If George Foot had the face of angel, no-one would have said the same of his fellow crew member Joseph Cheverton, least of all himself. A battered family photograph shows a stocky, cocky young man with a hint of a grin and his cap at a jaunty angle. On the back he has jotted a pencil note to his parents:
Gunner Cheverton may have given that impression, but he also looks like a good person to have on your side, and his sleeve bears an inverted chevron marking two years’ good conduct – showing that like Gunner Foot, he was already a veteran at the age of nineteen. Both had started out as private soldiers in the infantry, and now held the same rank in the Tank Corps, but whereas George Foot’s family was aspirational and upwardly mobile, Joseph William Cheverton was the son of a tin- and coppersmith and resolutely working class. Joseph had been born in Coventry, where his father had moved to find work in the city’s manufacturing industries, but the family soon returned to his parents’ hometown of Cambridge, and it was there that Joseph and his three sisters were brought up.2
Although Cambridge University was as celebrated then as now, the town where Joseph lived might have been a million miles away from the ancient courtyards and riverside lawns where young men of a similar age but a different class spent three years in a whirl of punting, parties and privilege. For families like the Chevertons, the colleges were no more than a distant glimpse of pinnacles on the skyline beyond the railway tracks, while the students themselves were a source of amusement, annoyance and income. The mistrust was mutual, with Rupert Brooke, who represented the golden archetype of academe until his death from septicaemia in 1915, famously describing the town’s residents as ‘urban, squat and packed with guile’.3 It was meant as a jibe, but Joe and his friends might have recognized something of themselves in that description.
By 1914, the Cheverton family was crammed into a tiny terraced house in one of the new roads built for the shopkeepers, college servants and other tradespeople who provided for the needs of the busy town and its transient scholastic population. Joseph’s occupation is not recorded, but he probably followed in his father’s footsteps by training as a fitter or mechanic. His family recall that he was idolized by his sisters, and he became involved with the local amateur football team, Romsey Town. One of the players was a slightly older man called George Coote, an apprentice house-painter from another large family which included four sisters. Joseph was a good-looking, confident lad, and was soon stepping out with Florence Coote, known as Florrie, who was a year younger. A photograph shows her looking most fetching in a striped Romsey Town football jersey and shorts, probably her brother’s, though football was also a surprisingly popular game among women. Joseph’s photograph shows him wearing a ring on his third finger, indicating that they were betrothed to be married as soon as the time was right.4
And so they might have jogged along, if it had not been for the tide of change sweeping across Europe that would soon empty the students from their college halls, and the young men from the football terraces and public bars. The coming of war found Cambridgeshire without its own regular army regiment, but with a Territorial battalion made up of volunteers who trained in their spare time, which was immediately mobilized as the 1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment. Like other Territorials they had only signed up for home service, and when they were asked to volunteer for service overseas, those who were unable or unwilling to go formed the basis of a reserve battalion, and recruitment later began for a further reserve unit to be called the 3/1st Battalion.5
Joseph Cheverton had so far resisted the frenzy of war fever, but in April 1915 the 3/1st Battalion began a recruiting drive, and for two weeks the quiet streets of Cambridge and the sleepy Fenland towns reverberated to the tramp of marching feet and the thud of the bass drum. The local paper listed the names of those who signed up, including Joseph Cheverton.6 His sweetheart’s brother George Coote had already gone overseas with the regiment, but Joseph had slightly longer to wait and formed part of a reinforcement draft that crossed to France at the end of September.7 Strangely enough, this was probably the first time he had really got to know anyone from the other side of the gulf that divided his town, since almost all the regiment’s officers, and a fair sprinkling of other ranks, had been at the university before the war.
