The bloody Battle of Loos 1915

A wonderful story of courage from the tomes of Fleet Street history was revealed by the Drone’s very own poet and chronicler last week.

Journalist Pat Prentice told me an astonishing account of his father’s life in the trenches on the blood-soaked battlefields of France in October 1915 that spanned the years and ended up in another battle … at the upstairs bar of the Harrow.

Last week I wrote about the navvy poet Patrick MacGill, who scripted poems about poverty in Britain in the 19th century. His fame led Express founder and Editor Arthur Pearson to hire him as a reporter.

But I didn’t mention that the young bard also wrote a moving and distressing account of life in the trenches at Loos during World War One, in his acclaimed book called ‘The Great Push’.

Battalions from every Scottish regiment fought in the Battle of Loos. Of the 21,000 killed, more than 7,000 were Scots soldiers. Almost every town and village in Scotland was affected by the losses.

Pat’s father believed ‘The Great Push’ was one of the most honest accounts of the conflict, equal to German writer Erich Remarque’s ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, which not long ago, became a smash hit film.

MacGill, a stretcher bearer with the London Irish Rifles, summed up the war on his pages:

“Now when we take the cobbled road
We often took before,
Our thoughts are with the hearty lads
Who tread that way no more.”

Pat writes of his father: “Dad volunteered for the madness at 17, in time for the Dardanelles. A few months later, he was blinded, concussed and sent home, expecting to die from a German rifle butt in a trench gas attack. His attacker was pinned to the side of the trench by the bayonet of a maddened Scot.”

Thus, he shared the wounded MacGill's experience as a ‘passenger on the Highway of Pain, which stretched from Loos to Victoria Station’.

His Dad recovered, and later volunteered for the next conflict - Dunkirk and more.

Pat added: “He hardly spoke of the war, and only began in his last days, when he was lapsing in and out of consciousness.

“He died in my arms after I dashed home to Lincolnshire from chief- subbing the first edition of the Telegraph in Fleet Street. But I went to work the next evening after helping my Mum to lay him out. He didn't want anyone to see a wound he had.”

Pat didn't get a drink until after his shift, and then he imbibed. He ended up in the upstairs bar of the Harrow with another soldier like his dad. No prizes for guessing who. But here’s a clue. He was a Jock news sub on the Express who had served in the paras but told us stories of glory with the SAS and liked a tipple or two. He was famous not for having a red beret; but for having the red mist.

Pat, distressed, told him the story of his father and how he had died in his arms. Later outside in the early hours, the Scottish sub asked him what his last words to his dad were.

Pat replied: “They were – you silly old bugger, because he was fingering his rosary, and yet we always joked about religion.”

It was like flicking a switch. The SAS/Red Beret sub seemed to take offence and suddenly tried to knee Pat in the stomach, followed with the famed Glasgow kiss … a head butt to the nose.

“But I was the younger man and soon got rid of my frustration on him!” said Pat. “We shook hands later.”

THE DUST SETTLES, ALMOST

Years later in the 606 Jazz Club, the popular live music venue in Chelsea that opened in the late Seventies, Pat spoke of the book and its foreword about the heartache of war, to an attentive young man and told him it was a shame it was out of print.

Some months later he saw him again and as the music warmed, the man handed him a new copy of the book. He was, it turned out, a publisher, and courtesy of Pat father's recommendation, MacGill had been given a very worthy fresh voice. You never can tell.

That book is available now on Amazon. Thank you, Pat.

THE DESK OF MANY SECRETS



Former Express editor Christopher Ward, he was No.16

Mirrorman Christopher Ward will never forget his first day as editor No.16 of the Daily Express in 1981. As he settled himself proudly behind the legendary Arthur Christiansen’s mahogany desk, he opened the centre drawer which was empty but covered with lining paper.

Under the paper were four visitor cards, each identical but for the names of the four editors who came before him. One by one, they had left them there for the next incumbent. He smiled. Alastair Burnet; Roy Wright; Derek Jameson and Arthur Firth.

Later that day his new secretary gave him a box of identical cards but with his name on. “I’m afraid there’s only one box,” she said. “The management won’t let us order any more until those are finished. We must cut costs. They say it’s a waste!”

Arthur Christiansen must have been turning in his grave to know that the editor of one of the most famous newspapers in the world was only allowed one box of visiting cards. A sign of things to come.

Ward smiled again, lifted the lining paper and put his card next to the others ready for his departure day. It was to come two years later.

Most of us can clearly remember those days, we were always the Daily Mail’s poor relation, with management and leadership from the top always groaning and cutting the costs of everything in their paths, except their bonuses. Even the tea bar went. My old mate and colleague Roger (Buffy) Watkins and I used to say on the Backbench: “Right job, wrong paper!”

From the 1970s, hardly a day went by when we weren’t merging one title or another. Finally, Victor Matthews and Trafalgar House came along and bought the Express for £14.7million, and Ward was brought in by Jocelyn Stevens who was biting the carpet over wobbly circulation figures, even though the Express wasn’t far off the sale of the Mail.

Matthews, the boss of Trafalgar House, nicknamed Whelks because of his fondness for them, knew nothing about newspapers but everything about shovels and buildings. And he was quoted as saying he hated journalists. As for editors … "They were like building site managers. If they give you trouble, get rid of them!” he said.

He was never at ease with journalists and never got the hang of newspaper jargon, never tried even, always referring to the Page One splash as the "leader".

And he never really knew where the editor’s office was. He would ring Ward and summon him to ‘come down and see me now!’ When the Chairman’s office was a floor above.

One final agony for Ward was when the Express won ‘What the Papers Say’ Scoop of the Year award for Norman Luck’s exclusive on the Palace intruder. The story had been firmly denied by the Palace, Scotland Yard and Downing Street, but believing it to be true, Ward ran it.

