The Forgotten Soldier: He wasn’t a soldier, he was just a boy

Guglielmo Marconi was sending the first radio signals across the English Channel, on the other side of which the messy Dreyfus affair was finally drawing to a close: the much-sinned-against French officer would be out of prison before the century ended. The Boxer Rebellion was prompting endless column inches in British newspapers on the moral failings of the Chinese, while even further away the British Antarctic Expedition was hunkering down for the first ever over-wintering on the continent.

Art, music, exploration, literature, sport, science, imperialism: as the nineteenth century eased towards its close, the themes that had defined it were preparing to push on into its successor. All of this was happening a long way from Gadsden Mews in North Kensington, however, where Edward Charles John Connelly was born to George and Marion Connelly ten months after their marriage the previous year.

Mews properties may sound quite fancy these days, but as London slums went Gadsden Mews was among the worst. It was a small, cramped, overcrowded clutch of dingy tenement buildings squeezed into a tiny space to the rear of other streets of slum housing, the centre of a triangular street pattern that began with the borders of the Great Western Railway to the north, the Grand Union Canal to the south and east and Ladbroke Grove to the west and shrank concentrically to the cramped, claustrophobic dankness of Gadsden Mews. Victorian poverty campaigner Charles Booth noted around the time of Edward’s birth that Gadsden Mews was ‘very poor looking, dirty, grimy’. The area had grown up rapidly from the 1840s with the coming of the railways and the canal, to become known as one of London’s worst slums. So many women worked as laundresses – including Edward’s mother and grandmother – that the area became known as ‘Soapsuds Island’. Charities including the Protestant missions did their best to alleviate some of the poverty, but it was a losing battle. This was the world into which Edward Connelly, the boy from Soapsuds Island, was born.

In many ways Edward was a product of the century that was ending as he entered it. He came from Irish stock: his great-grandfather John and great-grandmother Catherine had come to London from a small townland outside Youghal in the east of County Cork in 1842. It was just before the Great Famine, but there had been a number of smaller famines at the time and the Connellys were living in a tiny one-room house, trying in vain to live off the land. John, as the eldest, had to leave to make one less mouth to feed. He took advantage of a price war between steam packet companies to find a cheap passage on the crowded deck of a boat that docked at Shadwell in East London some time in 1842, where he and Catherine would live in various tenements for the rest of their lives while John got what work he could ‘on the stones’ at the docks until his death from tuberculosis in 1890 at the age of sixty-five. The desperate times are no better demonstrated than by the four months’ hard labour John did in Newgate Prison in 1852 after he was caught selling watches stolen from the hold of a ship on which he was working.

Around 1890 Edward’s father George moved from the East End to the burgeoning North-West London Irish community in search of work on the railways. While living among Irish immigrants in Admiral Place, a stone’s throw from the mews in Kensal Town, he courted an English girl living in the same building; they married and the newlyweds took a room in Gadsden Mews as their first marital home.

Marion Christopher, Edward’s mother, came from Dorset agricultural stock. The Christophers had lived for many generations in and around Blandford in Dorset, never owning land but always working it. Her parents joined the increasing migration from the uncertainty of the countryside to the greater employment prospects of the cities at the height of the Industrial Revolution, making the long journey from rural Dorset to the tenements of West London in 1874. Marion was the first Christopher to be born among the cramped, dirty streets of North Kensington, in the summer of 1877 to George and Mary Jane Christopher. George had been in the Royal Artillery for a period as a younger man, but on moving to London he found himself getting whatever labouring work he could.

At the time of Edward’s birth, Marion’s younger brother Robert Christopher had just left for the Boer War as a soldier with the 2nd Battalion of the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment, the same regiment that Edward would join eighteen years later. Robert had enlisted the previous year at the age of seventeen and would spend three years fighting in South Africa before being wounded and sent home to England in 1902. When the First World War broke out he was labouring in a power station, but his previous military career led to him being recalled to the army as a private in the 6th Battalion of the Queen’s (Royal West Surrey) Regiment. Robert Christopher died of wounds sustained in a raid on German positions at the Hohenzollern Redoubt near Bethune on 5 April 1916.

