We Hope to Get Word Tomorrow: The Garvin Family Letters, 1914–1916

Second-Lieutenant R. G. Garvin (‘Ged’), aged nineteen, in the uniform of the 7th South Lancashire Regiment, April – June 1915

In remembrance of all those who died on the Somme, and all those who survived.

‘They were above all that was ever dreamed of,

uttermost courage, honour, truth to

something above self.’

(J. L. Garvin, The Observer, 22 July 1917)

We Hope to Get Word Tomorrow

This edition published in 2009 by Frontline Books, an imprint of Pen & Sword

Books Limited, 47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

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Copyright © Mark Pottle and John G. G. Ledingham, 2009 Foreword Copyright © Hew Strachan

The right of John G. G. Ledingham and Mark Pottle to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

EDITORIAL NOTE

Acknowledgements

OVERVIEWS OF THE BATTLE FRONTS

PROLOGUE

1 - TRAINING IN ENGLAND

2 - THE LYS FRONT

3 - WINTER IN THE TRENCHES

4 - NEW YEAR 1916

5 - TRAINING FOR THE SOMME

6 - THE SOMME OFFENSIVE

EPILOGUE

CHRONOLOGY

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

GLOSSARY - A Note on Military Usage: ‘Battalion, Brigade, Division’

A NOTE ON PLACES

A SUBALTERN’S FRONT-LINE READING

A SUBALTERN’S FRONT-LINE PROVISIONS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY AND NOTE ON SOURCES

INDEX

Also by

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece

Second-Lieutenant R. G. Garvin (‘Ged’), aged nineteen, in the uniform of the 7th South Lancashire Regiment, April – June 1915

Plates

Christina Garvin, photographed around the time of the First World War

J. L. Garvin, photographed by J. Benjamin Stone, 1909*

‘The editor of the Observer’ : J. L. Garvin, photographed by Hector Murchison around 1914*

Christina Garvin and her daughters, c.1913 – 14

A lesson at Westminster School, c. 1910†

The ‘Homeboarders’, Westminster School, c. 1913†

The Westminster representatives at the public schools sports competition at Aldershot in 1912

The ‘Homeboarders’, winners of the Westminster School Interhouse CCF Drill Competition, 1913†

The officers of the 7th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment, 1915‡

The first page and envelope of Christina Garvin’s last letter to her son, 20 July 1916*

The first page and envelope of J. L. Garvin’s penultimate letter to his son, 21 July 1916*

Ged’s last letter to his parents, 20 July 1916*

FOREWORD

A war is a rite of passage for all those who are caught up in it, but it is especially so for those who enter it as adolescents and then become adults. ‘Ged’ Garvin was in his last term at Westminster School and due to go up to Oxford when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Instead, at the age of eighteen, he took a commission in an infantry battalion. Two years later, now a captain and as such responsible for the lives of many others, ‘a sort of little father’ in the words of one the last letters he received from his own father, he was killed on the Somme. He was still too young to vote.

His story is sickeningly familiar; it evokes that of ‘the three musketeers’, the trio of friends who, like Ged, left school (in their case Uppingham) in 1914, postponed university to go off to the war, and did not come back. Those boys were immortalised by Vera Brittain in Testament of Youth, a book that has its charge for all sorts of reasons that reach beyond its evocation of time and place; it is after all a lament for lost love. We Hope to Get Word Tomorrow is also much more than another story of a literate subaltern, able to articulate what he saw and experienced. At its heart too is the lament for lost love, in this case not that between star-crossed lovers, but that between parents and son. Nor are they simply grieving Ged’s death in anticipation of the fact; they are also mourning the loss of the little boy who is growing to maturity thanks to the inevitability of time as much as through the accident of war.

Ged’s mother and father wrote to him as often as he wrote to them, and so their correspondence is the story of their relationship and its evolution under the strains of war. Ged’s parents tried to live normally, and to tell their son that his home continued its domestic routine, when they were living each day under enormous stress. That emotional intensity, even more than the war itself, is the dominant theme of their letters: their uncertainty as to where their son was, what he was doing and whether he was even alive, and his concern to reassure them. ‘Of course’, Ged’s father wrote to his son ten days before he was killed, ‘parents at home go through a thousand deaths.’

