A worn, tattered tray-cloth, embroidered with the names of men who fought in the Great War set novelist Charlotte Cory on a quest to discover the identity of her great-aunt’s only lover and what befell him in the trenches. The search took her to the Faubourg-d’Amiens Cemetery in France, and to the realisation that the past is closer to us all than we thought.
When my great-aunt died 20 years ago, I inherited a rather tatty embroidered
tray-cloth, about 18in square, which her brother – my grandfather –
and all his friends had autographed before they went off to fight in the First
World War. Auntie Beatie had presumably whiled away the long, monotonous evenings
in their absence by carefully sewing over their signatures and embroidering
each of their regimental cap badges. She then added a neatly tasselled border.
We were not a close family and I only ever met Auntie Beatie a few times as a child. When I was a student though, living in Bristol, I acquired a bicycle with gears and one day hunted her down to her cottage in the Mendips. She opened the door and invited me in, plying me with boiled cake and tea. After I had been there about half an hour, I put my teacup down and asked the old lady if she knew who I was? “I imagine you must be one of my great-nieces,” she said, with a delighted cackle. “I always knew you’d look me up one day.”
I’m glad I did. I remember asking my father once if Auntie Beatie had ever had a boyfriend: he said he thought there had been someone called “Frederick” and that he had been killed in the First World War. When Beatie died and the family went to clear out her house, I was handed the tray-cloth and told to take care of it. No one else wanted this curious item, although everyone felt it should not be thrown away.
Occasionally, over the years, I have taken the tray-cloth out to look at it. It is such a strangely domestic and intimate war memorial, yellowed with age and stained slightly – probably the result of some tea that had been spilt. It is odd to think of this cloth actually having been used and I have often wondered which of the 16 signatures might have been the dead boyfriend. Many are hard to decipher; there is one name pencilled on the cloth that for some reason she did not embroider over, but which is now too faded even to read.
Earlier this year, when I was doing some work in the Public Record Office at Kew, I noticed that huge numbers of people researching there were looking for information about relatives who fought in the First World War. This inspired me to tuck the tray-cloth into my pocket and take it with me one day. I thought it might be interesting to discover what there was to be found out about Auntie Beatie’s friends. I imagined them all 100 years ago this New Year’s Eve, eagerly lighting bonfires and setting off fireworks to celebrate the start of the last century of the millennium – a century many of them would not live to enjoy and that Beatie would be obliged to live out on her own.
It is only recently, with the statutory 75-year closure period on official First World War documents over, that it has become possible to search the archives. With the last Armistice Day of this sorry century looming, I felt I owed it to Auntie Beatie to uncover at last the secrets of her tray-cloth.
The only name I recognised on the cloth was that of my paternal grandfather: “R A Phillips, 12th Glosters”. I know he survived – I would not be here otherwise – and I also know his first name was Reginald.
It is disconcerting to learn that most First World War British Army service records were destroyed in enemy bombing in 1940. Much that was not consumed by the flames was ruined by water from the firemen’s hoses. The small proportion of records that survived are called the “Burnt Documents”. They are too fragile to handle but have recently been painstakingly microfilmed. The chances of finding a service record for any particular soldier is only about 25 per cent.
Everyone who served in the First World War received at least two medals, so the best place to start looking for information is in the Medal Rolls, which were kept by the Army Medal Office. To search these, you first consult the Medal Index Cards, which are held on microfiche in the Record Office’s Microfilm Reading Room.
This in itself is a salutary exercise. With every fiche containing 360 record cards, thousands of fiches in each drawer and more drawers than I cared to count, the scale of the war is physically demonstrated. When I counted 76 Reginald Phillipses, the task felt hopeless. Then I realised that the Reginald A, B and C Phillipses are filed after, and although there were several Reginald A Phillipses in Gloster regiments, none specified the 12th battalion.
It was only by going from the index cards to the Medal Rolls that I was able to identify a Reginald A Phillips in the 12th Glosters. The task was complicated by the fact that my grandfather had been transferred from a Gloster regiment, where he won a 14/15 Star for serving in France in 1914/15, to a Devon regiment, where he was awarded the Victory and British War Medals. I remember hearing that my grandfather had been buried alive when a trench caved in under shelling, and was the only one still alive when they dug him out days later. Details were sketchy because he never spoke of it. But it seems that as the sole survivor of that contingent of the 12th Glosters, he had been packed off to end the war with the Devonshires.
There are 16 signatures on the cloth, complete with rank and regiment, thus providing exactly the information needed to facilitate a search. It was as if Auntie Beatie knew that one day I would be doing this and wanted to make it easy.
Six of the men were with the Glosters, and of these four had been together in the 12th Battalion: my grandfather, an F H Chappell, E H Carter and E A Arnold. It seems likely the friends went to enlist together. All the men came from Bristol and they had all embarked for France on November 21 1915. And yes, as if in answer to my question, Chappell’s card was filed under F H, but someone had taken the trouble to add, at a later stage with a different pen, “rederick”. In the section for “remarks” was written “K in A”. I was so amazed to find that the only F H Chappell in the Glosters was indeed a Frederick that it was a while before I understood that “K in A” is chilling shorthand for “killed in action”.
