Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War (3 page)

Harry’s wife, born Ethel Watson, was a local Ilkeston girl, the daughter of a plumber. They married in March 1914 in a civil ceremony in the register office in Basford, a suburb of
Nottingham. As has been said, Harry’s occupation was recorded as ‘lacemaker’, while Ethel was simply listed as ‘spinster’. Their wedding took place some five months
before the outbreak of war, a war about which Ethel never wanted to speak after Harry’s return from the front. She died in 1964, when I was in my teens. I remember her as a kindly,
no-nonsense woman who made an amazingly creamy mashed potato.

William Lamin (Willie), my father, was born to Harry and Ethel in March 1916, two years after they had wed and almost a year before Harry joined up to fight. He grew up in Ilkeston and was a
noted soloist, first as a boy soprano and then as a tenor, in the church choir for an astonishing seventy-five years. He became a successful textile salesman, and had a brush with the military in
the Second World War, apparently missing being shipped to Singapore, and almost certain capture or death, by minutes. His transfer to the Army Physical Training (APT) Corps in Aldershot came
through as he was on parade, ready to embark with the rest of his unit for Singapore. He was fortunate to spend the duration of the war as a PT instructor, remaining in England, for in February
1942, shortly after his draft arrived in Singapore, the allegedly impregnable fortress island fell to the Japanese, so completing their lightning conquest of Malaya.

There was another son, Arthur, born in 1914. I have a baptismal certificate from the parish church in Ilkeston. No one alive can recall any mention of Arthur, and I assumed that he died in
infancy. After a helpful reader identified the record of his death I was able to confirm that he did indeed die as an infant.

Willie (now known as Bill) is, as I write, still alive at ninety-three and living in a nursing home in Derbyshire. Harry frequently mentions Willie in his letters, underlining what a terrible
wrench it must have been to leave behind a baby son to go to the privations and horrors of the war.

Willie knew Jack – his Uncle John – quite well, and always refers to him in a respectful manner. Jack was considered to be one of the successful members of the family, and officiated
at Willie’s wedding to Nancy Elizabeth Satterthwaite in 1941.

Sarah Anne disappeared from the family records quite early on in my researches, and I had assumed that she had died, like her sister, Mary Esther. I later discovered, however, that Annie (as
Harry refers to her in his letters) also had an illegitimate child, named George. He too served in the First World War and at some time afterwards emigrated to Australia. Annie later married
– Harry’s letters make several references to her wedding – and lived to a ripe old age. I have now realized that she was my own ‘Auntie’ Annie whom I sometimes spent
days with as a toddler in Ilkeston. I can just remember her death in 1953, aged seventy-nine, when I was five.

These then are the main characters in Harry Lamin’s world, names that occur again and again in his letters. It is now time to turn to the man himself.

CHAPTER 2

PREPARING FOR WAR, FEBRUARY – MAY 1917

H
ARRY
, E
THEL AND THEIR
nine-month-old son Willie received a Christmas message from the War Office in late December 1916. At
twenty-nine and not in a reserved occupation (that is, a job considered vital to the war effort; those in reserved occupations were exempted from military service), Harry must have known that
conscription was inevitable and imminent. The call-up papers would not have come as a surprise to him, although married men were not obliged to be called up until May 1916. By then, after more than
two years of war and hundreds of thousands of casualties, the Army was facing a manpower shortage, for the flood of volunteers had all but dried up.

Harry duly enlisted on 28 December 1916. He would have been given a rail warrant to take him to Rugeley Camp, on the eastern edge of Cannock Chase, in Staffordshire, where he was to commence his
basic training, prior to selecting, or being assigned to, a regiment or corps.

The extent and scale of that camp needs to be appreciated. A contemporary map shows around five hundred huts, eighteen parade grounds, a hospital and the railway branch line which connected the
camp to the main line. With around twenty-five soldiers to a hut, the camp would have had a capacity of 12,500 men. That seems an enormous figure, until we realize that, not quite six months
earlier, more than that number of British troops had been killed before breakfast on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916. Many units would still have been short of men, even by
December; some battalions had been shelled and machine-gunned virtually out of existence. In extreme cases they had been disbanded, and their remaining officers and other ranks assigned to other
units. Rugeley Camp was there to satisfy the endless need for fresh replacements.

Harry would have travelled to Rugeley by train. Because the whole of the East Midlands was heavily industrialized, there was a concentration of railways, run by separate, private companies. As a
result, there would have been an almost endless number of ways by which Harry could have travelled from his home to Rugeley. There were three railway stations in Ilkeston alone, one within a few
hundred yards of his home, and two in Rugeley, with branch line that served the Army camp running about two miles (just over 3km) outside the town. Harry would have arrived, with a trainload of
other conscripts, most unsure of what he was to face.

The camp was effectively a production line for soldiers. On arrival, Harry would have had his details checked, undergone a medical inspection and been kitted out, and would then have put on his
new uniform for a squad photograph. Then he would have started basic training, which consisted of much ‘square bashing’ (eighteen parade grounds!) and physical training (PT). The
general form would be recognized by any soldier who has joined up in the last ninety years. There would also have been classes in aspects of military training, and, for some conscripts, in even
more basic education.

Amazingly, Harry’s squad photograph from Rugeley has survived, although I was not aware of its existence until the summer of 2007, a year after the Internet version of this account was
started. The picture turned up in a box of miscellaneous items at my sister Anita’s home. There are two versions now: the original print, faded, much battered and creased after ninety years
of obscurity and neglect, and a second version that has been subjected to modern computer technology to ‘clean up’ the image and remove the worst signs of wear and tear (the photo had
obviously been folded up quite small at one point).

Harry, who is at the right-hand end the front row (see below), has his belt on upside down (or, just possibly, all the other conscripts have their belts upside down). This confirms that he
must have only recently received his uniform and kit, for a few parades would have made sure that he got the belt right, drill sergeants being what they are. After my own, very limited, military
training, there is still no way, forty years on, that I can wear any belt with the buckle on the right. It just feels wrong.

The photograph also shows the considerable range of ages among the squad. Harry, at twenty-nine, certainly doesn’t look the oldest. One of the recruits has a wristwatch, a relatively new
kind of timepiece that was much more useful in a trench than a pocket watch, but which would have been quite an expensive item for a private soldier. On first seeing the photograph I wondered
whether the building with the stained-glass window in the background might still exist, but a quick look at satellite images on the Internet showed that today, there is hardly a trace of the
original camp at Rugeley left. A recent newspaper article described how a replica of an original wooden hut had just been installed there as a museum piece.

Harry would not have been at the camp for much more than a month when, on Wednesday, 7 February 1917, he wrote the first of his war letters to have survived, to his sister Kate.