Investigations of a Dog

90 years ago today 46th Division broke through the Hindenburg Line. You can read about 1/5th Lincolnshire Regiment’s part in the battle in the relevant chapter of Sandall’s history (and if you click linked names in the text you can get to medal citations and an interactive map). Although my great-grandfather served with the battalion he missed this action – by this time he’d been a prisoner in Germany for nearly 2 years.

It’s interesting to note that although people who are down with the revisionist work that’s been done in the last 20 years or so know this as one of the greatest achievements in British military history it still doesn’t seem to have broken into popular awareness in the way that the Somme or Third Ypres have. The coverage in Wikipedia is very poor, with 46th Division’s spectacular success on 29th September given only one sentence! The article gives far more attention to the less successful American and Australian attacks. Is this because people still can’t help thinking about the First World War in terms of failure?

Yesterday I went down to the Public Records Office (call it by its name!). I think I picked the wrong day. As well as the disruption from the building work, the ordering system broke down so I couldn’t order any documents for the first hour.

One consolation of the delay was that I had plenty of spare time to look at the First World War service records on microfilm. This time I was lucky to find a record for Thomas Wenham, my great-grandfather’s older brother (those for William and Charles hadn’t survived, which is exactly the ratio you’d expect from the burnt papers). Tom joined the reserves in 1915 but wasn’t called up for active service until 1916. He was initially in 19th Sherwood Foresters, a reserve battalion recruited in Lincolnshire, but then he was posted to 8th North Staffordshire Regiment, with whom he went to France. On 7th June 1917 he was wounded in the head by a shell at Wytschaete and was sent to hospital in Etaples, then returned to England. He survived but wasn’t fit for combat any more so served at home with the Royal Defence Corps. In 1918 he returned to France with the Labour Corps to guard prisoners of war. So out of three brothers known to have served in the war, all three were wounded in action, one died, and one was captured.

Then on to the real work: SP28 aka the Commonwealth Exchequer Papers. I tried photographing a whole account book to get an idea of how long it would take. The book was about 150 folios with writing on both sides, so about 300 images altogether, which took about an hour and a half. Quality is a bit variable because I didn’t use a camera stand (usually I find they’re all in use; this time there was one free but I then realised I couldn’t attach my camera to it!). Some images are perfect but others are so blurred that I can’t read them. It was also totally exhausting, but not as bad as copying them out by hand. I’m looking into the feasibility of a project which might involve photographing 20 or 30 entire boxes. That looks like it could be long, difficult and expensive.

I’ve just been playing around with the new “My Maps” feature on Google Maps. There are lots of other things I should be doing, but when I saw this post at Mercurius Politicus I just had to try it for myself. So I got out a trench map and came up with this map showing where my great-grandfather was captured by the Germans in December 1916 (I wrote about that in more detail here and here). We’re lucky that the incident was recorded in enough detail to reconstruct it reasonably well. It’s impossible to say exactly where the fight took place, but from the battalion war diary we can narrow it down to a relatively small area (the stretch of road highlighted in green on the map).

My Maps is obviously a very exciting development. It means that anyone can create custom maps with a few clicks rather than having to learn the Google Maps API. It took me less than an hour to make the map. The interface is so intuitive I didn’t need any instructions, I just got on with it. Most of the time was spent trying to trace the trench lines more or less correctly. It was easy for the Germans because their front line is still visible on the satellite photo, and the Z redoubt is a nice distinctive feature. The British trenches were more difficult because they don’t seem to coincide with any visible features. The lines I’ve drawn are only approximate and don’t capture all the twists and turns of the trenches but they give a reasonably good impression of the position.

