Memories of War   1

          We are being asked to offer memories  and photographs of the Great War, gleaned from survivors still alive or their letters and albums.

          There are photos in our family album, horses pulling huge field artillery guns, blurred pictures of groups of soldiers after the battle of Messines.   But, better than that, I had found    two old green suede diaries, obviously transcribed after the war from notes taken hurriedly at the time on the Western Front and the later campaign in Italy.   These have now been given to the British War Museum.    Before they went, I managed to link the entries to the accounts of military action given in official war histories. 

             My father, Harry Stead, was on the Somme in 1916 and his regiment was in the battles of Passchendaele as well as Messines.  He was with the Royal Artillery in battle for four years, was recommended for a DSO and given a Military Cross.   This was  for the time when he started off the day as a subaltern and ended it as a major at the age of 26 when he discovered he was the only officer who had survived.  He found his batman holding his lost cap and in tears thinking that he was dead.    He then took command of B Battery, at 102 Brigade, in the 23^rd Division, which fought through most of the Third Battle of Ypres before being sent to the Italian campaign in November 1917.

   The official account is from the history of the Royal Regiment  of Artillery, Western Front, 1914-18 by General Sir Martin Farndale, KCB, who records that 1917 and the spring of 1918 saw some of the heaviest fighting and the worst battles of the war, as the Germans and British with their allies fought savagely over each yard of ground.  Woods and railway lines, hills and spinneys were taken, lost and re-taken over and over again with huge loss of life.

   The Third Battle of Ypres , the history records, saw the mightiest bombardment so far on a frontage of 15 miles.  Seventeen British divisions, backed by the power of 3,106 guns fired the biggest artillery attack ever known until that time.  In an 18-day preparatory bombardment alone, almost 3m shells were fired on to the German forward positions.    Nothing like it had ever been attempted before.  It was “war on the grand scale.”

       There was nothing grand, though, about the men and horses struggling in the mud.  Harry Stead’s  diary starts cheerfully, impressed by the junior officers and other ranks of his new command in April 1917.    But there followed two months of attacks, counter-attacks and constant shelling before the big battle  at Messines Ridge which preceded Ypres.  The British and enemy lines were only yards apart.  The artillery plan, says the history, was “sound and brilliantly executed.”

2 Memories of War

    On April 10 the guns got bogged down in the mud.     On April 11,  “The remainder of the guns arrived at dusk.  It was an awful job.  The guns were sunk in mud up to the breech.  We didn’t get the guns into action until midnight and we were all wet through to the skin.”    Next day the battery was shelled and three guns knocked out.    “All the remainder were buried.  Our position is close to Shrapnel  Corner at Ypres.  Our O.P. is Windy Corner, to the right of Hill 60.  They are both bad places.”

    New guns are brought to replace the ones  knocked out.  Then the battery was shelled.   He left to go to the forward infantry lines and looks for position.  “Sniped.  Left front line at 5.15 p.m.  Shelled from 6.30 to .45.  More guns knocked out.

       April 18.  “Kirkley (a lieutenant)  had to leave observation post owing to the shells.  Battery heavily shelled by 5.9” and 8”.  More of our guns have gone west. The mess is a complete washout.”

     April 21.  “Moved the OP because of heavy shell fire, from Windy Corner to Grand Fleet St.  Heavy shelling everywhere.”  Then, in a classic understatement, “It’s been an uncomfortable day.”

      The battle of Messines started at exactly 3.10 a.m. on June 7.     From the diary, “June 6. Arrived at Battery from leave at 5.30 p.m.  Arranging barrages fort next day’s battle. Gas shells until 3 a.m.     June 7.  Battle of Messines, Zero hour 3.10.  Hill 60.  Gunfire intense.  Went forward to reconnoitre Observation Post.  Lost Blyth and three telephonists got buried in a trench by Hill 60 from shellfire.  Inspected Hill 60 craters and Boche dugout.  Found maps.  Shellfire very bad.  Narrow escapes.  Went to front line and found Infantry battalion out of touch.  Took their dispositions back to Base.  Good day but very hectic.”

