Walter Martin

On May 3rd 1933 friends and family of Walter Martin gathered at a graveside in Newport, South Wales. Thousands had lined the streets as the funeral cortège slowly climbed the hill to the church. All were united by a desperate sense of grief and guilt.

Walter had been diagnosed with cancer and had been treated at Saint Woolos Hospital but mental instability had plagued his recovery. His family had even removed disinfectant from cupboards, so worried were they that Walter would kill himself. Close friends were also aware of the danger and visited him daily, hoping that he would see a light at the end of the tunnel. 

There was an impressive collection of Welsh sporting celebrities at the funeral. One of these was Tommy Vile, Walter Martin's partner in the Newport rugby side, a man whose leadership and tactical nous turned a clever but sometimes frustratingly inconsistent player like Walter into a man who managed to represent his country. He built a reputation as a shredder of opposition defences and accumulated over 300 points for Newport. Elusive and brave, he had played a key part in the famous 1912 defeat of the legendary Springboks. By 1933, however, Walter was a pale shadow of his former self, a gifted sportsman fallen from grace. 

Like so many men of that era his sporting career was cut short by the declaration of war in 1914. Walter, along with many fellow members of the Newport club, joined the South Wales Borderers. The misfortunes of war led Martin and his pals to Salonica. Not as famous a front as the Somme or Ypres perhaps, but the British Army alone lost over 10,000 men in this often forgotten corner of the Great War. 

At the Battle of Doiran Walter Martin's bravery and leadership lead to the award of the DCM ( Distinguished Conduct Medal). The citation described Walter as "totally regardless of danger" as he rescued a wounded man under shellfire and carried him to the safety of the Allied trenches.

The four years lost to war robbed Walter and so many others of precious time when he was at the peak of his athletic powers. It may well be that the war had damaged him for ever, as his mental health deteriorated after he finished playing in 1921. His family and friends had to endure the view from the front seats as the tragedy of Walter Martin's last act unfolded. He was found dead in his room at the hospital having strangled himself with a scarf on 30th April 1933, perhaps as much a victim of the war as any of those men who lie in the immaculate CWGC cemeteries.

98 years on...

98 years after the guns fell silent on the Western Front I find myself thinking of the 3500 US troops killed or wounded on that morning despite the fact that the generals knew that the armistice had been signed at 5am. The assaults on German positions continued right up to the designated 11am end to hostilities. Later, Congressman Fuller asked "Black Jack" Pershing if American lives had been "needlessly wasted" that morning.
Up at Compiegne, the German delegation had been startled by Foch's intransigence. His Gallic shrug and level stare was the response of a man who had seen his country bleeding to death over the course of the 4 years. "Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make" he said, and waved them away.
No proposals, perhaps - but plenty of demands. German troops were to leave France, Belgium and Luxembourg. They were also to return Alsace Lorraine to France - that old wound had barely dried since the Franco Prussian War nearly 40 years back. France and its Allies were out to ensure that Germany would never be in a position to cause trouble again.
But as every History student knows, the severity of the peace treaty at Versailles did much to guarantee that there would be future conflict. It provided fertile soil for the growth of the Nazi Party in the succeeding decades, and the bitter crop was harvested in the self same railway carriage in Compiegne in 1940.
Those History students will be asking some big questions today.
They will see that we descended into World War in 1914 and 1939 because the world order was unstable, and it was challenged by ultra nationalists. Vast economic forces, barely understood at the time, caused tensions inside countries, and beyond their borders. These were exploited by political chancers who had little real understanding of the demons that they were unleashing on the world.
So - big questions...

Wilfred Owen

It was on this day - November 4th, 1918 - that the poet Wilfred Owen was killed leading his men in an attack across a canal near Ors. The war was in its final few days, and the 25yr old's parents took delivery of the dreaded telegram as the church bells were ringing out to celebrate the end to four years of hostilities. There is a link to his poems here - opinion may be divided as to how representative Owen was of the typical WW1 officer, but there can be no doubting the power of his verse, nor the extent of his influence on our own perception of the conflict. The poetry, he said, was in the Pity...

The canal bank nr Ors, where Owen was killed on Nov 4th 1918

Somme Burials

Piece from Times here

Work on site at La Boiselle, Summer 2013

Customised Tours this month

Much of September was spent on the road, with two big bespoke tours here in the UK and Ireland. Both itineraries started and ended in Heathrow, but followed slightly different trajectories.
The first was a two week cultural tour of Wales and Ireland, staying on Cardiff Bay, Dylan Thomas' Laugharne, Dublin, WB Yeats' Sligo, Snowdonia and Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon.
The second tour was with a party of just over 20 people, staying in hotels at Bath, Cardiff and London. Again, the focus was on the cultural and historical sites that make the UK such a popular destination. Are we Brits guilty of taking what we have for granted?

 

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".