Famous, 1914–1918

INTRODUCTION

The utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets), and always will be (despite the propagandists…).

JRR Tolkien

It is odd to start a book by apologising for its title. The idea, to write about the Great War experiences of men who later went on to national, frequently international, fame and sometimes fortune, seemed attractive, indeed, it was surprising that no one had written such a book before. ‘Famous 1914-1918’ was the obvious title, pithy and to the point, and the very word famous, particularly in the context of the Great War, would capture attention and, hopefully, interest.

Nevertheless, we apologise. Fame was rarely what any of these men sought; for some, it was an unwarranted intrusion into their lives. They wrote, acted, sculpted, led great institutions or helped safeguard the country’s future not because they sought celebrity, or even its trappings, but because they worked hard at what they wanted to do and happened to be very good at it. In recent years, the cult of the celebrity has come a long way (down) from the days when fame was incidental to an individual’s body of respected work, and considered a by-product, bringing mixed blessings. Today, popular culture has made fame accessible, egalitarian and utilitarian, often sought for its own sake.

The book tells the Great War stories of twenty-one of the best known men of the twentieth century. They are famous for a variety of reasons: for their work in literature and art, or for rising to the top of the political tree. Several went on to international acclaim as actors; another to posthumous fame for (perhaps) conquering Mount Everest thirty years before anyone else. They came from all walks of life but they all had one thing in common, a talent that set them apart from their peers and that would bring them to the pinnacle of their chosen professions. Only two of our subjects do not fit this scenario: John Reginald Halliday Christie, the infamous murderer of 10 Rillington Place, and Ned Parfett, the newspaper boy photographed outside the offices of the White Star Line. It was the day after the catastrophic demise of RMS Titanic, and his image has become inextricably linked to the most famous of all maritime tragedies.

Over ninety years ago, such men as these enlisted to fight. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the Great War was the almost universal desire to serve the country in its time of need. The voluntary nature of recruitment into the armed services between 1914 and the introduction of conscription in 1916 drew men into uniform from every social milieu, and without prejudice to one class of scholar, worker or artisan. Every trade, every occupation, enlisted; every class was represented, from the sons of serving or former Prime Ministers to the poorest Barnardo’s boy: they were all there.

There were many reasons why they chose to enlist. Patriotism was accepted as the over-arching reason, but thousands enlisted simply for three square meals a day. Others were pressurised into joining up, even shamed, while some wished to escape problems at home, or merely sought a great adventure with their mates. Nevertheless, whatever the real motivation, the popular clarion call was that Britain had to be defended against an overbearing and aggressive Germany, and national sovereignty and the international rule of law had to be respected. Most men, whatever their true, perhaps unconscious, rationale for serving, would have broadly agreed with the publicly-stated reasons for declaring war on Germany.

When the desire to serve cut across all social and economic boundaries, it naturally attracted men from occupations not normally associated with wearing the King’s uniform. Footballers, international rugby players, many playing at the highest levels of the game, joined up, as did boxers, cricketers, even a Wimbledon Champion. Artists, composers and actors did likewise. Some battalions became synonymous with particular occupations. There was a Stockbrokers’ Battalion, and ones for artists, civil servants and former public school boys. There was more than one battalion for sportsmen too: the 17th Middlesex Regiment, known as the 1st Sportsman’s Battalion, included such men as Walter Tull, not only the first black officer in the British army but also a well known footballer for Tottenham Hotspur. It is fair to say that there was no stratum of society, no professional body of men, that did not feel that, when duty called, their time and possibly their lives belonged to their country.

In 1914, fame was far more elusive than it is today, and tended to be built gradually over an extended time, as peer respect grew and the national press began to take notice. Even so, there were few available paths along which an individual’s growing fame could be disseminated; in the absence of radio and television, and with the film industry still in its infancy, newspapers and word of mouth were the predominant media for spreading information.

If the avenues to establishing a name were few, then the number of shortcuts to fame and fortune were even fewer. The army, however, was one possible route to public acclaim, at least amongst those who became officers. While it was popularly believed to employ ruffians and vagabonds in its ranks, it was still revered as an institution that maintained British power and influence internationally, and was a great source of pride amongst British people. The British army and navy were celebrated in schools and, with the dearth of popular alternatives, the images of ‘famous’ generals adorned school walls, and bronze statues cast in their image commemorated their great leadership and, as a consequence, their battlefield success.

