Died of Wounds, 14th August, 1916

A hundred years ago, an officer of the South Wales Borderers lay in a hospital near Choques in Northern France, his life ebbing away. The dried mud of No Man's Land on his uniform told the story of the trench raid where he had been wounded. Now, in his final moments, he wanted to know if that raid had been successful.

“Have they got the Hun?”
The answer was yes – the Bavarian he captured was indeed in custody, and undergoing interrogation.
“Well,” he said, “at least I have done my bit.”

With that, Charlie Pritchard died.

“The Battalion lost a gallant officer and a generous and chivalrous gentleman” said the Commanding Officer's letter to his pregnant wife at home. Charlie was also a huge loss to his home town of Newport, where he had captained the top Rodney Parade side for three seasons in a club career of over two hundred appearances. Pritchard was also a loss to Welsh rugby as a whole. He was many people's Man of the Match in the epic 1905 victory over the All Blacks. It was inevitable that a man described by the Daily Mail as "in the thick of the fight" on that famous day should have been leading men on the Western Front a decade later.
For Florence Pritchard, his wife back home in Newport, the 14th of August was a day she dreaded for the rest of her life. The child she was carrying when Charlie died, the daughter he never knew, was born just before Christmas 1916, and died in 1985 - on the 14th of August.

Taken from "Newport Rugby Greats" by Peter Jones (Amberley 2016)

On Tour

Le Tour is the biggest event in France. A sporting public still raw from the disappointment of defeat by Portugal in Euro 2016 gathered in huge numbers to cheer the riders on. On Mt Ventoux, the enthusiasm of those crowds caused a crash that will go down in Tour folklore, as Sky's Chris Froome decided against waiting for a spare bike to be delivered and started running up the infamous slope.
Chaos and controversy have never been far away from this famous race. The winner of the inaugural Tour in 1903, Maurice Garin, was subsequently banned for two years for cheating in the 1904 Tour, effectively ending his career. The circumstances surrounding Garin's ban are still shrouded in mystery, with the Tour de France archives lost after the Nazi invasion of 1940.
Known as "The Little Chimney Sweep", Garin was born in the shadow of Mont Blanc in the Aosta valley in Italy. His family illegally crossed the Alps to France to look for work in the North, and there was a story of little Maurice being smuggled in by a local trafficker/guide in return for some local cheese. After working as a chimney sweep in Reims, Maurice Garin moved to Lens and opened a bike shop.He only returned once to his birthplace in Italy to see the 1934 Tour pass through his home town. It is perhaps interesting in a modern context to remember that he would always see himself as a Frenchman. A properly controlled border would have seen his family staying south of Mont Blanc, and Garin riding for Italy. Much more likely, his impoverished family would never have got within touching distance of a bike.

That Inaugural Tour of 1903 included a mammoth 471km stage from Nantes back to Paris, where Garin was crowned as the victor by a winning margin that still stands as a record - 2hrs 59minutes and 31 seconds. It makes Chris Froome's 2016 winning margin of 4 minutes and 5 seconds look a little less comfortable than it appeared to be. Whatever Garin (and several others) did to justify a ban a year later, there were no doubts raised as to his supremacy in 1903. The Little Chimney Sweep had swept all before him.

This year I took the opportunity to see the Tour as it played out its dramatic final scenes in the mountains around Mont Blanc. The whole event is pure theatre, from the moment you settle into your chosen viewing point to the last view of the exhaust pipes of the team cars. An hour or so before the riders are due to pass, a carnival of all shapes and sizes rolls by, firing various freebies at the crowd from sponsors - dishwasher samples, Madeleines, baseball caps and sausages. Then there is a distant thumping of the hoardings, away round the bend from your chosen stretch of road, and a rider appears, hunched over his handlebars, on a desperate quest for glory. The fizz of tyres on Tarmac, flashes of lycra'd colour, and a great rush of air that follows the back of the peloton as it pursues the leader.


This sequence is repeated over three weeks every summer. Sometimes you're lucky enough to see it live, but TV coverage makes it almost impossible to miss it. For the French, in a world stripped of certainties, it is a constant image in their sporting and cultural year. Reading about an aged Catholic priest having his throat cut at the altar of a church in a sleepy French village will only make them tighten their grip on such certainties. A man at the wheel of a lorry, drunk on the propaganda of a death cult, will not stop their Bastille Day.

2016 has raised questions about the UK's certainties. Are we "European" any more?
An early test - and perhaps an insight into what it means to "Brexit"- came with the huge queues at the Border Control gates at Dover. Brits, of course, are known for their patience in line. It is a national pastime to rival the Tour.The writer George Mikes once noted that "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one". But 10 hours in a car with screaming children will have stretched the mental resources of the hardiest Brit. There would have been no point suggesting to those folks that the French, faced with the atrocity at Nice, were simply "Taking Back Control" of their borders.

Brexit raises many many issues for those of us who are dependent on travelling to the EU without undue hassle. Tourism between France and the U.K. is important for both economies. It was noticeable in recent days that there were large numbers of UK fans watching the Tour, encouraged by the success of Messrs Wiggins and Froome. Both countries would be the poorer if Brexit meant us retreating across the Channel.

For Single Step Tours, it is in the main UK visitors who travel to France and Belgium to see the WW1 battlefields. Brexit will not stop people wanting to make those pilgrimages. For me, however, there is a sense that the game has changed. When we stop in a vast space such as the Tyne Cot Cemetery on the Passchendaele Ridge outside Ypres, surveying 13,000 headstones, I am invariably asked "Can this happen again?"
My automatic reply before June 23rd ?
"No - because we're Europeans now"
So much better as an answer than a vague shrug of the shoulders and "I don't know".