     Infantry positions were important.  Cut lines meant that they could be right out of touch.  The official history recounts that many forward observation officers on Messines Ridge, no one having told them there was to be a second, following attack were unable to tell their own troops from the enemy and engaged them.  There was no way of stopping them.  Neither they nor their officers knew what was happening. Next evening, one battalion of a forward brigade was heavily engaged from Messines Ridge, being mistaken for an enemy counterattack.  It wasn’t until the next day that the breakdown in control was put right.    “The blunder marred one of the best periods of artillery bombardment so far in the war,” says Farndale’s history.   It was actually, in modern phraseology, a “friendly fire” at its most tragic, and showed the importance of Harry Stead’s visits to the infantry front lines.

   There was a lull for Battery.  Then fighting continues.

 “June 13.  Battery shelled with gas.  Went with Kirkley to find a new position forward.  Shelled all the time.   SGT Massey and Sgt Howarth killed.

   June 14.  Repairing lines to OP.  Firing for infantry.  Corp. Jones wounded.  Attack on canal successful. 

Memories of War  3

  June 15  Kirkley at new position preparing pits for guns.  Two guns with 12 loads of ammunition and four GS wagon loads of high explosive material all in.  Wired guns on SOS lines.

June 16.  Went to look for OP to observe on Klein Zillebeeke  (in maps in the official history this is about two miles north west of Hill 60, near a lake and about three miles south eas of Ypres.)  Walked for about six hours, nearly hit by 5.9.  Registered guns at Hill 60 in new position.  Four rounds.  Lost wire transport FM.  Back to old position.  Four gunes ready for moving.”

      There are more movements of guns overnight.    “Tired out.” he records.   There follows drenching rain, wet all night in bivouacs and cleaning up.   

     By June 22 the Battery had moved off to Boecheppe, arriving in the evening.  The diary is blank.  The next action recorded is heavy and daily bombing in July, before the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, part of the Third Battle of Ypres and the massive bombardments at Passchendaele from July 1 to November, 1917.

     From the official Royal Artillery history:  “Passchendaele:  what emotion that name generates, even to those who were not there:  it means many things to many people but to all it means mud, massed bombardments, bloody and cruel fighting and, above all, courage and stamina in the face of appalling conditions.   Strictly speaking, Passchendaele was part of the Third Battle of Ypres, which consisted of a series of battles.  First was the initial British attack on Pilckem Ridge, which was launched on 31 July and lasted until 2 August.

    My father and his Brigade were now with the 2^nd Corps in the Fifth Army.

“July 30.  Getting guns laid on barrage lines, digging dugout.  Sat up all night.  Pat and Marks had made dugout.  Hook (Sgt James Hook, his batman who was with him throughout), Page and Kirkley made one for Kirkley and myself.  Hook and Kirkley nearly buried.  Shelled all night.

July 31  3.50 a.m.   Zero Battery shelled by 8”, 5.9”, 4.2”.   Whizzbangs and some gas shells.  Ten Boche planes over ujs M.G 12.45.  Ellison with ammunitiuon.

1.10  New target.   Barraging all day, cease firing 7.30 p.m.  Blyth back.  Rain.

August 1.  One foot of water in dugout.    Soaked through.   New SOS lines.  Everyone went through.

August 2.   Dugout caved in on Kirkley and I.  9 a.m. Gen. Arbuthnot round, very sorry for us.  Shelled all day.  Rain all day, heavy rain all night.”

   The history records that a German counter-attack started at 11.30 hours.  By 1300 hours (when Harry Stead records that he is seeking a new target) drizzling rain settled in, blinding observation.  Control of guns became difficult.  Drenching rain began to fall making artillery observation nearly impossible.  The counterattack followed up.  But the prearranged protective barrage was fired by the British Gunners with such speed, accuracy and ferocity that the Germans broke and fled.

Memories of War  4

       At Ypres, the labours of the artillery were as gruelling as those of the infantry and judging by the casualties,  almost as hazardous.  There had been almost no proper rest or relief fom 16 to 31 July, when the battle commenced and detachments were near total exhaustion at the time when  they should have been most alert.