Born to Irish immigrants on one side and refugees of the Industrial Revolution on the other, Edward was an archetype of the late-nineteenth-century urban working class. His and their worlds were small, their horizons narrow: both families lived for more than half a century within the same tiny network of streets in North-West London. It was from there that I would set off on my journey to find the forgotten soldier.

3

‘A long, hard journey through a short, hard life’

One hundred and fifteen years after his birth, almost to the day, Edward Connelly’s locality looked quite different to the one he knew, especially on one of those spring mornings that make even the Harrow Road happy. There was the cheeriness of renewal everywhere – a freshness in the air; even the rattling rasp of the grilles going up at the bookmakers and money-transfer shops seemed to have a tangible jauntiness. The half-dozen people waiting for the post office to open smiled and chatted. Two men in bright-blue overalls with the legend ‘Love the Town You Live In’ written on the back of their hi-vis vests rumbled by, wheeling a bin full of brushes. As the sun climbed higher into the sky and forced the shadows into retreat towards the shop fronts, a young woman wearing a puffa jacket waiting in the post-office queue put her head back, closed her eyes and smiled to herself as the sunshine warmed her face. The sky was deep blue and cloudless, bare save for the swollen ghost of an aircraft contrail.

I ordered a cup of tea in a café, sat down at a Formica table, reached into my bag and pulled out a dog-eared copy of the London A–Z along with a folded map: a reproduction of an Ordnance Survey of the area from 1913. I found the right page of the A–Z and opened the old map, placing them side by side on the table, two landscapes divided by a century but whose urban contours made them recognisable as the same place. I ran my forefinger down the page of the A–Z and then did the same to the map until I found where I needed to go.

On the old map, Gadsden Mews is there in the east of Kensal Town, a wedge of North-West London still hemmed in today by the canal, the railway and Ladbroke Grove. Within this triangle on the old map, concentric streets of tightly packed houses shrink towards the very centre where, shoehorned into a cramped space between the backs of the residences, there are two rows of tiny squares named Gadsden Mews. There’s no Gadsden Mews on the A–Z, it’s long gone, but the surrounding streets survive and I could at least get close if I could find Hazelwood Crescent.

I drank my tea, headed back out into the sunshine, turned east along the Harrow Road, crossed the bridge over the canal and walked towards where Gadsden Mews used to be.

After crossing the canal I headed for the landmark of Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower until I found Hazelwood Crescent nestling in its considerable shadow. The entrance to Gadsden Mews had been at a slight dog-leg kink in Hazelwood Crescent that’s still there today, so I’d be able to pinpoint almost exactly where the mews once lay. The streets were quiet as I reached the hint of a bend I was looking for. On this spot had been the only way in and out of the slum tenements, the tiny three-storey wooden houses packed with the poorest of the poor, where whole families often lived in single rooms with little in the way of comfort or sanitation. Kensal Town itself was a poor area, but even Kensal Towners would probably have looked down on Gadsden Mews.

I gauged my bearings and stood for a moment looking into where the entrance used to be. Ahead of me was Hazelwood Tower and to my right was the gable end of a low block of flats. I was about to move on when the sign on the front of the block of flats caught my eye – it was called Gadsden House. So there was an echo of the old place here after all. I walked around a little further, passed between a couple of apartment blocks and made my way into the centre of the Kensal New Town estate at the heart of which was a tarmacked basketball court bordered by a bright blue metal cage where the breeze moved a few leaves around in a far corner. The gate was open; I walked onto the court and stood at its centre. Hazelwood Tower dominated one end and on one side the court was overlooked by the balconies of Gadsden House. Somewhere beneath my feet lay the heart of Gadsden Mews. Somewhere here, within no more than a few feet of where I stood and where my shadow fell, was where my great-grandparents had eked out their lives of relentless hardship and poverty, and where Edward Connelly was born.

