It’s easy enough to be happy

When life runs along like a song

But the man worthwhile

Is the man who can smile

When everything goes dead wrong.

 

Bombardier Billie Hill

 

 

By May 1915, it is almost certainly true to say, Private Frank Chivers Dixon had had enough.  A career soldier, he’d been in the army since December 1899 when, as a seventeen year old, he’d attested for a period of six years with the 3rd Wiltshire militia.  In 1902, just as the expeditionary force was returning from fighting the Boers, he’d enlisted with the regular army, joining the Wiltshire Regiment and later travelling with them to South Africa.  By 1910, with two good conduct badges under his belt and a career defined as ‘exemplary’ by his commanding officer he’d transferred to the Army Reserve and had settled down at Pietermaritzburg in Natal Province.  It was a long way from his birthplace in Old Swindon but the Army had looked after him well for the past eight years and South Africa, felt like home now.   Then war had been declared and as a Reservist he’d been recalled to the colours on August 15th.  By 22nd October he was in France, posted immediately to the 1st Wiltshire Regiment which was having a tough time of things at Neuve Chapelle.  Between October 23rd and 27th the battalion had sustained seven officer and over 500 other rank casualties and men with Private Dixon’s experience were worth their weight in gold and getting decidedly thin on the ground.  He must have been welcomed with open arms.

 

For Private Dixon though, the battlefields of cold, wet France were a rude awakening and a far cry from the arid climate he’d grown used to in South Africa.  In November they’d marched up through Belgium and seen hand to hand fighting at The First Battle of Ypres when D Company’s trenches had been regained in a bayonet charge. Then they’d moved forward to the Kemmel sector and on 12th December had been relieved by the 1/10th King’s Liverpool Regiment, a Territorial battalion which had only arrived in France just over a month before.  Frank Dixon, feeling unwell, had reported sick and was admitted to No 8 Clearing Hospital at Bailleul suffering from the effects of cold.  Two days later he was transferred to No 12 General Hospital at Rouen where his condition was diagnosed as rheumatism.  On Christmas Eve he was transferred again, this time to a hospital in Havre, and three days later, returned to England. 

 

The respite from waterlogged trenches appeared to have worked but by 17th February he was back in hospital again, this time at Weymouth with gastritis.  In fact it wasn’t until 26th April 1915, the day that the villagers of Chailey read that a trainload of 160 wounded men, (eighty of them stretcher cases), had arrived at Brighton after fighting at Hill 60, that Private Frank Dixon again shouldered his pack onto the troopship that would send him back to the 1st Wiltshires in Belgium.

 

By the time he rejoined his companions, they were resting at Dickebusch but on 2nd May they were marching again towards trenches at Elzenwalle to relieve the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC).  The battalion war diary variously describes the 1st Wiltshires’ time at Elzenwalle until the 11th May as ‘quiet’, ‘fairly quiet’ and ‘very quiet’.  Compared to other sectors it was quiet but there were still casualties.  During their stay there the battalion lost one officer killed, three other ranks killed and 15 wounded.  Frank Dixon was almost certainly one of the last casualties there, shot through the thigh on May 12th as the battalion was being relieved by The HAC.

 

And so, for the fourth time since his arrival in France in October 1914, Frank Dixon found himself in another foreign hospital, this time No 18 General hospital at Boulogne, admitted with a severe gunshot wound to his right thigh.  On the 17th May he was transferred to England and on the 20th May arrived with George Walburn and others at The West Hall VAD Hospital at Tunbridge Wells.  He would remain there and at Hickwells until September, adding another entry to Nurse Oliver’s album on 23rd July.

 

On September 12th 1915, Frank Dixon was discharged from West Hall, his wound healed and by now, walking quite well.  Three months after that at Littlemore Camp, he was discharged from A Company, 3rd Wiltshire Regiment ‘in consequence of the termination of his first period of engagement.’  He had completed thirteen years exactly with the army and would return, thankful for small mercies, to his home in Pietermaritzburg.