      Conditions at the guns were terrible, pouring rain, thick oozing mud capable of swallowing a man, a horse or even a gun, made hopeless platforms.  For shelter, a piece of corrugated iron over a water-filled shell hold was all that could be done.    General Farndale writes:The sheer courage and endurance shown by the exhausted , weary gunners at Third Ypres was as great as had ever been shown in the Regiment’s history for the horror of it went  on and on without respite, without mercy until death itself was merciful.”

    From my father’s diary:     “August 4.  Shelled all day.  Registered guns.  Signallers wounded.

August 5.  Heavy  shelling.  Heavy rain and mud.  Everything miserable.  Went to wagon lines.  Given 48 hours rest – much needed.   Hot baths in great request at rest  area.

Recalled to Battery after 20 hours. Shelled all way.  In action again at 4 p.m.  Bad night.  Boche shelling.

August 7. Shooting all day.

August 8  Battery and Mess shelled all day.  Rain again.  Direct hit on No. 1 gun.  SOS 9.40 to 10.15, shelled again.  Hitchcox wounded, Sgt Massey got DCM.

August 10  Zero hour 4.35 a.m.  Heavily shelled as soon as we opened fire.  Lt. Corder wounded, also Sgt. Massey. Gunner Cubley killed, Corporal  Hodgkins wounded.  Quietened down 10,30 a.m. New SOS.  Gunners Buxton and Boswell killed.  Bombardier Blackman and Sgt Rigg killed.  Bombs.  Brown, Barlow and Barnes wounded, also Cpl Forman, Gunner Jacks.

      August 9 Cleaning up round Battery.  Developed irrigation scheme.  Battery shelled .  Sgt Smith killed, Sgt Richardson wounded.

August 11   700 rounds got into position.  Heavy rain, also shells.

August 12   Intermittent shelling all day.  Went to Observation post, had to run once or twice.

August 13.  Handed over to 242 Brigade, RFA.  B242 knocked out within three hours of taking over.

August 14. Cleaning up.  Kirkley takes ammunition to Elverdin.  

On this day, the history records the start of the battle of Langemarck.   The fighting for Inverness Copse on the XIV and XVIII Corp[s front was long and better.  Though the Copse was taken, it had later to be abandoned.

      All of this time Harry Stead’s No 2 Corps, Fifth Army was in and out of action.

Memories of War   5

Sept  5   Went into acion in 155 Groupl  Fired smoke barrage.   Battle on right 8.45 p.m.  Standing by for SOS.

Sept 6  Zero hour 7.30 a.m., shooting match till 9 a.m.  Registered guns and checked lines of Battery.  Centre section relieved by section of B.290.

 Sept 7 Centre section to Hamjoek.   Marks, Seale and I returned to 290 Brigade and took 4 guns straight to Hamhoek around 10 p.m.   Heard we were going back to Dickebushe.

(In II Corps area 36 batteries had been moved into the Dickebushe area before Pilckem Ridge.)

     The Battery was now moved and went on a five hour march, having got up at 3.30 a.m. and ready to leave at 6.30 a.m., to what can most nearly be deciphered as Renungmelst, though this place is not in the index of the  history.   There they were busy constructing a Mess and even a table.  They must have been some way behind the front line.

     But illness followed.  By Sept 12 my father was laid up with boils, the result of weakness from the appalling conditions and bad weather.

   He carried on, with notes about Sanctuary Wood, making gun positions for Ypres and Polygon Wood being captured by 25 Division.    These woods recur again and again in accounts of the Battles of Ypres and figure prominently on the maps.

   All this time, Harry Stead was growing progressively sicker  and on Sept 28 had a carbuncle cut out of his neck.  Then the diary goes blank.  On October began the battle of Broodseinde, followed by Poelcappelle on October 9 and the first battle of Passchendaele on October 12.  The 5^th Army. Of which the Brigade was a part, was in the thick of it.  Hundreds of guns were knocked out.    There are continual changes in the diary.   Though the weather had broken and drenching rain fell for two days, producing the terrible mud of Passchendele, Douglas Haig, a master of the ruthless wrong move, determined to press on.  On October 12, the first battle began.

