Cyril Francis Cattley, BA MC

• Matriculated: 1907

• Born: 20 November 1888

• Died: 30 November 1917

• Regiment: East Kent Regiment (The Buffs)

• Grave/Memorial: Cambrai Memorial, Louveral: Panel 3.

Family background

b. 20 November 1888 at 67, Upper Berkeley Street, Marylebone, London W1, as the elder son of Arthur Cyril Cattley (1862–95) and Margaret Elizabeth (“Eliza”) Cattley (née Richardson) (1864–1908) (m. 1887) (later Sewell after her marriage in 1898 to Ernest Brooke Sewell (1865–1946) of Moorfield, Holmwood, Surrey, with whom she had another son and a daughter. At the time of the 1891 Census the Cattley family was living at Meadow Bank, Dorking, Surrey (seven servants); at the time of the 1901 Census – i.e. after her remarriage – Margaret and her second husband were still at this address (five servants).

 

Parents and antecedents

Cattley’s father was a hop merchant and a first-class cricketer who played for Surrey as an all-rounder. His paternal grandfather, Wildman Cattley (1837–1918), was a breeder of prize cattle and Master of the Grocers’ Company, but also a keen amateur cricketer who became the Honorary Treasurer of Surrey County Cricket Club.

Cattley’s mother was the daughter of an East India Merchant. She was also a keen cricketer, who played for the White Heather (Kent) ladies’ cricket team in 1896.

Cattley’s stepfather was a broker at Lloyds.

 

Siblings and their families

Cyril Francis was the brother of Gerald Wildman Cattley (1889–1918), who died of blackwater fever on 1 August 1918 in the Colonial Hospital, Cape Coast, the Gold Coast, while serving as an Assistant District Commissioner on active service with the Nigerian Land Contingent.

He was the half-brother of:

(1) Francis Brooke Sewell (1898–1918); killed in action on 19 May 1918, aged 19, while serving as a Second Lieutenant in the 126^th Heavy Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery; buried in Hédauville Communal Cemetery Extension, Grave D.4;

(2) Irene Agnes Brooke Sewell (1900–70).

Francis Brooke Sewell attended Charterhouse School from May to July 1915 and Reigate Grammar School from September 1915 to May 1916. He applied for a Commission on 28 June 1916 and from June to 4 September 1916 he attended an officers’ training course at the Royal Military Academy (Sandhurst), on which he came 146th. He was registered for a Commission on 26 September 1917, served as an Instructor at No. 4 Officer Cadet School in Oxford, and embarked for France on 6 May 1918. He joined his unit on 11 May and was killed in action four days later.

 

 

Irene Agnes never married; she got her private pilot’s licence at the Henderson Flying School, Croydon, in 1930 and became a well-known airwoman in the 1930s. In February–March 1932 she flew solo from England to Transjordan in a DH 60 Moth biplane in order to visit friends, a journey of 3,500 miles which she undertook in poor weather conditions.

Cyril Francis’s cousin Hubert Pennington Cattley (1890–1917) matriculated at Merton in 1910 and enlisted in September 1914 as a private in the 22 (Service) Battalion of the Manchester Regiment. He was killed in action on 14 March 1917 and is buried in Gommecourt British Cemetery No. 2 at Hébuterne.

 

Education and professional life

From c.1895 to 1902 Cattley attended Mr Arnold’s Preparatory School, Wokingham, Berkshire (see also J.H. Hudson, G.W. Cattley). This was founded in 1869 as Wixenford School when the Reverend Richard Cowley Powles (1819–1901; Headmaster 1869–1879) leased Wixenford House. In 1888 Ernest Penrose Arnold (b. c.1848 in Berlin, d. 1917), Powles’s successor from 1879 to 1903 and a nephew of Dr Thomas Arnold (1795–1842) of Rugby, moved the school into Wokingham, where it became known as Mr Arnold’s Preparatory School; it has been defunct since 1934. Cattley then attended Eton College from 1902 to 1907, where he played cricket against Harrow and became a good amateur golfer.

He matriculated at Magdalen as a Commoner on 15 October 1907, having passed Responsions in Hilary Term 1907. He took the First Public Examination in Trinity Term 1908, and in Trinity Term 1910 he was awarded a 4^th in Modern History (Honours). He took his BA on 29 July 1910. In summer 1909 he was a member of the College’s First cricket XI, six members of which (M.K. MacKenzie, G.B. Gilroy, H.M.W. Wells, Cattley himself, his brother Gerald Wildman, and I.B. Balfour) would be killed in action. When he made his will, he gave his address as Meadowbank, Dorking, Surrey.

