Some of the Characters After 1914

Robin Page Arnot (1890-1986) wrote such Communist works as Fascist Agents Exposed in the Moscow Trials (1938) and, less dubiously, a multi-volume history of British miners.

Soon after Ostend George Aston (1861-1938) commanded a similar expedition to Dunkirk. He retired in 1917 with the rank of major general. He wrote several books, mainly on the navy, or fishing.

Frank Balfour worked in the Middle East during and after the 1914-18 war and in 1920 married ... not Irene Lawley, but another Honourable; Phyllis Goschen. For the Balfour family tree see The Letters of Arthur Balfour and Lady Elcho 1885-1917, edited by Jane Ridley and Clayre Percy (1992).

Eric Bennett served in France in the artillery. In April 1918 he won the Military Cross for bringing six wagons of ammunition to safety despite artillery fire. He lived to old age in Staffordshire; two of his brothers were killed in the war, one invalided out.

As for the men linked by the outburst by Lord Charles Beresford (1846-1919) at the Carlton Club on August 27, 1914: the anti-German campaign worked. Prince Louis Battenberg (1854-1921) resigned as First Sea Lord in November 1914 and left public life. In 1917 Battenberg translated his name to Mountbatten, as King George V asked his relatives to un-German their surnames. A few months before Prince Louis died, he became an admiral of the fleet on the retired list thanks to the First Lord of the Admiralty - Arthur Lee (1868-1947), by then Lord Lee of Fareham. Lee donated his home, Chequers, on the edge of the Chilterns, to the state as a weekend retreat for the prime minister. Winston Churchill had to resign in 1915 over the failed Gallipoli campaign and was out of office for not quite a couple of years.

Possibly as it was the only way to stay in his job, Robert Blakeby put his name in for the ‘training corps’ at his employer, the London West End draper’s Peter Robinson, at the end of September 1914. He kept a diary until at least the 1940s.

Alan Brooke was in France by the end of 1914. He was the driver of a car in which his wife Janey died in an accident in 1925. By the Second World War he rose to become Churchill’s CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff). For more, see War Diaries 1939-1945 Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (2001).

The Derby railwayman and reservist Arthur Bryan was in France by the end of October 1914 and killed at Givenchy on March 10, 1915.

A T Daniel retired after 22 years as Uttoxeter Grammar School headmaster in December 1923. He had taken leave after the armistice to do ‘education work with the troops in France and Germany, a task for which his wide interests and continental experience were most valuable’, according to school historian and old boy W G Torrance.

Clifford Gothard (1893-1979) ended 1914 as he began it, shooting; and lunched on venison he had shot. He gained a BSc in mechanical engineering in July 1915. He served in the heavy artillery in France. He became an accountant and company director and a leading Conservative in Burton-on-Trent and was knighted. My father as a railway signalman in one of the town’s many railway signalboxes in the 1950s sometimes saw him arrive at an office: “He used to come in an old Rover. If anybody was in the box, I used to say, watch him. He would go in and come out again because he had left his attaché case; he did it every time.” Sir Clifford married in 1961 and was childless.

G C (Geoffrey Coleridge) Harper (1894-1962) survived the First World War, retired from the Royal Navy in 1931, went into teaching, and joined the navy again in the 1939-45 war.

Richard Holt (1862-1941) was the Liberal MP for Hexham until 1918. His shipping company flourished in wartime, but he argued in vain for Liberal principle and against conscription. On that, he wrote in his journal in 1916: “The betrayal has been cruel; war seems to arouse so many bad passions that Liberalism cannot live in its atmosphere. Let us have peace as soon as possible.”

Horatio, Lord Kitchener, was tall, ‘lithe, straight-limbed’, according to a reporter who saw him become a viscount in the House of Lords in July 1914. Minister for War from August 1914, he gave ‘inspired if unorthodox leadership’, in the words of one War Office official, Major-General Sir CE Caldwell. Kitchener sailed for Russia in 1916 and his ship sank on the way.

