The Family members who served in the
First World War
The story of the many soldiers from
the family who took up arms in the First World War
83795
Private Alfred Farndale, served 1915 to 1920 at Ypres and then in Mesopotamia
and India
Alfred
enlisted into 88th Training
Reserve Battalion at Northallerton on
13 December 1915 and joined the East Yorkshire Regiment in 1916, but then
volunteered for the Machine-Gun Corps and served on the front line with 239th
Company at Ypres in France until mid 1917 when he
went to Mesopotamia and served in action there until the end of the war. He
served in France, Iraq and India. He saw service with the colours from 6
December 1916 to 18 March 1920, three years and three months.
He later
recalled, the war came in 1914 and I was just 17. I wanted to join up so I
ran away and joined up at the local recruiting office at Northallerton, somewhere in South Parade
I think. I joined the West Yorks but my father found out and said I was under
age, which I was. The CO wanted me to stay on the band, but father wouldn't
hear of it and I came out. I remember being very proud of my first leave in
uniform. Then one day they called for volunteers for the Machine-Gun Corps and
I stepped forward. We went to Belton Park, near Grantham for training. I joined
239th Company MGC and we were attached to the Middlesex Regiment.
Machine
Gun Corps at Belton Park, Grantham in 1917
In 1917
we sailed for Calais and went to "Dickiebush"
Camp. A MGC
Transferral Oder showed him proceeding to the British Expeditionary Force in
France on 12 July 1917. He embarked at Southampton on 13 July and disembarked
at Le Havre on 17 July 1917, part of 239th Company MGC BEF 13 July 1917. His Medical
History Record showed he was 5 ft 6 ¼ inches height and 133 lbs. We were
first in action at Westbrook and Polygon Wood. He saw service with the BEF
for a three month period from 13 July to 13 October 1917.
The Battle
of Pilckem Ridge (31 July – 2 August 1917) was the
opening attack of the Third Battle of Ypres in the First World War. In follow
on operations by 4 August 1917, the Gheluvelt Plateau
was a sea of mud, flooded shell craters, fallen trees and barbed wire. Troops
were quickly tired by rain, mud, massed artillery bombardments and lack of food
and water; rapid relief of units spread the exhaustion through all the
infantry, despite fresh divisions taking over. The Fifth Army bombarded the
German defences from Polygon Wood to Langemarck
but the German guns concentrated their fire on the Plateau. Low cloud and rain
grounded British artillery-observation aircraft and many shells were wasted.
The 25th Division, 18th (Eastern) Division and the German 54th Division had
taken over by 4 August but the German 52nd Reserve Division was left in line;
by zero hour on 10 August, both sides were exhausted. Some troops of the 18th
(Eastern) Division quickly reached their objectives but German artillery
isolated those around Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood. German counter-attacks recaptured the Copse and all but the north-west corner of Glencorse Wood by nightfall. The 25th Division on the left
reached its objectives by 5:30 a.m. and rushed the Germans in Westhoek.
Both sides suffered many casualties during artillery bombardments and German
counter-attacks
Ypres,
France, 1917 (Alfred centre, rear)
I
remember an incident on the Menin Road galloping up with two limbers of
ammunition towards the gun positions at Hooge. I was a Private but I was giving
a lift to Quarter Master Sergeant Zaccarelli. The Germans started to shell us.
They could clearly see us. I had one horse killed and I managed to cut him free
and I then rode the other. Zaccarelli was killed; it was quite a party when I
reported it. My Captain asked if there were any witnesses but there were none,
otherwise I might have got something. I remember an officer coming up to me
when we were under bombardment at Ypres and saying "How would you like to
be in Saltburn now,
Farndale?" We saw some action at Zonnebeke, Ploegstraat and Arras.
Then
suddenly we were ordered to Marseilles and got on a troopship for Basra in Mesopotamia.
