#6029 Sergeant George Lee
156TH BRIGADE, ROYAL FIELD ARTILLERY
BEHIND THE BATTLE FOR GINCHY the artillery were doing everything they could to help the infantry to progress. At Montauban there was a father and son team serving with the Royal Field Artillery named George and Robert Lee. Nineteen-year-old Robert had already been serving in the army when war was declared and had arrived on the Western Front as early as August 1914 with the 3rd Brigade of the Royal Horse Artillery. In the meantime, his father carried on as the landlord of the Star and Garter on New Cross Road. In early 1915, however, 44-year-old George travelled 2½ miles to East Dulwich to join a new artillery unit that was being raised in Grove Vale.
While Robert continued to serve abroad, the new 156th Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery began recruiting on 3rd February 1915 and had all the personnel it needed in seven weeks. Nicknamed ‘the Camberwell Gun Brigade’, in July the army took over responsibility for equipping and clothing the unit and issued it with four 18-pounders. The men continued to live at home and each day George left to take part in initial training, which progressed locally in Dulwich and at the Harrods Institute in Bermondsey. Artificers went to Woolwich, men who were to be cooks went to a school in St John’s Wood, and Lady Bathurst even gave French lessons locally. George Lee left for Bulford at the beginning of August. Properly outfitted with guns on their arrival, the brigade began practising with their new weapons in November at Larkhill. Orders arrived just a month later: the brigade was to proceed overseas. On 12th December 1915, George Lee joined his son on the Western Front.
The brigade saw in the new year by undergoing a meticulous introduction to the front by partnering up with the artillery of one of the regular divisions to learn how to ply its trade in a fighting environment. In March it was in action properly, although still attached to another division. George’s battery was cutting its teeth by firing on the north bank of the La Bassée canal, where it crossed with a German front-line trench. Here it remained until the end of April and every opportunity was taken to send the officers and men off on gunnery courses and anything else that would get them ready for the summer campaign.
The orders to move to the Somme battlefield came in July, by the middle of which the brigade had reached Corbie. On the 15th George marched through the ruins of Fricourt just after dawn. The guns began firing on the 17th from a position next to Mametz Wood. By the 20th the brigade had been tasked with helping the infantry as they tried to seize High Wood again. They had spent the previous morning registering their targets, and now George and his fellow gunners let rip on the splintered trees and the trenches branching off to the north-west. Their collection of 18-pounder guns launched 2,000 rounds in a bombardment that started at 1am. For the rest of the day they maintained a constant barrage at a slower pace to protect the infantry as they attempted to consolidate any positions gained.
Graves of Sergeant George and Private Robert Lee at Dartmoor Cemetery. (Andrew Holmes)
Three days later, on the 23rd, as Horace Callaghan was going forward at Pozières and other attempts to gain ground went off at different intervals, the 156th Brigade had changed from divisionally allocated to corps artillery. This meant they were no longer directly responsible for the protection of the infantry, but searched the back areas and approaches to the enemy front. German retribution was scathing. On 25th July the wagon lines to the rear were so heavily shelled that they had to be sent back behind Fricourt. Four days later George helped to fire another 1,500 rounds at the rear areas behind High and Delville Woods in just three hours.
August was somewhat quieter than this frantic introduction to the Somme, but notable for the Lee family. During the month, eighty-one men were drafted in to join the 156th Brigade, among them George’s teenage son, Robert. From now on, father and son would serve side by side. As August ran its course, there were sporadic flurries of intense counter-battery fire laid down by the German artillery. George and Robert had to contend with the issues that arose from their guns being used constantly and not maintained properly, as many were put out of action when springs and other components failed. Replacement guns had to be hauled in, those that were not in use by other divisions, while their own were sent to the workshops at Heilly for repairs.
On 30th August heavy rain fell, rendering trenches used as cover and gun pits that had only been constructed hastily almost uninhabitable. George and Robert suffered from the same monstrous barrage that killed Harry Butters the following day, ‘thousands of lethal shells’ falling about them and releasing noxious fumes so that they too had to pull on their gas helmets to avoid being exposed as their work continued. At the beginning of September the brigade was yet another based in the Caterpillar Valley area, where life for an artilleryman was extremely dangerous.
On 5th September the men of A Battery, 156th Brigade suffered a huge blow; four men killed by enemy shellfire at once, including both George and Robert Lee. George’s widow, Fanny, had lost both a husband and her only son on one day. They were laid to rest alongside each other at Dartmoor Cemetery, plot I.A.35.