Welcome to the Old Front Line with me, military historian Paul Reid. This is a regular podcast where we'll look at the history of the First World War and travel together across the battlefields from Ypres to the Somme and beyond. So what's in this week's episode? This week we begin the first of our walks on some forgotten battlefields of the First World War. And we'll start in Northern France at the village of Richebourg.
In fact, we'll begin this walk near to the Indian Corps Memorial at Neu-Chapelle. Rue du Bois Wood Street, that's the street we're going to walk down shortly, and one just to the north of that, Rishborg St Vast, which is the main village of Rishborg itself. The road that we're going to take was used in October 1914 by the men of the British Expeditionary Force, the BEF, the Old Contemptibles, to march down to take part in the Battle of Labasse.
They detrained at Bethune, having come up from the Aisne and the Marne, where they'd taken part in the fighting there in September and October of 1914, and then moved along this road to go up over the Albers Ridge to confront the advance of the German army in the race to the sea in that autumn of 1914. In 1915, armoured cars went up and down this road in fire support for the attacks on the Albers Ridge and in some of the lesser known battles of the First World War.
And by 1916, it was all part of the infrastructure behind the British front line in this sector of the Western Front. Now I have to confess that this is not the most ideal road to walk down. It's a bit of a rat run from Bethune to the villages in this outlying area. But walk it down.
nevertheless we will and about half a mile down a little track will go off on the left hand side in between two modern houses and we'll take this track and walk out towards the fields it goes through a little wooded area first there's often a bit of a pile of rubble on the left hand side and amongst that are some of the detritus of war, the occasional shell, the old water bottle I've seen here over the years.
In the spring months, birds nest in the trees and the hedgerows here, and all year round you can often hear the skylarks high above these fields, and it reminds me of the county where I grew up, the county of Sussex, and Sussex figures very heavily in this story. Like many of the tales on the old front line, this week's podcast doesn't really start here as we stand on what was known as the cinder track going out towards the front line areas around the village of Richborg.
It starts many years ago in that county of Sussex and myself as a young student began to research Sussex war memorials and wander around graveyards and churchyards across the county and I kept coming across a date that the 30th of June, 1916. Now, my library of the Great War was small then, but I could not find anywhere any mention of this date, any mention of any great battle.
But yet for Sussex, It seemed to have affected us so greatly with the number of names and occasions in which I saw this date mentioned on headstones, on war memorials and on private graves in cemeteries remembering sons who'd gone off to the war and never come back. So what had happened to these men and what had happened on this date?
And that led me on a journey really, a journey to track down The men of the 11th, 12th and 13th Battalions of the Royal Sussex Regiment, otherwise known as the South Downs, interview the last remaining veterans of those battalions and trace many families of those who fought and died here in no man's land in the trenches around Richburg on the 30th of June 1916, a date which my old friend Albert Banfield, one of the veterans that I spoke to, referred to as the day Sussex died. More of that later.
So who were the South Downs Battalions of the Royal Sussex Regiment? In 1914, Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, was one of those who did not believe that this would be a short war. So he called for 100,000 men to join the New Army, or Kitchener's Army as it became known. In Sussex, a number of battalions were formed. The first of these, the 7th, at Chichester in August 1914, was full to capacity in just a few hours. And recruitment began right across the county of Sussex.
Claude Lowther, a Member of Parliament who lived in Hurstmansow Castle, decided to form his own unit. A battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment recruited right across the county to represent Sussex in the same way that in the north Powell's battalions or Chums battalions were representing the great cities and towns there.
Lowther utilised these many contacts, recruiting offices were established and that first battalion of the South Downs or Lowther's Lambs as they quickly became known in the local newspapers was formed in just a matter of a few hours, 1,100 men enlisting. A 2nd South Downs and then a 3rd South Downs battalions were raised over the course of the next couple of months. What to do with over 3,000 men? Initially, they paraded in their own clothes.
