Teenage Tommy: Memoirs of a Cavalryman in the First World War

Emden

New Introduction

I am delighted that this, my first book, has been reprinted in time for the 100th anniversary of the Great War. It is 25 years since I met Benjamin Clouting and 23 years since his death. Yet the memory of a short but very close friendship remains with me. It hardly seems credible now that I knew someone who not only took part in the great heroic Retreat from Mons – Ben always said it appeared to him more of a shambles – but that this man, this sixteen-year-old boy as he was then, took part in the very first action of the British Expeditionary Force in France and, two days later, one of the last great cavalry charges in history.

I have been back to the locations of both the first action and the cavalry charge on a number of occasions, most recently to take photographs for the plate section of this book. The site of the first ‘shot’ has hardly changed since August 1914, and not much since I went there with Ben in May 1990. A small electrical sub-station has been built next to the chateau where the action occurred and on my most recent visit (on a Sunday, in the hope of finding the place free of traffic) I found to my frustration, a large articulated lorry parked outside the gatekeeper's house. Never mind. It might be argued that the British Army went to war in the first place so that Belgians might be free to park their lorries as and where they wanted.

There is no blue plaque to mark the spot where the first shot took place. I have wondered if anyone other than Ben knew that it was outside La Roquette Chateau. As for the location of the cavalry charge, that has hardly changed either, except for large wind pylons that now dominate the horizon. Sadly, Ben and I did not return to this place but I feel he would have easily recognised it too, as the ground near Mons was not shot-blasted like that of the Somme orYpres Salient where Ben would later serve and where he was wounded.

Ben’s story is republished with some new pictures but no added text. Questions that I failed to ask him back in 1990 can find no answers now. I hope Ben would have been pleased with this new edition. He did not live to see the book in print although he knew it was being written and he was delighted.

Richard van Emden, October 2013

Introduction

It was through one of those rare, spectacular coincidences that Ben Clouting and I came into contact. I had become fascinated with the British Expeditionary Force’s ‘first shot’ of the continental conflict, and had long hoped to meet an old soldier who had actually been present. Research into the subject had, however, led me to the sad, if unsurprising, conclusion that the last witness, one Bumble Worrell, a Chelsea Pensioner, had died aged 91 in 1984. The action had seemingly passed into history.

In 1988 a Reading newspaper, The Evening Post, began a series of articles entitled ‘Berkshire At War’. It was primarily concerned with memories of the Second World War, but nevertheless I wondered if any older soldier, from the First War, had been featured, and so I went to Reading County Library to request some back issues. Through a fortunate misunderstanding, an assistant brought a file of old press cuttings, among which appeared one from 1977 announcing the closure of the Reading Branch of the Old Contemptibles. It read: ‘Early in 1914 a young private in the British Expeditionary Force saw the first shots fired in the First World War. Yesterday at his home in Hungerford Road, Reading, ex-Private Ben Clouting of the 4th Dragoon Guards recalled those shots… ‘A quick search of the register of electors, and the rest, as they say, is history.

A telephone call elicited the information that Ben was not only fit and well but still a working man, and any idea that I had had of interviewing him midweek was impossible. His work at a window-cleaning company ensured that he was out of the house by 6.30 each morning. ‘Come and see me on Sunday,’ he said. I did, and Sunday became a regular weekly date during which his memories were avidly recorded.

A friendship grew, culminating in a wonderful trip back to the battlefields in May 1990 on the final pilgrimage of the Old Contemptibles. This trip thrilled Ben as much as it did me, for although his health was rapidly declining – he died just three months later – any difficulties he had were put to one side and, armed with a walking stick for the first time in his life, he set about enjoying only his second return to the battlefields in seventy six years. The trip, which involved eleven other veterans, encompassed town functions, wreath layings, and a trip back to the battle sites including, for Ben, that of the first action at Casteau on August 22nd 1914. When the party of veterans leftYpres for England at the end of the tour, it seemed fitting that Ben was the last veteran to board the coach: the first one in and the last one out, I thought.

Unlike many veterans, Ben was glad he had gone to France. He was in fact tickled to death to go after the Regiment had tried to leave him behind, for he was still only a boy of sixteen. His experiences over the next five years remained close to him, but did not blight the rest of his life. He had excellent recall but, perhaps thankfully, he was not blessed with an over-imaginative mind, for it was often a fertile mind which was the root cause of so many soldiers‘ mental and physical collapse, either during or after the war.

