Captain William James Henderson
9TH THE LOYAL NORTH LANCASHIRE REGIMENT
AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER 1914 SAW a huge rush of university men desperate to go to war. One such boy was William James Henderson, who was due to begin a classical scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, having just left his public school, Dulwich College. With several years of service in his school’s Officer Training Corps, his extreme youth, however, was evident when he offered his services still suffering from teenage acne.
Originally from Forest Hill, William was a gentle boy, and devout with a ‘simplicity and naturalness of faith’. An earnest Christian, ’who offered up his free time to help with his local mission school. There he was ‘a most capable leader and immensely popular’ with the children. One fellow officer said that he was ‘very reserved, yet frank and open … and though never weak could be as sweet and tender as any woman. He was indeed his mother’s boy.’
Kitchener’s New Army officers were liberally dispersed, not necessarily to a battalion with which they would have any affiliation, and William was granted a commission in the 9th Loyal North Lancashire Regiment being raised in Preston. With his men, he was in final training at Aldershot by June 1915 and, once in France, he was awarded the Military Cross for a battalion exploit on 15th May when four mines and a camouflet were detonated under the German trenches and the 9th Loyal North Lancashire helped seize the crater nearest to them.
On 30th June the battalion marched into Warloy to begin its endeavours on the Somme. Close to where Billy Disbrey had attacked on 1st July, the village of La Boisselle was not seized until the 4th, largely by bombing and fierce scrapping at close quarters. This one village had caused almost 7,000 casualties as the British Army attempted to seize it. When William Henderson arrived in the area and looked out on no-man’s-land, he saw ‘a confused and tumbled mass of white chalk craters, debris, a mass of brick and mortar, strewn here and there with the beams and rafters of tumbled roofs’. La Boisselle itself was barely recognisable as a site of recent habitation.
Having taken it, it was now planned to push the Germans further away from the village, and as such William and his battalion were to attack trenches immediately to the east. On 6th July they moved off. ‘About a mile along the road we halted, dished out rations and handed out [ammunition] … then picked up bombs and tools…’ In single file they continued, slowed down by the machine gunners, who were so weighed down with their equipment and extra ammunition that they needed to make continuous stops before, finally, they reached their assembly position. ‘There we sat among a heap of dead German and English, the faint sweet and sickly odour rising as the day grew warmer.’
The Loyal North Lancashire attack commenced at 8:30am, targeting two lines of German trenches in an attempt to continue chipping away at further objectives. These were duly captured along with some 200 German prisoners and when enemy troops were seen massing for a counter-attack the Lancashires promptly dispersed them and sent bombers out to keep them at bay. Consolidation began, but the battalion’s success came at a cost. Its officers had been decimated by the assault. Six of them were dead, including 20-year-old William Henderson. Once the wounded were evacuated just two remained to oversee the improvement of their position under heavy shellfire until the North Lancashire men were finally relieved on 10th July, having lost nearly half their number as casualties for a tiny gain.
Captain William Henderson. (Private collection)
William’s Colonel wrote that ‘he was the most promising Officer of [the] battalion, full of resource and energy and ready to undertake any task’. He claimed William’s loss as one of the worst the battalion had suffered. Those associated with Dulwich College grieved no less. One of his schoolmates wrote:
I knew no one who stood so unfailingly for all that is the very best in the life of a public school, no one who did so much unnoticed … work, or set so consistently high an example. There are many who mourn for him and can never forget his unfailing cheerfulness, his joyousness and gladness in living, the ideals and earnestness which were the keynote of his actions and often an unconscious inspiration to his friends.
William Henderson’s family paid a heavy price during the war for its willingness to serve. Four of his cousins fell too, one exactly a month after William and three more over the course of one terrible month in 1918. If anything good can be said to have come from the conflict, it would be for his sister, Maud. In the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme, she began to visit a wounded fellow officer of William’s to find out about her brother’s death. Over time their relationship blossomed and they were married shortly after the war. Captain Henderson’s body, if recovered, was never identified and he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier & Face 11a.