The majority of the men in this book served their country and then became famous, not for their wartime activities but because in the post-war world, with the development in the scope and role of the media, they were outstanding in their own right, as actors, writers, sculptors, politicians. There are a couple of exceptions. Winston Churchill was already well known as the former First Lord of the Admiralty when he chose to serve in the trenches. The public’s awareness of him began nearly two decades before when, as a journalist, he was present at the Battle of Omdurman, subsequently writing The River War about the re-conquest of Sudan. A little over 18 months later, as a war correspondent, he was captured by the Boers in South Africa, only to escape in a Boys’ Own Paper style adventure that was widely reported at home. Another was A A Milne, an increasingly well-known playwright and, at 34 years of age, the deputy editor of Punch magazine.

Many of those whose wartime stories we have followed in this book, such as Basil Rathbone, and indeed those we have not, such as Ronald Colman, Charles Laughton, and Claude Rains, had a presence that, with the advent of the cinema, circled the globe, bringing their name and image to a vast audience, a level of popular exposure that was unobtainable fifty years earlier. Nevertheless, fame, of course, is transitory even for those considered legendary in their day. Men such as Ronald Colman are far less well known than they were fifty years ago. Basil Rathbone, but for his exploits as Sherlock Holmes, would probably have faded in the public consciousness too.

Vic Piuk and I drew up a list of as many ‘famous’ people as we could think of who were born towards the end of the nineteenth century and therefore old enough, and indeed young enough, to have served in the Great War. The age for enlistment in 1914 was nominally 19-30, extended soon after the outbreak of hostilities to 35 years. In searching for suitable candidates for study, we were looking in a demographically narrow belt, men born broadly between 1880 and 1900.

To be considered, each person had to be famous not just in the past but also today. To an extent, this was a subjective assessment. We considered including the writer Hector Hugo Munro, better known by his pen name Saki. His fame was already established by the time he served and died in the Great War but we felt that his name was now not familiar enough to justify a chapter. A biography of Saki, published recently and reviewed in the national press, undoubtedly contests our perception that he is largely forgotten. Even so, there was no point in writing about a household name of the 1920s or 30s, if his name drew little more from readers today than a shrug of the shoulders.

For this reason, no sportsmen are included in this book. Men and women who achieved short-lived fame during their playing days often won swift anonymity after retirement. This is especially true for those who played team games, where a significant turnover of players was the norm. For a footballer or cricketer to have served his country in the Great War and then played sport at the highest level, he would, almost by definition, have retired by the mid 1930s. Only a very few sporting greats can expect to be in the public consciousness seventy years later, and in the event few are. The chief criterion for appearing in our book was that the majority of people today should be aware of their names and, hopefully, familiar, to a greater or lesser degree, with their work.

In an unscientific straw poll, we asked friends and family of varying ages how many of the twenty-two characters who appear in this book they were familiar with. The number ‘known’ ranged from twenty (friends and family who were aged thirty-five or above) to as few as eight amongst teenagers aged fifteen and sixteen years old. Everyone asked was aware of Churchill, Tolkien, and A.A Milne; the majority knew the names of Macmillan, Priestley, Montgomery, Vaughan Williams and C.S Lewis; fewer knew the names of Mallory, Rathbone, Bruce and Christie.

Just as some names crossed generational boundaries, others halt abruptly at a certain time. A name might be perfectly familiar to a middle aged or older individual but completely unrecognisable to a child or young adult. This cannot be said of the characters in Dad’s Army, the hit comedy series which remains a staple diet of BBC repeats. In the case of the Home Guard of Walmington on Sea, it was not always clear who was more famous, the actor or the character he played. The names of Arnold Ridley and John Laurie are instantly recognisable to an older generation, but their alter egos, Private Charles Godfrey and Private James Fraser, are known to almost everyone. Both these men served in the Great War, Ridley as a Private in the 6th Battalion [Bn] Somerset Light Infantry, and Laurie as an acting Lance Corporal in the Honourable Artillery Company. Arnold Ridley has a chapter in this book while John Laurie, who does not appear to have ever spoken about his service, sadly does not.