     The Farndale history recalls:    “Conditions now became quite frightful, wounded lay unattended around the guns and pillboxes, and trenches were full of them.  Snipers did great execution on the survivors and the supply of food and ammunition became virtually impossible.”   Yet Haig had said he believed his troops were practically through the enemy defences.  “This ignorance of the truth and of the terrible misery of the forward troops cannot really be forgiven.” 

     Nowhere were the conditions worse than in the gun lines.  Guns sank and disappeared – men and horses sank for ever into the boiling quagmire of Passchendaele.

    The Battery missed the second battle, from October 26 to November 10,  which saw the horrors of mustard gas and a sneezing gas, which forced men to remove their gas masks.   “The battlefield took on a weird likeness to an artist’impression of hell.”    After the battle which improved the Ypres position for the winter, Haig decided to halt the Flanders campaign.

 Memories of war   6

      And some five British divisions, including Harry Stead’s, were ordered to Italy under General Plomer to help the struggling Italian armies.    That is another story.

Profiting from the housing shortage

The rent racketeers     1.








       " These people can't afford to live in Hampstead.   They just don't have enough money.     I'm going to sell the flats, they are worth a lot now".   Tidy properties they were,  a little square of well-tended flats with small gardens, one of them occupied by a local postman.     The new owner was quite young but well aware of the profits that might be made in Hampstead if its ancient tradition of mixed income housing could be broken up.        Further up the street, a row of houses built for local workers and traders in 1890, had already been bought up and the families living in them, usually three to each house with a flat on each floor,, evicted.
        Not so very different, then, from the recently publicised couple, obese and self-satisfied, who declared on Channel 4 television news their intention to evict hundreds of tenants who were having  rents paid by housing benefit.       The only difference was a separation of 50 years between the two events.    
        There was a happy ending for the 1960's flat dwellers.   The Guardian and other papers carried stories about it, pointing out that the flats could be compulsorily purchased by the local council.    This was done.   The tenantss were able to stay in their homes.  This would not happen now.
            There are few happy endings today.   In the 'sixties, I covered Rachmanism for my paper.  I spent hours trudging round the now-fashionable and then slummy Notting Hill (earlier I had carried out the same function in the slums of Leeds).   You could stop anyone on a pavement, explain what you were looking for, and almost certainly be taken to living conditions so appalling that you could not believe that even higher rents were being demanded for them.   The worst were the hundreds crowded into St. Stephen's Gardens, where one flat can now be worth millions but a place I still cannot look at without a shudder of remembrance.     The mother in the kitchen with the ceiling falling down, the rain coming through, nothing to cook with, the children crowded into one bed, the freezing cold, and tales of the cruel landlord coming round with fierce dogs to demand ever-higher rents, in pain of eviction.   Going back to a warm, spacious house was simply to experience shame.       Two tenants I still remember were asking for my help to get the landlord to let them keep their inadequate home in a garage from which he was trying to evict them..    The main organiser of the evictions, Rachman, became so infamous that he gave birth to the term "Rachmanism" as a symbol of ruthless exploitation of tenants.   In later years, I met him briefly, complacent about his actions.
      He first became known during the trial of Stephen Ward after the political scandal of the M.P. Profumo who had been having an affair with the same girl, Christine Keeler, as a Soviet agent.  I covered some days of the trial.   A witness, Mandy Rice- Davies, in the course of her evidence, spoke of a ruthless landlord involved  in this world and gave his name - Rachman.    The Insight team from editor Harold Evan's Sunday Times followed this up and  exposed  the shocking conditions of tenants  which no journalist seemed to have been aware of before.   I went to Notting Hill where many of the tenants were newly-arrived from the West Indies, as they were then known,      The affair of the overcharged and evicted tenants throughout the country became a national scandal, even though the night chief subeditor groaned "Not another story about broken lavatories, please."   No, there was nothing cheerful about the story,, and it was all much grimmer than non-working lavatories.
        But this , so long ago, had a good ending.   Rents were restricted.   No one could be evicted without a court order, and it meant most tenants were now safe from "rack renting" as it was known and the profiteering landlords, and from being turned out on to the streets.    Rent tribunals were set up and  the new Labour government, under its housing minister Dick Crossman  started on one of the most ambitious housing programmes the country has ever known.    Modern flats were built in Notting Hill near the old slums, where they still stand in contrast to the millionaire residences in St. Stephen's Gardens.      All over the country, modern flats were going up, high rise, often aesthetically unappealing, but giving safe and comfortable shelter instead of slums.
          An ambitious housing target has now been set by the Coalition government.   But meanwhile, as in the 'sixties, greedy, unscrupulous landlords are making huge profits out of the housing shortage, putting up rents and evicting tenants who cannot pay, forcing them to join the huge ranks of the homeless.   What is being done about this?   Will the government dare to start rent controls  and now they are having to foot the bill in benefits for higher rents which was not the case in the long-ago past  and stop it being an investment free-for-all?   Many  evictions are still required to have court orders before they can be carried out.  Two tenants I know spoke of the courts usually finding for the landlords, and there are a multiplicity of  rules for different kinds of  tenancies.
          The importance of a large-scale housing programme has now been recognised as more urgent than the last government's priority of getting more people to university.     People need jobs and somewhere to live.   The scandal of the high rents and eviction culture, the encouragement of buy-to-let investment has to stop.   The traditions of the post-war idealistic Attlee government need to be brought back.  Then we can be proud of our country again.
    

