#58176 Sapper William Wallwork
16TH DIVISIONAL SIGNALS COMPANY, ROYAL ENGINEERS
TWENTY-YEAR-OLD WILLIAM WALLWORK WAS FROM Bolton. In peacetime he was a telegraphist for the Post Office, and so when he enlisted in his hometown in November 1914, his knowledge of Morse Code and of wireless operation made William a perfect candidate for a very specific role on the Western Front. The idea of signalling on the battlefield was as old as war itself and all manner of methods had been used since the age of antiquity: torches, smoke, beacons, shutters and flags. Communications were revolutionised by Morse Code in the nineteenth century, then the electric telegraph, and the army made the most of Marconi’s wireless invention almost immediately at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1908 the Signal Service was formed as part of the Royal Engineers and for the most part it was to provide communications during the Great War by way of a signals company attached to each division.
As with every other form of military technology, equipment and innovations advanced rapidly during the war. Signal companies would incorporate wired telephones, which required the upkeep of miles of cable exposed to enemy shelling, wireless kits and the use of despatch riders to maintain communications on the Western Front. They also used more traditional equipment, such as lamps flashing messages in Morse or mirrors using the reflection of the sun to spell out signals.
William was placed in the company belonging to the 16th (Irish) Division and after training at Blackdown and Hitchin he embarked with the unit in December 1915. Moving anywhere was a trial for the likes of William and his fellow signallers. Each relocation brought with it a new system of telephony with which to become acquainted, setting up equipment and troubleshooting, all without letting essential communications lapse on the battlefield.
A few hours before Andrew Ballantyne had gone forward on 6th September with the 2nd Gordon Highlanders, the Irish Division had fully come into the line and the men had had a piecemeal involvement in earlier attacks on Ginchy. The division spent 8th September busily getting ready for the next day’s attack. Men were gathering in the Guillemont area, while battalions busily dug trenches and formed carrying parties. Teams of stretcher-bearers worked hard under fire to bring in the wounded still lying in no-man’s-land after the last attack on Ginchy. A few were lucky enough to rest as they awaited nightfall and the order to begin moving up.
Signallers attend to telephone wires on the Somme. (Authors’ collection)
Dantzig Alley British Cemetery. (Andrew Holmes)
Each of the division’s three brigades had its own section of signalmen and William and his cohorts had been run off their feet since arriving in the Ginchy sector. The lines of wire that the signallers had run out to brigades from Divisional HQ were long, up to 3 or 4 miles in some cases, and were in very poor condition owing to shellfire and traffic. Time and labour constraints meant they could not do a lot about such a vast and constant issue while the infantry were in the trenches and they were busy elsewhere, but William and his fellow sappers had laid some alternative cabling routes to try to work around the problem. They hadn’t even managed to bury their cables to as good a standard as they would have liked. Ideally they would have laid them safely some 6–8ft down in the areas that were being most fiercely shelled, but the division only had one little section of cables buried and they were hardly underground at all.
William and his companions had been luckier with telephone lines laid further forwards towards various battalion headquarters in their sector. They had stayed mostly intact, for ‘it was found that even a shallow trench gave very considerable protection to lines laid therein, as compared to lines which had to cross the open’. As far as the most forward cabling was concerned, it was useless, for every time it was laid it was simply cut to pieces again almost immediately. The signals men simply gave up, ‘as communication by runner was quicker and satisfactory’. Visual signalling was also pointless. Their lamps were cumbersome and kept getting smashed, and for all the effort they entailed, near Ginchy the dust and smoke from constant explosions meant that nobody could see any successful transmissions.
William was under no illusions about the peril that his job entailed. He had handed his paybook and some money in before heading up to the front on the 8th, with the words, ‘take care of these until I come back, you never know your luck in these parts’. Artillery fire on both sides was constant during the day, along with enemy snipers seeking to pick off men one at a time. During the course of the day William was killed, his body retrieved and brought back for burial as final preparations were concluded for the upcoming attack. He was just 20. His mother Alice chased the War Office in desperation to know where her boy was buried, ‘since his and our sacrifice is so great, and we hope in future to be permitted to visit the spot which to us is so dear’. Her ‘Dear Boy’ William was laid to rest at Dantzig Alley British Cemetery, plot I.E.4.