We regret that this is a male-dominated book. Both Vic and I tried hard to discover any women who might have become indirectly involved with the fighting at the front, almost inevitably as nurses. Names were few and far between excepting the obvious, Naomi Mitchison and Vera Brittain, but they became famous largely owing to their service in the war and their subsequent writings on the subject. There were several with tenuous links to the war, Amelia Erhardt, Agatha Christie, and the ‘Unsinkable’ Molly Brown, of Titanic fame are examples, but their involvement was too transitory or peripheral to warrant more than a mention, let alone a chapter.

Sometimes individuals were discounted because we already had enough characters from that arena or sphere of work. Almost an entire generation of politicians served, including Anthony Eden, Winston Churchill, Clement Atlee and Harold Macmillan, but four politicians would have been too many for this book and so only two appear. Equally, almost every senior officer in the Second World War fought in the First, from Bomber Harris to Claude Auchinleck, from Bernard Law Montgomery to Archibald Wavell; the list goes on and on, but only Montgomery is featured here.

There were those about whom, for one reason or another, we were unable to find much information. Unfortunately, these were usually men who served as privates or NCOs. Their names, unlike the names of those who served as officers, would not as a rule appear in battalion war diaries or regimental histories, and, if they never spoke to biographers or wrote about their service themselves, they left little on which to base any research; John Laurie is a case in point.

Then there are those whom most people will never have heard of and yet their image is very familiar. Private George Scorey, of the 2nd Dragoon Guards, is unknown except for his distant image. He is the policeman sitting astride the famous white horse at Wembley Stadium during the pitch invasion before the 1924 FA Cup Final. William Wells, better known as Bombardier Billy Wells, the heavyweight boxing champion, is known now as the man who struck the gong as a prelude to all J. Arthur Rank films. Both he and his brother served in the Great War. Neither Scorey nor Wells appears here but newspaper boy Ned Parfett does. Thanks to the kind co-operation of his family, his story can be told.

The majority of our characters left a reasonably detailed record of their service, JB Priestley wrote of it, as did Harold Macmillan, Dennis Wheatley and Basil Rathbone. Others such as Nigel Bruce were harder to piece together. An unpublished memoir by Bruce was left to his daughter, but her whereabouts are currently unknown. It has been possible to recreate his story from the scant records left in his officer’s papers, (he served as a private in France but was later commissioned) along with information obtained from his unit’s war diary and from memoirs written by comrades who were serving in the same part of the line. The story of George Mallory is told almost entirely through his personal letters which survive at Magdalene College, Cambridge. The complete War Diary of the unit with which he served, the 40th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, sadly no longer exists.

Every year of the war is covered by one or more of the twenty-one names, although only one theatre, that of the Western Front. A few that we might have included, such as the Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee, served elsewhere, in his case Gallipoli, but on reflection we decided to remain in what was the principal crucible of the war, France and Flanders. Of those we chose, over half were wounded or invalided out of the army for health reasons; a dozen went over the top or were otherwise involved directly during an action in which their unit attacked the enemy lines. Most lost very close friends or brothers during the war.

Most went on to profess that they had been deeply affected by what they had seen and experienced, and that the war had a direct influence on the way they wrote, commanded, governed, even acted, and in one case, that of John Reginald Christie, murdered. These men survived the war, but they never quite escaped it.

The original idea was that each chapter would fit a pre-set blueprint. Each character would have one incident that could be studied in detail, followed by a précis of their remaining service followed by a short description of their childhood and subsequent post-war career and fame.

In studying any one incident in detail, we have drawn on a number of sources to explain and describe events beyond those recalled by the characters themselves. This means studying war diaries and unit histories not only to flesh out the story itself but also to verify the sequence of events and the overall effect and result of actions in which our famous people were involved. Records held at the National Archives, the Imperial War Museum and the Liddle Collection at Leeds University have proved particularly useful.

The scope which we have employed when describing an event has had to be limited by space in the book. An attack in which Arnold Ridley, AA Milne or Harold Macmillan was involved might employ a number of neighbouring divisions, each with its own objective within a broader overall plan. It would be too easy to become bogged down in strategy and tactics, referring to battalions or brigades which are not directly relevant to our subject. For that reason, we have narrowed descriptions of battle to those that our subject would have seen, and refer to other units only as they are or become directly relevant in a battle. For readers interested in the broader strategy at a particular juncture, there are many other books available that will supply a more complete picture.