The Great War

'Tug of war', Jean Stead, Wednesday September 17th 1969.

        Edmund Blunden once painstakingly explained to me why he went on his regular pilgrimages to the Flanders battlefields - the effect on him when he saw the relics of old boots and helmets, as remote to most people now as Iron Age skulls; what he felt when he saw flowers growing over the ancient trenches. It was a phenomenon familiar to me. Blunden is a man of peace and I have known many others who have this odd combination of fear of another war and a compulsion to retread yard by yard their old battlegrounds. Some are even members of CND.
        It has nothing to do with the sort of jingoism that formed part of a television film on Arnhem last weekend: thousands, we were told, had died that others might live. As I remember it - I was very young at the time, though expertly informed - it was a massive failure of intelligence which caused the doomed men to parachute straight into the perfect trap set for them by the Germans.
        It is not that "noble war" stuff, but a curious ambivalence towards war shared by those who were in the worst battles. Perhaps it is because they thought they were seeing qualities of courage and fidelity displayed that could never be repeated in peacetime, because the necessary conditions would not be present.
      Yet they felt such horror at the waste of life, such premature consciousness of their own mortality, that they felt war was not worth it, for however high-seeming a principle. Siegfried Sassoon is probably the best example of this ambivalence? He was utterly involved in war, deriving all his greatest poetic inspiration from it, until he rejected it entirely.
      My childhood, in one way and another, was dominated completely by two wars. Looking back, it seems always to have been coloured by khaki and myself crying because people were going away. The stories I was told at my father's knee were unsuitable ones about Passchendaele and the Angel of Mons and by nine I was being reared on "Undertones of War", Sassoon, and Wagner. Later, the stories were about the dreadful defeat of Dunkirk because my father's regiment hadn't managed to bring its guns back with it.
       I realise that this is why when I once found a trench in the country, I flattened myself professionally against the bank and showed my small son how to look along the sight of a rifle and start shooting at the counter-attacking hordes. At least we didn't call them Germans.
       Yet the fear if war overshadows my family, as it did my parents, as no other calamity. I used to take the children as uncomprehending babies to Committee of 100 demonstrations. It has left them with a healthy fear of being bombed, which I share. But in spite of this, an artillery gun remains one of the homeliest objects in the world to me.
        A friend of mine is married to a poet who was in every bloody campaign of the last war, hated Monty and lived to be a militant pacifist. So struck was she by his tales of grisly death and poems about the dead hanging on barbed wire, that she has dug a large hole in her garden in the country and hidden in it quantities of corned beef and Marmite, in case they are ever attacked by the enemy. For his part, he went on a lone holiday for a tour of the Normandy battlefields.
          This is a dangerous ambivalence, more treacherous than ignorant jingoism. When schoolchildren were asked before the showing of the film of the Battle of Britain what they knew of it, they said nothing at all because they hadn't yet got to it in history. That is as it should be. And even so, it isn't worth more than a few paragraphs. There is little children can learn from it.
         The most peace-desiring of people, most of them ex-combatants, can be a threat to peace. War, they feel, is where all the playing with politics in fantasy-land stops and self-knowledge really begins. Perhaps they are right, but they should keep the secret to themselves.