He then saw service
overseas Iraq and India from 14 October 1917 to 9 January 1920, a period of
two years and three months. His later
service was recorded with 239 Company in Mesopotamia. After
about 14 days we were in the Suez Canal and then the Red Sea. We landed at
Basra and marched to Kut-el-Amara
as part of a force under General Maud to relieve Townsend. About the middle of
1918 the Turks surrendered. We hung around for quite a while. I cut my thumb on
a bully beef tin and it got poisoned. I was in hospital in Kut
when 239th Company left for England. There is a
record of an accidental injury and in a separate statement, he wrote While
opening a tin of canned beef on 2 February 1919 at Baiju Station with Jack
Knife, the knife slipped and cut my right thumb. A Farndale.
Alfred in
Mesopotamia 1917 to 1918, a corporal and a sergeant
I
eventually got to Mosul where I thought my unit was and met my platoon
commander Lieutenant Pearson. He asked me where I had been and put me in charge
of the officers mess. We had some Punjabi officers at the time and they used to
knock me up to try to get whiskey! Later in 1918 we were ordered to Bombay. He was posted to 18th Indian
Divisional Battalion 10 January 1919 and to 17th Indian Divisional Battalion 10
January 1920. I remember I had to
take my stripes down on the troopship. We were sent up to the Afghan frontier
for a while and we had quite a lot of trouble in the local bazaars.
Eventually
in early 1919 I think, we got a troopship to England. We landed at Southampton.
I remember we were told that we could keep our greatcoats or take £1 when we
were demobbed on Salisbury Plain. I took the £1! I remember arriving at Middlesbrough station very late at night
and sleeping on the platform. I got the first train next day to Guisborough and actually arrived at Tidkinhow before they were up! This would
be in 1919. I know that I was clear of the army by the start of 1920. I wish I
had stayed in. I really did like the army life. But I had to come out.
Alfred transferred
to Class Z Army Reserve on demobilisation on 19 March 1920 and was discharged on
31 March 1920 on General Demobilisation. His Identify
Certificate was issued on his dispersal on 20 February 1920. His address
for pay was Tidkinhow, Boosbeck.
His (most recent) theatre of War was recorded at Mesopotamia. The place
for rejoining in case of emergency was Clipstone. He
was granted 28 days furlough from the stamp date. The standard
form completed by all soldiers regarding any disability, showed that he had
none at the time of his discharge. He was awarded the British War Medal, issued
17 March 1922 and the Victory Medal, issued 17 March 1922.
His
grandson, Nigel Farndale, later wrote of his military career. For my
grandfather, Private Alfred Farndale, who died in the mud of Passchendaele, and
again seventy years later in his bed. In Farndale’s view, every man died in
that battle, even those who survived. For the dark, life-sapping shadow that
descended on them all snuffed out a vital spark. The battle raged for 100 days. More than half
a million Allied troops and a quarter of a million German were killed. The dead
would be buried under a deluge of soil only to be disinterred by the next
shell, and reburied by the next. In his novel, The Blasphemer, partly inspired
by young Alfred’s traumatic experiences, Farndale vividly brings to life the
horrors young men endured. As a boy, he had listened to his grandfather’s tales
of war as they worked together on the family farm near Leyburn. But the
silences were just as memorable: “He was an affable man but prone to dark mood
swings. There were long periods, maybe three weeks at a time, when he wouldn’t
talk. I had little doubt what lay behind it, having grown up listening to his
stories of life in the trenches. It deeply affected him,” he says.
Alfred’s
eldest son, Farndale’s uncle, went on to join the Army against his wishes and
rose to the rank of general. The fact that a former private’s son was able to
go on to claim the title General
Sir Martin Farndale, Commander-In- Chief of the British Army of the Rhine
is perhaps partly due to the social upheaval that followed the Great War.
Alfred’s beginnings were much more humble. He was the youngest of 12 children
and in a reserved occupation looking after the stock on his parents’ farm near Guisborough when, against their wishes, he
lied about his age at 17, signing up at the local Army recruitment office in
Northallerton. Despite being sent home because he was too young, he volunteered
again as soon as he was able. Alfred knew something of the realities of life on
the Front Line and would have been very aware of what he was letting himself in
for. “My grandfather had two older brothers fighting in the trenches and one
had been shot in the elbow. His distant relative George had been
killed at Arras in May 1917. There were widespread reports of the 20,000 men
killed and 40,000 injured on the first day of the Somme. It was quite a
frightening prospect.”
Alfred
certainly rose to the challenge. He was, undoubtedly, a hero, and an unsung one
at that. One of the stories he told his family, about a daring dash under fire
to deliver much needed ammunition to the Front Line, revealed an act of bravery
that had gone unnoticed in the chaos of battle. “My grandfather was haunted by
this incident,” says Farndale who, in 2007 visited the battlefield with his
father to mark the 90th anniversary of Passchendaele. “It was a moving
experience. When we came to the notorious spot known as Hellfire Corner, we
remembered the story he told us. He and Quartermaster Sergeant Zaccarelli had
been galloping up to the Front with an ammunition limber when the Germans
started to shell them. Zaccarelli was killed, along with a horse. My
grandfather managed to cut the dead horse free, drag Zaccarelli’s body into a
ditch and carry on up to the Front on one horse with his delivery of
ammunition. “It amounted to family legend because there were no witnesses or
dates, just this memorable surname. We came across a small British war cemetery
and there was the surname, only spelt slightly differently. Company
Quartermaster Sergeant John Zaccarelli died on August 28, 1917, a month into
the battle of Passchendaele. He was 27. “Until that moment we didn’t really
believe it had happened. He was a real person after all, not a myth, and when
we stood before his grave my father and I felt the hairs on the backs of our
necks rise. “It was so arbitrary; this man happened to die and my grandfather
happened to live. This meant my father had been given life, and so too had I.”
For
Farndale, visiting the site of the battlefield brought much of what his
grandfather had told him to life. He recalls Alfred explaining the complex
trench systems and the nicknames they used to describe them. As he stood there,
Farndale could even sense the smells his grandfather and comrades had to
endure… “an acrid combination of cordite, mustard, chlorine, sweat and
putrefying horseflesh,” he says. “He would tell me about the noise, which was
so loud, so deafening, it gave men mild concussion. They couldn’t even remember
their names, they weren’t able to count to three. During one particularly heavy
bombardment, his first commanding officer from the Yorkshire Regiment
recognised him. “I bet you’d rather be in Saltburn
now, Farndale’,” he said.
Alfred
talked a lot about the mud. “The drainage system on this reclaimed marshland
had been destroyed by shelling. It was a landscape of mud, one big bog. As well
as constantly dodging bullets, soldiers who slipped off the slippery duckboard
walkways, just 18 inches wide, were drowned in an orange sea of bubbling,
gas-poisoned mud. It was a death trap. “In winter on the farm, when we got
stuck in deep mud, he would say ‘This was like the dry bit in Passchendaele,
dry enough to sleep on’. We talked a lot. We would go round the stock together,
singing World War One songs. I don’t think I quite got the brutality of it when
I was young, but the War seemed very immediate to me.”
Inspired
by his grandfather’s story, Farndale, 47, did more in-depth research into the
experiences of young men in the First World War. In The Blasphemer, which takes
place partly in the present day and partly in the First World War, he explores
what happens when our courage is put to the test. “My generation didn’t have
the experience of war to test our courage. That is what I wanted to explore,”
he says. He read letters and diaries written by troops in the trenches, as well
as personal accounts written after the war. “Many of them left school at 14,
but they wrote such vivid descriptions, in such beautiful handwriting. The
letters, written by 17 and 18- year-olds, were very humbling. When the last of
the veterans died, our remaining link with that war was broken. All we have now
is empathy.”
“He was
among those British troops sent to India. He ended up in Iraq and Basra for a
short time. That saved his life,” says Farndale. When he returned to England,
aged 22, Alfred was offered the choice of taking £1 or keeping his greatcoat.
He took the pound. Other than that, he had nothing. With little work around, he
farmed for a while in Canada, before returning to Yorkshire. “Things had
changed. There wasn’t the same deference,” says Farndale. “He was working in a
field once when a local aristocrat, who had managed to avoid fighting in the
war, came along and told him to open the gate. He told him to ‘open it
yourself’.”
Alfred
and his wife Peggy went on to have four children and he died in 1987, just a
few weeks short of his 90th birthday. “As I said in my dedication, he did
survive Passchendaele. But he died then as well,”
or
Go Straight to Act 31 – The Soldiers