The structure which we set ourselves has been broadly adhered to, though there are exceptions. Occasionally, such as in the career of Dr Alexander Fleming, no one story or event stood out for particular attention. However, Fleming’s outstanding contribution to world health and his international fame ensured that such a fascinating man automatically received his place.

In the same vein, where the war had an obvious and profound influence on an individual’s later life and fame, and where this influence was recorded, we felt that their story should be broadened to add this element to the overall picture, beyond that originally envisaged. Arnold Ridley’s post war trauma was particularly enlightening and his character as Charles Godfrey in Dad’s Army appeared to have been written with so much of Ridley’s own character entwined that it was worth further exploration. Nicolas Ridley, Arnold’s son, added fascinating extra material, recalling his childhood with his father and the extent to which his father was still haunted by the war years.

How close Arnold Ridley came to death is evident in his story. He nearly died, as did a number of others who lived to enrich and expand British culture. And this is what was also disturbing about the research we undertook. Any one of these men could so easily have been a fatality. It is not only a question of asking where Britain would have been had Churchill been killed in 1916 or how much longer the Second World War might have lasted if Montgomery had not survived his bullet wound in 1914, but what unimaginable loss of human life would have resulted if a German aeroplane had dropped a bomb and accounted for Alexander Fleming at Wimereux in 1918.

Looking over a cultural precipice, can we imagine how much poorer the world would be without The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the sculptures of Henry Moore or the music of Vaughan Williams? Television without the influence of Lord Reith or the law without Lord Denning – it is unimaginable.

Then one is inescapably drawn to the terrible alternative. If they were lucky enough to survive, which man died who might have made an equally remarkable contribution to society? Who died in a dugout on the Somme, on the barbed wire at Ypres or in a Casualty Clearing Station near Arras who might have changed the world? So many of those who appear in this book lost not just one but two, three, even four friends they venerated, held up to be better than they were, were considered more gifted, more intelligent, more skilled. Everyone in this book lost someone precious to them; what they would have become had they survived, we shall never know.

We are aware of the extensive and growing interest in the Great War, as we are of the on-going fascination with the lives of those we have covered in this book. Well over 250,000 Britons visit the battlefields each year, and with this in mind we have included a number of maps identifying the location where our characters fought. These maps are intended as a battlefield guide. However, the battlefields have, by and large, been returned to farm land, and respect for a French or Belgian landowner’s property should always be kept firmly in mind. They will not thank anyone for trampling their crops to see where Milne, Priestley or Macmillan went over the top.

Finally, it has been an honour to examine the lives of these great men, with the obvious exception of Christie, and to handle original letters and manuscripts was at times both exhilarating and humbling. Holding the small bundle of letters recovered from George Mallory’s body, found just below the summit of Mount Everest in 1999, was extraordinary, no less extraordinary than their remarkable state of preservation. It is no exaggeration to say they looked as if they were written yesterday. It is also true to say that it has been a thrill to hold the officer enlistment papers of the ‘famous’ held at the National Archives (NA). JRR Tolkien’s papers at one point rested on top of those of Dennis Wheatley and JB Priestley. There was an undoubted nostalgic thrill, too, when the service papers of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, were put side by side in the NA’s reading room, a strange association that even the great sleuth could not possibly have foreseen.

Richard van Emden and Victor Piuk

June 2008

CHAPTER ONE

A A Milne

If a special order had gone round the British Army: ‘For your information and necessary action: Milne is joining us. See that he is given the easiest and best time possible, consistent with ultimate victory,’ I could not have had more reason to be grateful to my commanding officers.

AA Milne, It’s Too Late Now

IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE any connection, no matter how unlikely, between Jane Austen and the pock-marked Somme battlefield, but there is one, albeit rather tenuous. During the carnage of the Great War, almost anything was possible in extremis and in August 1916, in a dugout just hours before an attack, there seemed to be nothing more apposite than for the author AA Milne to talk about literature, and great literature too. Overhead, as he spoke, the enemy shells slammed into the ground, and intermittent machine gun fire spattered the trench parapet.