They slept under canvas at Cooton Common, just outside Bexhill-on-Sea, in what is now East Sussex. And they had little to do except parade and march and delight the people of Bexhill and Hastings as they passed through those areas. But they represented in those three battalions, over those 3,000 men, almost every corner of Sussex, every trade from farmhand to clerk to railway worker to men who worked on the seafronts at some of the big resorts like Eastbourne.
This was truly a representative unit of the men from Sussex-by-the-Sea. Ron Shorts, one of the veterans that I interviewed who came from Eastbourne, said that we were a very fine battalion, that here were men who, perhaps in normal civil life, wouldn't really even talk to each other, wouldn't mix, wouldn't drink in the same pubs, wouldn't play in the same football teams or cricket teams, but yet here we were, in uniform, ready to lay everything that we had on the line.
And this spirit kept them going until the uniforms arrived, they became more of a coherent military formation, and the training took them from Sussex to Kent, and then to Aldershot, and then to Whitley Camp in Surrey near Guildford, where they did their final phase of training before going to France in the spring of 1916. In their first three months in France, they occupied some of the quiet sectors of the Western Front.
They went into the trenches for the first time at Fleur Bay, suffered their first casualties only a few days after arrival, often through carelessness where men stood in trenches exposing themselves to enemy fire and were killed by shrapnel or snipers. They moved down to Gewinche where mine warfare was commonplace and mines went off underneath their positions. They served at the Gewinche brick stacks. But all of this really was the day-to-day activities of trench warfare.
All quiet on the Western Front really. It wasn't the big battle for which they felt they'd trained, but that was coming. The Battle of the Somme was moving ever closer, and as part of the preparations for the Battle of the Somme, it was decided to launch a series of diversionary attacks along the Western Front to confuse or try and confuse the Germans as to where the true intentions of the assault lay.
One of those would take place at the Boar's Head at Rishborg, a promontory in the German lines. And it would be here that the men of the South Downs Battalions would enter the fray in their first assault, their first time over the top. Originally it was intended that the 11th Battalion, led by Lieutenant Colonel Grisewood, would make the initial assault supported by the others. But Grisewood looked at the plan. And he was worried by it.
He went to his brigadier, he went to the divisional commander, and he protested. And according to Ron Short, the veteran from Eastbourne who I knew, he told his commanders that he wasn't prepared to sacrifice his battalion as cannon fodder. Now these comments had to be taken seriously. Grise Wood was... Bowler Hatted, Stellenbosch, sent home. His battalion was relegated to a support role and the assault thereafter would be led by the 12th and 13th battalions.
Despite Grisewood's protests, which haunted him for the rest of his life, he was unable to stop what would happen. And the men went out of the line, trained near Bethune, on a rudimentary training ground for the attack that would come, and then entered the trenches on the 29th of June, to make ready for their assault the next day. So that's what brought these men of Sussex to these fields and we'll continue with our little walk. out along the track, the Cinder Track.
This was a name given to this ground in the 1915 battles when troops attacked here as part of the Battle of the Albers Ridge on the 9th of May 1915. Men from Sussex were there then. The regulars of the 2nd Battalion and the territorials of the 1st, 5th Sink Ports Battalion suffered terrible casualties here. It would become a corner of a foreign field that costs Sussex dearly.
over two years, 1915 and 1916. And as we walk past the fenced off areas of pasture on our right, we come to the flat fields around Richborg. There's no rising ground here, there's no hills, there's no promontories, except across to our left we can see the gradual slopes of the Albers Ridge, no more than tens of metres above sea level. Here it's all flat and there are lots of drainage ditches.
The trenches here were a mixture of trenches dug into the ground and what were called breastworks which were positions built up above ground level, big earthen banks with sandbags. In the early years of the war they were too thin and high velocity bullets could pass through them so they got thicker and thicker and the men sheltered behind these as part of their defences in this area.
