The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy. Charlie Connelly

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СКАЧАТЬ the 10th Queen’s (Royal West Surrey). Descended from a long line of Sussex agricultural labourers, William bucked the family trend when he left school at fourteen to be apprentice to a painter named Fisher, who employed him to assist in the painting of brewery vans in red, black and gold-leaf livery. It wasn’t long before the war impacted on William, too.

      ‘He was a very nice man indeed,’ recalled Dann of Fisher. ‘But as a reservist in the Royal Marines he was called up almost immediately, and we heard he was killed about three months later.’

      Like George, all the talk around him was of the war. The army had sergeants walking around Brighton stopping men apparently of military age and asking them pointedly why they hadn’t joined up. One day in 1916 one of them stopped William and, despite being barely seventeen, he decided to go and enlist.

      ‘I was at lunch on this particular day and thought, I suppose I’d better go and join the army, then,’ he remembered. ‘So I went to the drill hall in Church Street in Brighton, queued up past the sergeant and the policeman on the door and eventually came around to the officers and the sergeant at the recruiting desk. They said, “How old are you?” I said, “Seventeen.” “Ooh, no,” they said, “that won’t do; come back when you’re nineteen.” As I was going out, the sergeant on the door said, “What? You back already?” I said, “It’s no good. They won’t take me.” He asked why and I said, “I told them my age, seventeen.” He looked from side to side, lowered his voice and said, “Well, go and join the queue again and when you get to the front again just say you’re nineteen.” So that’s what I did. Next thing I was sent along to the barracks in Lewes Road for a fitness examination. I came out with an A1 and I was in the army.’

      In West Yorkshire, Horace Calvert was another young working-class boy like Edward trying to make his way in the world. Horace was born in September 1899 in Manningham, Bradford, to a father who worked as an assistant to Horace’s grandfather at an ironmongery business on Carlisle Road. Horace was one of six children, four girls and two boys.

      ‘It was just the usual everyday life of that time,’ said Horace of his childhood. ‘I started going out delivering papers and running errands at the age of nine or ten, anything to get some extra money because there were eight of us in the family and money was tight.’

      The Calverts lived in a typical northern working-class back-to-back house. It had a parlour, cellar, kitchen, two bedrooms and an attic pressed into service as a bedroom. There was no hot water, the lighting was gas powered and the toilet was outside, but Horace certainly didn’t feel he had a deprived upbringing.

      ‘There was plenty to eat because it was drilled into me by my mother to always make sure you had a roof over your head, warmth in the house and food on the table,’ Horace said. ‘I don’t know how she did it but we had meat every Sunday, which lasted till Monday. We managed all right. Clothing was patched hand-me-downs but on Sunday you were always well turned out as far as possible.’

      Like his siblings, Horace was sent to Drummond Road School, where he received a basic education that was fairly typical of the times: ‘It was a big school and we were well looked after by the teachers, who were very nice. I learned the three Rs, a little history and we were given talks about behaviour after school hours. We had a concert once a year for the parents.’

      At the age of twelve the need to bring some money into the household meant that Horace stopped going to school full time and took a part-time job at Field’s Mill in the spinning department. He’d start at 7 a.m., finish at midday, go home for lunch and then spend the afternoon at school. All his wages went into the household, other than the sixpence he was given every Saturday.

      ‘I’d buy little toys, pea-shooters, catapults, a bow and arrow,’ he recalled. ‘I had plenty of mates and five or six of us would all go to the local park, but you had to be back for bed by 9 o’clock.’

      At fourteen Horace went to work full time in a small engineering shop on Richmond Road in Bradford. His father had wanted Horace to learn a trade and wasn’t keen on him staying on at the mill doing simple manual work as a full-time occupation.

      ‘The first thing I had to do when I got there in the morning was turn on the gas engine. I didn’t like doing that. Then I used to go to a place called Slingsby’s, where they made handcarts for warehouses. I had to go and collect the wheels, put them on the boring machine and bore them out ready for fitting on the axle and deliver them back to the firm. Also, I had to take out all the filings from the lathes which were then sold as scrap. I kept the floor clean and would go and watch a chap working the machine to see how it was done: it was a good place for training but after twelve months of this I didn’t like it any more. I think it was the dirt and the noise and the running about you had to do. Also, I was on 7 shillings a week; the average wage for a skilled engineer was about 23 shillings.’

      Horace, like his contemporaries Edward, George and William, was fifteen when the war broke out, and he remembered it vividly.

      ‘My father told me there could be trouble among nations because we were being warned in the Telegraph and the Argus about what was happening with Germany,’ he said. ‘The territorials were actively recruiting even before the war broke out so the authorities must have been expecting something. I was interested in the military because we had a quartermaster sergeant in the territorials living near us and I would see him in his scarlet uniform. Also, our headmaster at school, Lodge was his name, was a sergeant in the TA. In addition, I had a friend whose father was in the artillery, so there was always a little link between me and the military. Believe it or not, in those days before the war if people joined the army you thought they either didn’t want to work or they’d got a girl into trouble.’

      On 4 August, Horace was up early and on his way to work as usual. When he reached the top of Richmond Road he saw a billboard outside the newsagent announcing in stark black letters ‘WAR DECLARED ON GERMANY’.

      ‘Even on that day the military was stopping all the horse-drawn vehicles and examining the horses before taking some of them away,’ he said. ‘People welcomed the war in the sense that a challenge had been thrown down over Belgium and they were eager to take up that challenge. That first evening a crowd gathered outside the Belle Vue Barracks and they were cheering every time one of the territorials came out. People were singing ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and all the old favourites outside the barracks. I got so carried away with it all that I stayed there till half-past ten, and I was supposed to be home at nine.’

      There hadn’t been scenes like it since Bradford City brought home the FA Cup in 1911. In those early days of the fledgling war, when everything seemed so glamorous and easy, Horace watched the men queuing at the recruitment office at the ice rink near his home on Manningham Lane and was already thinking of joining them. The Bradford Pals had just formed, the rink was their headquarters and Horace liked what he saw (2,000 of the Bradford Pals, incidentally, would be at the Somme and 1,770 of them would be killed or wounded on the first day). Bradford was on a war footing and Horace was up for the fight. Every night when he finished work he’d go to the nearby barracks and glean the latest information from the sentries about the war and all the new recruits until he could contain himself no longer.

      ‘I was fifteen when I decided to join up. One morning instead of going to work I left my working clothes in the scullery head, went out in my better clothing, walked into the barracks, lined up, the doctor looked at me, I received the King’s Shilling and that was it, all done inside an hour. They never questioned my age – I just said I was eighteen and that was it. I looked at it as a big adventure: I’d read all the stories in the Wide World magazines in the library and it made me want an adventurous life, so I thought this might be more exciting than the alternatives. Otherwise life was just work and a penny to go in the bioscope at the fairground every now and then. I wanted more than that.’

      Horace’s СКАЧАТЬ