Gerald Legge was killed in action on August 9, 1915, aged 33. He has no known grave; his name is one of 21,000 on the Helles memorial on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula. There is a memorial chapel to him in the long-shut Patshull Church, near Wolverhampton; and his name is on the roll of honour at Lord’s cricket ground as a member of MCC.

In October 1915, replying to a letter of condolence, his father Lord Dartmouth wrote: “I am grateful to you for your kindly reference to my son. This is not a time however to give way to private sorrow and we have much to console us in our loss. It is a help to have plenty of work to do.” He died in 1936. Among his many public roles, he was president of the Territorial Army Association from its beginning in 1908; and president of I Zingari cricket club. The Dartmouth seat, Patshull House, is now a hotel and golf club.

Gerald Legge’s brother in law Francis Meynell (1889-1941) served in the artillery, first near Ypres in 1915, was wounded home in 1917, and ended the war as a lieutenant colonel. He returned to Hoar Cross and died in 1941.

Oliver Lyttleton (1893-1972) did make it into the Guards, and reached the rank of brigade major. He was a member of Churchill’s war cabinet and became Viscount Chandos in 1954.

Guy Paget found himself over-worked and under-equipped training Northamptonshire recruits from September 1914, who were part of the British Army’s first large attack from the trenches, at Loos in September 1915. Then, according to his reminisces, ‘three-quarters of this magnificent division was just thrown away by the incompetence of the Staff from Division upwards’. He ended the war in Beirut. His son Reginald was Labour MP for Northampton 1945-74.

William Pickbourne (1860-1932) and his wife returned to their native Nottinghamshire in March 1918. Of their four sons in uniform, Wilfred worked in the Army Pay Corps in Salisbury; Stewart survived Gallipoli but was killed at Gaza in April 1917; Frank, a private in the Machine Gun Corps, died of pneumonia at Alexandria in October 1918; and Arthur, the youngest, was wounded at Messines in 1917. Pickbourne wrote characteristically after his final loss: “It was with a very heavy and sad heart I set out to preach the gospel but again as so often before while watering others I myself was watered and helped.”

The solicitor Robert Ramsey (1861-1951) took the train on Saturday August 22, 1914 from London - ‘Peterborough Cathedral stood up white against a thunder cloud with a startlingly beautiful effect’ - and changed at Darlington for a holiday in Teesdale. “We seem here in a kind of backwater far removed from the war and all its terrors and excitements,” he wrote in his full, but very hard to read, diary.

Arthur Ross left Beverley on August 24 to join the 5th Yorks Regiment at Darlington, commanded by Colonel Sir Mark Sykes MP. He had his last home leave in April 1915, ‘before going on Foreign Service in our just cause’. He was wounded in France in March 1916. He rose in the Royal Naval Division to the rank of lieutenant and was killed on October 8, 1918, at Cambrai.

Lord St Aldwyn (1837-1916), as plain Sir Michael Edward Hicks-Beach, twice a Unionist chancellor of the exchequer, took up an offer of late 1914 to become first Earl St Aldwyn of Coln St Mary. He has a memorial in Gloucester Cathedral.

William Swift (1842-1915) ended his diary, after 55 years, in mid-sentence on February 5, 1915. He died on February 10 and was buried in Churchdown. His grandson Ernest Swift died on the Somme on July 3, 1916, aged 21, and is buried there.

Donald Weir served in France from 1914, then Mesopotamia, and France again, ending the war as a battalion commander. He returned to India via Malta, having in June 1919 received a bar to his Distinguished Service Order at Buckingham Palace. He died of cholera in India in 1921.

Dorothy Wright (1895-1993) saw her older brother Charlie off from Selby railway station in September 1914 as a volunteer. After the war he finished his history degree at Trinity College, Oxford, and became a schoolmaster. He married in 1922, she in 1955. Both were childless.