It must be twenty years ago now. My parents were in their mid-seventies so I took them holiday to France for a week while they were still healthy and mobile enough to do so. I rented a gite in St Valery-sur-Somme, a picturesque fishing village at the mouth of the Somme estuary. The town’s chief claim to fame is a tower where Joan of Arc was briefly imprisoned en route to meet her fate at Rouen.
My father and I shared an interest in history so I took my parents one day to the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval which commemorates over 72,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died there that have no known grave. The wind moaned as it blew through the gap and my father quite casually announced that his grandfather had fought at the Somme. It was the first time I had ever heard him mention it. I thought it must have been a common enough story for a Shankill Road man, joining Carson’s UVF and then the 36th (Ulster) Division and from there to the Somme and thought little more about it for several years until I joined an ancestry site and through it, was able to find my Great Grandfather’s attestation form. William Thompson signed up on 16th August 1914, twelve days after the UK declared war on Germany. He had three young children so it cannot be a decision he took lightly. I was able to learn his service number and that he was in the army reserve, had already served in the Royal Irish Rifles and had been ‘discharged free’. The form indicated he had been allocated to 3rd Battalion of the Royal Irish Rifles or 3 RIR in military short-hand. I now had another lead but a little information in genealogy can be a dangerous thing unless it is backed up with something else. I looked up the history of 3rd RIR on the web and saw that it was a reserve unit and the only action it saw was in the Easter Rising when elements of it were rushed to Dublin to help put down the rebellion; that I thought, at least would be an unusual story.
While my knowledge of the First World War was decent it was at a macro level. I knew the names of the statesmen, the battles, how it started, etc. but not the intricacies of the administration of the British army. A friend who is a tour guide in the Somme area suggested I search for a medal record and what I found surprised me. William Thompson had been awarded a 1914 Star with a qualification date of 14 October 1914. This was stunning. The medal was awarded to those who served in France or Belgium between 5th August and 22nd November 1914 and it meant two things:
- He must have been one of the first group of reinforcements to arrive with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France.
- He could not possibly have been in the 36th Ulster Division as it did not arrive in France until early 1916.
The qualification date was an obvious clue and internet research showed that the only RIR battalion in France on 14 October 1914 was the 2nd, a regular army battalion that had a large proportion of Catholics if not a majority; the same could be said of its sister battalion, 1 RIR, and these regular army battalions were quite different in their make-up from the UVF based battalions that made up the 36th Division in its original incarnation.
This was as much as I knew for a few years until I found the remainder of his military file. This was like striking gold as most records were destroyed in the Blitz. From the record, and in consultation with James W Taylor’s excellent histories of 1 and 2 RIR, I was able to compile a story of his war service.
The first thing to mention was that he was not in fact in 2 RIR, but rather 1 RIR. That caused me some confusion as his qualification date of 14 October was before 1 RIR even arrived in England before going to France on 5th November 1914. It is something I have not been able to reconcile as his service record clearly says he was ‘posted’ to 1 RIR on 13 October. There is a suggestion he qualified for the medal whenever it was ordered to go to the Western Front, perhaps someone with a better knowledge will be able to explain it.
Within the record, there is a letter from my Great Grandmother addressed to, ‘1st Batt RIR, A Company Transport, British Expeditionary Force France’. The letter is useful in that it told me he was attached to the transport detail of A Company at the time the letter was written. As far as I can ascertain, the company transport personnel carried ammunition and food to the front-line trenches and carried casualties to the rear. Most army transport during the First World War involved horses and his occupation of ‘carter’, meant he would have been familiar with horse drawn transport, a skill useful in the army at that time. There is also the possibility he was in ‘transport’ while recovering from wounds. Unfortunately, the letter is not dated and Agnes Thompson gives her address merely as 15 Huss Street, Shankill Road.
‘Dear Sir,
I have received word from you that my husband was wounded on the 10th of march (sic) and I received a letter from him today 11th march just before I got your letter would you kindly write and let me know whether this is a mistake or not and oblidge (sic)
Mrs Thompson’
A note on the reverse of the letter simply said, ‘There is no mistake on this casualty.’
Unfortunately the post mark is illegible and there is no other record of this wound but the letter confirms he was wounded, most likely on 10th March 1915 the first day of the battle of Neuve Chapelle, a day when 1 RIR suffered heavy casualties. As the wound is mentioned nowhere else in the record, I concluded it was a slight one, not requiring evacuation.
William must have been a steady enough soldier to be promoted to lance corporal on 8th April 1916 but the promotion was a brief one. He was reverted to rifleman less than a month later on 2nd May for ‘absence’. One can reasonably assume he was no leader of men but examination of the next page of the record, his ‘military history’ sheet has next to the heading ‘Wounded’, the words:
‘Shell Shock 11/4/16’.
