907 Slocock made his ‘second debut’ against France at Richmond, taking the precaution of getting his name on the score-sheet, for any RFU blazers able to read. He was ever-present in the 1907 and 1908 Test side, although it was not a successful English era. He signed off his international career against Scotland in March 1908 with a personal flourish: captain for the day and a try, but not the team win he would have perhaps preferred. Liverpool kept him busy as Club Secretary and the siren call of King Cotton became more insistent. He took his family to Savannah, Georgia; it was from America that Noel returned to fight in France with his hometown Liverpool Scottish.

  Jack King, a most unlikely lock and number eight at 5ft 5in, made his England debut at Swansea in 1911 and won ten more caps. In France, he wearied of the patrols and police work of his Yorkshire cavalry unit and longed ‘to be more of a soldier’. A chance meeting with old rugby mates in the Liverpool Scottish, including the ‘famous old English forward Slocock’ saw him transfer to ‘X’ Company, willingly swapping his dry saddle for waterlogged knee-deep mud in the Poor Bloody Infantry. He refused to apply for a commission, preferring to stay in the thick of the scrum. His last letter to Bob Oakes, his Headingley mate, was relentlessly cheery: ‘I am absolutely A1 in every way – but one can never tell and so long as I don’t disgrace the old Rugby game, I don’t think I mind.’18

  The initial Big Push at the Somme had famously failed; a series of summer battles now saw battalion offensives designed to ‘bite and hold’ small chunks of enemy territory. These also failed. On 9 August, three assaults were made by the Scottish on the village of Guillemont and two of its England men were killed: Second Lieutenant Noel Slocock, leading his men into action, and Lance Corporal Jack King, two years to the day after he had stood an inch taller in front of the recruiting sergeant and taken the King’s Shilling. In the same action, Edgar Mobbs was wounded with his 7th Northants; they were just three of more than 82,000 casualties in this phase of the Somme campaign, sacrificed for a thousand-yard gain.

  Edgar Mobbs, promoted to major in March 1916, had taken over command of the 7th Northants in April. Having helped to raise the battalion and risen from the ranks, it was the job he was born to do: formal promotion to lieutenant colonel swiftly followed. At Guillemont, where King and Slocock were killed, both he and his sidekick Grierson were wounded by shrapnel. Their recuperation in Blighty afforded another welcome interlude of rugby:

  Then we went to the Somme, and just before we went over the bags Edgar got hit. I took a bit of the same shell in the Headmaster’s area, so we came home together. When better we went to the Old Deer Park at Richmond to see the A.S.C. [Army Service Corps] Grove Park XV perform. I was much struck with Wagstaff, the NU [Northern Union] centre who was the best player I ever saw in this position. He had everything – pace, hand-off, swerve, lovely kick etc, but Mobbs wasn’t keen, for he thought the lot should be in France. I believe he told [Major] R.V. Stanley so, and I don’t think the latter had much to say in defence of his charges.19

  After two mentions in despatches, Mobbs was awarded the DSO in December. His battalion suffered severe casualties at Arras in April 1917. Mobbs was again wounded, this time in the neck, at Messines on 7 June, but returned to the battalion nineteen days later. As Grierson said, ‘Edgar didn’t stay in England until he was fit – he wasn’t the kind of fellow who would – but went back to his battalion as soon as the doctors would let him.’

  The battle that would be called Passchendaele opened on 31 July 1917. Walking wounded arriving at his headquarters near Zillebeke, in Canada Street tunnels, told of officers killed; Mobbs decided to lead from the front, and moved to Shrewsbury Forest. There he bumped into Lieutenant Norman Spencer, also from Bedford; in the heat of battle, the pair reminisced about rugby and mutual friends. Spencer witnessed Mobbs’s heroic effort to bomb a machine gun:

  In the tornado of hostile shelling he got ahead and seeing a number of his men cut down by an undiscovered machine-gun strong-point, he charged to bomb it, certain death under such a terrific hail of shell.20

  Before he died, Mobbs scrawled a last note of gunnery instructions and sent it back with his runner. The battalion history states, ‘The fact that his body could not be recovered and buried, as all ranks would have wished, was perhaps a good thing, as it helped keep alive his memory in the battalion, and inspired in everyone the resolve to avenge his death and to end the war that had already caused so much misery and suffering’. He is
commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial.

  Mobbs, said Grierson, was ‘one of the finest fellows his generation will see. As a footballer he had of course his limitations, but as a man he had practically none. He was big, in every sense of the word.’ He revealed Mobbs’s intentions to emigrate to Canada; Grierson believed that he would have ‘made his mark there in much the same way and as quickly as Mr. S.M. Bruce, the old Cambridge Rowing Blue has done in Australia’.21 He recounted one final story:

  Lt Colonel Mobbs had been asked to send in a return in red ink. We were in the trenches at the time, so the return was typed in black, which we thought good enough. Back it came in due course, signed by some Subaltern ‘for Major General’, drawing Edgar’s attention to the fact that it should be in red ink and requesting him to comply. Edgar replied at the foot of the letter. ‘Reference the above. We are in the front line trenches and have no red ink. There is however plenty of red blood here, so if you would like that instead, please instruct me to use it.’ He heard no more. He died as he lived – a sportsman and a gentleman.

  No less heroic was the later death, in the same prolonged, mud-logged battle, of another ‘big sportsman’, Northampton bootmaker Private Tom Collins. This powerful Saints forward, heavyweight boxing champ of his division, had played against the Springboks in the same Midlands side as the lauded Mobbs and Poulton-Palmer. On 7 October, at Zonnebeke, Collins and eight men went out as a stretcher party to bring in the wounded; a single shell wounded five and killed three, including Poor Tom. It was, said the Northampton Independent, a ‘painful shock to all followers of Rugby Football’. He met his death in a ‘chivalrous, courageous way characteristic of him’.

  Colonel Davidson of the Liverpool Scottish sent his sympathies to Corporal Jack King’s sisters at the farm in Wharfedale, paying tribute to their brother and indeed to all rugby players: