The grey branches of a dead tree rest peacefully against the lush green of a Welsh field in a satellite image. It is huge, its trunk cut into sections, and I wonder if, when it fell, it was old enough to have been there during Percy Liddle’s childhood. How did he come to be Private Percy Liddle of the Machine Gun Corps, his grave at Greenford Park, a suburban cemetery in London?
Born in 1893 to a gardener at Cefn Tilla Court, he was the second of an eventual six children, five of them born in Llandenny, Monmouthshire. His older brother, Frank, had been born in Wokingham in Berkshire where his father had been the Head Gardener at Holme Grange, a relatively new house designed by Norman Shaw. This was the latest move through the structured network of gardeners by Joseph Liddle, who left behind his father’s forge in Northumberland in order to begin a career in horticulture, starting on the lowest rung of that ladder with the aim, along with many others, of reaching the top of his profession one day. This process began with living in a “bothy”, often very basic accommodation, with other unmarried gardeners on an estate, employment found by word of mouth or recommendation. “The Gardeners’ Chronicle” was usually to hand, with its advertisements and articles on horticulture.
Any meeting with other gardeners was an opportunity to seek out the next advancement, whether it was as a journeyman learning to tend exotic plants in glasshouses or as a foreman responsible for the pleasure gardens that surrounded a stately home. The work was hard, requiring dedication and a desire to learn in order to get on. For most it meant life as a bachelor, as only more senior roles came with accommodation for wives and children. At the age of sixteen Joseph had been a gardener at South Hill Park, home of Lady Hayter, widow of the late Advocate General, Sir William Goodenough Hayter, working in the terraced gardens and around the four lakes in the grounds of the house. Joseph’s path crossed that of Emily Turner, employed as a nursemaid by a shipowner at the time. She was part of a large household resident in what was probably a villa near Crystal Palace. They married in Paddington in London in 1889, where she may have been working, allowing Joseph’s advancement to the role of Head Gardener.
Today it is hard to imagine the effort it took to maintain the gardens of many of the large houses, whether historic or newly built, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A home with an estate that could produce rare fruit and flowers alongside the essential vegetables that a large household required was a status symbol. The range of work and level of manpower needed to sustain it varied from one establishment to another but the principles and the knowledge needed were the same. There had to be a vegetable garden to supply the kitchen, along with traditional tree and soft fruit, but there had also to be a supply of cut flowers all year round. It was sometimes the Head Gardener or a senior member of his team who took responsibility for “floral art”, collaborating with the butler to coordinate displays compatible with the interiors of main rooms. Flowering pot plants were brought up from cuttings and seed in glasshouses. A range of environments were created within the grounds that allowed a wealthy host to offer figs, peaches and grapes to his guests. Arthur Hooper, who wrote of his experiences as a domestic gardener in the 1920s, described the intensive labour and dedication that went into ensuring this:
“There are certain jobs that cannot be done in the daytime, or which must be done in the shortest possible time. We were growing over a thousand chrysanthemums, and half that number of carnations, so when it came around to potting those plants it was important to get them done as soon as possible. Now this kind of work is very time-consuming, and as we were expected to pot three hundred plants into seven-inch or even ten-inch pots each day this was a task we could not do in a normal working day. Grape thinning is a job that can only be done in the evenings, as the sun can be blinding at times, unless one got a dull day when this thinning could be undertaken. We were producing several hundred bunches of grapes, and as each of these bunches might take as long as twenty minutes to thin, we were spending a lot of our own time in the vineries.”
A Head Gardener had to supervise all of this as well as ensuring that lawns were cut and that shrubs and roses (often hundreds of them) were pruned correctly. In addition, if his employer wanted to enter produce at horticultural shows, time would have to be set aside to grow it to an exceptional standard so as to bring home some certificates.
The gardens at Cefn Tilla Court seem to have been fairly modest in comparison with those where Joseph had worked previously, and it is unclear whether he could be described a “Head Gardener” at this point. There was terracing and topiary but not on the same scale. The house, a remodelling of a far older structure, had been purchased as a memorial to Lord Raglan who commanded British forces in the Crimean War, and been given to Richard Somerset, the 2nd Baron Raglan. The gardens were laid out in the 1850s and do not seem to have been much altered after that. Joseph must have had some assistance but I could not see any references to other gardeners in a very small community. Percy’s entry in the baptismal record was separated by one other from that of Lord Raglan’s child a month later. By 1901 Joseph was a self-employed market gardener apparently working for himself from the same cottage, possibly one in the grounds of or close to Cefn Tilla Court. It may be that Lord Raglan had been obliged to reduce expenditure, the Cefn Tilla herd of Hereford cattle had been auctioned off in 1892, along with other livestock and agricultural equipment, when he had given up farming. Despite this the Monmouthshire Beacon was able to report in 1894 that “…Lord Raglan, of Cefn-tilla Court, exhibited two fine bunches of white grapes, and a dish of white and red plums” at the Raglan Flower Show that year.
The birth of a sixth child, Frederick (after Winifrid, Ralph and Eric) may have influenced a move into Llandenny village, and then, London. It coincided with the death of Emily’s mother in Chelsea, the London suburb where she had grown up. Her father had retired from bootmaking in order to become a church caretaker, a job that may have come with lodgings, so the Liddles moved into the house at College Place (now Elystan Place), where her father had held the tenancy for over twenty years. Joseph and his sons now lived in a part of London where there was plenty of work for gardeners. Streets and squares were newly built, most with gardens to the rear of each property. This was a part of London that had many associations with horticulture. Chelsea Physic Garden was established in the seventeenth century. One of the earliest commercial plant nurseries, Brompton Park, was on the land now taken up by the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A later very successful one, Royal Exotic Nurseries, had operated to the north of King’s Road, it’s grounds disappearing under development just as the Liddles moved there. Chelsea Flower Show first took place in 1913. Percy probably saw some of the Chelsea we would recognise being built and it must have been quite a change from the peaceful Welsh village where he had grown up.
Joseph had secured employment as a Royal Parks gardener for himself and his oldest son, Frank. This meant working for the Crown on the parts of Royal estates that had been opened to the public in London. At fourteen Percy might already have been assisting his father at Cefn Tilla and had probably learnt enough to gain employment for himself tending some of the gardens near his new home. Maps of the area at the time show that many houses had substantial back gardens, though these householders were probably less reliant on home grown produce. By now greengrocers were common and there would have been some market stalls. Maintaining existing trees, shrubs and lawns, and raising bedding plants for display as well as some flowers for a household would probably have been within his abilities. In 1911, at seventeen, he is described as a domestic gardener in the census. His father and older brother were doing much the same thing but on a far larger scale. College Place was within walking distance of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens but public transport could have taken Joseph and Frank to others such as St. James’s Park. It may be that Percy was waiting for an opening to work with them. The family seem to have taken pride in the job description, some documentation describes their employer as “The Office of Works”and their role as “gardener (non domestic)” but where they had control over the wording it said “Royal Parks gardener”. It was certainly better paid than some gardening positions. In 1907 the MP for Brentford, Dr V. H. Rutherford, complained that in comparison with Royal Parks and London County Council gardeners, who earned twenty-seven shillings a week, those at Kew only earned twenty-one. The London Poverty Maps, based on the work of Charles Booth, a business man with political and social concerns, show that College Place had a mixture of reasonably paid and less well off residents.
