The Gallants
The East Surrey Regiment was formed in 1881 and the 9th (Service) Battalion was raised in September 1914. The regimental depot was an easy walk from Sherriff’s house in Kingston upon Thames. The men of the 9/East Surrey featured a lot of Londoners as the county back then included much of what is now suburban south London.
The battalion was just a pixel in the big composite picture of the Third Kitchener Army (K3). 2/Lt Robert Sherriff, just out of his teens, joined the battalion in the 72nd Brigade of the 24th Division and proudly stuck in his diary the picture of its stern commander, General Sir Henry Horne. The division had around 18,000 men in twelve battalions. A battalion had around 1,000 men including thirty officers. Each battalion was divided into four companies. Each company was subdivided into four platoons, each with four sections. Sherriff would end up in C Company, his surrogate family for his active service. This family would provide him his play’s cast.
The men of the Division – mostly from south-east England – had joined up for a variety of motives: patriotism, joblessness, hunger, boredom. A fair few joined in preference to helping the police with their enquiries. Many were cockneys. Sherriff described them in his diary as ‘a mob of several hundred civilians who had never touched a rifle in their lives...and surely never such a mixed crowd had been seen before: East End labourers: navvies: coalmen: shopmen: hawkers: burglars: I don’t think a trade in London went unrepresented’.
The East Surrey Regiment could certainly not boast the same arty glamour as The Royal Welch Fusiliers, known as ‘the literary regiment’ because Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones and so many other writers served in it. Graves in Good-bye to All That noted the snooty treatment meted out to an East Surrey officer on attachment to his regiment. But the East Surrey could claim some future writers with theatrical and literary connections. Three years before Sherriff’s runaway success with Journey’s End, J. R. Ackerley (of the 8/East Surrey) caused a mini sensation in the London theatre. As a civilian Joe Ackerley was a mincing student nicknamed ‘Girlie’. On the battlefield he proved an officer of true grit. He was wounded on the first day of the Somme. He recovered, returned to the front, again being wounded and then taken prisoner in 1917. His internment camp was a hotel in neutral Switzerland. There he set his play, Prisoners of War, during two weeks in July 1918. Somehow the censor failed to recognize it for what it really was – a gay play. Full of illicit yearnings and crushes, the pampered officers behave like schoolgirls. When the leading man Conrad strokes a young subaltern’s head, the boy cries: ‘Look out! Someone might come in!’ Ackerley included lots of hysterics but sadly none of the pumping adrenaline of his own front line war experience.
Prisoners of War opened in 1925 and was considered ‘morbid,’ a code word for queer. When the play was revived at the New End Theatre in London in 1994 it was reviewed very much as a forgotten landmark in the history of modern drama. It had nil influence on Sherriff who almost certainly never saw it. But its cast of upright officer types calling each other ‘old man’, their nerves shredded by the strains of war, is not dissimilar in tone. Nor is its language of the school dorm.
The other soon-to-be star of the East Surrey was the novelist Gilbert Frankau who wrote a hugely successful and very gripping 1920 war novel with the unmilitary title Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant. It is virtually a history of the early days of the battalion and Sherriff’s play is a sort of sequel to it. Frankau could not have been more different from Sherriff. He was a rich, dapper Old Etonian and a cracking snob, according to his fond grandson. He and Sherriff became friends. Gilbert’s brother, Ronnie Frankau, was a comedian celebrated for his West End revue Sauce Piquante and their mother, Julia, wrote novels under the name Frank Danby and was a founder member of the Independent Theatre Club that did much to promote Ibsen, Shaw and serious drama in London. Now forgotten, Gilbert Frankau sold over a million books in his lifetime. He and Sherriff – briefly in the same battalion – were among the most commercially successful writers about the war.
The East Surrey was a good, tough regiment and it was famous for one legendary deed that massively boosted its media profile. On the fatal first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916, Captain Billie Nevill (of 8th Battalion) gave out four footballs and offered a prize to whichever platoon dribbled theirs to the German front line first. On one football was written: ‘The Great European Cup-Tie Final. East Surreys v Bavarians. Kick off at zero. No referee.’ The balls were duly dribbled toward the enemy frontline and Nevill – who was instantly killed – became a posthumous hero. The Daily Mail even got its house poet ‘Touchstone’ to write an embarrassing ‘play up and play the game’ ditty about the event in the manner of Henry Newbolt’s cricketing poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’. Quite what the Germans made of this act of sporting lunacy is not known. But for the British, World War One was always an away match. Their innocence was soon lost but the spirit of the sports field persisted and Sherriff’s play would reflect it.
The narrative of the 9/East Surrey is actually part of the play – its history at the front climaxes in France shortly after the play ends. But even by the time Sherriff joined it the battalion had already been to hell and back. Its fiery baptism occurred almost exactly one year before he arrived in France, among the slag heaps in the mining district of Loos in late September 1915. Loos is a battle you find in anthologies of great military cock-ups. Its most famous casualty was Rudyard Kipling’s son, the subject of David Haig’s sorrowful play My Boy Jack.
Barely off the boat, soldiers with nil fighting experience were chucked into the battle after days without hot food, little sleep and soaking wet after endless marching. On the second day of the battle, of the 10,000 men ordered to attack 8,246 became casualties in under four hours. German casualties were nil. Those troops that made it to the enemy line, found the barbed wire unbroken and were soon picked off. Slaughter was followed by mass panic and retreat. The reputation of the 24th Division was unfairly trashed in this action and there was a great deal of buck passing by its commanders. Only the Germans spoke up for the British. They indicated to prisoners from the massacred 9/East Surrey (16 officers and 438 Other Ranks were casualties) their warmest admiration of the gallant advance of the Battalion. The battalion’s nickname ‘The Gallants’ might be derived from this remark.
In The Donkeys, Alan Clark’s bitingly sarcastic book about the slaughters of 1915, the British generals are savaged for their incompetence and Clark’s account has set in stone the ‘lions led by donkeys’ theory. The lions were of course the men, the donkeys the generals. Sherriff, looking back on his unit’s part in that hellish advance, wrote of it in his diary with a strong feeling for the hurt caused to volunteer pride that was totally characteristic of him:
Inexperienced officers and experienced NCOs were called upon to lead untried men through a dark night into the thick of a raging battle. They stood it finely for a while: then something failed; men lost touch and it is very obscure as to what happened. Some units, panic stricken, fell back, and the Division came out shattered by the loss of many of its best men, and worst still, with a branded name. ‘The 24th? Oh yes, you mean the division that ran away at Loos’. You heard that expression everywhere. How the division won back its good name having unfairly lost it in an impossible test, stands as a splendid occurrence of the war.
After Loos, the battalion was rested and topped up, then spent the winter of 1915 in the Ypres Salient, the bulge in the line surrounded by the Germans, where they suffered constant casualties. Ypres (‘Wipers’) was referred to by Fred Billman, a corporal in Sherriff’s battalion, as ‘the city of the dead, the one place above all dreaded by soldiers.’ During its six months in Ypres the battalion’s casualties were light. The problem was more the weather, the trenches filling with water that turned to ice, causing frostbitten toes and much misery. From Ypres the battalion was moved to Wulverghem before arriving on the Somme in the summer of 1916. The Somme campaign was fought against better British judgment; it was explicitly designed to take the heat off the French who were suffering appallingly at Verdun. The first day (1 July) was an epic disaster for the British army with near on 60,000 casualties including 19,000 killed.6 The Somme campaign dragged on until November.
For the 9/East Surrey there was terrible carnage during that summer. The fighting at Delville Wood, according to Sherriff, was ‘a dreadful time where men fell like flies for no seeming gain.’ Delville Wood was one of the ‘untellable’ battles of the war. It had the classic Great War horror landscape – shattered tree trunks, fuming shell craters, the ground thick with bodies and flies. The lowing of the wounded was its most ghastly feature. Every time the guns ceased the place was said to have sounded like a cattle ring at a Spring fair – an image used in Oh What A Lovely War.