"You had no business publishing that story if the Queen didn't want anyone to know about it," said Matthews, "the trouble with you journalists is you're always sticking your noses into other people's business!"

He headed Trafalgar House with Sir Nigel Broackes, who was to say later that they bought the Express to give Victor a new interest in life because he was bored, and his personal life was going badly.

“I asked him if he fancied it over lunch at The Savoy,” Broackes said. Matthews then was obviously no Beaverbrook in the making. He got the job on a whim for something to do.

But later most pundits agreed that he made a success of his Express chairmanship when he created the Daily Star in Manchester with virtually the same number of machines and staff and took on the tabloid brigade of the Sun and Mirror.

In 1985, the Express business was bought by United Newspapers and Matthews retired to Jersey where he died aged 76 in 1995, with £8 million in the bank. Jocelyn Stevens was appointed chairman of English Heritage and died in October 2014, aged 82. 

Christopher Ward became chairman of Redwood Publishing. He is 82. His book, ‘And the Band Played On’ became a bestseller and was made into a TV documentary. It tells of his grandfather, Jock Hume, a violinist who died playing as the Titanic sank.

*****

Funny old world: This tells us something — in August 1980 Trafalgar House bought the Firestone tyre factory, a unique example of Art Deco architecture, which was about to become a listed building. Matthews personally ordered the destruction of the main features of the facade over the Bank Holiday weekend, two days before the building was to be saved for the nation. He had been created a Life Peer the previous month and was determined to build on the site. Remember that? Not much of an accolade.

NATION AT WAR IN OUR STREETS



Britain declares war on Germany

WITHIN hours of the outbreak of the First World war, the Daily Express editor came under fire as a backlash against anyone the British public thought had German sympathies or even a German-sounding name, broke out on the streets.

Shop windows were smashed, and stores looted as gangs of youths, some egged on by their parents, went on the rampage. Abuse was shouted at people in the street, paint was splashed over front doors, riots broke out in the towns and even some commentators of the day were making mischief as they homed in on those in power who might be pro-German and side with the Kaiser.

As the lads of Blighty picked up their kit bags and rifles and marched to the Front, Express editor Ralph Blumenfeld became a target because he was an American-born son of German immigrants whose wife Ellis Barker, a naturalised German, had changed her name from Elzbacher.

By August 1914 the unrest led to Blumenfeld, now editor and chairman of the Express, to proclaim on Page One:

“Some of our rivals, smarting under the phenomenally successful competition of the Daily Express, are sedulously spreading false reports calculated to damage the prestige of this journal.

“For the benefit of the many of our readers who have written to us on this subject we beg to state that:

“The chairman and editor is not and never has been a German.

“The paper on which the Daily Express is printed is not and to our knowledge has never been made in Germany.

“There is not one German on the staff of the Daily Express.

“We would be greatly obliged if any reader to whom these false and malicious statements are made will kindly communicate to us details of such conversations including the names of those making the statements, so that we may take steps to bring the spreaders of falsehood to book in the Courts.”

Terry Manners writes: My own grandfather, William Saunders, a boy of 12 when war broke out in 1914, remembered the anger on the streets of North London when the Germans declared war in his memoirs he left me.

“He was a London lad born and bred when the roads to Neasden and Cricklewood were still strewn with fields of dandelions and buttercups and coal was delivered to your door by horse and cart. Life was always centred around the corner shops and there were no supermarkets in the streets then.

“He wrote: ‘Near our house was a baker’s shop run by a German woman named Mrs Wagner, who cooked good bread and was popular. All the families nearby ate her wares, and she lived upstairs with her husband Franz, who was a piano teacher and taught many of my friends at school.

‘One day, I watched as an English mob of fathers, mothers and sons surrounded the baker’s home and threw Franz’s piano out of a top floor window to loud cheers. It smashed into pieces in the road with piano keys, strings and wood chips everywhere. His wife stood in the street sobbing as her husband tried to pick up the pieces and the crowd jeered.

‘Many of us hated what we saw, but sadly did nothing. I always regret that day even to this one in my Eighties. I get angry with myself. I can still see the bewilderment on the couple’s faces. They thought we were their friends. I was, but what could I do as a boy? Spy was the cry! We never saw them again’.”

Things are summed up about the feelings at the time by notes in Blumenfeld’s diary about the ordinary people around Dunmow in the English countryside where he lived. He told how the people from all around would listen to lectures from their famous residents who held meetings at Easton Lodge, the home of H G Wells.

He had not long written War of the Worlds, about the invasion of the Martians, and was one of the many famous speakers who enjoyed ‘enlightening’ the natives about politics of the war, as they called it.

Blumenfeld said: “They came and listened and some of them understood, and some did not. They felt that the call of the farm land for their sons was more important than the call for Mars!

“They were so detached from the outer world that although they loved their hearths and homes and families and would fight like tigers for their bit of Essex soil, they felt no rising lump in their throats to the appeal that the Empire was in danger.

“They didn’t really know what the empire was. How could they when for a thousand years they had looked upon people 10 miles away as ‘furriners!’

Then one dark, moonless night, a clanking whirring, rattling Zeppelin blundered over our heads and dropped some bombs in a field nine miles away. A so-called ‘furriner’ was killed in his bed. That settled it. Our boys flocked to the recruiting offices along with their fathers, even lying about their ages. They warned: "We ‘ont ‘ave any of 'em Germans doing that to us British!”

*****

*Apologies to a former colleague who told me over coffee recently that my pieces were too long, and no one gives a fuck about nostalgia and past editors. Sorry mate, I just love the historical anecdotes and the way we were. My grandfather drummed the past into me, taking me around on London buses, which I know the Drone Editor loves.

TERRY MANNERS

14 October 2024