In 1913 Frank married and moved to Christchurch Street (assessed as comfortably off), while Percy moved in to the adjoining Caversham Street, a short distance from College Place. He may have shared this address with his brothers or other members of the family. His path in life might have followed that of his father had it not been for the First World War, which had an immediate impact on some of the Royal Parks. Hyde Park and St James’s Park became a storage area for commandeered cars, Green Park for horses. Reservists and members of the Territorial Army paraded there. Throughout the war uses were found for these useful open spaces in the capital city. Temporary adminstrative buildings appeared, trenches were dug in Kensington Gardens which was also the home for a research facility specialising in camouflage techniques. These changes did not find favour with everyone and the matter was raised by local MPs in Parliament. Eventually allotments were permitted and lakes that had been drained for maintenance were used as another site for buildings.
At fifty Joseph would then have been considered too old for military service. His sixteen year old son, Eric, working as a baker, did not consider himself too young, and enlisted, claiming to be nineteen. By the time Frank and Percy registered in 1916 this had been discovered but not before he had served for several months, becoming a driver with the Royal Field Artillery. It is noticeable that Emily Liddle is always mentioned as next-of-kin and the point of contact rather than their father, she may simply have been better at dealing with paperwork. She had her hands full because in November 1915 their son Ralph enlisted in the Territorial Force at the Duke of York’s Headquarters in the Kings Road and began, within weeks, to display behaviour that proved to be a sign of serious mental illness. It may have been evident before then but being in such a rigid environment seems to have precipitated a deterioration into a far worse condition. After several breaches of discipline and a transfer into a provisional battalion he was given a medical examination and diagnosed as having “dementia praecox”, which we would now term schizophrenia. It is unlikely that he would have been able to return to his former employment as a footman and he was discharged to live with his parents, now in accommodation at the gardens of the newly built Horwood House in Buckinghamshire. Joseph must have found a position as gardener there.
Chelsea was, and still is, a place where the very rich and those who might consider themselves poor live close to each other. A young woman called Eleanor Richards, employed as a maid by the widow of a Governor of Hong Kong, Lady des Voeux, at smart Cadogan Square must have encountered Percy as he carried out gardening work or met him through mutual acquaintances. It was a few streets away from where he lived. In June 1916 they were married at Paddington Registry Office. Percy was no longer a gardener but a private in the 3rd Battalion (London Irish Rifles). He would have gone to the Duke of York’s Headquarters in King’s Road to respond to a conscription notice and joined 1/18th Battalion (London Irish Rifles) in February 1916, the local battalion of the Territorial Force. At the time of his marriage he was training at Morn Hill Camp at Winchester in Hampshire. By then he would have completed basic training and may have been about to be posted to France.
Eleanor married from Queensborough Terrace in Bayswater. Her father is described on the record as a photographer, the latest in a range of occupations. She had been born in Marylebone, descended from a family that had moved around what is now central London, from Charing Cross, then further out to Bermondsey. Her sister Beatrice had also been in service as a maid. Getting married was a step away from the insecurity of domestic service. Televison and film dramas have romanticised the experience of servants at that time but young women like Eleanor and Beatrice were often forced to escape poverty by seeking work in situations where they were at risk of assault by any men in the household they moved into. They had little time off and were almost always on call. It has been noted that “the Servant Problem” might not have existed had employers been more reasonable. Lilian Westall, who worked as a kitchen maid at a castle at Bletchingley in Surrey, at the age of seventeen, described her experiences at around this time:
“The food was good here, but the work very hard. All the cooking was done on a huge range; I had to clean this range with black-lead, and the great copper preserving-pans I burnished inside and out so that they gleamed golden. The great kitchen had to be scrubbed daily, and it had to be spotless. I had one evening off a week, and one day off a month. I didn’t dislike it here, but this sort of work needed the stamina of an ox, and years of semi-starvation meant I hadn’t this sort of strength. I left after about three months.”
Her next employer had a nineteen year old son whose attentions left her too nervous to stay there for more than a year. Marriage to someone like Percy, while not guaranteeing a comfortable income, may have been an escape from such uncertainty, and while he was a gardener, some lovely flowers too. Hothouse blooms sometimes found their way into a housemaid’s bedroom.
In September 1916 Percy moved even further away from the peaceful, gently paced world of gardens and parks when he transferred into the Machine Gun Corps. The First World War is thought of as a conflict transformed by the rapid mass production of weapons and equipment, by attrition made possible on a far greater scale than had ever been imagined. A mechanised war that left behind the tradition of cavalry charges and infantry squares. Those living on the south coast of England could often hear battles taking place across the Channel, and could even feel the impact of immense explosions such as that at Messines in 1917. There is a dearth of information about Percy’s military service, because so many records were lost to enemy action during WW2, but in joining the M. G. C. he became part of that industrialised war. A unit that reflected a modern approach and a willingness to change tactics based on experience.
The M. G. C. served in all theatres of war from its formation in 1915 and was also deployed in the Russian civil war as well as on India’s North West Frontier. It was part of the occupying force in Germany in 1919. Formed in 1915, it was a response to lessons learnt in combat, that machine guns, initially the Maxim and then the Vickers, were not being deployed to their greatest advantage. Each British Army cavalry regiment and infantry battalion was provided with two machine guns, but it was recognised that more were needed to counter the stalemate on the Western Front. This led to a greater provision of guns and trained men used in a more effective way. A training base was set up at Belton Park in Lincolnshire.
Its memorial stands at one edge of the large traffic island at Hyde Park Corner in London. It was once flanked by trees at its original location in Grosvenor Place where it was unveiled in 1925, and where it stood for twenty years before being dismantled to enable roadworks. After eighteen years in storage it was placed in its present location, now with a large hotel as a backdrop. Dwarfed by the building the Boy David stands on a plinth with a Vickers machine gun on either side of him, each almost hidden by laurel wreaths, steel helmets before them. He holds Goliath’s sword rather than the sling with which he defeated the giant. I was reminded that Israel’s defence system is called “David’s Sling”, that over a century ago Machine Gun Corps personnel served in Palestine and that a war being fought now has its origins in that time. “Saul has defeated his thousands, but David his tens of thousands” is inscribed on the marble. A century later later the Old Testament is once again being quoted in the rhetoric of war.
Two miles away, in a darkened corner of the Imperial War Museum’s First World War gallery there is a Mark 1 Vickers .303 inch medium machine gun. It was a sample donated by the Ministry of Munitions at the end of the war, made by Vickers Sons & Maxim Ltd., never used in anger. It seems quite small, but that was the point. It could be carried easily to where it was needed. The team that operated it took numbered roles, an efficient human machine. No. 1 held the greatest responsibility, ensuring that the gun was in good working order, but he also fired it and carried the tripod it rested on. No. 2 carried the gun into position, fed the belt of ammunition through it while it was being used and assisted the firer, passing on any orders. The ammunition was carried by Nos. 3 and 4, who were also responsible for ensuring there was adequate water for the cooling system. Nos. 5 and 6 (of whom there were two) acted as scouts and range finders. All of them were expected to be able to take over other roles if necessary and practised this when possible. The sergeant or corporal in charge determined who had the most aptitude for each. The gun and associated equipment, as well as the team’s rifles, was transported in a limber, a kind of trailer drawn by a mule.
Fabric belts with loops sewn in along their length to hold ammunition were filled in factories in the UK, one in Park Royal in west London employed over 7,000 people, most of them women. The belts were then placed into boxes. Following an engagement a machine gun position would be surrounded by both, empty and discarded. The intention was that both would be reused but there was always a need for fuel to cook with so the boxes didn’t last that long.
The weapon had won over those assessing it for the British Army by 1912:
“The report (SAC 1197) is long and very detailed but its conclusion was inescapable – the new gun was an unqualified success. Compared to other models the feed block could now be stripped without disturbing the rest of the mechanism and it was far easier to replace broken firing pins or springs. The use of badly filled, soaked, or mud- and sand-covered belts did not materially affect the functioning of the feed mechanism and in terms of mechanical reliability all that could be found wanting after 10,000 rounds was a loose pawl spring on one gun and barrel wear resulting in a drop in bullet velocity of 200ft/sec.”