The image of the grieving mother is one perpetuated for us in countless war memorials. Christina’s letters, and her son’s replies, are both open in their love. She worries about his fitness and comforts, sublimating her maternalism by sending out food and equipment. He responds with warm endearments, and is anxious about her fragile health. What is really revealing in these letters is the manifestation of love between father and son. Ged’s father, J. L. Garvin, found words in his letters that might – like much affection between father and son – have remained otherwise unspoken face to face. As Ged was about to go overseas, his father could console himself knowing that he had made his feelings for his first-born clear enough. ‘Though a certain stoppage in all decent souls makes full speech impossible on things too dear and deep to be expressed between father and son (being menfolk and denied emotional relief),’ he wrote on 9 July 1915, ‘yet there never was in the world a son dearer to a father nor a better son.’

Within a year, although the mutual love was undimmed, the relationship between father and son had changed. Its epistolary nature meant that it could not be exclusive. Ged urged his father to share the more confidential aspects of his letters only with his mother, but both men knew that they also shared them with the censor. The quality and quantity of the postal services sustained by all the armies on the Western Front in the First World War is one reason why we have so much purchase on the experience of that war. But Ged, not least because, as an officer, he had to censor the letters of those under his command, knew that there were things that he could not tell his father, however insistent the latter’s quest for information. Two more obstacles came between them. The first was of course the war itself. Often Ged was simply too exhausted to write at all or to write much. Even when he had the energy, he confronted the challenge of what he should tell his parents of an experience that would only increase their anxieties.

Then there was the further challenge of finding the right words. Like others of their background and education, Ged and his father fell back on literature and history for their shared vocabulary. Ged read voraciously and his father supplied the books his son sought. More jarring than the contrast between the reality of war and the words of Meredith or Wordsworth, which both of them quoted, was the use of earlier forms of fighting as analogies for those of 1915 – 16. Garvin senior spoke of ‘trailing pikes’, a reference that presumably made sense to a son studying the campaigns of Turenne and himself ready to refer not only to the practices of seventeenth-century siege warfare but also to Henry V and Agincourt. Garvin junior kept alive his filial obligations by consulting his father on his drinking habits, wondering whether he was old enough to drink crème de menthe. His father reassured him that his parents had no right to ‘order your conduct now that you are passing through that last test of manhood’ . Nonetheless he could not resist also telling him that the principles to follow when drinking were ‘neither asceticism, nor indulgence, but controlled enjoyment’.

The gap between them was opening up as his son was indeed becoming a man, a process accelerated by the war but not initiated by it: ‘then the war came and you grew a man unawares’, Garvin senior wrote on 27 April 1916. Unable to serve in the army himself, J. L. Garvin felt ‘superannuated’ and ‘decrepit’. The normal balance between the generations was being inverted, with the younger suffering and dying at the front, and the older unsure how best to provide support. J. L. Garvin’s frustration, however deeply felt, had less reason than most. As one of the most influential newspaper editors of his age, who made the Observer a voice of formidable comment, he was close to the centre of events and had the power to help shape them. Garvin’s commentary on the policies of the day is important in its own right, not only because what he expressed to his son would find its way into print but also because he had the ear of many great men. A Unionist but an Irish Catholic, he was critical of the wartime administrations of H. H. Asquith – both Liberal and, after May 1915, coalition. Shilly-shallying over conscription and uncertainty over strategy were for him the hallmarks of Asquith’s premiership. Recent scholars have been kinder, arguing that Asquith kept a consensus going and eventually adopted the measures that Garvin wanted. But for Garvin himself the political heroes of the day were his friend, Winston Churchill, and Asquith’s eventual successor as Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

J. L. Garvin never wavered in his conviction that the war was just, and was accordingly determined that all the nation’s resources should be bent to its prosecution. Chief among these was manpower. He favoured national service and he recognised that the fight would be long and the losses consequently high. That was what his head told him was right, but it cannot have spared his heart when the news of one particular death did finally reach London.

Hew Strachan

Chichele Professor of the History of War

All Souls College, Oxford

EDITORIAL NOTE

In the early morning of Friday 21 July 1916 J. L. Garvin, editor of the Observer, awoke suddenly from his sleep and exclaimed to his startled wife Christina: ‘Good heavens, I haven’t written to Ged.’ He had been so busy the day before that he had forgotten to write to his son, who was about to go into battle on the Somme, and in a letter to Ged written later that day he described how the incident had amused Ged’s mother: ‘She feels under God that you will surely come back to her and will be guarded through the war: that is why she is bright to a degree that will do you good to think of.’ It was the penultimate letter that Garvin wrote to his son, who did not live to receive it.