Ahead of me lay a long, hard journey through a short, hard life. Around 175 miles south-east of me, as the crow flies, was a small, neat, unvisited grave. I looked a little incongruous standing in the middle of an empty public basketball court on an estate in North-West London clad in full walking gear and rucksack, but this was where a story with a mysterious, tragic ending began. I was beginning my physical journey from the cradle to the grave, through the all-too-brief life of Edward Connelly. I took a last look around, shifted my rucksack into a more comfortable position, strode away from the basketball court and set out for Belgium.

4

‘A half-deaf kid from the slums of Kensal Town’

It would be more than a year before Edward was christened, perhaps suggesting he was a sickly baby for whom the first year was touch and go. But he survived and by 1901 the family had moved from Gadsden Mews to Admiral Mews, a few hundred yards west, close to the railway lines. It doesn’t seem as if they were moving up in the world. Booth’s notebooks, having set out the extreme poverty of the surrounding streets, described Admiral Mews as: ‘If anything worse than the foregoing. Houses on north side only and a few stables at the eastern and western extremities. Rough, noisy, all doors open, passages and stairs all bare boards, the usual mess … Gipsy looking women standing about, Irish. The worst of this block of streets.’

Two-year-old Edward was no longer living with his parents. Instead he was living with his grandparents, which was probably more to do with the nature of the tenements than any family disagreements. They were living in the same building, but George and Marion were in one room with Robert, my grandfather, aged eight, while Marion’s parents, the Christophers, George and Mary-Ann, lived with Edward in two rooms along with their 42-year-old son John.

Edward received some rudimentary schooling at the local mission school, but for families like the Connellys the capacity to supplement the meagre household income was always the priority, and Edward would have been sent out to work as early as possible, probably at the age of fourteen. In the 1911 census, when he was twelve, he was still living with his grandparents and his uncle John in Admiral Mews, close to his parents, but there’s one extra detail: on the census return Edward is described as ‘a bit deaf’.

Within weeks of that census John Christopher died suddenly at home from a brain haemorrhage. It’s very possible Edward was there as his uncle held his head, let out an agonised cry and lurched across the room, scattering furniture and belongings before crashing to the floor in the corner, limp, motionless and ash-grey.

Edward next turns up in the 1915 wage books of the Great Western Railway’s Old Oak Common railway depot, a vast establishment that employed a large number of local men and boys. Edward’s job was washing railway carriages, not a pleasant task in the age of steam and unchecked industrial pollution. He’d finish his shifts grimy and black with soot and filth, exhausted and arm-sore from the relentless brushing, but he was bringing in an income, which for a half-deaf kid from the slums of Kensal Town was about all that could be asked of him.

It’s after this that the trail goes cold until Edward’s death. He would have been fifteen years old when war broke out in the summer of 1914, but it’s impossible to know what kind of impact it would have had on him and life in Kensal Town. His uncle Robert would have gone off to fight almost immediately, but we can only guess at how this might have affected Edward. Were they close? Robert lived in the same warren of streets, so he would probably have been a regular visitor to his sister and grandparents. Edward would have seen his uncle frequently as he grew up, but what would his thoughts have been about the war? How would he have taken the news of his uncle’s death in 1916? Would he have expected to go? Would he have tried to enlist under-age? What was the nature of discussion among his friends and neighbours? The talk around Admiral Mews – of enlistment, of the men who had already gone, of the prospects for a quick resolution to the conflict – would have been replicated in every street and among every boy of Edward’s generation. There hadn’t been an event in history at that point to unite a nation and affect its everyday life like the First World War. It permeated every county, every town, every street and every home. Nobody was unaffected.