Martin Pegler, “The Vickers-Maxim Machine Gun”
It could be carried on a shoulder and brought in to meet a sudden need or a planned attack. They were so effective that those operating them were sought out by enemy snipers, their muzzle flashes giving away their location. In 1918 an attachment was trialled to conceal them but prior to that an armoured cone was introduced that protected the muzzle from such attacks. In 1916, at High Wood, at the Somme, machine guns were used as artillery weapons for the first time, providing rapid fire continuously for twelve hours. It had a devastating effect on the opposition, undermining their attempts to counterattack. A belt reloading machine was manned throughout to provide almost one million rounds fired during the barrage. The water cooling process required hundreds of gallons of water and one hundred barrels were changed during the action.
The Machine Gun Corps casualty rate was unusually high, 1,200 of its 11,500 officers were killed, and 1,671 of 159,000 other ranks. In his preface to “Machine Gunner 1914-1918”, a collection of personal recollections and excerpts from battalion histories compiled by by C. E. Crutchley in 1973, Sir George Wade, M.C., Chairman of the M.G.C. Old Comrades Association wrote:
“They were always at the centre of things. Wherever trouble most threatened, or an attack was planned, there they had to be amongst it all. They had tremendous fire power, and the moment they started they were the targets of every enemy weapon within range. No wonder the Machine Gun Corps was nick-named the Suicide Club!”
They could be in no doubt of their impact on the enemy having seen what machine guns could do to their own men. A former N.C.O. of X100 Machine Gun Company described how men just ahead of his team had been caught in their fire:
“Not far away there were hummocks of churned ground where the enemy front line HAD been. Nearer still the pale soil was churned up into encrusted clumps and tangles and stumps of half-destroyed wire, and among the remains were fantastic khaki dolls in all attitudes from fully prone to grotesquely upright. From the wire to the enemy front line, and beyond, the bodies lay in decreasing swathes so that the top of the insignificant ridge, no more than three hundred yards, was unencumbered.”
Service in the M. G. C. must have been an intense, adrenaline filled series of experiences for these highly trained men. They might be expected to move suddenly to support an ongoing action or to prepare a position under the cover of darkness for a dawn attack. Their recollections leave a sense of a powerful esprit de corps, of genuine comradeship and trust, a motivated, resilient elite – modern soldiers. It does not surprise me that there was such an effort to maintain that spirit through its association, despite the Corp’s disbandment in 1922 as a post war cost saving measure.
Although there is no record available of where Percy served what is certain is that, on his return, he not the person he had been. At some point between his transfer into the M. G. C. in 1916 and his return to Chelsea in 1918 he had suffered experiences that left him with “shell shock”, a condition synonymous with the First World War. The term was first used in The Lancet in 1915 by Charles Myers, a psychologist who was drawn into assessing and treating early cases in France, and did much to advance approaches to its treatment. He believed that the explosive sound of shelling must have had some impact on those affected.
The British government’s official figures for those affected by this strange new phenomenon, sometimes referred to as neurasthenia, suggested that around 80,000 personnel had received treatment for it by the end of the war, but the true number was believed eventually to be around 200,000. At first no one knew what to make of it. Men who showed no physical injuries other than slight wounds, or none at all, were unable to function normally because they trembled, fell over, became paralysed, could not speak or shouted involuntarily, displayed these or any number of bizarre behaviours. Their sleep was broken by nightmares. In recordings made at the time by Pathe News and other film makers we see them stagger about, some giggling at the peculiar spasms and tics they were exhibiting. Medical staff had no idea what to do with them and some of the first wave were sent to what were known then as “lunatic” asylums on discharge from the military, where they stayed for the rest of their lives. Yet it became evident that many of them could be treated successfully using a variety of different approaches if the condition was addressed early on, and that men could be returned to service without even leaving the theatre of war they were serving in. This approach continues to be used today, PIE – Proximity, Immediacy and Expectation. In her book “Shell Shock” Wendy Holden says:
“The theory is that if you treat men near the front, you treat them straight away and you treat them like soldiers, not like patients, they have a much greater chance of recovery. It was the start of a marriage between psychiatrists and the military that endures today.”