 

 

Military and war service

Cattley was almost certainly in the Oxford University Rifle Volunteer Corps (1907–08) and the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps (1908–10), as he was given a Territorial Commission as Second Lieutenant on 29 May 1908 (London Gazette, no. 28,156, 7 July 1908, p. 4,946). He joined the 1^st (Regular) Battalion, the East Kent Regiment (The Buffs) as a probationary Second Lieutenant on 18 September 1909; he was confirmed in this rank on 24 August 1910 (LG, no. 28,409, 23 August 1910, p. 6,107); and he was promoted Lieutenant on 10 July 1911.

On 5 August 1914 Cattley rejoined the Battalion from leave and on 9 September 1914 he disembarked with it at St Nazaire as part of 16^th Brigade, in 6^th Division. The Division then entrained and on 12 September arrived at billets in the Coulommiers-Montcerf area, due east of Paris on the Grand Morin River. On 13 September, five days after the start of the so-called “race to the sea”, the 6th Division reached the River Marne, about 15 miles to the north. By 20 September Cattley’s Battalion had reached Courcelles-sur-Aisne, from where it was sent on the following day to trenches at Vailly-sur-Aisne, about ten miles to the north, and it stayed here until 6 October, when it began a three-day march to the rail-head at Compiègne, where it entrained. Like the rest of the Division, the Battalion arrived at St-Omer on the following day, marched to Hazebrouck on 12 October and continued its march northwards on 13 October to Cassel, just below the Franco-Belgian border. Then, together with the rest of the 6^th Division, Cattley’s Battalion took up positions on the western end of the eight-mile long ridge that extends from Armentières to Lille, where, during the last ten days of October 1914, it was involved in the fluid fighting for control of the Ypres Salient that took place from southern Belgium to the Dutch frontier. On 31 October 1914 the fighting turned into trench warfare and hardened into a front line that would see little real movement for the next four years.

On 30 November 1914, the Battalion War Diary recorded that “Lt Cattley returned”, probably from leave, since the Battalion seems to have been relatively inactive from the beginning of November 1914 to the end of May 1915. During his time away, on 15 November 1914, Cattley was promoted Acting Captain and was confirmed in this rank on 17 May 1915. Throughout this period, his Battalion, like the 6^th Division as a whole, seems to have remained in the Rue du Bois area, just to the east of Armentières, and so did not participate in either the Battle of Neuve Chapelle ten miles to the south (10 March–22 April; see M.A. Girdlestone) or the Second Battle of Ypres to the north (22 April 1915–25 May), which cost the lives of 17 members of Magdalen. Thus, just before the end of the Battle of Sint Juliaan, the Battalion War Diary reads: “No attempt was made on our portion of the line, but great losses were experienced NE of Ypres.”

On 30 May 1915 Cattley was sent to hospital; he returned to the Battalion on 9 June to take charge of ‘C’ Company in his new rank as Captain. During the period from 31 May to 6 June 1915, when the front was hardening in new positions after the end of Second Ypres, the 6^th Division moved northwards into the Ypres Salient and Cattley’s Battalion found itself at Wittstock, near Poperinghe, to the west of Ypres. So starting on 18 June, the 1^st Battalion, together with the rest of the 6^th Division, began a seven-week period in and out of the trenches near La Brique, on the north-eastern edge of Ypres, where it was not involved in any major action but where it experienced shelling and gas and, almost immediately, began taking twice as many casualties as it had near Armentières.

On 30 July 1915 the Germans attacked the 14^th (Light) Division at Hooge using liquid fire for the first time in the war, and drove it out of the trenches and back to Sanctuary and Zouave Woods after inflicting many casualties (see B. Pawle, H.N.L. Renton and J.J.B. Jones-Parry). So on 31 July, the 16^th Brigade of the 6^th Division, which included the 1^st Battalion of the East Kents, was sent as a precaution to trenches south of Ypres, and by 18.30 hours on 8 August, after ten days of careful planning at Corps and Divisional level, the entire 6^th Division, including Cattley’s Battalion, was in position near Hooge, which was important because it stood on a piece of high ground and so offered the possibility of observing the British lines.