Joseph’s arrival at the front may not have lived up to expectations, as the regiment had been allocated to a quiet sector near the banks of the river Somme, which at that time was not much livelier than the river Cam. In fact, the General Staff initially seem to have had little faith in the fighting qualities of the Cambridgeshires – probably because they were mere Territorials, with no corresponding regular unit to pass on its skills. So far their war had been distinctly low-key, and although they played a supporting role in the Second Battle of Ypres, they had never taken part in a major attack and spent most of their time holding the line in areas where nothing much happened. Despite this the trenches were never an entirely safe place, and they had lost around eighty men, mostly from sniping and shelling.8
If things had been relatively quiet for the Cambridgeshires, they were about to get even quieter. In October 1915 they were detached from their division, which was sent to Salonika (now Thessaloniki) in northern Greece to join a gruelling campaign against the German-backed forces of Bulgaria. The Cambridgeshires were sent in the opposite direction to become the training battalion at Third Army School in the town of Flixecourt. The regimental historian’s view was that they had ‘fallen on their feet’, but the posting was a strenuous one since it involved much digging of practice trenches, frequent drills and parades, and ‘all sorts of fancy attacks’ for the benefit of senior officers studying at the school.9 For the next five months the battalion therefore found itself conducting mock battles with a simulated enemy, while the real thing was being enacted with deadly purpose just a few miles away. We do not know what Joseph Cheverton made of this, but it must have been frustrating for anyone who had joined up to fight. One of the company commanders – an intensely intellectual young man called Captain Arthur Adam, known to his men as ‘Parson Snowy’ on account of his fair hair and evangelical manner – summed it up in a letter home: ‘This is indeed a funny war; that is, I suppose it is war; but it isn’t like any other I ever came across.’10
This period of duty came to an end in April 1916, when the battalion marched back into the line to occupy yet another uneventful sector. A number of the officers were being replaced by regulars, among them Brigadier-General Edward Riddell who took over as commanding officer, only to be warned that he was ‘in for a stiff job’.11 The singular nature of his new command was brought home one night as he watched his men filing down a trench in the rain: ‘One of the officers was reciting a few lines from the classics. Probably his memory failed him; anyway he stopped. Whereupon the third man behind him continued the quotation. I pushed into the trench to find out what manner of man this private soldier was; for [he] must be a man of education and imagination. Fate ruled that I should not speak to him. A stray bullet, probably from a fixed rifle two thousand yards away, hit him in the back of the neck. He was dead when we lifted him out of the mud. “Bad luck”, said the adjutant. “He might have made a name for himself after the war. He was hopeless as a soldier.”’12
As the summer wore on, the Cambridgeshires were sucked into the vortex of the Somme, no longer a sleepy sector but now the setting for one of the greatest battles in history. At least there was now the prospect of some real fighting, but the battalion was once again given one of the quieter sections of the line, north of the ruined village of Hamel with the marshy valley of the River Ancre to its right. This was one of the areas where the great offensive launched on 1 July had foundered at the start, and although they arrived at the end of August, the Cambridgeshires took over the same trenches from which the 36th (Ulster) Division had advanced with such high hopes nearly two months before.
Their trenches gave a grandstand view of the one of the strongest German positions on the Somme, the Schwaben Redoubt, which occupied the high ground towards Thiepval, only 500 metres to their right across the Ancre valley, and was still holding out against repeated attacks. Witnessing the bombardment that preceded one assault, ‘Parson Snowy’ turned to his commanding officer and shouted above the din: ‘Nothing on earth can withstand that. Will this mean the end of the war?’13 It was a naive question, for the Germans in their well-built positions could withstand that, and plenty more, and shortly afterwards even launched a counter-attack which the Cambridgeshires helped to repulse.