On the 29th of June, the South Downs moved up through the communication trenches here, and the two attacking battalions, the 12th and the 13th Royal Sussex, the 2nd and the 3rd South Downs battalions, in which were men from literally every corner of Sussex. And here in those trenches, these men thought of home, of the pier at Bolkner, of the rolling downs above Brighton, of the seafront at Eastbourne.
of the fishing fleets at Hastings, of the fields and the copses and the lanes across every part of Sussex. But now was their destiny. At five past three on that morning of the 30th of June 1916, the whistles blew and the men went over in waves. It was said that it would be a walkover, but the bombardment had been ineffective. The German trenches were hardly damaged and the bulk of the German garrison had survived.
Albert Banfield remembered that as soon as they entered No Man's Land the machine guns began to play their merry hell on the lines of men that moved forward. And in No Man's Land some of these ditches offered obstacles to the advance and parties of men had been issued with duckboarding material to lay across it to enable bridges so that the men could pass more easily. but these became some of the first targets for the German machine gunners and men and their bridges toppled into these ditches.
Others tried to scramble across and the machine guns swept the banks of the ditches so that very soon they became full of the dead, the dying and the wounded of the South Downs battalions. Very quickly these assaults melted away and it would be a foretaste really of what would happen 24 hours later on the Somme battlefields further to the south. Near to that promontory in the line itself, the Boer's Head, men from the 12th Battalion got into the German trenches.
All of the companies and platoons went forward led by their officers, so casualties amongst the officers were very, very heavy indeed. And it was then down to the sergeants, the NCOs, the non-commissioned officers, or the warrant officers to take charge of the men that were left. One of these was Company Sergeant Major Nelson Victor Carter. Carter was a mighty man in every respect. He was over six feet tall. He'd served as a regular soldier before the war in the artillery.
He had tattoos of Buffalo Bill on both his forearms. On the outbreak of war in 1914, he was commissionaire of the very first cinema in the old town in Eastbourne. He knew Lowther, who personally invited him to join the battalion. and he was one of the first to enlist. His regimental number was SD4. All of the original soldiers in the South Downs Battalions were given the SD prefix. With the number 4, you can see that he was one of the very first to join up.
Originally in the 11th Battalion, he became Company Sergeant Major to A Company of the 12th Battalion. And as he led his men across no man's land at Richborg, the officers began to fall around him. So he took the initiative. He led the men forward and into the German trenches at a point in which the bombardment had actually done its job, the wire was cut, and an entry into those trenches was possible.
Armed only with a pistol, he took out a German machine gun team, then turned the machine gun on the Germans themselves, giving fire support to his men. He led a party down one of the trenches into the German second line, and after a while it soon became apparent that this position was untenable, so a decision was made to withdraw.
And during that withdrawal, Carter went out into no man's land, made sure the men got back and given his physique and his physical strength, he was very prominent indeed in making sure that the wounded were recovered as well. He was seen on many occasions, personally picking up wounded soldiers, pulling them over his back or cradling them in his arms and bringing them back to the British trenches before returning to no man's land to find more wounded soldiers.
And just as they thought they'd recovered everybody, a voice called out of a young man that he'd known from Eastbourne and he couldn't refuse his call. So Nelson Carter went out one more time, picked him up and just as he got to the British trenches, a single shot rang out and Carter was killed instantly. For his bravery that day, he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. A married man, he left behind a family in Eastbourne.
including his daughter Jessie and in the 1980s I discovered that she was still alive and I went to see her at her house. The first time I tapped on the door she opened it and hanging on the wall behind her was a frame in which it was his medals and his memorial plaque including of course his Victoria Cross and we sat down and talked about her dad.
She'd never been to see his grave and And after a bit of encouragement and a chat with her children, I'm pleased to say that that year, on the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Richborg, she went to finally see her father's grave in the Royal Irish Rifle's graveyard at Levante, a duty that she'd wanted to do for many years. And when I went back to see her after this visit, I knocked on the door again, she opened it, and the medals in that frame were gone.
