#1581 Private William Morris
1ST NEWFOUNDLAND REGIMENT
FOUR DAYS AFTER THE OUTBREAK of war in 1914, the Governor of Newfoundland communicated with London to say that the colony would be able to find 500 men to serve in the army. Within a month there were more than 700 attempting to join the war effort, from a tiny population that was equivalent to just one thirtieth of London’s at the time. A training camp was set up and at the beginning of October the First Five Hundred left for Europe. But more men needed to be recruited as reinforcements and so the colony got to work. The vast majority of the Newfoundland recruits came from St Johns, but a special team was recruited to travel to more remote communities and find able-bodied young men.
One of those who was moved to enlist was William Morris, whose large family lived in isolation some 3 miles away from the local community in Robinson’s Head, a tiny hamlet named after an Irishman who had lived in a cave nearby. William’s was one of the long-settled families in the Outer Bay area. His father, a farmer and a fisherman, was a widower, his mother having died after having her tenth baby at the age of 39. William was the eldest boy, and in May 1915 he enlisted while still a teenager and began training at St John’s. Embarking for England at the beginning of 1916, he had arrived at Marseilles in April just in time to join his battalion for the Battle of the Somme.
The Newfoundlanders were the only Dominion troops present on 1st July. Ordered to attack in the Beaumont Hamel sector, William was lucky to survive. The battalion went into action with about 780 men. At 9:30am the Newfoundlanders moved up to support the faltering attack on their front. By now the communication trenches were full of wounded from the first wave returning for treatment and so the battalion stepped out from the trenches and headed towards the British front line in the open. Without cover, they had immediately started incurring heavy casualties. Many of those Newfoundlanders who made it to the British front line were picked off by German machine guns, who had already pinpointed the gap in the British wire through which the troops were advancing. The few soldiers that made it into no-man’s-land were caught up in a maelstrom of artillery and a hail of bullets, unable to advance much further. In less than an hour the Newfoundlanders had almost been wiped out. Fewer than seventy answered roll call the following morning, including William Morris. Every other man, including all of the officers, was dead, wounded or unaccounted for. Understandably the battalion was completely unable to function following its losses, and was sent away to the Ypres area in July.
Private William Morris. (Private collection)
By the time William Morris was recalled to the Somme at the beginning of October, the Newfoundlanders had built their complement back up to almost 600 men. On the 8th they boarded trains south and two days later left the rear area in twenty-one motor buses to return to the battle, sent to man the lines north of Gueudecourt. Once troops were left with the transports to the rear, including a nucleus of officers to prevent the entire battalion being wiped out if the worst occurred, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment found itself just over 385 strong, hugely under strength, as was the case for battalions throughout the battlefield by the autumn of 1916.
More than 100 of these men had already become casualties by midday on 12th October, two hours before zero hour, thanks to heavy shelling. As Eustace Hyde’s battalion went forward next to Lesboeufs, at 2:05pm William Morris and the rest of the Newfoundlanders also swept forward in waves. Keeping as close to the barrage as they could, the men seized the enemy trenches as planned. Company commanders were cut down, but the battalion kept its cohesion and prepared for its second objective. The plan was for William and his companions to go out in front of their captured trench and dig a new forward line. The first party led out to do it was obliterated. In the meantime, the rest of the men carried on consolidating the captured trench: digging in, throwing bombs down into dugouts and clearing them. Any Germans that they found were rounded up and sent back to cages at the rear as prisoners.
As the afternoon wore on, it transpired that the Essex battalion that should have been on the left of William and the other Newfoundlanders had retired as their position was untenable. They had fallen back to their original trenches, leaving the Newfoundland flank without direction. The battalion immediately fanned out and occupied the empty space, putting up a trench barricade as the Germans emerged into the open and counter-attacked. Frantically, they were beaten back and the Germans retreated again. Darkness fell. At about 9pm a group of Hampshire men were sent up to help reinforce the Newfoundlanders’ dwindling numbers, which were now, despite their partial success, almost too low for them to hold their position. In the early hours, more men of the Hampshire Regiment arrived to relieve them. Once again, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment had been decimated on the Somme. The attack on 12th October cost them another 230 men, 40 per cent of their strength.
Caribou Memorial on the battlefield near Gueudecourt in tribute to soldiers from Newfoundland. (Alexandra Churchill)
Apart from some small gains, across the board the day was a failure and very little progress was made anywhere along Rawlinson’s line. If the Germans were close to crumbling, as Haig believed, it had transpired that it was simply not close enough. Nevertheless, the British Army would keep trying. More objectives were given out to prepare for another general advance, provisionally set for 18th October. Nobody seriously believed any more that the Germans could now be defeated in 1916, but still the battle went on.
William’s body, if recovered, was never identified. Witnesses appear to have confirmed that he died of wounds on 13th October. In the aftermath of the war, the scene of his battalion’s horrific loss on 1st July at Beaumont Hamel was selected as a site for a memorial. Included are panels that bear the names of 814 Newfoundlanders, including 21-year-old William Morris, who died on land or at sea in the Great War and have no known grave. More than 8,000 Newfoundlanders fought in the war. Of those, as many as 1,500 never returned home. For a colony whose largest city boasted about the same population as Guildford’s at the time, it was a crushing loss.