Once again the men found themselves exposed to the constant dangers of trench warfare, including a series of poison gas bombardments intended to disrupt the Allied advance. One of these was described by Brigadier-General Riddell: ‘From 11 p.m. until dawn the German artillery saturated the valley in which the Cambridgeshires were with gas shells. Those who have worn the old grey flannel gas-mask for five or six hours continuously will know what that means. All night the fluttering sound of those shells as they fell amongst us made rest impossible. Those who removed their masks were immediately incapacitated.’ There was no response from the British artillery, who were unable to bring shells up to their guns, and he added: ‘Had the Germans only known our plight – blinded, coughing, exhausted infantry, and ammunitionless guns!!’14
The frustration was shared by ‘Parson Snowy’, who had managed to disguise his own short-sightedness from the military authorities. ‘There is a serious drawback to me as a soldier which has only just transpired, to wit, that spectacles under an anti-gas apparatus become so misty that I can’t see a yard. So I was rendered entirely incapable for 3 hours the other night, when our delightful enemy gave us a few thousand of his more poisonous forms of gas shell. That proceeding made me really angry, because, though it did no real harm, it made us feel very uncomfortable, and prevented sleep at a time it was badly wanted.’15
But these proceedings could do real harm, and a number of men were gassed, including Joseph Cheverton who was sent back to England as a casualty in September 1916.16 This probably happened on 23 September, when the War Diary recorded that ‘A large number of gas shells dropped on our frontage and around Hamel during the night, making things very uncomfortable. Casualties 1 officer … & 20 [other ranks] one of whom later on died. In a large number of cases effects were not felt until 12 hours later. There were 3 different kinds of gas used.’17
Nearly a month later, the Cambridgeshires finally got their chance. For once they were to lead an attack, and their task was no less than to drive the Germans out of their last foothold in the Schwaben Redoubt, which had maintained its defiance ever since 36th (Ulster) Division had seized it for a few glorious hours on 1 July. As he watched his men going over the top, Brigadier-General Riddell never doubted that they would succeed: ‘Shells sizzled overhead like rain. A second later they burst on the rising ground two hundred yards to the north, throwing up fountains of earth mingled with the debris of a battlefield; and although we could not discriminate between one clod of something in the air and another, we knew that men, too, were being blown to pieces. Silhouetted against this cloud of spurting earth and smoke were my Cambridgeshires advancing to victory … I stood up in the open, spell-bound with admiration for the men who were steadily advancing into that upheaval of earth, with the sunlight gleaming on their bayonets.’18 The regiment had finally proved itself, but it came too late for Joseph Cheverton, who was already back in England – and too late for Captain Arthur Adam, who had been wounded and captured while leading a disastrous raid in the Ancre valley on the night of 16/17 September. No word was ever received of ‘Parson Snowy’s’ fate, but the discovery of a grave several years after the war confirmed that he had died in German hands.19
Following Joseph Cheverton’s recovery, it may come as no surprise that he was among a draft of eight men from the Cambridgeshire Regiment who transferred to the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps.20 His family background in metal-working would have made him especially suitable for the new role, though the unventilated interior of a tank, choking with exhaust fumes and thick with gunsmoke, was hardly the place for someone whose lungs had been damaged by poison gas. However, the newspapers were full of the exploits of the new machines, and although there were many question-marks about them, they must have seemed a better bet than huddling in a trench with only a steel helmet and flannel gas mask for protection, or running around conducting mock attacks for the edification of elderly staff officers.
It may also have occurred to him that Florrie was likely to be impressed by his involvement with the army’s newest secret weapon. If so he would hardly be the first young man to think in this way, or the last, and surely none of us would begrudge him this fickle glory.
* * *
It often happens that the people with the best sense of humour are those with the least to laugh about, and this seems to have been the case with the third member of Deborah’s crew, a twenty-five year-old Ulsterman called William Galway. The son of a labourer who had no fewer than nine children,21 he had worked for the local council before being wounded on the most disastrous day in the history of the British Army, and was now on the brink of a battle that had the potential to be even worse. It was not very promising material, but Gunner Galway was described by his commander as ‘a true Irish gentleman’ who ‘kept us in shrieks of laughter’ and was ‘the life and soul of my crew, doing two men’s work and cheering us all up’.22 No-one has recorded exactly what he managed to find funny in all this, but one imagines that the foibles of the officers, the idiocy of the General Staff, and the incompetence of their allies would have provided a rich comic vein, as in most wars.
William Galway was born and raised in Holywood, a pleasant little town in County Down on the shores of Belfast Lough that was linked to the city by rail, and now boasted a number of large houses belonging to wealthy industrialists. It was a very different story for William, whose parents must have struggled to cope with such a large family, but his personality suggests that it was a happy household. In 1911 his parents and their seven surviving children, aged from three to twenty-two, were all living in the same house with only three incomes to support them – from their father, who was a labourer, his oldest daughter who worked in a tobacco factory, and his oldest son William who was then a grocer’s vanman, but later went to work for Belfast Corporation.23
Tensions in Ireland had been growing in the years before the war, with the Protestant community becoming increasingly isolated not just from the majority Catholic population, but also from the British government as it made repeated attempts to introduce home rule in the yet unpartitioned island. The Unionists, fearing their interests were being ignored, had formed a militia called the Ulster Volunteer Force to resist home rule, but with the coming of war they agreed to set their grievances aside, and the UVF became a ready-trained unit of the British army known as 36th (Ulster) Division.
