The Lost Tommies. Ross Coulthart

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      PLATE 127 Two of the highest-ranking officers identified in the Thuillier collection: 9th Battalion York and Lancaster commander Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Addison (left) poses with his second-in-command Major Harry Lewis (right) at Vignacourt in late March 1916. On the following 1 July, both men elected to lead their men into battle on the first day of the Somme – and both would die, within three months of this photograph being taken.

      ‘Going in with the lads’

      By the time the photograph above was taken, these two high-ranking officers of the 9th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment had been through more than eighteen months on the Western Front, including the Battle of Loos in late September 1915. For months since the disastrous British losses at Loos, the battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Addison, and his second-in-command, Major Harry Lewis, had pushed their men – most of them Yorkshire miners – extremely hard in training near the French town of Saint-Omer, preparing them for an assault somewhere on the entrenched German front lines that they knew was soon to come. Both officers finally learned the attack would be on the Somme when, in January 1916, their 9th York and Lancaster Battalion was deployed 100 kilometres south from Saint-Omer to Vignacourt. We know this photograph was taken sometime in late March 1916, in the final weeks of their time there – and, sadly, we also now know it to be the final months of both their lives.

      It is wonderful to be able to identify these two dignified-looking senior officers because their faces and story might so easily have been lost in the fog of war; and they are two of the highest-ranking officers identified up to now in the Thuillier images. For within a few months of their photographs being taken by the Thuilliers, Lieutenant Colonel Addison and Major Lewis would be two of the thousand or so British officers who would die ‘on the German wire’ on the very first day of the Somme. We only know who they are because, over half a century later, in February 1970, an elderly gentleman by the name of Philip Brocklesby, who had been a lieutenant in the 13th York and Lancasters, and was clearly a chum of Addison and Lewis, took the trouble to remember both men because, he lamented, so little was told of their steadfastness and courage in the regiment’s official history. He sent his story and a faded print of the Thuillier image to the regimental journal’s editors.

      Brocklesby had been an orderly room clerk private with the 9th from May to November 1915, no doubt winning a commission after Loos, but he wrote of the warm affection and regard in which all the men of the 9th held both Addison and Lewis. Of Colonel Addison he quoted one soldier describing him as a ‘pleasant, quiet, Regular officer recalled from half-pay, not a dynamic man but a responsible soldier with right principles about training troops’.¹