Most of us will have an Edward Connelly in our backgrounds: a youngster born on the cusp of centuries who’d grow up to be a participant, willing or not, in the greatest war and the greatest tragedy of the modern age up until then. These lads weren’t poets, they weren’t officer material – they did nothing heroic beyond their best. They went off to war as cheerily as they could, made the best of it, had no say in its strategy or planning and just did what they were told. Many of them came home afterwards and resumed their lives; others didn’t and lie to this day in the soil of France, Belgium and further afield. These lads were raised among grimy cobbles rather than the playing fields of Eton, and there were thousands of them right across the land.

Take Admiral Terrace, for example, where the Connellys and the Christophers lived. According to the 1911 census there were twenty-nine households in Admiral Terrace containing 127 people of all ages, from elderly couples to enormous family broods crammed into the pokey rooms of eleven shabby buildings. I combed through these records for the names of men and boys who would have been of official military age during the First World War and then compared those names to any surviving military records I could find. I unearthed eight men, not including Edward, who went off to war, four of whom were killed. Two of those who died were brothers: William and John Lovell, twenty and twenty-three respectively, killed in March and August 1918. Including Edward, that’s five First World War deaths from one small North London street of eleven properties. Bear in mind how most soldiers’ records from the Great War were destroyed during the Blitz: these are just what I could find in the surviving files.

The war came to visit every street and practically every building. Everyone had a son, a father, a nephew, a godson, a son-in-law, a brother, a cousin at the Front. We all have grandfathers, great-grandfathers, even great-great-grandfathers who served, in addition to the attendant generational strata of uncles. Ordinary men, not heroes; men of whom there’s little of note: they didn’t win medals beyond the campaign ones that everyone received; they weren’t court-martialled; there’s no specific record of any acts of heroism; they were never promoted beyond the rank of private, and they didn’t expect to be. They just turned up, did their duty as best they could, smoked their cigarettes, drank their rum ration and tried to get through it.

Edward’s story isn’t unique. It’s the story of many, the story that’s in your family background as well as mine. Edward is an everyman, his experiences similar to thousands upon thousands of others who left nothing behind, no letters, no diaries, no poems. Yet some of them did leave stories behind. In order to fill in the yawning gaps in Edward’s life and war, it was time to unearth the narratives of his contemporaries, to construct the tale of all the ordinary men in the poor bloody infantry in the name of Edward Connelly. The forgotten soldier, anonymous for the best part of a century, would stand up from the decades of silence and shout on behalf of all the men like him.

I delved into archives, read yellowing letters and leafed through diaries, struggled through regimental histories and watched hours of documentaries. I listened to old recordings made years after the war, old men’s voices from broad Geordie to lilting Sussex burr, occasionally punctuated in the background by the chimes of a mantelpiece clock marking another hour passed since the horror of the trenches. Dead men’s voices now, but in my headphones they were alive, animated, chuckling, emotional, tentative, sad and forthright. Making sure that we would remember as they transported themselves in their minds from silent sitting rooms of china ornaments and antimacassars back to the mud, noise, fear and death of the Western Front. These men had seen what Edward had seen, heard what Edward had heard, feared what Edward had feared, yet they were able to tell their stories and make sure that they could still be told long after their own deaths – and longer still after the events they described.

I’d come to know well men like George Fortune, Fred Dixon, William Dann and the rest in my quest for the life of Edward Connelly and all the other forgotten soldiers.

5

‘I was at lunch on this particular day and thought, I suppose I’d better go and join the army’

When war was declared the British Army had just under 250,000 officers and men. They were backed up by just over 300,000 territorials and around 230,000 conventional reservists.

The British Expeditionary Force under Field Marshal Sir John French that crossed the Channel in August 1914 consisted of 81,000 men, including two cavalry divisions. It was, of course, all supposed to be over by Christmas, but by October the first trenches had been dug and four years of attrition on the Western Front were under way. When Christmas arrived there were nearly 270,000 British troops in France and Belgium. By the time of the German Spring Offensive of 1918, the front line, twelve miles long in the autumn of 1914, stretched from the North Sea coast to the Swiss border.

