#3605 Private John Valentine Heasman
1/1ST HONOURABLE ARTILLERY COMPANY
ASTRIDE THE RIVER ANCRE THERE was still the monumental task of clearing the battlefield of the wounded. Casualty clearing stations had been working tirelessly to save those shot, maimed or otherwise incapacitated by the fighting on both banks of the river.
Private John Heasman. (Private collection)
John Heasman had enlisted as a teenager. From Westcliff-on-Sea, his father worked for a transatlantic cable-laying company. John had gone straight from Felsted School into the army, enlisting in May 1915, and embarked for his first stint abroad at Southampton on 21st July 1916. After serving initially with an entrenching battalion, which helped to acclimatise new arrivals to the front, John joined the 1/1st Honourable Artillery Company on 17th October. John was incredibly proud to be part of it. The HAC was an illustrious unit; incorporated by Henry VIII by Royal Charter in 1537, it could trace its history back to the Normans and the only military outfit in the world that was older was the Vatican’s Swiss Guard. The ‘artillery’ aspect of the name referred more, in this case, to long-redundant weapons such as longbows that hurled arrows as opposed to guns and shells. As well as seven batteries of guns, the HAC would raise three battalions of infantry during the Great War, and it was to one of these that John belonged. In a slightly confusing state of affairs, his served with the Royal Naval Division.
Like Fred Hattersley and the Nelson men, the 1st Battalion went over in the second group of attackers on 13th November along with a contingent of Royal Fusiliers. The advance went in four waves, starting at 6:30am in thick mist. Keeping direction was extremely difficult, but it may have helped their cause. John and his comrades had almost reached the German reserve line before they were spotted and ultimately held up by enemy snipers and bombers on both flanks. These men had evidently been in dugouts that had not been mopped up by the battalion ahead, and the fog made it very difficult to locate them. But by sending bombing parties out to test the water and then eventually locating and advancing on them, the offenders were either killed or taken prisoner.
It was a grim day for John’s battalion. It suffered high casualties when attempting to cut through German wire, as well as in clearing out enemy dugouts in which the Kaiser’s men were still hidden. Even without the fog, the trench system it was trying to enter was complex and confused the men as they tried to establish their positions and objectives. Nevertheless, the HAC pushed on, reaching the day’s second objective. It began to frantically dig for cover in two groups spread out 100 yards apart. Survivors of the Hood Battalion were by this time digging in about 200 yards ahead of them and on their flank John’s battalion managed to established communications with the Cambridgeshire Regiment across the river. Their left flank, however, was forced to wait until another company of the HAC battalion came up to fill the gap. The Naval Division men were still well short of their crucial objective, the village of Beaucourt ahead. Sniping soon began from the ridge in front of it and during the afternoon the HAC men were shelled heavily as they tried to work. A further attack followed in the afternoon; the men were ordered out at about 3:30pm to support the Hood Battalion in front as it went forward. An hour and a half later these attempts had also failed and, as darkness began to fall, John’s battalion was ordered to fall back to its previous line and carry on its consolidation work. Shelling became so heavy that they left as few men in the line as possible, the others sheltering under a nearby bank.
At 5am on the 14th, the HAC men were ordered to push forward an hour later, pick up the survivors of the Hood before the yellow line, the third objective that still lay ahead of them, and then advance on to the Red line, the last task that had been allotted at the outset of the battle together. At 6am the survivors of John’s battalion went forward to meet their fellow Naval Division men. ‘Shell holes and trenches of the Hoods afforded cover while we waited for the barrage to lift.’ At the appointed time they all advanced in tandem. ‘The barrage put a curtain of shells over you, that was the theory and you advanced. Of course, you are bound to get casualties from your own shells, you were bound to get quite a lot of casualties when you were on a big show like that.’
Astonishingly, considering the advance was, in fact, a mash of different Hoods, Drakes, Nelsons and HAC men, they surged through Beaucourt under the command of an indomitable young naval officer named Bernard Freyberg, who simply did not know when to give up and on this day was awarded the Victoria Cross for his trouble. The final objective, the red line, was taken. ‘It was astounding to me that on the second day we did take Beaucourt, because we were very thin on the ground in that attack … I think luckily for us, their reinforcements hadn’t been in the Somme before and they panicked. Otherwise we shouldn’t have got through,’ pontificated one survivor. ‘We had a most gruelling time second day. When we got beyond the village [to dig in] there were no trenches, we went into shell holes as deep as we could get. But they gave us the almighty pasting that day with really big stuff … it was very grey day and you could see things coming towards you before they hit, it was a most unnerving experience.’ John Heasman’s battalion picked up more casualties at the last. ‘They came in salvoes of four over. That was only one part of the shelling. Of course, there were the ordinary field guns and that sort of thing, but I particularly remember those big guns, and seeing the little black balls getting bigger and bigger until they came in the most almighty roar around you.’
The 1st Honourable Artillery Company was relieved in the early hours of 15th November, but out on the battlefield were scores of wounded and dying Royal Naval Division men who needed attention. All the going backwards and forwards that had occurred in the previous two days meant it had been incredibly hard to keep tabs on their numbers and it could be almost impossible to establish what had happened to an individual. What is clear is that John Heasman, with a gunshot wound to the abdomen, lay on the battlefield for quite some time. Nobody was able to record if he had been wounded on 13th or 14th November. He was admitted to a casualty clearing station on the latter but all of its efforts to save John were in vain and he died on 17th November as the attack north of the Ancre began being brought to a halt.
In February 1917 his father was still awaiting these details as he had heard nothing from the HAC and had received nothing but the official notification of his 20-year-old son’s death from the War Office, which only arrived after a kind letter from the matron of the clearing station. ‘I have rather expected to have had some acknowledgement of his services and his death from the regiment he had the honour, and my son felt so proud to belong.’ Despite his justification for feeling as if his son had been overlooked, John’s father apologised for bothering the HAC. John Heasman was laid to rest at Contay British Cemetery, plot VIII.B.26.