 

If the 1st Wiltshires were having a comparatively ‘quiet’ time of it, Corporal Reynolds of the 3rd Battalion The Royal Fusiliers certainly was not.  When war was declared, the battalion had been in India and it was only in December that they’d finally sailed for England.  By the time they arrived, Kitchener’s recruitment plans were already well under way.  The original expeditionary force had been numbered into eight divisions and the next sequence of numbers, 9 to 26, had already been allocated to the Kitchener Divisions now forming.  At first it had been thought that the men now returning from the Empire’s distant outposts would be invaluable to the raw and inexperienced Kitchener armies and could form training cadres to assist them.  That was when it was still thought that the war would be over by Christmas.  By the time they arrived in England from the Far East, their comrades fighting in France and Belgium had a string of battle honours running from Mons to First Ypres and the casualties to match.  To spare such experienced troops for a New Army that was still some months away from being ready was a luxury that the War Office could hardly afford and they decided to create three more divisions or regular troops out of the men now returning.

 

The 3rd Royal Fusiliers formed part of the 85th Brigade of the 28th Division which was established in the Winchester area in December 1914 and January 1915.  Ten of the battalions had come from India and one each from Egypt and Singapore. The Fusiliers were joined by men from regular battalions of the East Kent, East Surrey and Middlesex Regiments and they crossed to France in January 1915.

 

It hadn’t been long before they were at the centre of the action.  When the Germans had launched their gas attack upon the French Zouaves on April 22nd, it was the recently arrived men from the 27th and 28th Divisions who held fast south of the main German thrust.  The 3rd Royal Fusiliers had been called upon to help steady the Canadians on their left and later they had offered “stout resistance” in defending Berlin Wood east of Gravenstafel.  The wood had fallen on the 5th May but the Fusiliers had barely had time to reflect on its loss. 

 

Three days later, on the morning of 8th May, a terrific bombardment opened up on the three brigades of the 27th and 28th Divisions that were holding forward positions along the Frezenberg Ridge.   The Official History describes the fighting that occurred there as some of the most desperate fighting that ever took place in the Salient and certainly, it seemed to the troops of the 83rd Brigade, dug in on the forward slopes of the Ridge that they were exposed on all sides.  In such a precarious position, they could neither be supported from behind nor wished to concede even greater observation areas to the Germans by retiring.  In short, they were at the mercy of the German artillery and it showed them no mercy.  They withstood two bombardments and two infantry assaults but with practically all of the men in the forward trenches either killed, wounded or buried, they had retired in the face of a third onslaught.

 

The 80th Brigade to the south and the 84th Brigade to the north had also suffered a similar fate; remnants of the battalions that had been holding the line forced back but somehow just managing to hold on.  And into this carnage was rushed the 85th brigade with the order to recover the trenches that had been lost.  They pushed on until 8pm but were halted by heavy shellfire and an enemy now entrenched in a strong position and with an artillery supremacy that was able to break up any reinforcements before they were able to launch a counter attack. 

 

In the late 1930s, with another war looming, and the taste for reminiscences of The Great War very much in vogue, the periodical series, Twenty Years After, recalled what happened next.

 

“With nightfall there was little that could be done, neither men nor guns were there to strengthen the battered line, so the 10th brigade of the 4th division was called upon.  Following on the counter attack of the 85th brigade, the 10th was ordered to move eastward so as to take the Germans in flank.  At 7.30pm the attack was released and was rewarded by an outstanding measure of success.  The Germans, seemingly over-awed by the superb resistance of the 84th brigade and already shattered by the desperate effort of the 85th, gave ground.  More than that, two complete German army corps evacuated the whole of the ground they had won.  Still more remarkable, for the next five days they did not renew their efforts at this point of the front.  So the rest of the night was spent organising the front some 1200 yards in rear of the line held in the morning.”