Once the stalemate had been established Lord Kitchener estimated that it could take up to three years to overcome the Germans, a lengthy war for which the British Army was utterly underprepared. He began vigorous campaigns to encourage recruitment in order to build an entire new army. In fact, there would be five Kitchener Armies, mostly comprising six divisions of twelve battalions each.

The initial reaction among the men of Britain was rampant enthusiasm: for one thing, early enlisters were generally able to choose their regiment, hence they could remain with their friends and colleagues, and for another, the wave of patriotism in the light of Blighty going to war washed thousands through the doors of the recruiting offices. Everything was done to encourage men to enlist, from poster campaigns to the creation of the ‘pals battalions’, which were raised in the belief that if groups of men from certain towns or professions could stick together the chances of mass recruitment would be greater. They were right, too: in Lancashire, for example, the Accrington Pals Battalion reached 1,000 recruits in just ten days. The intention might have been admirable, but when entire pals battalions were being all but wiped out (of the 720 Accrington Pals at the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 584 were either killed, wounded or never seen again) it was leaving huge, irreplaceable holes in communities, and the idea was soon dropped.

At first, the enlistment procedure was fairly rigorous compared to how much it would relax later: you had to be between the ages of nineteen and thirty-eight, at least five foot three inches in height and have a reasonable level of fitness. If Edward had tried to join up under-age early in the war it’s likely his partial deafness would have seen him turned away.

The process was straightforward: each recruit was given a brief interview and filled out an attestation form which, when signed by both the recruiting officer and the recruit, committed the latter to serve in the army for the duration of the war. He then swore an oath of allegiance before an officer, underwent a medical examination, another officer countersigned his approval and the man was officially a ‘Soldier subject to the King’s Regulation’. He was given a shilling (the famous king’s shilling) and either handed a railway pass to a training camp or told to go home and await the call-up to begin his training.

George Fortune, born in Dover in February 1899 and the son of a diver at Dover Harbour, was six weeks older than Edward.

‘My father used to say that a man who goes into the army is not fit for anything else,’ he recalled. ‘“Once a soldier, never a man,” that’s what he said.’

George’s father, also called George, worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and walked three miles to work every day, and then three miles home in the evening. According to George the only time his father would take the tram was if he’d been bell diving and come up with the bends. He was a tough, taciturn man and he was tough on his son.

‘I think he was a bit disappointed in me,’ George recalled. ‘He would say, “Give him another basin of sop, we will never rear him.”’

George’s grandmother on his mother’s side was Annie Ovenden from Cork in the south of Ireland, the same part of the country from which Edward’s family had come. His father’s family also had Irish roots and George liked to think of himself as Irish. He was very close to his grandmother and would visit her whenever he could.

‘I used to go straight from school and she’d be waiting at her gate,’ he said. ‘She used to cuddle me up to her and always smelt of snuff and peppermint. Sometimes she used to send me to the pub to get a gill of gin for sixpence: I knew then that Father Laws was coming to see her.’

Although his mother left his father when George was five years old, and his father didn’t seem like the warmest of men, George appears to have had a happy childhood. As youngsters he and his friends would play and bathe by Shakespeare’s Cliff.

‘The trains used to come through the tunnel there from Folkestone’, he recalled. ‘When we heard a train coming, we used to come out of the water and dance, and the old ladies would pull down the blinds.’

Young George even witnessed, practically on his doorstep, one of the great moments from history when, one morning in 1908, he and his brother Walter got up early, walked to North Fallen and watched Louis Blériot make a bumpy landing to complete the first air crossing of the English Channel.

Dover has always been an important place geographically and strategically. The imposing castle still overlooks the town and George was always keenly aware of the military, especially the Navy. The Fortunes lived at Clarendon Place in a working-class area in the west of the town, and one of their neighbours was a naval seaman.

‘Whenever he came home on leave he set the street alight. He would hire a barrel organ in town and park it outside his house. He would have everybody dancing and singing,’ said George.