I had found Auntie Beatie’s boyfriend. But for those four letters “K in A”, he might have come home, they might have been married and had a family, I’d have cousins (albeit once-removed) and she would not have been the batty great-aunt of my childhood, living on her own in the Mendips, boiling cake.
Records of casualties are kept on a Soldiers Who Died in the Great War CD-rom in the Record Office library. It is unnervingly easy to use. You queue up until a computer becomes available, then tap in the names and wait. Within seconds, I discovered that Frederick Herbert Chappell had died on May 8, 1917. I wondered how he had died and what the 12th Glosters had been doing that day?
To find this out, I returned to the main Record Office indexes and found the reference number for the war diary of the battalion. Ten minutes after I ordered the document, I was handed a box containing pale brown folders tied with pink canvas ribbon.
I flipped through Volume 13, which contained January to June 1917, a day-by-day account of events, written in pencil on a specially printed form. In May 1917, the 12th Glosters were in the trenches east of Fresnoy. The entry for May 8 begins:
Rain began to fall about midnight. At 3.45 am, a very heavy enemy barrage started on all lines and Battalion HQ. There was a thick mist rendering observations at 50 yards difficult… The enemy attacked in force, it being afterwards found he had brought up the 5th Bavarian Division for that purpose. After checking his first assault, the remnants of our front line fell back. Counter attacks were made immediately … and that front line was recovered but could not be held owing to the enemy having already got in on the high ground on both flanks…
The battle raged all day and into the night. The account ends: “The Battalion went into Bivouac at NINE ELMS at 1.30 am on 9th.”
There is a list of names of the men who were killed, wounded, wounded and missing, and missing. I looked in vain for Frederick Chappell until I read “288 O.R. killed wounded and missing”, and realised that Auntie Beatie’s boyfriend was one of the 288 “other ranks”. The Reader’s Guide to researching Army records, sold in the Public Record Officeshop, has a photograph of a long line of soldiers marching to the trenches on its cover. You can count 28 individual men. If you multiply that picture by 10, then you would have the number of ordinary soldiers mown down in that one trench on that one day alone – a day of no particular significance in the long-running battles of Arras.
There was a report on the day’s fiasco appended to the War Diary, written in passionate, angry tones by the colonel commanding the battalion. It is literally a port-mortem, scribbled in blue pencil on 10 sides of squared exercise paper with much underlining. It concludes:
This disaster is due to the following:
1. Attempting to hold an impossible salient as a defensive
position.
2. Lack of aeroplanes.
3. Lack of artillery support of any kind
4. Was largely contributed to by the bad weather, the thick dust forming into
mud at once and visibility being NIL.
It is odd to think that I probably know more about what happened to Frederick Herbert Chappell in the end than either his family or my great-aunt Beatie ever did.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission informed me that, although he does not have a grave, I would find his name on Bay 6 of the Arras Memorial in the Faubourg-d’Amiens Cemetery in the town of Arras. He was 24 years old. They sent me directions and maps.
What began as a casual exercise in curiosity now led to me boarding the Eurostar train to Lille. Having found out who her boyfriend was, and where and how he had died, the least I could do was to take my great-aunt’s tray-cloth across the Channel and walk from Lille to Arras to see for myself the battleground where he lost his life. I went more for her sake than for his. In memory of all those great-aunts of my childhood, the women who spent their lives alone.
I have chosen a suitably cold, wet November day. It is a long dreary tramp. The roads are straight and the fields on either side dismally flat. East of the little village of Fresnoy there is nothing of note and it is raining hard.
I hurry on to Arras. By the time I arrive at the memorial to “35,942 officers and men of the Forces of the British Empire who fell in the Battles of Arras or in air operations above the Western Front and who have no known grave”, a quiet haven beside a busy ring road, I am exhausted and find myself weeping easily. I find his name swiftly enough but it is too high up on Bay 6 of the beautiful, sandstone Lutyens Memorial to see, let alone to photograph. I can make it out but only because I know it is there: Corporal F H Chappell.
I telephone my husband to tell him I have accomplished my mission. The real reason I call is because I want to hear his voice. I tell him how odd it is that although there are wreaths of poppies scattered throughout the immaculately kept cemetery, the only one in the whole of the huge sweep of Bay 6 is to an “Uncle Fred”. Of course there are hundreds of Freds. I count 17 other Chappells in the Memorial Register that is kept in a neat brass cupboard by the entrance for people like me to consult. There is even another Frederick Chappell.
Jogging along in the thankfully warm, crowded local train back to Lille, I stare out over the darkening fields and recall how when I left the Public Record Office, the warden who checked my papers called his colleagues over to look at the tray-cloth. “They had one just like this on the Antiques Roadshow last week,” he said. “What did they say it was worth?” I asked. “Nothing at all,” he laughed. “Unless one of the signatures turns out to be famous.”
Frederick Herbert Chappell was 24 when he died. He never had a chance to do anything that might have made him famous. For the rest of her life, my great-aunt remembered him, though. At the going-down of the sun and in the morning he was there with her on the tray-cloth while she drank her lonely cups of tea.
The Daily Telegraph
Weekend Saturday November 13 1999