Between September 1914, when he gained his commission, and his death on 23 July 1916, Roland Gerard Garvin (‘Ged’) wrote to his parents several times a week, and they responded with similar regularity. The majority of their letters has survived: some 340 letters from Ged, 190 from his father and 140 from his mother. Most of Ged’s letters from the front were written in pencil on small pieces of paper that came from a writing ‘block’ that he carried with him, protected from the elements in a leather wallet. He expected his parents to share his letters, and about three in every four were addressed to his mother, who replied less frequently than his father. On Sunday 16 July 1916, while his battalion was resting at an encampment about six miles from the battle front, Ged sent his parents’ letters home for safe keeping. He had made a realistic assessment of his chances of survival and wrote simply: ‘I’m getting straight again with various papers and arrangements . . . I’m lightening my kit. All the old letters from both of you are coming home – will you put them in my bureau.’ In his letter of Friday 21 July his father acknowledged their receipt:

Your returned letters came in a batch today. What a funny little lump they make: one would have thought there would be a pile of stuff big enough to relieve the paper famine. They shall all be preserved for you like the others and what a sifting you will have and what huge archives you will have accumulated at your age. Of course there’s no fresh letter from you and we didn’t expect it. But we hope, all the same, to get word tomorrow . . .

Ged’s letters, together with those of his parents, were kept by two generations of the Garvin family before being placed in the British Library in 2003. None of Ged’s parents’ letters from September to December 1914 have survived, and this period is covered in the Prologue with selected quotations from Ged’s letters alone. Chapter 1 thus begins in January 1915. As might be expected, there was a dramatic increase in the number of letters exchanged after Ged went to France on 17 July 1915. While he was training in England he saw his parents fairly regularly, but once at the front he had only two periods of leave, giving him sixteen days at home in a little over a year. Letters then became more important as the only link between people who had previously been accustomed to seeing each other every day. If one omits the days when he was on leave or in transit, or when he sent only a field card, Ged wrote to his parents and/ or they to him on almost nine out of every ten days from 23 July 1915 to 22 July 1916. Even given that letter writing was a skill so much better performed and so much more common then than it is now, it is still remarkable that they wrote as often, and so well, as they did.

The total number of words in the extant letters is just over 280,000, of which it has been possible to reproduce only about one quarter. This was a very difficult task and much remarkable and interesting material has had to be omitted. The largest cuts have been made in the letters of J. L. Garvin, who invariably wrote at great length, and some major themes of his have had to be left out almost completely. He had an encyclopedic knowledge, for instance, of the Eastern Front and would speculate on all manner of subjects related to the war as well as to literature, but this material adds little to our understanding of Ged, his relationship with his parents, or his experience of the war – the essential themes of this book. The complete collection of the letters is of undoubted historical value, but can only be a given a scholarly treatment elsewhere. The editors have sought to present a readable and illuminating narrative, and have tried not to be intrusive in their editing, but they have had to make some alterations to the punctuation, grammar and use of capitals. Cuts have been marked by a three-point ellipsis, and words that have been added to clarify the meaning are enclosed in square brackets. Spelling mistakes and errors in the dating of letters have been corrected. Where the location from which Ged wrote is the subject of a guess – as is often the case when he was moving between billets near the front – it appears in square brackets. For obvious reasons relatively few of his letters were written in a front-line trench, as opposed to a reserve trench or a billet close to the line.

Ged served first on the Lys front, August 1915 to May 1916, and then on the Somme front, May to July 1916, and there are five maps illustrating this. The first three, which follow directly after this Editorial Note, are large-scale overviews covering: (1) the Western Front 1914 – 16; (2) the Lys front in November 1915; and (3) the Somme front July – November 1916. There are in addition two detailed maps offering background to the night attack on the German line north of Bazentin-le-Petit, 22 – 23 July 1916, in which Ged died: both appear in the Epilogue, which offers a detailed account of the engagement in which Ged fell.