To Sherriff, who arrived at the front a couple of weeks afterwards, the reports from the survivors must have been utterly terrifying. In August the battalion had lost nine officers and fiftythree Other Ranks, six officers and 175 Other Ranks wounded. By the end of the month the fighting strength was just 325 men. Sherriff was let in gently. On arrival in France he was sent to a ‘cushy’ part of the line, near Bruay. His first stay was at Base Camp in Étaples (or Eat apples). It was a depressing makeshift city of tents and hutments. Part of its function was to ‘inculcate the offensive spirit.’ Edmund Blunden in Undertones of War wrote about how a sergeant major was demonstrating the workings of a rifle grenade which then went off, killing him and everyone in the circle around him. Blunden only survived because he was loafing at the back.
The place was hated, the NCOs were brutal and Etaples was the scene of a minor mutiny, an incident dramatised by Alan Bleasdale for his 1986 BBC series The Monocled Mutineer, based on a book of the same name about the small-time crook and impostor Percy Toplis.7 The series – with Paul McGann as the phony officer anti-hero – got good viewing figures and embraced all the cardinal First World War clichés: callous officers, utter futility and lashings of mud. Not to mention executions at dawn with a drunken firing squad puking at the horror of the task which they then botch. In dramatic portrayals of the First World War nothing ever goes to plan. Ever.
Sherriff’s experience at Etaples was one of pure bewilderment. He felt like a new boy looking at the rules on the school notice board. Standing Orders had instructions on the proper saluting of French officers (due courtesy to the senior partner in a coalition force was strictly enforced) and on the prohibited shooting of rabbits and game. Shooting game was of course an on-leave activity for those officers lucky enough to have gamekeepers too old to fight. To some officers, Germans were partridges. The officer and poet-scholar Julian Grenfell actually entered the Pomeranians he shot in the game book at his family estate. He famously likened the war to a ‘big picnic’, which provided Bill Bryden with an ironic title for his 1994 Great War play.
The world of the front had elements of Downton Abbey. Sherriff’s diary records that one servant was allotted to every three officers at a cost of two francs per officer per week ‘for a short stay’ Sherriff’s tailored uniform was deliberately designed to separate him from the men, his tunic and breeches conferring the army equivalent of ‘upstairs’ status. The Germans much appreciated this sartorial distinction as it made British officers easy to spot and pick off first in an attack. He was issued with trench boots ‘which would serve me many a good turn’. He liked the war best when it was most like his weekend rambles through the Surrey countryside.
In his diary he talks about various fellow officers including Blackman who was last seen hitting out at the enemy with a shovel on Vimy Ridge. Harding and High had previously been in the ranks and had then gone home to do officer training hoping the war would be over by the time they qualified. It hadn’t, and now they were back. Percy High was in his late thirties, a kindly schoolmaster, like Osborne in Journey’s End. ‘Despite a certain abruptness of manner, I liked him instinctively from the first. He inspired confidence and his supply of shrewd common sense was enormous. He was a good companion,’ Sherriff wrote in his diary. All the other officers were new to active service. On the subject of Etaples, Sherriff summed up its utter pointlessness: ‘There was nothing to learn in this place about real war. There was only one place to learn that. You could only learn it in the trenches.’
His journey to the Front was a slow train via St Pol, where the men got their first taste of ‘tray bon’ egg and chips at a French estaminet. His diary contains a flash of literary purple as he heard the distant rumble of guns to the east. ‘As I sat watching I realized that we were very nearly there at last, and that those green flickering lights shone over the very nucleus of the disturbance that had shaken the world...the Mecca of men from Ceylon, Australia and Canada – they came in thousands to die in stinking mud...’
Sherriff and his intake were to top up the numbers depleted by the Somme. He arrived six miles from the front line at the village of Estrée-Cauchy (‘Extra-Cushy’) where the 9/East Surrey had its HQ. There is a picture in his diary of a modest farmhouse. He met his commanding officer Lieutenant Clark, known as ‘Nobby’, a popular ex-colour sergeant whom Sherriff noted dropped his h’s. The lopping off of aspirates to denote lower-class origins seems to be a common feature of trench dialogue in plays about the war.
As he walked into the mess an officer welcomed him with whisky. ‘I accepted; as politeness suggested, but felt that 12 o’clock in the morning was hardly time for whisky – I felt so then because I knew nothing of the habits of active service.’ In Journey’s End Osborne welcomes the new boy Raleigh to the dugout with a large whisky and he accepts with the same bemusement. Whisky and the Western Front were inseparable for officers (the men were not allowed it although there was a rum ration in certain circumstances). Estrée-Cauchy also gave Sherriff his introduction to C Company. His first sight was a young officer, ‘Father’ Douglass, like ‘Uncle’ Osborne in the play a clergyman’s son, drying a sock over a candle. The same sight (in the shape of Captain Hardy) opens Journey’s End.
Doubtless, there were other Companies as good, but C was mine and C remained mine during all the time I served in France and Belgium. By degrees, C Company became my most perfect ideal and it would have broken my heart to have been transferred to any other Company. C Company is an ugly, colourless expression, but it became a term of loving memory to me. We wore a red diamond of cloth above a green cross on our sleeves and the very sight of those colours brought a glow of pride to me. We had five different company commanders and twenty different officers while I was with the Company and my greatest pleasure to look back on is the fact that I remained with C Company all the time I was on Active Service. Everyday I became bound more surely to C Company and everyday I loved and esteemed it more.
Sherriff had arrived at the Front with Louis Abrams and Percy High. He now joined his other officers. Colonel Tew was in charge and Sherriff didn’t like him one little bit. He drummed into the young officers new to the line their responsibilities. Sherriff left the briefing in a muck sweat. ‘A cold dread came over me. “Am I an efficient officer” “Do I know enough” “Will I be sent back to England as an awful example of incompetence”’, he put in his diary. The most memorable of the officers was Captain Tetley, a far more genial man who had recently won the MC for rescuing men buried in a bombardment while under heavy shell-fire. The men adored him.
He was the quickest tempered man I ever met, flying into a rage in the most childish way on the slightest provocation. He was the greatest object of amusement to the men and at the same time the greatest object of affection and admiration. In the line he was a marvel. Naturally highly strung and nervous, he was always with his men should there be any danger. Any shelling, any risky wiring to do, he was always there, and you could see what he suffered in nervous agitation. He would go round the line with a cheery word and joke with every man – then he would go down into his dugout and fly into a furious rage because a drop of water from the roof trickled down his neck.
Sherriff was never quite sure about the sarcastic Hilton, a man of jet-black humour whose response to any fatality was to cheerily shout: ‘one further vacancy for a bright young thing in C Company!’ Hilton clocked up a twenty-two-month stint in the trenches before being forcibly sent for rest by the Medical Officer and one wonders whether there isn’t an element of him in the creation of Stanhope.
Nobby Clark was a more reassuring presence and part of the regular army from the old days – a career soldier – but he empathised with citizens in uniform like Sherriff. ‘In the Mess Room he would talk with the most junior subaltern as if they were members of a village cricket team,’ Sherriff wrote. (His play after Journey’s End, Badger’s Green, was all about a village cricket team.) It gave Sherriff a shock when he met the men he would be in charge of. Many had ‘the look of the Somme’ about them. Wilfred Owen had thought the men he saw at Etaples had a ‘dead rabbit’ face – a particular look no actor would ever be able to replicate on stage. Sherriff compared his men to Ali Baba’s forty thieves, carrying parcels and ammunition belts and the clobber of war.
Sherriff and the others were to occupy a portion of the line at Vimy Ridge. On 2 October 1916 the battalion went into Divisional Reserve at the destroyed village of Souchez between Arras and Lens, his company being posted at a place called Cabaret-Rouge, now home to a large British war cemetery, then the reserve line to Vimy Ridge. The trenches zig-zagged from the Belgian coast right down to Switzerland. Although British accommodation never aspired to the wallpapered luxury of some German dugouts, it was in Sherriff’s diary a smoky place of comfort, fruitcake, fried steak and tinned fruits.
I felt an immediate love for this dugout – with the spluttering candles making little shadows dance about the rough timbered roof, the steaming mugs of tea and the cheerful men who were becoming my friends; the feeling of fellowship (the herd instinct some would call it, I suppose) made the meal times in this little place the most looked forward to events of the day.
The officers’ cook, Mason, in the play was drawn from life. Sherriff thought he was a hoot. His name was Morris (a fellow Thames-sider from Molesey) and he became a great feature of Journey’s End. The actor Alexander Field played him at the stage premiere to guffaws at his cockney trench stereotype. His tea tastes of onions, his dishcloths are filthy, and his porridge lumpy. In inventing this character – a big feature of his diary – all Sherriff had to do was consult his memory. ‘You never saw a more miserable man to look at: ill-fitting clothes, slouching walk, sleepy-looking blue eyes, and stubbly yellow hair – yet he never left the dugout without saying something funny.’
Sherriff records Morris’s magnificent soliloquy about the rats’ feast from the night before: ‘what we do want is that bloke who hypnertised all the rats, and tootled them away wiv a flute, and took them all away into a mountain and shut them ’in – Hamilton was ’is name I think – I’d ’ave a try only I ain’t got no flute, and there ain’t no convenient mountain ’ere abouts – it ’ud be rotten to get them all out following yer and then not know what do wiv ’em’. You can hear Morris’s voice whenever Mason comes on stage. Morris/Mason is surely the immediate ancestor of the cheerful trench servant Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Forth.
One of Sherriff’s first tasks in the line was the censoring of the men’s letters home. This comes up early in his diary and it moved him greatly to read the crudely expressed but sincere letters from the men. He would use the business of letter censorship in his play.
There was something infinitely sad in those scrawled, thumb-soiled attempts from the men who never wrote letters before: from men who sought to tell wives or their mothers that no matter what happened they always thought of them and loved them. Some of those ugly little scrawls rang with a truer note than any elaborately worded missive could. A dirty bit of paper, no address, no date, – to Darling Jenny or Dearest Ma, telling her that he is well, hoping that she was the same... It is quite easy to laugh at the grammar, the crudities of spelling – the great big sprawling letters and the little ‘i’s for the first person singular; but when you see these notes before you and know the rough men who wrote them, when you feel with them; yearn, with them, for home; and suffer with them, there is nothing funny in these letters, they are things with a wonderful beauty.
When you see a great hulking man sitting on a box in the doorway of a mudhole dugout, with his head bent low over a dirty writing pad on his knee, working with a little stump of a pencil clenched in his great black fist as though he were carving the message out of a great lump of stone – when later, it is your duty to read that letter and you see written at the bottom – I am sending you a flower, give it to little Elsie and say Dad picked it orf the side of a trench – when you see things like that war ceases to be a brutalising force...
In his diary Sherriff wonders why he should have better quarters, better food, better clothing and more material comforts than the men. ‘Perhaps it may sound terribly snobbish, absurdly conceited, yet I told myself that the average man in the ranks, who had no education – did not have these awful nameless fears. I told myself that whatever I enjoyed by way of better comfort, I paid out again in mental dread.’
His attempts to win over the men with informality caused him problems. This is a mistake Raleigh makes in the play when he feeds up top with the men, preferring their company to that of the other officers. Sherriff came to admit that the men were best left alone socially as ‘most would prefer pack drill to being patronised’.
One of the assumptions about the war is that it was unremitting hell. But the truth is many men came home having experienced very little but acute boredom punctuated by moments of bowel-loosening terror as the odd speculative shell came their way. Even had they been exposed to fire there was in place a pretty guaranteed system of relief. Sherriff’s experience in France would be that of every infantry unit – constant rotation between the firing line, the support line, reserve and billets. It was an almost unfailing system believed to have been the principal reason why British morale never cracked during the war. Any soldier could tick off the days (usually six) until he would be out of the line again. Sherriff, like most, thought of little else. He wrote in his diary: ‘What an eternity of an evening this is! I think of the other hours of duty I have got to do – I shudder when I add them up: I shall never do it.’ The play features his timetable in the single-scene first act.
Trotter: Six bloomin’ eternal days. That’s a hundred and forty-four hours... I’m going to draw a hundred and forty-four circles on a bit o’ paper, and every hour I am going to black one in, that’ll make the time go alright.
Stanhope: It’s five to eight now. You better go and relieve Hibbert. Then you can come back at eleven o’clock and black in three of your bloody little circles.
6 An even bloodier day was the Battle of Towton in 1461, featured in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 3
7 By William Allison and John Fairley, 1978