The Iron Harvest

The so called "iron harvest" continues to amaze and appal in equal measure. The visitor to the Western Front has enough on his or her plate just getting their heads around the body count without contemplating the idea that this dreadful war might still be taking victims today.
A battlefield trip to the Somme with journalists from papers such as the Telegraph and Mirror led to a chance meeting with farmer Claude Samain, whose fields regularly yield piles of rusting munitions a hundred years on. In 1916, his fields were crisscrossed by a maze of communication trenches, filled with the flower of North country menfolk. Lads from Leeds and boys from Barnsley would have awaited their fate out on Claude's land. The ill fated Accrington Pals too. These were Kitchener's volunteers, who joined up in the breathless excitement of the late summer of 1914. They had trained hard, and were desperate to impress. This was their town's chance to make a mark. The Accrington Pals would become famous for the role they would play in the great breakthrough, they hoped. Tragically, they have become synonymous with the blood letting of July 1st, 1916. Accrington is forever associated with a strangely named football team and the fact that out of 700 men who went over the top on that sunny morning, 585 of them were dead or wounded just minutes later. They were, as a witness said, "mown down like meadow grass".
Claude's land is peaceful now. He showed us rusted heaps of metal, plied up against the brick wall of a barn. The weight and sharp edges of the shrapnel makes you shudder - what these red hot pieces of flying metal could do to a human body doesn't bear thinking about for too long. Venomous coils of barbed wire, spent cartridges, shell fuzes and bent rifle barrels had all been collected by Claude over the past few months. And around the corner, the dangerous stuff. Unexploded shells, some no doubt containing poison gas, stood to attention in neat rows waiting for the army truck to arrive. There didn't appear to be any rush.
Claude and his fellow farmers can be forgiven for being a little blasé about it all. He recalled his time as a child in these fields, exploring a nearby copse which had been used a medical post. He would chase around, hunting amongst the shredded pieces of tarpaulin for treasures in a place where  wounded men, some screaming, some at the very point of death, would have been carried in by sweating stretcher bearers. Suffering on an unimaginable scale has always formed the backdrop to his life in this quiet, rural corner of France.

 

STA Neil - kia July 1st 1916

Leeds Pals

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.

Fighting them on the Beaches

"Wars are not won by evacuations" Churchill, 1940

Careful preparation of a battlefield tour involves walking familiar ground all over again, thinking practically about the logistics of where coaches can park, starving schoolkids can eat etc etc.
But in the midst of the logistics, Jeremy Banning (www.jeremybanning.co.uk) and I had the time and space to think about the events of 1940. Both of us spend most of our time on WW1, and the tour we're planning for Single Step will take in the Ypres Salient, but the fact that we will be based at Dunkerque means that it is an opportunity for us to tie in the events of WW2.

There are some who see the struggle against Hitler as an extension of 1914-18 - in other words, one long World War, stretching over the first half of the twentieth century. The Kaiser and the Fuhrer were very different men, of course, but the roots of conflict go back to the relative imbalance of power in Europe. Germany, as the growing force at the centre of the continent, was restless. The Kaiser wanted his "place in the sun". Hitler wanted "lebensraum". Same difference?

Preparing a school battlefield tour of the Dunkirk area took us to the beautiful Memorial (see the picture), whose panels are filled with the names of 4,500 men who have no known grave. We also called in on the excellent Dunkirk museum (http://www.dynamo-dunkerque.com/en/) - a place that packs an awful lot into a small space - as well as the beach itself. A view across the level sands towards the Bray Dunes from the Mole is immediately populated by thousands of khaki figures and abandoned trucks in the popular imagination, such is the power of the Dunkirk myth three generations later. Close your eyes and you can hear the satanic screams of the Stuka bombers. Over 338,000 men were lifted from this area in 1940 in one of the most remarkable operations of any war. The Admiralty thought they might be able to rescue about 45,000. Although, as Churchill noted, wars are not won through evacuations, the "Miracle of Dunkirk" meant that Hitler could not assume that Britain was out of the war just yet. Cue graphics and theme tune from "Dad's Army".

Planning for the summer

With a long winter behind us, battlefield guides are shaking themselves down and sniffing the air. Daffodils are out.

The email inbox is filling up with requests to go to Ypres or the Somme - the usual venues - but also to visit small, out of the way cemeteries down quiet tracks to find the grave of a relative killed a hundred years ago. These bespoke battlefield tours are always special, and I learn as much as my clients on these trips.

And away from the WW1 battlefield tours, there are some intriguing cultural trips in the offing. Dylan Thomas' Wales, Yeats' Ireland and Shakespeare's Stratford are all in the mix.

It's all in the planning...

Thoughts from last battlefield tour.

WW1 changed us as a country, probably in more ways than we might imagine. Fighting a Total War meant that the state had to modernise its approach, and it had to pass laws that allowed it to fight that war in the most effective way possible.

The logistics of moving millions of men, feeding them, training them, kitting them out - all this had to be carried out by a High Command that was used to handling a pre war force that was a fraction of the size of the British Army between 1914 and 1918. And, of course, that pre war force had been a fully professional outfit. To turn those keen recruits that joined up in their thousands when war was declared in the late summer of 1914 into soldiers was a mammoth task, and it could only be done with the support of a modern industrial state working at full capacity.

On our last bespoke battlefield tour, where this was discussed at some length, we reflected on the fact that the logistics behind the CWGC was evidence of a highly organised state structure too. This was particularly obvious at Thiepval and the Menin Gate, where the individual names of those who were lost were painstakingly recorded and carved into stone.
Lest We Forget.