Before he enlisted in the army, Alan Alexander Milne, creator of Winnie the Pooh, was already known as a playwright and assistant editor of Punch magazine. Yet the international acclaim that would make him one of the most familiar writers of the twentieth century to children and adults alike was still a decade away. Not that either fame or fortune was on his mind on 12 August 1916. Survival was uppermost in his thoughts, and as the battalion was due to go over the top in a few hours, it was by no means certain that he would live to see the next dawn.

Milne was serving as a Second Lieutenant in the 11th (Service) Bn Royal Warwickshire Regiment. It was his first time up the line and an attack on a heavily defended German trench was set for later that evening. As the battalion’s new Signalling Officer, (the previous incumbent had been wounded in the head only a few hours before) Milne was supposed to be asking the men under his command a thousand and one technical questions. Instead, he found himself engaged in a long discussion about literature with Lance Corporal James Grainger, formerly a Welsh miner and now an experienced soldier, who had served with the battalion since it came to France, a year previously. He would be the perfect person to help turn Milne’s theoretical knowledge of signalling into something more practical for a battlefield. Instead the quiet, genial NCO was more than happy to trade ideas about the novel and in particular Jane Austen, for whom they shared a passion.

For over two weeks, British forces had been attacking a German line known as the Intermediate Trench. This had appeared on aerial reconnaissance photographs taken on 21 July, and was situated midway between the village of Bazentin-le-Petit and a low ridge beyond. Ever since the photos had been reviewed, the capture of this long trench had become critical to the wider objective of taking the ridge and High Wood, which dominated the surrounding landscape. Battalion after battalion had been sent in to take the Intermediate Trench, which the Germans defended tenaciously. The most recent attacks, in early August, had seized two-thirds of the trench but a further three hundred yards were still in enemy hands, a sandbagged and barbed wire barricade being all that separated German from Briton in the same trench. The 11th Warwicks, with support from other battalions in the Division, were to attack at 10.30pm on the night of 12/13 of August and seize the remaining portion of the line. A bombardment would precede the attack.

Two days earlier, on 10 August, the battalion had taken over five hundred yards of the front line, just to the north of Bazentin-le-Petit. Much to Milne’s frustration, after 18 months’ training as a signalling officer, he had been given command of an infantry platoon. However, he had been told that he could accompany the existing Signalling Officer, Kenneth Harrison, and three other men, into the line to gain some practical experience. The plan was to run out telephone cable through to the front line trenches by a devious route so that during the forthcoming attack communications with battalion and brigade headquarters could be maintained. On the day before the attack, Milne followed Harrison, laying cable as they went, but as they neared the front line a salvo of German shells burst overhead. Harrison was struck on the back of the skull by a shell splinter that punctured his helmet and entered his head. Surprisingly it was not, at first glance, a serious wound. Nevertheless, he was sent down the line and eventually to England. He never returned to France. Milne was now the new Signalling Officer, in which capacity he had gone to the signallers’ dugout to introduce himself to Lance Corporal Grainger and the other men in the section.

The following morning, 12 August, Milne set out at 4am and laid another telephone line, ‘elaborately laddered according to the text books, and guaranteed to withstand any bombardment’. He then returned to battalion headquarters to await the start of the battle.

In the event, two companies would lead the way, attacking over ground that varied between 150 yards and 200 yards in width. They would be supported, if required, by two further companies, while battalions on both flanks would lend assistance, the 10th (Service) Bn Loyal North Lancashire Regiment bombing down the Intermediate Trench from the section already captured. Once in the trench, the men of the Warwickshire Regiment would consolidate the position.

Heavy calibre guns unleashed the preliminary bombardment during the afternoon, ending at 7.00pm just as the sun set. These guns were followed by lighter artillery which would pound the objective and sweep the ground behind to stop enemy reinforcements. However, the heavy bombardment was the last thing the Warwicks’ Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Collison, wanted. ‘Not only would it render the trench uninhabitable to our men, should they succeed in taking it,’ he later wrote, ‘but it was plain intimation to the Hun that we contemplated some action against him in the near future.’ He contacted brigade and asked for the guns to cease fire but his request was refused.