A ride on an open line

1


     This is the story of a fraud.  I know it is true because it happened to me.  I should not have been taken in, because I used to be an investigative reporter once, nosing around to discover how criminals were getting away with it.

      There was a call from Harrods story in Knightsbridge one afternoon.   Someone claiming to be my nephew had tried to use what was a clone of my bank card to buy lingerie.  They had challenged him and were sending for the police.   I had been having having a quiet nap at the time, not as awake as I should have been.  "I don't have a nephew," I said, and checked my wallet.  "My bank card is here all right, though."   The man at Harrods said it would be as well to tell the bank security people.    There was a number on the back of the card, so I phoned it, and a helpful man answered.  He took it all very seriously, asking a lot of knowledgeable questions about my account and finally saying it was very important that I should send in all my cards and bank statement.   They would send a messenger.     I phoned back Harrods - the girl in the department did not seem to know anything, but a man rang back and said yes, it was all in hand, and the one claiming to be my nephew had been arrested and taken to the nearest police station.   I did not check the police station, which I should have done, because the messenger had arrived in a respectable looking black saloon, saying he had been asked to collect something, though he wasn't quite sure where he was supposed to be going with them.
        I was still on the phone to the banking official when my 26-year old grandson happened to drop in.   "This sounds like a fraud," he said.   ~"No, no, it's all in hand," I said, waving him away.   The man was still talking, so I gave him the phone and said " you talk to him then."   He asked why he wanted the bank cards and the man said to do an analysation, and my grandson said there is no such word and handed back the phone.  I made an excuse to the man, saying I wanted to ring my daughter, then rang the Yorkshire Bank and cancelled the cards - but not before they had managed to draw £500 on the credit card.   And they still had my bank statement, with lots of information about direct debit payments.
         I went to see the bank three days after Christmas Day - the phone call had happened on the day before Christmas Eve, and asked them to close my account and to open a new one.
          But most of the worst was yet to come.   The account was frozen, but the bank refused to transfer all the old account to the new one as I had asked.   This meant ahat the direct debit payments were not met.   But because the bank did not warn me about this, I assumed that all the bills would be met as before.   Not so.   First, without warning, Virgin cut off the phone and only after hours of calls and explanations was it switched on again.   Would it be electricity or gas next?  No, they did not seem to be due for payment, luckily, nor Camden who would have sent in the bailiffs if their council tax bill was not paid.   Then came a letter from the bank, 10 days after the account had been closed, saying that a cheque could not be honoured because there was no money in the account.   Would I let them know what was to be done about this they asked, taking a full A4 page to deal with it.   They did not seem to have noticed that the account had been closed or as I had discovered later, frozen..   The funds had been transferred to the new account, and standing orders set up by the bank, but that was all.
      Having discovered that several other people had been through this mental torture and expensive physical fatigue through all the phoning, I think we should be warned about these alleged calls from Harrods and other well-known stores.   I'd be grateful if the police could get on to these chaps and stop them.  
      How do they manage to do it?  By keeping an open phone.  When you think you are ringing your bank, their line is still open to you and they answer it.   The same with the alleged "Harrods" caller.  
     Oh, and Virgin have cut off my phone again, even though I paid the bill.  Someone there didn't get the message.  Maybe I should tell Richard Branson, he's a bit off-message himself sometimes.

ends