Teenage Tommy is edited from tape recordings made between January 1989 and August 1990. On the whole, what Ben remembered proved correct or remarkably close to the known passage of events. There were time slips, when incidents were placed chronologically out of sequence, and these have been rectified, but, throughout, I have always sought to keep the flavour of Ben’s spoken word in the written text. As the book was put together after Ben’s death, there were many frustrations, when seemingly obvious questions cropped up, and I wondered why I did not think to ask Ben for the answers at the time. As I pondered on how to check or verify obscure facts, the outrageous fortune and coincidences that were a feature of Ben’s service in France seemed to rub off on me, and I often found solutions in the nookiest of crannies! I would like to think he is co-ordinating my efforts.

During the writing of this biography, I have tried to be as accurate as possible in my narrative. However, while this is principally Ben‘s story, I have made a feature of two famous events in which Ben was involved, the BEF’s first skirmish in Belgium on August 22nd 1914, and the famous charge at Audregnies two days later. In both cases, new and significant light has been thrown on proceedings as a result of follow-up research to what Ben told me.

This said, I am also aware that mistakes may have crept through, for which I apologise. Even so, I feel that this book is very readable, and gives a new and rare insight into the life of a cavalryman in the First World War. It is not a book of blood and guts. Other memoirs, mostly written by infantry or artillerymen, have far more of this sort of detail than appears here. Ben was a cavalryman, and for much of the war was an officer’s horse orderly and therefore spared such great tests as going over the top, or participating in a trench raid. Ben did serve in the trenches; he shot and was shot at; he was wounded twice, and saw men die, yet the real strength of this book lies in Ben’s deft insights into the daily life of a soldier in the First World War. These insights were often unwitting, but were nevertheless detailed, perceptive, and often very funny.

I have endeavoured to make this book attractive to read, for both seasoned researchers of the conflict and interested yet more casual readers. For this reason the notes, which could easily have become very expansive, have been sharply curtailed, and are limited to items of distinct historical importance, or to asides which will appeal to a mainstream readership. Within the text, the role of the editor has been to place stories in a broader context, or to narrate, in depth, stories of significant historical interest and appeal. I should mention at this point that in one instance a name has been changed, as Ben requested.

I would like to thank the following people and institutions for their help; firstly, the curators at the Royal Dragoon Guards Museum at York for their very kind help. The Imperial War Museum and the National Army Museum have both kindly consented to the reproduction of several photographs, which I greatly appreciate. I should also like to express my gratitude to the family of Louise Donnay de casteau, and to the family of Captain Hornby. My appreciation also goes to the Clouting family, and Betty Williams, all of whom have been encouraging and supportive throughout. Thanks are also due to my parents, Joan, and my late father, Wolfgang van Emden, who proved invaluable sub-editors. I am grateful to Maurice Johnson, Tony and Teddy Noyes and David Bilton.

Finally, I should especially like to thank the superb staff at Pen and Sword Books for their work in bringing Benjamin Clouting’s story to a wider audience. In particular, Jonathan Wright, who is not just someone I enjoy working with, but who has become a good friend too. I would also like to thank Dominic Allen for his excellent book plate design, David Hemingway, Matt Jones and, of course, Charles Hewitt.

Richard van Emden

CHAPTER ONE

A Sussex Childhood

Ben

Had luck not been kind to me, I might never have survived past the age of four. My earliest years were anxious times for my parents, who saved me from various dangerous exploits, exploits which lived on, as such things tend to do, as favourite family stories. I was bom in the country, at Beddingham, a little village close to Brighton, in September 1897. My father was head groom on an estate called Little Dene, where he was in charge of a large number of hunting horses belonging to the local landowner and renowned huntsman, the Honourable Charles Brand. The stables were adjacent to my parents’ tied house and it was inside these that I was found at the age of three trying to climb the hind leg of one of two horses in a valiant attempt to mount. By chance I had chosen a docile old mare which didn’t react to the irritant clinging on to her back leg; the other horse, so my father later assured me, would have kicked my brains out. Fate saved me on this occasion, as did the fortunate intervention of my mother, one year later, when any number of fingers were saved as I endeavoured to show my two-year-old sister how the chaff-cutter worked.

My parents, William and Ellen, had moved to Beddingham soon after they married in the early 1890s. They had met at the Sussex home of the Sassoons, where my mother worked as a parlour maid and my father as a stable boy. I was the eldest of four children, being followed by Dorothy in 1899, Mabel in 1900 and William in 1902. We were brought up in a six-roomed house with three bedrooms. The children all slept in one bedroom in two double beds, my bed being an old wooden four-poster bed with the posts cut off and a seaweed mattress.