At 9pm the Germans retaliated, plastering the British communication trenches and the Warwickshires’ battalion headquarters with shells of every size. The headquarters was an old German dugout deep below ground, and facing, of course, the wrong way. Here, Milne sat round a candlelit table with the commanding officer and two other officers, a major and the battalion adjutant. All communication with the front line was cut almost immediately, to be followed by the line to brigade headquarters.

We sat there completely isolated. The depth of the dugout deadened the noise of the guns, so that a shell-burst was no longer the noise of a giant plumber throwing down his tools, but only a persistent thud, which set the candles dancing and then, as if by an afterthought, blotted them out. From time to time I lit them again, wondering what I should be doing, wondering what signalling officers did on these occasions. Nervously I said to the Colonel, feeling that the isolation was all my fault, ‘Should I try to get a line out?’ and to my intense relief he said, ‘Don’t be a bloody fool.’

It had been difficult for the infantry to keep their composure. For over half of those waiting to go, this was only their third week in France. They had arrived at the end of July in a draft of 388 men. The War Diary notes that only 63 of these men had ever seen action before, and of the rest, most had received just 13 or 14 weeks’ training. Few had ever thrown a Mills Bomb and none had fired a Lewis Gun. These men, led mostly by new officers, had been set the already difficult task of taking the Intermediate Trench – and that was before the German bombardment.

Colonel Collison wrote:

The delivery of an assault under such conditions was a test that would have tried veteran troops, but the bravery and devotion of the officers, and the steady valour and example of the old remnants of the original battalion provided the necessary impetus, and punctually to time the leading line of stormers left the trenches and advanced against the enemy.

The men made their attack behind a shrapnel barrage that lifted as they went forward. Almost immediately they came under intense enemy machine gun and artillery fire, and although a few pressed on, none of the men got to within twenty yards of the German trench. On the left, part of one company became so confused in the dark that it ended up jumping into a British sap that ran at right angles to the objective.

Soon afterwards Private Hunt, one of two headquarters orderlies, arrived with a message. The attacking companies were in no need of support or assistance. ‘This was very welcome news, as it was naturally inferred that the attack had succeeded,’ recalled Collison in a memoir in 1921. ‘These hopes, however, were soon dashed.’

The attack had failed completely. At 2am a runner reached battalion headquarters to explain the situation, reeling off the names of a few of those who had died, some of whom Milne recognised. The Major then stood up and buckled on his revolver; he would go and reorganise the surviving troops. It was a signal for Milne to stand up and buckle his revolver on too. The Colonel spoke to them: ‘Use your common sense,’ he said. ‘I simply cannot lose three signalling officers in a month.’ Milne promised, while wondering what the difference between common sense and cowardice was.

Milne told his sergeant that he intended to run a telephone cable up to the front line so communications could be restored and that he needed two men to go with him. ‘I knew nothing of the section then, save that there was a lance corporal who loved Jane Austen, unhelpful knowledge in the circumstances.’ The Major, followed by Milne, led the way, followed by a sergeant and a signaller who laid out the telephone line neatly and skilfully.

We passed one of the signal stations, no longer a station but a pancake of earth on top of a spread-eagled body; I had left him there that evening, saying, Well, you’ll be comfortable here. More rushes, more breathers, more bodies, we were in the front line,’ wrote Milne. The Major hurried off to collect what men he could, while I joined up the telephone. Hopeless, of course, but we could have done no more.

Milne pressed the buzzer and, much to his surprise, got through to the Colonel, telling him what he knew, and asking for a small counter-bombardment.

Then with a sigh of utter content and thankfulness and the joy of living, I turned away from the telephone. And there behind me was Lance Corporal Grainger.

What on earth are you doing here? I asked.

He grinned sheepishly.

You weren’t detailed, were you?

No, sir.

Well, then.

I thought I’d just like to come along, sir.

But why?

He looked still more embarrassed.

Well, sir, I thought I’d just like to be sure you were all right.

Which is the greatest tribute to Jane Austen that I have ever heard.

The battalion lost around sixty killed, and just over a hundred wounded. Of the five officers who led the attack, three were killed and two severely wounded, and the officer commanding the supporting company was evacuated with shell shock. Colonel Collison wrote a report for the divisional commander. Rightly proud of the efforts made, he defended his men against any possible accusation that they had not tried hard enough. ‘I may mention that I