Major William La Touche Congreve VC
BRIGADE MAJOR, 76TH BRIGADE
IN COMMAND OF THE SOUTHERN end of the British front, directly subordinate to General Rawlinson, was a Victoria Cross recipient named General Sir Walter Norris Congreve. As more troops arrived to help with the struggle that encompassed Longueval and Delville Wood, his eldest son was to come under his command.
Major ‘Billy’ Congreve VC. (Authors’ collection)
Billy was 6ft 5in and had been born in Cheshire in 1891. He spent his early childhood in India and in Surrey before, in 1904, he was sent to Eton College. Not slow, Billy was, however, quite lazy and prone to mood swings, although he was a good oar. Perhaps inevitably given his father’s occupation, he joined Walter’s regiment at Tipperary in 1911. Billy was not long with the Rifle Brigade on the Western Front at the outbreak of war though, instead taking up a post as a divisional aide. It was a job that ground him down and made him feel he was not contributing to the war effort sufficiently, although he had picked up a Military Cross in 1915 and was then awarded the Distinguished Service Order for single-handedly forcing the surrender of a substantial body of Germans. He was modest about how it came about. ‘Imagine my surprise and horror,’ he recalled, ‘when I saw a whole crowd of armed Boches … I stood there for a moment feeling a bit sort of shy, and then I levelled my revolver at the nearest Boche and shouted, “hands up, all the lot of you!” A few went up at once, then a few more and then the lot; and I felt the proudest fellow in the world as I cursed them!’
Tired of being an aide, in December 1915 Billy was appointed Brigade Major of the 76th Brigade. A fellow old Etonian had summed up what the role entailed rather succinctly the year before. ‘Brigade Major is a plum job and they do not give it to fools. It is like being adjutant to a Brigadier, you do all his dirty work for him.’ Billy worked long and strenuous hours but loved it. ‘Of all the jobs … this … is the most dear to my heart,’ he said. ‘I am more or less my own master … there is unending work to do [and] there is heaps that’s definite to show for it.’
Billy and his brigade were not present when his father enjoyed his comparative success on 1st July. In fact, as summer began, Billy’s thoughts could not have been further from the war. He had gone home on leave and married Pamela Maude, the daughter of two actors, on 1st June and they seized the opportunity for a brief honeymoon at Beaulieu. Within days though, Billy was on his way back to the front. By the time the Battle of the Somme had commenced, he was at Saint-Omer with the rest of the brigade when they were ordered to entrain for the south to join his father’s troops. Having caught up with him on arrival, Billy made off to reconnoitre his new surroundings.
On 17th July 76th Brigade had received short-notice orders to assault the village of Longueval and the north-west corner of the Delville Wood the following morning. The attack moved off at 3:45am, but the north of the village was behind too much uncut barbed wire and it was too well shielded by enemy rifles and machine guns to make a proper advance. At 4:30pm the Germans launched a counter-attack. The northern half of the village was by now completely untenable and when the enemy came on in four waves the British troops withdrew to the south. Together, the combined elements of Billy’s brigade managed to strengthen their positions and began digging in.
Billy Congreve’s widow with her baby daughter, born eight months after her husband’s death. (Authors’ collection)
The following day things did not go well at all. General Haldane, commanding the division to which they belonged, travelled through the ruins of Montauban into the very south of Longueval, where he found brigade headquarters ensconced in a quarry. They were under a heavy artillery barrage and Billy had just returned from a dangerous visit about the village to assess the situation. He looked tired, but Haldane said nothing. ‘I knew that if I said he was overworking he would scorn the idea.’ Billy had worked himself into a state of exhaustion. His batman was snapping at his heels, urging him to calm down, but Billy characteristically (for they loved to snipe at each other) told him to shut up. The brigade was shelled heavily until dawn on 19th July. Headquarters was hit repeatedly with gas shells and the occupants had to evacuate. Billy was pulling casualties out of harm’s way with a medical officer despite having been exposed to the gas himself (not the only instance of him attempting to help treat wounded men under heavy shellfire).
That evening orders arrived for the 76th Brigade to attack again the following morning, 20th July. At 10:30pm Billy arrived at a Suffolk battalion’s headquarters to describe their task. He spoke to all officers and platoon commanders and explained that they were to push off east, clear Longueval and sweep north-east along a road running through the splintered remains of Delville Wood to gain touch with the 10th Royal Welsh Fusiliers, another of 76th Brigade’s battalions. They were then to consolidate the entire area together.
Having explained the plan, Billy then went out to superintend arrangements for the attack. The Suffolks were in place by 3am but the Royal Welsh Fusiliers had a much harder time getting to their jumping off point thanks to lost guides and shoddy intelligence, and had already had to repulse two German attacks while they were trying to get ready. It was mayhem and a testament to their resolve that they managed to form up at all. To make matters worse, the leading company of Welshmen was being shot at by their own comrades because the commander of the nearby 11th Essex had not been told that friendly troops would be moving about on his front, or even that there was to be an advance.
The Suffolks went off at 3:35am and the Welshmen, despite all that they had thus far endured, ten minutes later. The Royal Welsh Fusiliers were hit hard and, because they were unable to co-operate with each other, the attack folded and the men had to be withdrawn. They fell back and dug in, changing tack from offensive to defensive. Reports coming back to the brigade from wounded men and prisoners had initially seemed to indicate that everything was going well. Then silence fell and worry began to seep in. Patrols were sent out but could not make any contact with the two companies that had gone out. It was feared that the men of 76th Brigade had been wiped out entirely.
Billy had been on the move all day trying to establish just what was actually going on. Standing on a road leading to Longueval from the west, he was attempting to get the 2nd Suffolks to secure their position. He had just about decided that he had gathered all the information he could and was looking to the higher ground in front when, from inside the cornfield he was observing, a German sniper fired a single bullet. It struck just below the breastbone and 25-year-old Billy Congreve was dead soon after he hit the ground.
His father Walter was still attempting to command the battle. Word reached a member of his staff early in the afternoon via telephone. Events at Delville Wood had reached a critical juncture and Walter was about to send his men forward again in ‘a very important and very daring operation’. General Congreve had to be informed, but his keeping his head was absolutely essential for the tens of thousands of men under his command. A staff officer entered the room and gently informed the general that his eldest son had fallen:
He was absolutely calm to all outward appearance, and after a few seconds of silence said quite calmly, ‘He was a good soldier.’ That is all he allowed to appear; and he continued dealing with everything as it came along in the same imperturbable and quietly decisive way as usual.
But the staff man was not at all fooled. ‘You know perhaps better than I,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘what the loss of that son meant to him.’
Billy’s servant was utterly heartbroken but fiercely determined to go up under fire and bring his body back. As he was carried away from Longueval, brigade men of the Gordon Highlanders followed with wild poppies and cornflowers to lay upon him.
Billy Congreve had excelled himself on the Somme. In the build-up to the attack he had personally reconnoitred the enemy and taken out patrols more than half a mile in front of the British lines. He also escorted one of the brigade’s battalions to its jumping off point to make sure they found their way and then remained in the line of fire to get an accurate assessment of how the fighting had played out. For his example he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross and at 25 became the first infantry officer in the Great War to be awarded all three gallantry medals available to him.
Unbeknownst to Billy, he had left his new wife pregnant and their daughter, Pamela, was born eight months after her father’s death on the Somme. Major William La Touche Congreve was laid to rest at Corbie Communal Cemetery Extension plot I.F.35.