The estate was very much a model of its kind, with its farm and riding stables. The Brands entertained frequently, bringing their guests to the stables to walk round, my father always being on hand to give carrots to those who wished to feed the horses. There was also a walk round after church on Sundays when some of the local gentry paid a visit, so everything had to be spick and span, from the burnished harnesses right down to the painted blue wooden stable buckets, each sporting C.B. in white on the side.

The Brands had pots of money. The Honourable Charles had married a member of the Vanderbilt family and they had had four children, Betty, Ruth, Eve and Jack. They all lived a luxurious lifestyle, hence the two dozen employees needed to run what was a self-supporting estate which included a small herd of cows and a large number of sheep, all carefully selected and bred. There was the big house, then adjacent to it were tied cottages for the head gardener and his wife, who was the dairy maid. Then, the estate carpenter lived next door to the head carter, followed by another pair of cottages where the second gardener lived next door to Mr Weaver, the bailiff, who ran the farm.

My father had been taken on as head groom at the princely sum of five pounds a month. He had grown up with horses, trying his luck out in Canada as the driver of a Royal Mail coach. He had returned to work as a stable boy at the Sassoon family home and had worked his way up before getting the job with the Brands. No one could fail to notice my father’s love of horses; he never hesitated to pass on his natural enthusiasm, talking to the horses as though they were his own children. As a boy, I watched admiringly the rapport he built with them, for they seemed intuitively to understand his chatter. I was barely two years old when my father put me on my first mount. From then on, I ran into the yard every time the horses came in from exercise and my father would place me on a horse’s back as it walked into the stables. By the time I was five, he had begun teaching me all aspects of stable life, and by six I was riding my own polo pony. I was taught to ride military style, as my father himself had been, by an uncle who had ridden in the 11th Hussars.

I first rode without any reins, holding on with just my knees as the horse was led round the stables. From these humble beginnings, I was taught the basics so that by the age of seven I was able to ride independently, being taken out to go cub hunting with the hounds, a sport designed to break up fox families. A year later, I was riding every morning, taking the horses out for exercise with my father at 6am before returning for breakfast and dashing off to school. In the end I was excused religion, the first lesson at school, so I had more time to ride, although in return I attended Sunday School and sang in the Beddingham church choir.

Working on a country estate was a full-time job in every sense of the word. In those days, factory workers received a week’s holiday a year but for farm or stable workers, such things didn’t exist. Father worked at the stables every day of the year, with only the occasional break when he and I might go to Tattersall’s to buy a couple of new hunters for the stables, or rarer still an occasional afternoon visit to the races at Brighton. Otherwise it was a daily routine from early morning when the horses went for exercise, to 5pm when the horses were watered, bedded down on soft straw and their day blankets exchanged for night. Night meant 6pm when the working day ended, though Dad, with paraffin lamp in hand, would walk round the stables before bed checking that everything was all right.

Large families were very much the norm, and mine was no different. I had some eleven aunts and uncles, and innumerable cousins. Throughout my childhood, an assortment of family members came to stay. There was Aunt Pat, a nanny to the wealthy, who came on many occasions but who would never take her hat off unless she was staying the night. Then there was Uncle Charlie, my father’s brother. He was a great gambling man and former apprentice jockey who, it was said, rode the great Fred Archer to a close finish. However, his career was short-lived, as he was warned off the course for deliberately losing a race after making a deal with some bookmakers. As a result, he was always broke, so one season he came to work at my father’s stables and lodged with us. Uncle Charlie had a fiery temper and could neither be told what to do nor criticised, and, as my father too was a bit sharp, it was an arrangement that could never work. On one occasion, my father gave Uncle Charlie half a sovereign, only to discover he had gambled it away. That was the last money he ever gave him. Uncle Charlie couldn’t stop the gambling habit and died in a workhouse some years later. Then came my father’s nephew, Sidney Clouting. He used to come down and spend his holidays with us, as well as occasionally helping out at the stables. He was the illegitimate child of my Aunt Nell, who was in domestic service when the butler got her pregnant. Money had apparently changed hands, and the scandal was hushed up, for, as an unmarried mother, she would never have got another job. Nell kept her job, and Sid was brought up by his grandparents, believing Nell was an aunt, and that his mother had abandoned him at birth. He was to die in the war, without Nell ever owning up to who she really was, although Sidney had his suspicions. Nell never got over the shock and died in 1929. Then there was Great Aunt Bessie, aged 103, on my father’s side. I do not recall ever meeting her, but, it was said, she had planted her own potatoes in 1903 but didn’t live long enough to dig them up. Lastly, there was Uncle Toby, a great character and a sergeant major in the Scots Guards. Even though he had been too young to fight in the Boer war and later somehow avoided the First World War, he nevertheless nurtured my interest in warfare.

