Stanley Spencer - Stanley Spencers Great War Diary, 1915–1918

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright Tony Spencer 2008

ISBN: 978 1 84415 788 5
PDF ISBN: 978 1 47389 779 3
EPUB ISBN: 978 1 47389 778 6
PRC ISBN: 978 1 47389 777 9

The right of the estate of Stanley Spencer to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
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Foreword

My father, Charles William Stanley Spencer, was born in Sheffield on 2 July 1890.

He was the only son of Louis Spencer, a Sheffield bank manager. As a young man he also worked in the bank before volunteering for army service.

Stanley Spencer enlisted as a private in the Royal Fusiliers in 1915, was commissioned in 1917 and served with the West Yorkshire Regiment until being demobilized early in 1919. He saw active service on the Western Front from 1915 until 1918 and the end of the Great War, the war to end wars. He was slightly wounded on three occasions and was awarded the Military Cross for his leading part in a successful trench raid on 1 August 1918.

Babs Ramsden (H. Warwick Ramsden from Leeds) was his friend from 1917 and served with him in the West Yorkshire Regiment in France. After the war he was best man at my fathers wedding to my mother, Molly Breakey, on 3 July 1924, and subsequently became my godfather.

Not long afterwards my father fell ill and was an invalid for the rest of his life.

He suffered from tuberculosis of both kidneys and died on 7 July 1943, aged fifty-three.

John Anthony Spencer

1915

January

I enlisted in the 24th (Service) Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers (known as the 2nd Sportsmens Battalion) on 14 January. I was a private in 13 Platoon, D Company, and we trained in England for most of the year.

From January until 17 March our Headquarters were the Hotel Cecil, Strand, London, but then we moved to our new camp at Gidea Park, Romford, Essex. We paraded on the Guards Square behind Whitehall on that day, marched through the City of London, passed the Mansion House where the Lord Mayor of London in full robes watched us go past, and entrained at Liverpool Street Station for Romford. We remained there until 26 June when we moved to Clipstone Camp near Mansfield. On 4 August we left Clipstone and went to Candahar Barracks, Tidworth, on Salisbury Plain, where we stayed until ordered overseas in November.

November

Our Battalion was in 99 Brigade, 33rd Division, and on 8 November a grand review and march past of the whole Division, with transport, was held on Salisbury Plain. The King was to have been present but as he had recently suffered a serious accident, the Queen and Princess Mary came instead.

On the morning of 15 November we marched out from Candahar Barracks for the last time and entrained for Southampton which we reached at about 1.00 pm. We heard that because there were enemy submarines in the Channel we would not be able to leave port until after dark, so we remained sitting about on the platform until 5.30 pm when we went on board. The transport was the Monas Queen, built in 1885 for the Isle of Man service. She had been painted black when requisitioned for trooping in March 1915. We were issued with lifebelts and went below at once. We were very crowded and I lay on the wood floor most of the night and by so doing probably escaped seasickness. At about 3.00 am we ran into the estuary at Le Havre and disembarked at 7.30 am. It was cold and bleak as we lined up on the quay and as we marched through the town and on to the Rest Camp it began to snow heavily.

The Rest Camp itself consisted of a great number of Army bell tents in rows in a large field and the whole place was a sea of mud. There were no plank walks or even cinder tracks between the rows of tents and it was impossible to go a dozen yards without being ankle deep in squelching mud and pools of water. Fortunately the bell tents had the usual wooden floorboards and a little drain dug round each one, but as there were thirteen of us to each tent, and as each mans boots were smothered in mud as he walked in, it was not long before the tent floor became unsuitable to sleep on. We were issued with two blankets each and before nightfall collected some bits of stick with which to scrape our boots as we came into the tent. Early in the evening we set about the business of settling down as well as we could for the night. We laid our mackintosh sheets on the dirty floor, put all our equipment and our boots round the edge of the boards, stacked our rifles against the pole in the centre and all lay down with our feet to the middle. It snowed during the night and the tent leaked water onto several of us, but we were tired and used to hard beds so slept pretty well.