In an effort not to interrupt the flow of the correspondence the editors have made sparing use of footnotes and linking passages. These are applied only when the reader is likely to need additional information to understand the immediate context. There are, however, several appendices, including a Chronology, Biographical Notes and Glossary, which explain and amplify a number of features, some otherwise obscure, in the letters. The index cross-references between the text and the appendices.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to a number of people. Professor Jon Stallworthy introduced the two editors to one another and was encouraging in persuading JGGL that the project was worth pursuing. Richard Charkin and Alessandra Bastagli helped steer us to our publisher. William Frame and the team at the Manuscripts Department of the British Library gave unstinting and expert help with the Garvin archive, and we are equally grateful to Peter Robinson of the library’s imaging service, and to its picture researcher, Auste Mickunaite. Jonathan Young reworked our rough drawings of the battlefields that Ged experienced into five excellent maps. We also wish to thank Mark Warby, editor of the ‘Old Bill Newsletter’, for advising us about the late Captain Bruce Bairnsfather. Jane Davies, the curator of the Museum of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in Preston, and regimental secretaries Lieutenant-Colonel E. J. Downham, MBE, and Major Doug Farrington, have been a mine of information and encouragement – as has Eddie Smith, honorary archivist at Westminster School. Frank Blamey read the text and gave us good advice, and we were assisted also by J. L. Garvin’s granddaughter Patricia Wildblood and his godson, Mark Barrington Ward. Without the help and encouragement of John Wilson the letters might never have left JGGL’s attic, while Dr Michael Brock has expertly clarified a number of historical points for us. We are indebted to Professor Hew Strachan for a foreword that is full of insight, and we are grateful also to our families, who have given time, patience, advice and support. Finally, we thank our publishing team at Frontline Books, Michael Leventhal, Kate Baker and Deborah Hercun, from whom there has been such an enthusiastic welcome.

JGGL and MP

OVERVIEWS OF THE BATTLE FRONTS

PROLOGUE

The Volunteer

In July 1914 Roland Gerard Garvin – ‘Ged’ to his family – was eighteen years old, and approaching the end of his final term at Westminster School. Contrasting images of him emerge from this period. One is of a boisterous, confident schoolboy, tall and good-looking, who was to be found ‘climbing over the Abbey roof, plotting against masters’ and joining in ‘free fights in the house’.¹ The other is of a thoughtful, diffident young man, whose habitual reserve concealed emotional depth and many talents. Ged was an accomplished flautist and pianist, a fine linguist and a champion fencer. He read avidly, in French and German as well as in English, and was awarded the Goodenough Medal for languages at Westminster. In his final year at school he won a history scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, and he was due to take his place at the university that October. The summer of 1914 marked a rite of passage from schoolboy to young man.

Ged’s father, James Louis Garvin, came from an impoverished background and had left school at thirteen. He was largely self-educated, but rose to be the editor of the Observer newspaper and a figure of national importance. His father had left Ireland to escape the potato famine and died at sea in 1870, leaving Garvin, then aged two, and his older brother Michael to the sole care of their widowed mother Catherine. The family drew support from the strong Irish Catholic community in Birkenhead, where Garvin was born, and his mother hoped that her younger son would enter the priesthood. There was a deeply spiritual side to Garvin’s character, but he was also a free thinker, and his wide reading led him to doubt the faith in which he was raised, although he never entirely rejected it.

Garvin was ambitious and prodigiously hard-working. He studied at the public library, went to night school, taught himself French, German and Spanish, and, while delivering newspapers, dreamed of becoming a newspaper editor. It seemed an unlikely prospect, but in Newcastle, where his brother Michael had secured work as a schoolmaster, he began writing unpaid articles for the local press. On the strength of these he was given a junior post with the Newcastle Daily Chronicle in 1891. A few months later a vivid account of the funeral of Charles Stewart Parnell brought Garvin national acclaim. He soon earned enough money from journalism to allow him to contemplate marriage, and one evening in 1893 he beheld Christina Ellen Wilson, the daughter of a police superintendent, singing at a friend’s party. ‘Tina’ was also from an Irish Catholic background, a dark-haired beauty of seventeen, just out of convent school. That night Garvin vowed: ‘By the grace of God, that is the woman I shall marry.’ He proposed eight days later and she accepted: ‘Well, Jim, I don’t mind trying,’ was her reply. They were married in 1894 and their first child Roland Gerard was born the following year. Four daughters followed – Viola in 1898, Una Christina in 1900, Katharine in 1904 and Ursula in 1907.

By the time that the last was born ‘J. L.’ Garvin (as he was commonly known) was an established name in London literary and journalistic circles. He had arrived in the capital as leader writer for the Daily Telegraph in 1899, and in 1908 his growing reputation and driving ambition secured for him the editorship of Lord Northcliffe’s Observer. Founded in 1791 the Observer was Britain’s oldest Sunday newspaper, but it was of limited importance when Garvin took over. He revolutionised its format and content, and dramatically increased the circulation.² As well as contributing to the paper’s literary pages Garvin wrote a penetrating leading article each week. At a time of bitter controversy in domestic politics, and growing tension in foreign affairs, these articles became essential reading and earned him a national and international reputation. Garvin was a passionate supporter of the Unionist Party – some would have argued, its effective leader – and he was also an expert on European affairs, and he used the Observer to warn of the dangers posed by the growth of German militarism. Garvin was no jingoist, and had great reverence for German culture, but he regarded Britain’s energetic preparation for war as the best guarantee of peace. He had considerably more success in strengthening the navy than the army, and joined Admiral Sir John (‘Jacky’) Fisher, first sea lord from 1904 to 1910, in the successful campaign to build more Dreadnoughts. He also formed a close political friendship with Winston Churchill, first lord of the admiralty from 1911.