In the twenty-first century we are almost all familiar with the term “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD), and understand that someone may not show signs of the impact of combat that they have experienced. It is unlikely that someone affected in this way now would show much physical evidence of it other than, perhaps, a tremor or tic. From 1914 there were casualties of both sorts, the men who were brought staggering from trenches and those who left relatives and friends perplexed by displaying intense reactions to sudden loud noises when they came home om leave. In the twenty-first century we are almost inured to huge spectacles, real or artificial. Loud and immense is the default setting. Those who took part in that gargantuan industrialised war were of the same generation who were unnerved by a silent film of a train arriving at the Gare du Nord in Paris in 1895. Soldiers, whether conscripts or volunteers, were drawn from all walks of life, mostly quiet ones. For someone like Percy, who spent his days in peaceful parks and gardens, the change must have been shocking.
Shelling seemed to have been one of the most common causes. One shell could cause a crater the size of a house and the vast amount of displaced soil often ended up on those around it, in some cases burying them alive unless they could be dug out quickly. This might happen to a man several times before he began to show any sign of distress. Where the front line had shifted back and forth, as ground was gained or lost, the living could see and smell the dead. Unburied bodies were everywhere and re-emerged as a result of shelling or the digging of trenches. For the average man, who had never been exposed to such horrors, the constant presence of those remains, the relentless noise of battle and the conditions they were obliged to live in, let alone the fear of death or injury, must have had a profoundly damaging effect.
“Even the horror of the day spent in shallow, waterlogged trenches under increasing fire was surpassed at night when the full fury of the German guns was let loose. Men disappeared into the night; one knows not to this date their fate, whether destroyed by gun fire, or swallowed up in the yawning shell holes, stifled with mud and water, gripped and paralysed with cold and wounds. The scream of the shells, the dull boom of the burst, the chatter of machine guns, and the spat, spat of heavy raindrops lashing the surface of the quagmire were incessant.”
33rd Battalion Machine Gun Corps history
It is not surprising that some simply refused to continue but this was perceived as cowardice and there is no doubt that a proportion of those now referred to as being “Shot at Dawn”, executed by firing squads, were victims whose minds and bodies could not cope with their situations. Others hid signs that they were affected in case they were accused of cowardice. The British Government’s response was influenced by concerns that an increasing number might refuse to fight or that so many were suffering genuinely from mental wounds that there wouldn’t be enough manpower, even with conscription, to continue the war, let alone win it. There was a need for anyone who could recover to do so as soon as possible and return to the front. There was also the prospect of the enormous cost of pensions and gratuities for those who would not be fit to fight or even work ever again. Eventually more resources were made available and there was an acceptance that a new approach was necessary.
The change in attitude towards what was once known as “lunacy” or “feeblemindedness” came about partly because so many in the population were forced to be more sympathetic as a consequence of having family members affected in this way. When officers fell victim to it they could hardly be ignored. Until then mental disorder was thought to relate to inherited illness rather than being brought on by environmental factors or experiences. Treatment rather than containment was now a possibility and the newsreels that showed the afflicted also showed near miraculous “before and after” transformations. In some cases quite vigorous manipulation and massage brought tremulous limbs under control. Doctors were on hand to talk to these patients and listen sympathetically to their experiences. It was the start of talking cures. Methods of treatment and theories that had been proposed by Sigmund Freud and others before the war evolved and were put into practice in what were now known as “mental hospitals” across the UK.
