All too brief

Cecil Abercrombie - Died at Jutland, May 31st, 1916 

In 1977, a battered, dust covered photo album was hooked out of a builder’s skip on a street in central London. The pictures captured the pre WW1 marriage of a young naval officer called Cecil Abercrombie.  A rugby international and a Hampshire cricketer, Abercrombie was destined to be one of the 8,500 men killed at the Battle of Jutland at the end of May, 1916.

He spent some of his youth with relatives in the New Forest, the Shaw family of Milford House, and on joining the navy he played rugby for the Combined Services side in Portsmouth. A powerful loose forward, he went on to win six Scottish caps. By the summer of 1912 he had taken up cricket, and he impressed the crowd at Lords with some destructive hitting in the Army v Navy match. His quick fire century in the second innings featured a mammoth six that landed on the players’ dressing room balcony. Hampshire lost no time in securing his signature.

In just 13 matches in the summer of 1913, Abercrombie scored nearly a thousand runs.  Most famously, Abercrombie combined with George Brown to produce a huge stand of 325 for the seventh wicket against Essex, a record that is still etched proudly on Hampshire’s records board more than a hundred years later. Abercrombie smashed 165 runs, including 11 fours and 4 sixes.

Hampshire’s supporters would have been licking their lips at the prospect of their new hero dismantling County attacks in the 1914 season, but naval duty called for Abercrombie.

When his ship, HMS Defence, was finally called into action at Jutland at the end of May 1916, Abercrombie was one of 903 men lost. Defence had lasted a matter of minutes in combat. A stunned officer on board a nearby ship, the Obedient, wrote that after a huge explosion “we could see no sign of a ship at all – Defence had gone.”

Abercrombie and his wife had only married in 1913, and the battered photo album saved from the builders’ skip was the record of their time together. Like Abercrombie’s cricket career, her married life had been all too brief.

ARTHUR JAQUES



 ARTHUR JAQUES

The figure in the striped blazer in the middle of the front row is Arthur Jaques, a newcomer to the Hampshire side in the two seasons leading up to the Great War. A tall opening bowler, he lived in Bassett, a suburb of Southampton. A hundred years ago, in the late summer of 1915, he was on his way to the catastrophe that became known as The Battle of Loos. He had ended his season, and his cricketing career, with 6 wickets for 55 runs in 23 overs at Dean Park, Bournemouth. Arthur had also just married. By the early autumn of 1914, however, he and his twin brother had signed up.

Having gained commissions in the 12th West Yorkshire Regiment, the Jaques brothers would have undergone training in the Home Counties. The West Yorkshires were part of the 21st Division, which was based near Tring. June 1915 saw them at Halton Park, where they were finally issued with rifles. Soon they were on the move, this time to the camp at Witley. Lord Kitchener inspected them on manoeuvres on 12th August. The losses incurred by the B.E.F. in the failed campaigns of 1915 meant that the 21^st Division was soon sending advance parties over the Channel, and the remainder of the Division left for France from Folkestone on the 7th of September. The different units gathered at a camp near the town of Tilques.

A sense of excitement must have been building by this time, but the worsening weather, allied to a series of taxing forced marches, would have tested that early enthusiasm. The men were marching ten to fifteen miles a night, carrying heavy packs in pouring rain. Exhausted and soaked to the skin, they would be allowed to rest at daybreak, and lay down in the mud by the side of the road. It was up to officers such as Arthur to keep these troops moving and following orders. This would have been no mean feat when the men discovered two days out of Loos that their food supplies had not caught up with them.

One of the great mistakes made at the Battle of Loos was that reserve units such as the 12th Yorkshires were kept too far back from the front. The modest gains of the initial attacks were then lost as German counter attacks wrestled back control of their trenches before Allied reserve units could help to consolidate the ground taken. So it was that the 12th Yorkshires did not get into action until Sunday 27th September. For such inexperienced troops, the sloping ground near Bois Hugo became a killing ground. With most of their officers (including Arthur and Joseph Jaques) dead, the remainder of the men crawled back to their frontline trenches. The 21^st Division had suffered 3800 casualties. No ground was gained. It was the final nail in the coffin for Sir John French, who was sacked as Commander-in-Chief of the B.E.F. shortly afterwards.

According to one report by Major-General Forester-Walker the 12th West Yorkshires did not behave with credit and retired without due cause. When one looks at the shortcomings of the planning and execution of the Battle of Loos, it is easy to see why men such as Forester-Walker were so quick to play the blame game. Inexperienced, exhausted and hungry, Jaques and his men found out exactly what Haig meant when he talked about “unfavourable ground”. For one young officer in the Royal Welsh, it was his first taste of combat. Robert Graves describes Loos as a “bloody balls-up” A hundred years later, looking out from the viewing platform at the Loos Memorial which bears the names of the Jaques brothers, one instinctively trusts the judgement of the junior Royal Welsh officer over the Major-General.

For more on Jaques and other Hampshire cricketers in WW1 see A Torch in Flame

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