Creatives in Khaki

In December 1915 Sherriff started his training in Essex, at Gidea Park, thirty minutes by train from Liverpool Street station. He spent most of January billeted on a family in nearby Romford. In March 1916 he moved into the grounds of Hare Hall Camp. The camp consisted of forty long wooden huts (fitted out by richer members of the Sportsman’s Battalion whose first-class cricketers made the most of the grounds) that held 1,400 men in total. From a literary point of view Hare Hall was a major coincidence of burgeoning talent. Edward Thomas had arrived there in July 1915. At thirty-seven, he was a lot older than most recruits, a jobbing critic and a published author with a young family to support. He qualified as a lance corporal and a map-reading instructor. Another new face was that of Cadet Wilfred Owen (three years older than Sherriff) who arrived in mid-November before taking a commission in the Manchester Regiment six months later.

Owen and Thomas briefly shared a hut. But the meeting between them that should have happened never actually did. It is one of the great literary near misses of the 20th century. In his book Strange Meetings, Harry Ricketts invents an intriguing conversation in Hut 16 between Owen and Thomas. He doesn’t, however, mention Sherriff who was ten huts away. Nor does Matthew Hollis in his recent book about Thomas, Now All Roads Lead to France. The reason no one has ever heard of Sherriff in connection with these men in training camp? He didn’t go on to write poetry. Had he done so, however footling the verse, he would have been anthologized and discussed and his life story teased out over the years. But it was a poet’s war and the playwrights have been ignored. One other thing: had Thomas, Owen and Sherriff met and then waited a year or two, they could have formed an army barbershop quartet with Cadet Noël Coward. Coward’s unhappy stint in the Artists ended when he caught a convenient virus and was invalided out with, he said, the score of Ivor Novello’s Arlette running through his brain.

Owen, Thomas and Sherriff all experienced the same life of drill, more drill, further drill and occasional outings for some light shopping in Romford, the big excitement being the appearance of a Zeppelin. Judging from Sherriff’s letters, the army life with the ‘lunge-thrust-disembowel-disengage-two-three’ of infantry training had scant appeal. Sherriff’s martial spirit was always slightly lacking. His favourite lessons were map-making – it’s tantalising to think that Edward Thomas could have been his instructor – at which he was extremely good. He learned how to reconnoitre, how to use a prismatic compass, how to find direction at night. The maps he left behind are sketched in a neat hand and done with great care. The Artists were red hot on the matter of turn-out and Sherriff spent a great deal of his time burnishing, brushing, crimping, oiling and buffing. He was once even ordered to polish a sergeant’s bicycle with a piece of bacon.

There is a further, remote connection between Owen and Sherriff. He was Harold Monro, poet and proprietor of the famous Poetry Bookshop in Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury. Monro was angry about the war (‘how ungrudgingly Youth dies’) before almost anyone else. In 1928 he would be at the first night of Journey’s End. It was he who tipped off its eventual West End producer (his brother-in-law) that the play was a cracker.

At camp Sherriff was often homesick and lonely, though he re-met a friend from Kingston called Trimm ‘whose only drawback is his extreme fondness for girls’. Why that should have been a drawback isn’t clear. Sherriff’s letters to his mother (he called her ‘Dearie’) are full of worries about appearing as miserable as he felt. It seems he had trouble joining in the singing and showing the required rowdiness of spirit. A devotee of the Stoics, he asked for a cheap edition of the Discourses of Epictetus; it would accompany him months later to the Front along with Marcus Aurelius, Lewis Carroll and Walter Scott.

His letters to his mother are those of a bit of a mummy’s boy whereas those to his father are upbeat and full of the utter absurdities of army life. For example, on 13 June 1916 he wrote to his father about training in Epping Forest: ‘A Bombing Party consists of 2 bayonet men, 2 bombers, 2 carriers, 2 spare men and a commander. I put my rifle over the parapet of the trench, and the man on the other side throwing earth buried it. Luckily it was sand that came off fairly easily despite the fact that it looked like fried sole in egg and breadcrumbs. Made little seats to sit on and eat a sandy dinner. Then there was a raid. The experience would have been very pleasant bar the rain.’

He thought about joining the Royal Flying Corps but rejected the idea as it would have been a waste of months of infantry training. Sherriff’s training finally came to a grateful end in late August 1916 and he took leave pending gazette. He was commissioned into his original choice of regiment, the East Surrey. Of the three budding writers at Hare Hall, only Sherriff would come back from the war: Edward Thomas would be killed by a shell blast in April 1917 and Owen machine gunned crossing a canal just a week before the Armistice.

The gentleman’s outfitters Thresher & Glenny supplied Sherriff with trench coat, check cashmere jerkin and angora balaclava. He also took with him lots of anchovy paste and some decent wire cutters. He went to war wearing his tailored officer’s tunic that the young Laurence Olivier would one day borrow and wear on stage. He set off from Charing Cross station, waved goodbye to his mother and vanished abroad on a boat train with hundreds of others doing the same, as if going off to school after the summer holidays. He noted a man next to him reading a paper with the optimistic headline ‘Great Advance on the Somme, Thousands of Prisoners’. The troop ship arrived at Boulogne that afternoon.