Martin Middlebrook - Captain Stanilands Journey: The North Midland Territorials Go To War

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Maps by Roni from preliminary drawings by Martin Middlebrook

Under The Messines Ridge, April-June 1915

The Ypres Salient, July-September 1915

Captain Staniland's Journey

Under The Messines Ridge Tour

Salient Sector Tour

PHOTOGRAPHS AND CEMETERY PLANS

Acknowledgements are due as follows: The Ringrose Law Group, page .

Nearly all other photographs were taken by Mary (mostly) and Martin Middlebrook.

Jane. Why is your house called LINDENHOEK?

This story began with that simple, idle enquiry of mine when collecting my wife from a visit to her friend's home in Boston. Oh. That was where Tom's father met the body of Captain Staniland being brought back for burial. Tom was Tom Kent, Jane's late husband. Tom's father, it was explained, was William Kent who survived the war and returned to the family business of monumental masons located close to Boston Cemetery on Horncastle Road. When William Kent and his wife had a new house built next to the business premises in the late 1920s, Mr Kent decided to name it LINDENHOEK. The nameplate is now on another house in Boston in which his daughter-in-law, my wife's friend Jane, now lives.

I knew about Captain Meaburn Staniland, the commander of Boston's pre-war infantry Territorial company. He had taken the company to war in 1915 and was killed later in the year. I have seen his grave in Dranoutre, a village seven miles south-west of Ypres. William Kent was a lance corporal in the company; my uncle, my mother's eldest brother, was one of the company's sergeants. Lindenhoek, however, I did not recognize, despite having visited the Ypres area many times. I thought Lindenhoek might be the pre-war Belgian name for Sanctuary Wood close to where Captain Staniland was killed; modern maps show a farm named Lindenhof near the southern end of the wood. An enquiry to the helpful Ieper Tourist Office brought a correction. Lindenhoek was, and still is, a small place more than nine miles away by road from Sanctuary Wood. It is just east of Mont Kemmel and just south of Kemmel village. Linden lime tree is an easy translation; hoek, according to the Tourist Office, means corner in Flemish a small area, a hamlet, mostly located at crossroads. There are many place names in Flanders ending in hoek.

Dranoutre, where Captain Staniland is buried, is a mile and a half further on from Lindenhoek. Why had his body been brought so far from where he died? Why had Lance Corporal Kent gone to Lindenhoek to meet the body? Why had that meeting made such a deep impression on him that he later named his new house after that little corner of Belgium?

Finding the answers to those questions led me to research of a most interesting nature. Initially, it was just a personal project, but it developed in ever increasing circles until I found that what I was really studying was the experiences of a whole Territorial division in its first year of the war six months of preparation in England, six months at the front in Belgium. Those six months in Belgium April to September 1915 would split neatly into two halves on different sectors. They would also encompass exactly the front line service of my uncle. Pen and Sword Books thought that the subject could be turned into a book. It will not be a work of sweeping military history or a description of a great battle; I retired from such writing ten years ago. Critics may call it a hybrid book and they will be partially correct. It is part family history, part local history, particularly for Boston and Lincolnshire, but also in lesser degree for the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire which sent their Territorials off to fight with the Lincolns in 1914. It is also a modest contribution to military history. Not many books describe in detail a prolonged period of the simple trench-holding duty that occupied the majority of the time for soldiers on the Western Front in the First World. This is told here mainly through the experiences of one battalion the 4th Lincolns but these were typical of the introduction to war of all of the North Midland battalions. Finally, there are descriptions of cemeteries in areas not on the popular battlefield touring routes which may interest enthusiasts of that activity.

I am pleased to have been able to study part of that year of 1915. It was not a popular one in which to die. To have a relative killed at Mons, Le Cateau or on the Marne or Aisne in 1914 has rarity value. The Somme and Passchendaele in 1916 and 1917 are the celebrity battles. The last year, 1918, with its massive offensives and sweeping advances of both sides, was the year of the conscript and of confusion. A grandfather killed at Neuve-Chapelle, Festubert or Loos in 1915 may arouse a flicker of interest, but to die at Peckham Corner or Armagh Wood in that year does not attract much attention. However that man is just as dead and the manner of his passing is just as worthy of remembrance.

That is one purpose of my telling the story of Lance Corporal Kent and Captain Staniland.

The Territorial Force (later the Territorial Army) was only six years old when war broke out in August 1914. The Haldane Reforms of the Army in 1908 had brought the long established Volunteers more closely into the county regiment system and given them a new name. But the role for these part-time soldiers remained the same; if the Regulars had to go overseas in time of war, the Territorial Force was to be deployed on Home Defence.

Lincolnshire had possessed two Volunteer battalions. The 2nd Volunteers, covering the southern part of this large county, became the 4th Battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment the 4th Lincolns for short. The battalion was part of a fully Territorial division organized entirely on Regular Army lines. The 4th Lincolns formed a brigade with the 5th Lincolns, from the north of the county, and the 4th and 5th Leicesters. A second brigade was formed from two battalions each from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire which had a combined county regiment known as the Sherwood Foresters. The third brigade was made up of two battalions each of the South and the North Staffordshires. The division's artillery, engineer and other support units were also provided by Territorials from throughout the region. The whole formed the North Midland Division, one of fourteen such Territorial infantry divisions created by Haldane in 1908.