His absence and shell shock may well have been linked. Taylor wrote:
‘At 6:55pm on the 11th (April 1916), the Germans laid down a very heavy bombardment from guns and howitzers of all calibres and trench mortars. This lasted for almost eighty minutes and included a heavy gas attack. It was mostly directed on 1st RIR’s reserve, communication and front lines but also on the battalions on their right and left.’
The next event recorded is a shrapnel wound to the shoulder on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1st July 1916. He was evacuated to a hospital in Kent three days later and then to 3 RIR based in Belfast on 15 August 1916. I am sure he had some long-overdue home leave as his second daughter, Margaret was born the following May.
It was during his stay in Belfast I made the most disturbing discovery of the record. On 1st September 1916 he was ‘absent from tattoo until apprehended by the Civil Power (Royal Irish Constabulary) at Belfast on 4.9.1916 whilst under orders for active service’.
This infringement was basically failing to return to the barracks at night. Given that William lived perhaps a mile away from Victoria Barracks the temptation to pop home must have been strong. He was docked four days pays which coincided with his absence and sentenced to Field Punishment No 2 for 28 days. I looked up what Field Punishment No 2 was and was horrified to find the soldier was kept in iron shackles, either handcuffs or fetters, and the soldier had to do hard labour or menial and exhausting work while chained. I felt angry. The punishment was barbaric even in the context of the time and it was abolished in 1923. It is difficult to explain how emotional one can get over the misfortune of an ancestor one never knew. I am sure others who have researched their family journey have encountered similar feelings.
William returned to his unit on 21 December 1916. He did eventually end up in the 36th (Ulster) Division when his battalion was transferred to it at the beginning of 1918 as there were not enough fresh volunteers to fill its depleted ranks. 1 RIR’s Catholic chaplain Fr Gill wrote:
‘We were to be transferred to the 36th (Ulster) Division. This news came as a surprise and disagreeable shock to almost everyone in the Battalion… The prospect of a change into a political division was not pleasant… there were not many Catholics in the other battalions except the 1st RIR.
However, after the change had occurred Fr Gill noted:
‘Out of the nine battalions for sometime before March 21st (1918) no less than five were old regular battalions which had no sort of sympathy whatever with the religious or political aims of the original Ulster division… A census of religions at this time showed that in the Ulster Division, at the time of the German advance (March 1918) there were between 3,000 and 4,000 Catholics. When this division came from Ireland their boast was that there was not a single RC in their ranks.’
Today, the Battle of Messines in June 1917 is rightfully commemorated as an occasion when Irish Protestants and Catholics, in the 36th and 16th Divisions fought together rather than against each other, but Fr Gill tells us this was already happening within the ranks of the Ulster Division itself, almost certainly even within its battalions.
William remained in 1 RIR until after the end of the war. Due to his length of wartime service, he was one of the first group to be discharged and returned home in March 1919.
He did no great deeds I am aware of, received no awards or honours other than the ones due to him for simply being there, but that was no small thing. He was wounded on at least three occasions and was present for many of the war’s great events, the Christmas Truce of 1914, the battles of Neuve Chapelle, the Somme, Passchendaele and the German offensive of 1918. He survived almost the entire war on the Western Front and must have been one of only a very few who had the good fortune to do so.
With survival, his good luck ended. My Great Grandmother died within a few years of him returning home and he died on 3 June 1941, at the age of 52 of myocardial degeneration due to chronic bronchitis. In layman’s terms his heart gave out. His death came a few weeks after the Belfast Blitz. Doubtless the crash of high explosives must have brought back unwelcome terrors and months in cold, wet trenches and being gassed must have had a negative impact on his health. Near the end he must have wondered had it all been in vain. His middle son Thomas had been chased out of France at Dunkirk as part of another BEF and the war situation at the time of death was very bleak. His youngest son, Samuel, whose name I bear, landed in France by glider on D-Day, 6th June 1944 and was killed in the Rhine crossing on 24 March 1945, around six weeks before the end of Second World War.
William’s story is one of the untold millions of ordinary working-class people whose lives are lost to us. What survives is family folklore and fragments of scattered papers. I’m glad I found out what I did. The courage and dutifulness of my recent ancestors does not make me a better man as they are their achievements I cannot claim, but they do make me feel grateful my generation did not have to bear a similar burden.
Sam Thompson is an occasional blogger, writer and historian, his latest book is ‘The Lesser Evil: A Political & Military History of World War II 1937-45‘.
You can find him on Twitter at: @JarrieSam
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