She saw my startled face and she said, don't worry, not long after you last came here, somebody from my insurance company came round and wasn't too pleased about me having a Victoria Cross hanging on my hallway wall. So it's in the bank now. And for the rest of her life, she would go several times a year to get her father's Victoria Cross out of the bank and proudly wear that. at one of the Remembrance services. And I'll put a picture up on Twitter of her doing that at Eastbourne.
With the death of Nelson Victor Carter and the clearance of No Man's Land of the wounded such as they could, it brought that battle at Richborg to a conclusion. In a matter of just a few hours, there'd been 1,100 men wounded or missing and over 365 killed in action.
When you analyse the casualties of the battalions that day, At least 77 towns and villages in Sussex were affected by this, and it meant that right across the county over the course of the next week, telegram after telegram would arrive in the towns, in the villages, in the farms, in the cottages on the downs, signalling that a lad from Sussex, one of the lambs, had been killed in action in the Battle of the Boar's Head, in that forgotten battle of the Great War. In that day, Sussex had died.
As my old friend Albert Bamfield used to call it. The day Sussex died. And it wasn't until many, many years later that Sussex once again woke up to this terrible sacrifice. And it was pleasing during the Great War centenary to see so many different communities from Worthing to Brighton to Eastbourne researching their role in this battle and remembering it. So it's far from forgotten now. And the Battle of the Boar's Head is remembered.
We continue our walk along the cinder track and we'll pass over some of the drainage ditches. One of them marks the area just in front of the British Front Line. And it brings us up to an area where the locals now shoot. cleared an area of ground and they have shooting here at different times of the year. So Richborg once again echoes to the sound of guns, not quite in the same way that it did in 1916 of course.
And you can walk round this area where they shoot and join another track on the far side that takes you across to an area known as Indian Village. on the British trench maps because of the Indian Corps, the men of the Indian units that were here in the early period of the war. And this was just behind the British front line.
As you walk down this track towards Indian Village, you can stop, turn round and look back and you're looking directly towards the promontory known as the Boar's Head, close to where the 12th Battalion attacked and where Nelson Victor Carter carried out those deeds that would result in the award of the Victoria Cross. Coming out at Indian Village... You're in an area where there's a number of 1920s houses now. and some modern builds.
This whole area, of course, was lain waste by war by the end of the conflict, and nothing here survived the First World War, so all these cottages date from the 1920s or later. And we can walk up to the junction of the Rue de Bois, Wood Street again, and here was Chocolat Meunier Corner, a famous corner mentioned in many memoirs of the First World War, a route towards the front line.
Chocolat Meunier was a brand of chocolate famous in France at the time and there was a poster on the wall, sadly no such poster today. And from here we can walk some of the minor roads up into Rishborg village, Rishborg St Vast and into St Vast Post Cemetery and that will be our next stop. As we approach the cemetery we cross over one of the drainage ditches that so characterise the battlefield around the Boar's Head.
So it's quite appropriate that there's one here right in front of the cemetery itself. And we cross over it via a stone, Portland stone bridge through an impressive entranceway into the main body of the cemetery. The plots here are essentially in date order. There's just over 800 burials. And it was set during the war in an old orchard. between some farm buildings, which were used as an advanced dressing station, an ADS, to receive the wounded from the front line.
During the fighting of June 1916, many of the wounded brought back from the trenches where the South Downs had gone into the attack, passed through here en route to the casualty clearing stations much further back. And sadly, some of these men died of their wounds. And that's how the South Downs graves here were established. We're gonna walk to plot three, where the bulk of these burials are.
Some of these men died of their wounds, others were killed in the very act of going over the top, climbing over the breastworks, getting out into no man's land, and their bodies could be recovered and brought in for burial. And as this had been essentially a regimental burial ground for many units in the front line along the Rue du Bois, it was the obvious place to bury them after the attack on the boar's head.