 

Remarkably, Reynolds had come through the action unscathed but by now the old regular battalions of the 27th and 28th Divisions were a shadow of their former selves.  No less than 11 battalion commanders had fallen in the action and few of the original NCOs and men now survived.  Reynolds’ own number would be up a fortnight later - wounded at Belewaarde Lake on 23rd May, one of 12 men injured that day in what the diarist would term as a “Fairly quiet day.”  Compared to what they’d been through it was quiet but it would get decidedly worse on the 24th.  The following day, Whit Monday, the battalion would be decimated in a gas attack, losing 16 officers and 536 men killed, wounded and missing.  The gas cylinders being so close to their line, many men did not have time to put on their respirators and were overcome before they could protect themselves.  Major E Baker, commanding 3rd Royal Fusiliers would record in the battalion’s war diary on 30th May that, “Out of a total of 800 rank and file, some 70 men were collected in a gassed condition in rear of the line and 150 men remained ultimately with me.  The remainder were killed, wounded or missing.”

 

Corporal Reynolds though was out of it.  Later he would return to France with the 9th Royal Fusiliers and much later he would encounter Nurse Oliver and her album, the pages now increasingly full of entries.  Two years on though, and with thoughts of the friends he had lost at Second Ypres, there was still only one thing he could write: "Wounded at Ypres on 23rd May 1915".

 

As the casualty lists lengthened in the newspapers, work at Hickwells continued.  The nurses were doing a fine job and Nurse Oliver found time to approach some of her favourites and ask them to contribute a few words in her album.  More and more of the men now coming through the doors at Hickwells had been wounded in action but there were still others who were convalescing after bouts of sickness and some of them had already been discharged from the army.  They were a blend of experienced old soldiers with years of service abroad under their belts; Territorials whose excitement up until now had been their annual summer camp, and Kitchener volunteers: men who until a few months ago had never dreamt they would be putting on a khaki uniform and learning how to kill Germans with dummy rifles.

 

Private Charles Banks of the 1st Royal Fusiliers and Corporal Albert Brandon of the 7th Middlesex Regiment had over twenty five years’ soldiering experience between them by the time they were handed Nurse Oliver’s book.  Perhaps spurred on by tales of derring-do in South Africa, Banks had joined the army in 1900 whilst Brandon had joined even earlier, serving three years in South Africa and taking part in the Second Boer War, not as an infantryman but as a lancer with the 12th Prince of Wales Royal Lancers.  Now both men were back in England, Brandon with wounds to his right cheek and eye and Banks in such a poor state of health that by the time he had recorded his name in Nurse Oliver’s book in June 1915, he’d already been discharged from the army for two months as a result of sickness. 

 

Other men could count their service in weeks rather than years.  Sapper E Weeden of the 135th Field Company Royal Engineers lasted just seven months.  Enlisting in January 1915 he too had been discharged as a result of sickness and by July was back home with his family.  Although his education had been rudimentary, he still took time to express his feelings about soldiery and Hickwells as best he could.  He wrote:

 

For gold in merchant plough

The sea, And the farmer plough

The manor.  But glory is the soldier’s

Prize, the soldier’s wealth is honour.

So the brave soldiers never despise

And treat him as a stranger.

For remember he his country’s stay

In the hour of danger.

_______________________

 

Sapper E Weedon

                        Royal Engineers

 

With the best Respects to the

staff at Hickwell Convalescent

Home for their kindness and

Praiseworth treatment

 

By August 1915, the ladies of Sussex 54 VAD had treated 56 patients at Hickwells and eleven of those had returned to the Front.  Additionally, The British Red Cross Annual Report for The Sussex Branch for 1915 would later state, “two were discharged unfit but derived so much benefit that they have re-enlisted, and one other, who arrived on crutches, was discharged, walking with a stick, and hopes to re-enlist.”

 

Some of the nurses too were keen to pursue a more active role.  Frances Blencowe had enrolled with Sussex 54 in 1911 and by 1914, at the age of 50, she was a Red Cross stalwart.  The family was well established in Chailey; had been active in political and judicial affairs in Sussex and could trace its lineage back to 1309.  Great aunts and uncles had married well but Frances was unmarried and would remain so.  The outbreak of war instilled in her a renewed vigour which would not be sated by a convalescent home in Chailey less than a mile away from her family’s own comfortable seat at Bineham Mansion.