But veterans were not all helped in time or at all. In the years following the war, and probably across the Empire, there must have been many Percys and Eleanors trying to navigate normal married life despite the situation inflicted on them, in their case, as for many others, one put on hold by his service. They set up home at last in Cornwall Street (now Rumbold Street) in Fulham and Percy followed his father and brother into service at the Royal Parks. His condition must have been evident because he received a small disability pension but his life was settled enough for him to become a parent for the first time. Percy Arthur was born at Cornwall Street in October 1919. There is nothing to tell us what happened over the following months but by the summer of 1920 Percy senior was at the asylum in Hanwell and may, belatedly, have been receiving treatment. Perhaps the news that he was to become a father for the second time was more than he could cope with. Living in one room with a toddler and a pregnant wife may have been intolerable for him, and his behaviour may have been frightening for her. Thomas Olive described the impact of his war years on family life in an interview with the Imperial War Museum:
“I used to have little breakdowns now and then and my wife used to be very frightened. It more or less used to happen at night, when I was in bed. I used to spring up off the bed, you know; it used to frighten her. My daughter, incidentally, is terribly nervous, she’s terribly nervous. My wife says it’s all my fault. Well I had shell shock, you see. I got blown up, you see, and it affected my whole system. I got a pension for about oh, what was it, about 9 shillings a week.”
In post war Britain if you had no work there was little or no financial support other than that of the charitable or informal kind. It was common to see men with trays of matches or bootlaces for sale and signs explaining their condition. To be worried that you might not be able to support your young family without asking for help from relatives and friends who were as hard up as you must have been an immense strain on a troubled mind. Despite the return to peace there was none for many veterans.
Percy’s war ended on the first of July 1920. At the asylum he seems to have engaged in therapeutic activities, and his final hours were spent out in the open, just as he had spent much of his working life, surrounded by birdsong and the sound of insects, only interrupted by the passing of trains. He had been with fellow patients, in a field close to the asylum, but was eventually missed, then found. He had been struck by the Cheltenham Express. The coroner found that there was not enough evidence to determine whether it had happened by accident or deliberately but at last he had found peace. His grave was paid for by the authorities because he had been a patient at the asylum, but it is marked with a Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone because he died before the 31st August 1921. The cemetery record shows that he was given a military funeral. Eleanor would not have been able to afford a plot at smart Brompton Cemetery, a short walk from her home, now cared for by Royal Parks. His youngest son, Victor William, was born in November, at an address in Fulham Road.
Eleanor, now a war widow in all but name, continued to live at Cornwall Street, and was made a grant of £6, the equivalent of just under £200 today. I found that Percy’s death had been recorded on a pension card simply as “Injuries to head and body”, the words used on his death certificate, without any indication of the circumstances. There might have been a deliberate decision to limit what was said in this instance as a coroner’s verdict that indicated suicide may have meant she was denied any payment at all. As it was, she only received financial support for her oldest child, the one born after Percy died did not count.
Two years after his death the War Office Committee into Shell Shock published its findings. In the introduction it said:
“…it became abundantly plain to the medical profession that in very many cases the change from civil life brought about by enlistment and physical training was sufficient to cause neurasthenic and hysterical symptoms, and that the wear and tear of a prolonged campaign of trench warfare with its terrible hardships and anxieties, and of attack and perhaps repulse, produced a condition of mind and body properly falling under the term “war neurosis,” practically indistinguishable from the forms of neurosis known to every doctor under ordinary conditions of civil life.”