One improvement that I’d like to see is the ability to place a grid over the map, move it, and change the size of the squares. That would help with tracing lines which don’t follow present day features visible on the map. It’s possible to do this with the line drawing tool but it’s a bit tricky. An automatic grid would make life much easier. Also a tool for measuring distances would be very useful – I found myself holding a ruler up to the screen! – and more fine control over scaling so that it’s easier to get the scale to coincide with a paper map. What would be really good is if someone made a map which overlaid the entire trench map grid onto France and Flanders…

I’m trying to get some “proper” English Civil War related work done this week, but at the weekend I did some more First World War stuff. In April I posted about World War I on Flickr, when I uploaded my great-grandfather’s photos from Cottbus PoW camp. Now I’ve added his letters, and another photo which I got from ebay. Although he isn’t on it, it was taken in the theatre at Cottbus and one of the men has the same “Bing Bong Boys” navy outfit:

I’ve now put each letter/postcard in its own set to make the link between the front and back of the same document more explicit. The sets are then arranged into collections. Some people on the Great War Forum were able to help me locate Cottbus Camp No. I, so now most of the photos have been placed on the map.

I also discovered that another Wenham brother might have died in the Great War. I don’t know why I hadn’t ever looked for Wenhams on CWGC before, but I found a Charles Wenham who could well be one of William’s brothers. Some of the evidence is circumstantial and I need to do more digging to be sure, but the epistemic probabilities are quite high. So far it looks like he joined 10th Lincolnshire Regt (Grimsby Chums), served overseas, was wounded and sent back to England but died of his wounds. Unlike the soldiers who died overseas, his body was brought home and buried in Cleethorpes cemetery. Again the Great War Forum has been a great help, and you can see more details on this thread.

And with regard to the other World War, I played some more of Brothers In Arms: Earned In Blood. I was still a bit curious about the post-Hill 30 storyline, but so far it’s been quite boring, and I gave up when I got into a silly tank level that’s suspiciously similar to the silly tank level in Road To Hill 30 that I complained about before. But there are more trees this time…

I nearly called this post “the Great War on Flickr” but that could easily have been misunderstood…

It’s really about using the photo hosting site Flickr for photos and other documents from the First World War. I’ve uploaded some photos of my great-grandfather here as an experiment in digital history. Flickr is much more than just an image hosting service. I’ve been trying out some of its advanced features to see how useful they can be to digital historians, and what the limitations might be.

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More details of my great-grandfather’s experiences in the First World War, up to the night he got captured in December 1916. Since my last post on the subject we’ve uncovered a few more details of his life, including copies of his birth and marriage certificates. I’ve also had some invaluable help from Steve Bramley and Chris Bailey who are writing a new history of 5th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment, based on years of research. It turns out that Chris has been trying to trace William’s descendants to find out what happened to him after he went missing but had drawn a blank! Even with this new information it’s difficult to trace the movements of one individual, so this post is as much about the battalion as about the man. Most of this is paraphrasing the official history of the battalion written by its commanding officer (Lt. Col. T. E. Sandall, A History of the 5th Battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment, Oxford, Blackwell, 1922), along with some quotes from the battalion war diary (Public Records Office, WO95/2691). It should at least give an impression of what things were like.

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On 5th December 1916, 1/5th Battalion, Lincolnshire Regiment moved into the front line near Gommecourt to relieve 8th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment. The previous month had been spent training behind the lines, even though it was officially a rest period. After this exhausting “rest”, and a parade and inspection in very cold weather, the battalion marched on foot from Halloy to Bienvillers. Battalion HQ and one company were placed at Foncquevillers, and the other three companies went into the wet, muddy trenches between La Brayelle and the Hannescamps to Essarts road (you can see the Foncquevillers area on Google Maps).

At about 9.00pm on 6th December, Lieutenant R. E. W. Sandall led a reconnaissance patrol into No Man’s Land. Somewhere on the road between Hannescamps and Essarts, they were ambushed by a group of Germans (probably from 77th Reserve Infantry Regiment). The patrol fell back to the British trenches under heavy fire from small arms and hand grenades. Lieutenant Sandall was wounded, and one man was missing. A bigger patrol was sent out straight away, but the Germans had gone and there was no sign of the missing man. That man was almost certainly 2683 Lance Corporal William A. Wenham, my great-grandfather.

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