 

In 1914, with Britain’s Regular Army limping back from the battlefields of France and Belgium, Frances travelled across to Southampton Water and the imposing Military hospital in Netley.   Completed in 1863 having taken seven years to build, the hospital stretched for a quarter of a mile, boasted 138 wards and could accommodate a thousand men.  In the years that followed, it had played host to soldiers injured or wounded in the line of duty who came from every conceivable corner of the British Empire.  Despite the building’s magnitude, the Boer War had tested Netley’s capacity to the limit and the Red Cross, which had sent its nurses there in 1881 to train for future emergencies, had organised the construction of temporary huts to accommodate the excess men spilling into the fields that surrounded the hospital.   Anticipating similar needs with the outbreak of a new European War in 1914, the Red Cross now offered The War Office a 500-bed hutted hospital on condition that it could be dismantled and shipped to France if necessary.  The War Office accepted and the result was twenty five prefabricated huts, each funded by donations that came in from as far afield as New Zealand and Australia and each with accommodation for twenty five men.   The beds too were sponsored by local organisations and individuals, each gift acknowledged on a brass plate above the beds.  Frances Blencowe spent three weeks there, posted to Sussex No 1 Hut and working alongside Japanese nurses, occasionally snapping them on her little camera as they posed outside the huts or on duty inside the wards.

In the meantime, Hickwells had been offered up as a convalescent home and by spring 1915, Frances was back in Chailey and throwing herself into the new local effort.  Then the Red Cross had received a request for help from Serbia where nurses were desperately needed to attend sick and wounded soldiers there.  Stretched as they were, with increasing demands upon their services at home, in France and elsewhere, an appeal went out for volunteers to assist the Serbs.  “Under the best of circumstances,” stated the Joint War Committee Reports of The British Red Cross later, “it is not always easy to find the right woman at the right time for the right place, even for duty close at hand.  Since mistakes could not be rectified by a short journey home, infinite pains were necessary in selecting those finally chosen for Serbia.  Many who offered themselves could not be accepted because of the special qualifications required in view of the difficulties of working in Serbia.”  But Frances Blencowe was selected and in August 1915 she departed Sussex for the Balkan states, reporting to Rear-Admiral Troubridge, the head of the British Naval Mission to Serbia.

 

Meanwhile a steady trickle of patients continued to leave their mark in Nurse Oliver’s album.  There were Private Martin Donnelly and Private James Salmon, Donnelly, a territorial with the 1/5th East Surrey Regiment and Salmon, a regular with the 4th Royal Fusiliers.  Donnelly hadn’t even got to France, discharged sick before the first year was through, whilst Salmon had been overseas for the first Christmas and then stopped a bullet at La Bassee.  By February 1915 he was back home again.

 

Driver Jimmy Gilbert of the XV Brigade Royal Field Artillery was also back in Blighty.  He’d joined the army in 1908 and had landed in France on 19th August.  Within a week he had driven his gun into position at Mons and had stayed with the 5th Division for the rest of that year; his entry read like the battle honours of the Division.

 

50082 Driver J Gilbert

Royal Field Artillery

 

In action Mons, Le Cateau, Aisne

La Basse, Ypres

 

Privates Ferguson and Leigh, both of the 3rd Border Regiment, added their comments above Jimmy Gilbert’s.  Though all three had different backgrounds, Hickwells united them.  It didn’t matter to 24 year old Joseph Leigh that he hadn’t actually seen any action yet; his time would come.  He could hardly reel off battle honours in his entry but he could do the next best thing.  After signing his name and number, he wrote proudly, “Kitcheners Man” and then in brackets, “Shoeburyness” and just for good measure, “(Essex)”.  Private Ferguson wrote the same.