As a member of the local Presbyterian church, William Galway’s allegiances were clear, and in September 1914 he and his younger cousin enlisted together in 13th (Service) Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles, newly formed from the County Down Volunteers. The fact that both men had the same name and were in the same company might have caused confusion, but the younger William Galway failed to thrive in the army and suffered from a series of ailments during training, until he was finally discharged in May 1915 complaining of knee pain.24
For all his flippancy, the older William was made of sterner stuff, and after training in Ireland and England he travelled to France with his battalion in October 1915.25 Unlike Territorial units from sleepy English shires, the army’s high command had no doubts about the fighting qualities of the Ulstermen, who came from what we would now call a tough neighbourhood, and were united by a common faith, a shared political ideology, and a fierce sense of pride. After a period of familiarization they were sent to hold a key sector of the line near the enemy stronghold of Thiepval, and remained there as preparations got under way for the enormous Allied push on the Somme in the summer of 1916.
The opening of that offensive is generally regarded as the blackest day in the history of the British Army, but the heroic part played in it by 36th (Ulster) Division has entered the realms of military mythology. Rifleman William Galway’s unit, A Company of 13th Bn Royal Irish Rifles, found itself in the first wave of the attack against German positions on the gently rising ground north of Thiepval.
Following a five-day bombardment, zero hour was fixed for 7.30 a.m. on 1 July – a propitious day for the Ulstermen, as it was the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne which had brought triumph for the Protestant King William. At 7.15 a.m., the men of the Royal Irish Rifles filed out of their trenches in Thiepval Wood and formed up in No Man’s Land. At zero the thunder of shelling was replaced by the rattle of small-arms fire and cries of ‘No Surrender’ as the attackers surged forward. The first two platoons of A Company reached the German front line with few casualties, overwhelmed the defenders, and moved on to seize the support trench behind. But the Germans were now emerging from their deep dugouts, and the second wave from A Company was caught in the open as it crossed No Man’s Land, losing a large number of men from machine-gun fire. The survivors then moved forward to the second-line trench, clearing the way with hand grenades. According to the battalion’s commanding officer, Colonel William Savage: ‘This trench was held for a considerable time, but owing to our bombs giving out & not getting any reinforcements we were ordered to retire back.’26
To their right, the Ulstermen swept even further forward to occupy the complex of trenches known as the Schwaben Redoubt, but soon found themselves far ahead of their neighbouring units. Isolated and exposed to fire from both flanks, and in the face of determined German counter-attacks, they were eventually forced back to their starting positions leaving only a tenuous hold on a stretch of the German front line. The Schwaben Redoubt would remain in enemy hands for more than two months, until it was finally retaken by the Cambridgeshire Regiment, among others.
For all their heroism, the Ulstermen had suffered a terrible defeat, though a glorious one. A message from Major-General Oliver Nugent, commander of 36th Division, was relayed to 13th Bn Royal Irish Rifles: ‘Ulster has every reason to be proud of the men she has given to the service of our country. Though many of our best men have gone the spirit which animated them remains in the Division and will never die.’27 The cost was summarized by the divisional historian: ‘Its casualties in the two days amounted to five thousand five hundred officers and other ranks killed, wounded, and missing. The whole Province was thrown into mourning for its sons.’28
In William Galway’s company alone, the casualty return shows thirteen men were killed, thirty-four missing, and fifty-four wounded (including ten with shell shock).29 When the missing were accounted for, it turned out at least thirty-six men from A Company were dead.30 Among the wounded who made their way back to Thiepval Wood was Rifleman Galway,31 though the nature of his injuries is unknown. It was probably while he was recovering that the appeal came through for volunteers to join the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps. Perhaps even his irrepressible sense of humour had been strained by the slaughter on the Somme, but whatever the reason, he transferred to the new unit on 19 October 1916, just over a month after the tanks had first gone into action.32
From then on William Galway was separated from most of his fellow Ulstermen, and found himself in a very different unit dedicated to a new kind of warfare. It was not the last time he would come across 36th (Ulster) Division, though strangely enough, on the next occasion he would find his own life and those of his comrades were endangered by the actions of a small number of its men, who took a very different view of their obligations to the British Crown.