When I walk around these rows of graves and look at the names of the Sussex men buried here, I see the names of people that I went to school with in Sussex and when I read through the cemetery register, I see where these men came from.
and here are the names of places that I know so well in Sussex places that I've walked along the Downs and set as this cemetery is in the sight of a former orchard still even today surrounded by trees which are often alive with birdsong I can stand here and close my eyes and be in Sussex once more I've brought with me for them in many respects a little bit of home My own memories of the county they knew so well. The county that they enlisted to fight for. Their home. Sussex. By the sea.
So it's that part of the podcast where we look at some objects of the Great War connected to this week's story. And I've got a little collection of things this week, because over those many decades of following the South Downs, whether it's in Sussex or on the battlefields of the Great War, I've picked up quite a few little objects connected to their history. And I've got a few of them to share with you now. I've got two dog tags here.
One, the official dog tag, the red fibre tag that was issued to soldiers. And this was worn round the neck of Bob Lightfoot. of the 13th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment, the 3rd South Downs, when he was wounded that day. His wounds were serious enough to get him down through to the Advanced Dressing Station, beyond to the Casualty Clearing Station, to a base hospital and back to Blighty, back to England. But sadly, the wounds proved fatal and he died of his wounds at home.
And this is one of the last little souvenirs of his life. connecting him to that day in the fields around Richburg. The other type of identity disc with me as well, the private purchase one, which many soldiers bought, and this one also carried into battle that day on the 30th of June, belonged to Fred Watts, an Eastbourne lad who served in the 12th Battalion, the 2nd South Downs.
He was in the same company as Company Sergeant Major Nelson Victor Carter, and this was worn round his wrist in that attack at Richburg that day. I've also got two medals and sadly only the victory medals, the war medals I suspect were melted down. I bought these many, many years ago in a junk shop in Brighton and they commemorate the Blaker brothers from Worthing. Fred and Leonard Blaker who were killed on the 30th of June 1916, one in the 12th Battalion, one in the 13th.
They were one of about a dozen pairs of brothers that were killed that day. One family lost three sons, also from Worthing like these lads. The tremendous sacrifice that some families made in the Great War is absolutely incredible at times. And when we look back over more than a century now, it's hard for us really to understand the true scale of that loss. And Sussex, just like every other county in Britain, responded with its war memorials.
And these men are named on the memorial in Worthing, a beautiful bronze figure of a British soldier listing the men from the town who died between 1914 and 1918. I've also got a field postcard here that belonged to Private Smith from Brighton. And it's one that he sent home to his family in Brighton during his incarceration at a German prisoner war camp. He was captured at Richborg. He was one of about 100 men taken prisoner there.
Some of the wounded were left behind in the German trenches, of which I suspect he was one. And he remained in captivity until the very end of the war and didn't return to Brighton to his family until the spring of 1919. The other thing I've got is a very large group photograph of a company, 13th Service Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, Whitley Camp 1916. And all three battalions of the South Downs had every single one of their companies, that's four companies in every battalion, photographed.
And in some cases some of the individual platoons were photographed at Whitley at this time. It was only a few weeks before they sailed for France. And this particular company suffered probably about 80% casualties on the 30th of June 1916. So when I look at this and look down those faces, we're looking into the men who were there at the Boar's Head on that day that Sussex died. And objects like these bring alive that story. They're tangible links to the men of 100 years ago.
and connect us to the pathways and the places across the old front line. Well, that's it for another episode. As I mentioned earlier, the first in our forgotten Battlefields of the Great War series and we'll return to some more. Next week the podcast goes out on Saturday because that's the 25th of April, Anzac Day, the anniversary of the landings at Gallipoli. And you'll be able to join me then for a walk down to W Beach and a little chat about the Gallipoli battlefields.
But for this week I'll put some photographs of the objects we discussed on Twitter and you'll find them using the hashtag oldfrontline on my Twitter feed at Somcor. So that's it. See you next time. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Front Line with me, military historian Paul Reid. I hope you found this week's content of interest. Do take time to subscribe to the podcast. Follow me on Twitter at Somcor and tell us what you think using the hashtag Old Front Line.
Until next week when our paths cross again on the battlefields of the Great War.