Hurst - Duke of Cambridges Own August 1914 to July 1916 The Public Schools Battalion in the Great War: The History of the 16th

Sitting in his dining room in Portsmouth, the table covered in papers and relics of his war, Noel Peters said to me, I have never told anyone this story before.

Why not? I asked.

Because no one was interested. He said and then asked. Why are you interested?

Explaining this interest was not easy. The need to know started with an accident. I got lost in the undergrowth looking for the Hawthorn mine crater. When I emerged I came on two small cemeteries, one on the upland, on the edge of a field of corn, and the other close to the road leading to Auchonvilliers, at the point that I learned later was the Sunken Road. There I came on the line of graves, each with its familiar badge, that of the Middlesex Regiment. Here was a massacre of men from North London. I wanted to know how disaster happened. The start of the quest was as simple and nave as that.

A second chance meeting happened at an Armistice Day dinner of the 7th Middlesex at Hornsey. I sat next to the curator of the Regimental Museum, Dick Smith. I told him about the shocking experience of blundering onto the graves of the 16th Middlesex. The Public Schools Battalion He said. Come and see me at the Museum, I will see what I can sort out for you.

The intense interest generated by the tragic events at Beaumont Hamel introduced me to a remarkable group of men, all of them born at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a great privilege to know them. As weeks passed into months, even into years, I got to know Noel Peters and Lionel Renton as friends as well as advisers and story-tellers. I never met Alf Damon, but I corresponded with him in Tasmania for a long time and through a large pile of letters. The other survivors of the Public Schools Battalion were all contacts of Dick Smiths who wrote to me through the late seventies. The Chelsea branch of the Red Cross introduced me to Sergeant Charles Quinnell MM who lived just down the road at the Royal Hospital.

The research period ran through the seventies while I was teaching at Chelsea School of Art. I had a job to do and a family to support so could not hurry the work. None of my advisers and friends lived to see the results published. Noel Peters died of cancer in 1979 and Lionel Renton not long afterwards. I lost touch with both Dick Smith and Alf Damon through a misunderstanding. In 1979 I moved to Northern Ireland to take up a teaching post at Ulster Polytechnic (today the University of Ulster). For a civilian living and working in the city of Belfast any suspicion of military activity could damage ones health. Alf told me that I and my family must move from a city in a state of virtual civil war and emigrate to Tasmania. Foolishly I wrote back joking that Belfast might be a turbulent city but compared to the Western Front it was a haven of peace. Alf did not reply, nor did I hear from him again. Despite many wounds he lived to the age of 85, dying in 1984.

I completed the first draft, then titled Some Desperate Glory, in 1981. It was far too long. The literary agent, Murray Pollinger was kind enough to read it and give me a criticism. You are attempting the re-write the history of the Great War. He said. I have to tell you that it has been done. What you ought to do is re-write it concentrating on the story of the men who were there. But you will not do that.

I will. I said. Ive got to get it published for them.

Ten years after we returned from Ireland I rewrote the manuscript, cutting it by half and sticking to the story told me by the survivors. I re-titled it Goodbye Picadilly . Almost a decade later I went through the manuscript and virtually rewrote it. The result is The Public Schools Battalion.

In the beginning of the search I relied on four museums and a library. The museums are listed, not in order of merit, because they are all important, but in the order in which I discovered them. My thanks to all the museum and library staff who were so helpful in assisting me in this research.

The Library of Printed Books, the Photographic Library, and the Archives at the Imperial War Museum

The Middlesex Regimental Museum at Bruce Castle in Tottenham.(Now closed)

Richard Dunnings museum in Mitcham. (now closed)

Major General A. MacLennan. The RAMC Library at Millbank (Closed)

Lieut Colonel A.V.Tennuci. The RAMC Museum at Ash Vale, Aldershot.

The Middlesex Regimental Archives at Mill Hill. (Bombed by the IRA)

Some of the later, more general research took place in the museum to the 36th Ulster Division, then in the centre of Belfast.

My thanks to the BBC Archives, Caversham, for the permission to read the papers of Uncle Mac, and to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for detailed reports on the British cemeteries around Beaumont Hamel and for the list of the men of the 16th Middlesex commemorated on the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval.

I relied on two regimental histories through the search, Everard Wyrall and Wallace Grain, but more as frameworks than as accurate reports. Each used official reports rather than the evidence of survivors. For general reference I used Cruttwells beautifully written account ot the Great War, which has the major advantage that the writer was there.

The story of Richard Dunnings struggle to preserve the Lochnagar crater as a memorial demands a book to itself. I met Richard in the early seventies because of the crater, but it was his museum in south-west London that influenced my work for decades, both in written form and in sculpture. In particular the glass case one metre by two metres that appears at first glance to contain dried mud. This, in fact, is a section of soil that once covered the German Front Line exactly as it was excavated, containing both the war-like and the banal debris of life in a Front Line trench.

Dick Smith made contact with survivors of the 1st July 1916 who were kind enough to write to me:

John Wilson. Wirral. Merseyside

Albert Edwards. Cornwall

C.P.Lawson. London

Laurie Barrow. Croyden

Tony Chubb. Devon

George Jones-Walters. Surrey.

Three others who were not at Beaumont Hamel but were closely connected to the 16th Middlesex were:

Mrs Fanny ODonnell. Guildford (Youngest sister of the Catchpole brothers, who enlisted under the name Tennant)

Colonel Benham Purnell RADC (nephew of Captain A.C.Purnell, Bombing Officer 86 Brigade)

Robert Taylor who allowed me to read the papers left by his father, Albert Taylor.

Military advisers who took part in the Battle of the Somme, serving with other units:

Sergeant Charles Quinnell. MM. Chelsea Royal Hospital.

Captain James. L. Crosbee formerly of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who I knew as a colleague at Birmingham School of Art.

The publisher David Unwin introduced me to Major Ynr Probert. RA whose guns preceded and supported the infantry on July 1st 1916.

Major Dick Smith MBE joined the Middlesex Regiment as a boy soldier in 1919. He knew many of the soldiers who survived the Somme battles, including Brigadier Hamilton Hall. Dick Smith rose to become an outstanding RSM in Libya and Tunisia in the Second World War. During the Cold War he was training adviser to the Malay Regiment. Dick Smith was more than curator of the museum at Bruce Castle, he was a walking encyclopaedia of information on the regiment.

My thanks to colleagues at Chelsea School of Art who gave me every encouragement in researching this project even though it was not strictly Fine Art. In particular I have to thank that fine sculptor and head of the Sculpture Department, George Fullard, who died at the age of fifty from wounds sustained as a young man at Monte Casino.