On the eve of war Garvin was at the height of his powers, but success came at a price for family life at home. In a typical week he was occupied day and night in reading and writing, and the floor of his study became almost impassable because of the rising piles of journals, both British and foreign, by which he kept himself so well informed. Tension would rise every Friday and Saturday as the deadline for the next Observer approached. Often there would be last-minute changes to the leading article, so that his finished piece only reached the paper’s offices late on Saturday night. Sunday was generally a day of recovery, and on Monday the cycle began again. As the war progressed Garvin worked longer and longer hours, and this put a particular strain on Christina, who was often ill, having never fully recovered from recurrent middle-ear disease and chest infections that first afflicted her in 1904. The move to London had brought her into contact with the highest echelons of London political and intellectual society, an abrupt and demanding change from the environment of her youth. Her husband’s chaotic hours of work, together with a flow of important and often unexpected visitors to their home at 9 Greville Place, greatly increased the burden of managing a large household with five children at day school. Throughout her married life she had to share her home with her mother-in-law, and when obliged to entertain her brother-in-law as well during the summer of 1914 she came near to a breakdown.

Tina was a devoted mother, and Ged’s decision that August to join Kitchener’s new armies filled her with pride, but also with fear. She faced the constant anxiety of the next two years with great courage. The hostilities opened on Ged’s last day at school, Tuesday 28 July, when the Austro-Hungarian army began the bombardment of the Serbian capital Belgrade. What began as a regional conflict quickly became a European war, and for a week Britain’s neutrality hung in the balance. The issue was decided early on Tuesday 4 August when German armies invaded Belgium. Britain declared war at eleven o’clock that evening. One of the first acts of the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, was to appoint Lord Kitchener of Khartoum – ‘K. of K.’ as he was universally known – Secretary of State for War. Kitchener had the prescience to foresee that the conflict would be long, and that this necessitated the raising and training of new armies. Since Britain did not have conscription he called for volunteers, and on 7 August, the day after his appointment, he launched his famous appeal for ‘the first hundred thousand’: placards simultaneously announced ‘Your King and Country Need You. A Call To Arms’. The response was overwhelming. The invasion of Belgium had given the British public a straightforward and enduring moral argument for war, and neither the recruitment offices nor the professional army could cope with the numbers willing to fight. From 4 August to 12 September 478,893 enlisted, more than 300,000 of them in the fortnight after 30 August.³ By the end of that month the first of the new armies, ‘K.1’, was formed, and on 11 September the Second New Army, ‘K.2’, was created.

Ged must have abandoned his plans to go to Oxford within days of the declaration of war, because on 17 August Churchill’s private secretary, Eddie Marsh, passed a message to J. L. Garvin from Lord Kitchener to the effect that no decision had been reached on commissions for Ged and his school friend Hume Chidson. Garvin had tried to arrange for them to serve together in the Irish Guards, but by this date Chidson had already joined the East Surreys. Ged was not prepared to wait either, and on Friday 28 August he enlisted in the 7th (Service) Battalion of the South Lancashire Regiment – ‘The Prince of Wales’s Volunteers’ – which belonged to the 56th Brigade of the 19th (Western) Division of ‘K. 2’. Ged had a single weekend in which to reflect on what he had done. The following Monday he found himself marched around Andover in Hampshire with other tired recruits looking for non-existent billets. The town, he noted, was ‘horrible rowdy that night’.

The new armies needed leadership, and a large number of the officers came from the public schools and universities. Many had received basic military training in a cadet force, as indeed had Ged at Westminster – in 1913 his platoon had won the interhouse drill competition.⁴ But these boy soldiers were not much older at the outbreak of war, and even Ged, who was commissioned on 19 September, thought his brother officers ‘very raw’. His battalion was fortunate in having two ex-regulars and a serving lieutenant assigned to it, but its early history was nevertheless chaotic. It was not fully uniformed or equipped until March 1915, and in their first uncomfortable weeks on Salisbury Plain the new recruits had to wear their civilian clothes. Ged wrote home at the end of September: ‘The officers are almost all young; the regiment – or my battalion – ragged as to the trousers, coatless mainly, and garbed in black wool waistcoats, with scarfed throats.’ He was then inhabiting an empty tent, devoid of even a groundsheet, and