I found it difficult to trace what happened to Eleanor after 1921. She must have had some support from her husband’s family, and her sister Beatrice was married to a fireman based in Fulham by that time, living close by. Eleanor appears on the 1939 register, living in Wimbledon with her widowed mother and Victor, by this time a government clerk. I noticed that he gave his date of birth as Armistice Day, and I wondered what it must have been like growing up not knowing your father, perhaps not even the circumstances of his death, and whether it made you feel better to think that, as you were born, crowds were gathering at the unveiling of the new stone Cenotaph in Whitehall. His birthday was around two weeks later than that. What must have it been like for his older brother who barely remembered his father at all? The charity Scotty’s Little Soldiers supports the bereaved children of military personnel in the UK and has found that, even today, in supposedly enlightened times, they are subjected to bullying and intimidation because of their loss. Eleanor remained a widow until her death in 1977 at the age of eighty-four. She had been married for four years and although she had probably barely seen her husband in that time she now had two sons to raise at a time of economic difficulty.
Percy’s parents had moved to a cottage at Upper Lodge in Bushy Park by the end of the war and that was their home until Joe’s death in 1926 at the age of sixty-one. He must have been a Royal Parks gardener right to the end. Emily died in 1939. Their youngest son, Frederick, was the last to work as a gardener, a domestic one. The form that was sent out by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to next-of-kin must have reached them rather than their daughter-in-law. I expect Emily dealt with the paperwork as usual. No mention is made on his Commonwealth War Graves Commission entry of his wife, just that his parents lived at Upper Lodge, Bushy Park. I believe that their choice of epitaph says everything about the suffering Percy must have experienced at the end, that they hoped he would have “PEACE PERFECT PEACE” at last.
For John Sevigny
Text © Albertina McNeill 2023 with the exception of quotations. Do not reproduce without written permission on each occasion. All rights reserved. Do not add text or images to Pinterest or similar sites as this will be regarded as a violation of copyright.
I could not have written this without a great deal of help from the following people and I am very grateful to them for giving me their time:
Richard Fisher, Vickers M G Collection and Research Association
Gavin Gribbon, Royal Parks Records Manager
Karen Meadows
Richard Sullivan, London Irish Rifles Association
Veronika Chambers, Lost Hospitals of London
Dr. Johnathan Oates
Paul Reed
Imperial War Museum bookshop staff
Sources:
Census records
Electoral rolls
1939 England and Wales Register
World War I Pension Ledgers and Index Cards, 1914-1923
British Army World War I Medal Rolls Index Cards, 1914-1920
British Pathe
Wikipedia
The Long Long Trail
Vickers M G Collection and Research Association
The Monmouthshire Beacon 30 April 1892
The Monmouthshire Beacon 25 August 1894
Middlesex County Times 10 July 1920
The Gazette 1 June 1907
The Gardens Trust blog
Royal Parks
Royal Parks in WW1
Lost Hospitals of London
National Library of Scotland side by side maps
Imperial War Museum – Voices of the First World War podcast
Imperial War Museum Gun, Machine, .303 inch, Mk 1 & Vickers Machine-Gun
The Old Front Line podcast – Trench Chat: WW1 machine guns with Richard Fisher
National Army Museum – Machine Gun Corps
English Heritage: The history of the Cenotaph
London Poverty Maps
Coflein: Cefn Tilla Court Gardens, Llandenny
“Machine Gunner 1914-1918: Personal experiences of the Machine Gun Corps”, C E Crutchley, Pen and Sword Military Classics
“Shell shock” Wendy Holden Channel, 4 Books
“Shell-shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis”, Anthony Babington, Leo Cooper
“The Vickers-Maxim Machine Gun”, Martin Pegler, Osprey Publishing
“Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-shock”, The Naval and Military Press in association with the Imperial War Museum
“Useful Toil: Autobiographies of working people from the 1820s to the 1920s”, edited by John Burnett, Allen Lane
“Life in the Gardeners’ Bothy”, Arthur Hooper, Malthouse Press, 2000
“The Head Gardeners: Forgotten Heroes of Horticulture”, Toby Musgrave, Aurum Press Limited
“The Royal Parks in the Great War – revealing their part in the conflict 1914 1919”, Royal Parks Guild
Positive Greenford 