From as far back as I can remember, I was crazy to be a soldier. As a child I brandished a wooden sword, with red ink spattered along the edges, and strutted around the estate like a regular recruit. I daydreamed about the heroic actions of former campaigns, and avidly read highly-charged tales of action in South Africa. At the annual village fair, known as The Club, rides on the roundabouts or shies at the coconuts always came second to the shooting range.

For a boy with army aspirations, five-shilling ‘Blucher’ boots were very important. Made on an army pattern, with hob nails and a broad toe cap, the boots were sold at the Crosskeys village shop, unstained and semi-watertight. Three days’ work was needed to change them from brown to ‘army’ black, either by working in spitblacking (purchased in cakes and wetted with saliva or beer) or with the liquid blacking from an ‘Everetts’ stoneware bottle, conveniently sold with a brush attached to the bottle’s cork so as to dab the paint onto the shoe before polishing. The hard work needed to properly prepare a pair of Bluchers was all part of military discipline, and the resulting glorious polish enough to make any sergeant major smile.

As soon as I was old enough, I bought an air rifle for the princely sum of three shillings and sixpence. This I had earned by becoming a company agent and hawking penny packets of flower and vegetable seeds door to door. Some ninety packets had to be sold to realise seven shillings and sixpence, which was then sent to the company in exchange for one of several gifts. There was never any question that I would choose the gun and I quickly became a dabster at shooting any number of sparrows tempted into our garden by bread for bait. Sparrows, as well as rooks and pigeons, were widely eaten and were caught in their dozens for home-made pies. In winter, when sparrows nested in haystacks, evenings were organised when the whole village turned out to catch them. Adults, armed with nets on poles, surrounded the stacks as boys flashed bicycle lamps into the hay, or beat tin cans. The clatter terrified the birds, flushing them out into the waiting nets, which were quickly brought round to trap them. My rifle made little further impression on their numbers but they were mine and they tasted better. I took them home, defeathered and held them by a toasting fork in the kitchen range, then ate them with some bread.

In 1908, I, like many of my friends, joined the rapidly expanding scout movement that had just been formed by Lord Baden Powell. Our local curate, the Reverend Finch, had formed the 1st South Down Troop with the help of Miss Betty Brand. No one knew anything about how a scout movement should work, the rules or the laws, so we all learnt together from the handbook written by Baden Powell. There were around twenty of us in the troop, mostly from Beddingham, Glynde and Firle schools, and being one of the oldest, I was made patrol leader straight away. The uniforms were provided free of charge and we met every Friday in a corrugated-iron hut at Glynde. Everything else had to be provided by us, so competitions were organised to make the things like stools that we needed.

Like all scouts, we had to learn to tie eight knots without looking, and then there were the badges for all the usual things such as cooking, gardening, cycling and riding. Quite often the Reverend Finch took us camping to Firle Park, just below Firle Beacon, or once or twice we went boating on the river Cuckmere near Alfris- ton. This was in a small boat which we pulled up the river until the tide turned, then we would float some three miles back down again.

The outdoor life always appealed to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed all my physical pursuits, riding, gardening, scouting. I disliked being stuck indoors and from four years old, when I attended Beddingham School, I found my education an uphill struggle. I did not stay long at the school, for soon after I arrived I was traumatised when a mad bull broke into the field where we were playing. It had broken out of a nearby farm and careered into our field, closely followed by several farmers running with pitch forks and shouting to us kids to ‘run, run!’ We scrambled through a fence, only for the bull to crash through the same fence farther up the field. Eventually the farmers cornered the bull between two carts and shot him, but the horror of the event stayed with me for years. Ironically, the field we had played in did not belong to the school, and normally the children played in the road instead. My mother disapproved of our having no playground and wrote to Mrs Weston, the headmistress, to inform her that she wished to move us to West Firle School in November 1905.

There were just three teachers at Firle Church School, one each for the three standards: Mr Price, headmaster and teacher of the senior class of some sixty children, Mrs Price, his wife, who took the twenty or so infants, while the twenty five or more children of the middle class were taught by a succession of supplementary teachers who were appointed only to resign a few months later.

Most of my school life was spent trying to avoid lessons as much as possible. I quickly got a reputation as a trouble maker, not in a bad way, for I was always considered the most polite child around, but because I simply would not pay attention. As a result I was always being kept behind after school to write lines for talking in class, and a week would never go by without my receiving the cane. Mr Price was a very nervous man who was always biting his finger nails (in reality he didn’t have any nails left to bite). Owing to this, he was always quick to resort to the cane for all manner of minor infractions, though I think he enjoyed meting it