The battle to retake the ground lost at Hooge on 30 July began at 01.00 hours on 9 August with an artillery barrage that focused exclusively on the German trenches. Using this barrage as cover, two battalions of 16^th Brigade on the left, the 1^st Battalion of the King’s Somerset Light Infantry and the 2^nd Battalion of the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment, crawled out into no-man’s-land, while one Battalion of the 18^th Brigade, the 2^nd Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry (DLI), did the same on the right of the attack. A painting of this incident from1924 by Gerald Cedric Hudson (1894–1966) now hangs in the Museum of the DLI. When the artillery stopped firing at 03.50 hours, the three lead Battalions, with the 1^st Battalion of the East Kents in support on the left and the 2^nd Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters in support on the right, rushed forward and retook all the lost ground with extreme speed, inflicting heavy casualties on the Germans as they did so; they also captured a large number of prisoners and an important spur of the Menin Road. But the German artillery retaliated from the south-west and caused heavy casualties, especially on the 2^nd Battalion of the DLI, which lost a third of its number killed, wounded or missing. The fighting continued until 12 August and cost 6^th Division 70 officers and 1,700 other ranks (ORs) killed, wounded or missing; Cattley’s Battalion alone had taken 192 casualties killed, wounded or missing by the time that it returned to billets in Poperinghe on 13 August. But after a few days rest, the Battalion was back in the trenches at La Brique on 19 August, where it served until 22 September, when it went to billets in Poperinghe until mid-October. In mid-October, the Battalion began another stint in the trenches, this time near Hooge, and then, like the rest of the 6^th Division, it spent 3 November to 31 December 1915 in billets at Poperinghe and Houtkerque, about six miles west-north-west of Poperinghe and just over the French border. During this latter period Cattley acted as the Battalion’s Commanding Officer (with effect from 21 November), probably for a brief period while its normal CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund George Francis Langdon Gould (1882–1946) was on leave.

The Battalion stayed with the 6^th Division in the Poperinghe/Ypres area from late 1915 until the end of July 1916 and spent a certain amount of time in the trenches. During this period, Cattley’s increasing standing within and outside of the 1^st Battalion is evidenced by several facts: he was appointed Acting Major for the first time from 26 February until 26 April; he survived the Battalion’s one major action – at La Brique on 19 April, when it incurred over 100 casualties killed, wounded or missing; by mid-1916 he was the only officer left in the Battalion who had accompanied it to France nearly two years previously; he was mentioned in dispatches (LG, no. 29,422, 31 December 1915, p. 32); he was promoted Acting Major for the second time from 1 April to 1 May 1916 while Lieutenant-Colonel Gould was on leave; and he was awarded the MC on 4 June 1916 (LG, no. 29,618, 3 June 1916, p. 5,572). But most significantly, the Battalion War Diary for 4 May records that notification had been received for Captain C.F. Cattley to report to Administrative HQ at St-Omer to take up an appointment.

We do not know how long Cattley stayed in this post, but when he returned to the front, he was attached to the 6^th (Service) Battalion of the East Kent Regiment (The Buffs) on a date which the Battalion’s War Diary does not record, since it does not mention Cattley’s name until the engagement that cost him his life. But he probably joined the Battalion on or around 19 November 1916, since according to the Army List it was from this date (until 1 June 1917) that Cattley held the rank of Acting Lieutenant-Colonel and so, presumably, was in command of a Battalion. The 6^th Battalion had landed at Boulogne in May or June 1915 as part of 37^th Brigade, in the 12^th (Eastern) Division, and during 1916 had lost 35 officers and 724 ORs killed, wounded and missing as a result of three major actions on the Somme. These were the disastrous attack on Ovillers on 3 July, the capture of Ration Trench on 4 August, and the capture of Rainbow and Bayonet Trenches on 7 October during the Battle of Ancre Heights. The Battalion suffered more heavy casualties during the fighting east of Arras in 1917. On 9 April, the opening day of the First Battle of the Scarpe (9–14 April 1917), it lost nine officers and c.150 ORs killed, wounded or missing, and on 3 May, the opening day of the Second Battle of Bullecourt (3–17 May 1917; see R.H. Hine-Haycock), it lost 14 officers and 360 ORs killed, wounded and missing, so that by 1 July 1917, its strength was down to 33 officers and 488 ORs. On 9 June 1917 Cattley reverted to the rank of Major and so, probably, became the 6^th Battalion’s second-in-command.

On 14 November 1917, the 12^th Division was transferred to III Corps and gradually moved to a position around the village of Gonnelieu, on the extreme right (south) of the British line during the Battle of Cambrai and. nine miles south of Cambrai itself. On 20 November 1917, the opening day of that battle, the 6^th Division, including the 6^th Battalion of the East Kent Regiment, which would lose five officers and 105 ORs killed, wounded and missing, advanced north-eastwards, and once it had captured its first objective, it consolidated its position by creating a defensive right flank. It stayed in this position for ten days, but at 06.45 hours on 30 November 1917, the Germans began a heavy barrage and then counter-attacked, using five divisions in the north and 13 in the south, with their focus on Havrincourt, just to the north of 12^th Division’s position. This attack forced the 12^th Division to withdraw over the ground that it had taken ten days previously until it reached La Vacquerie, slightly to the north of Gonnelieu and still on the extreme right of the British front. It is on that day that Cattley’s name appears in the 6^th Battalion’s War Diary for the first time, when he is named as one of the Battalion’s 331 casualties killed, wounded and missing. At first he was listed as missing, but his death, at the age of 29, was confirmed in mid-August 1918. He has no known grave. He is commemorated on Panel 3 of the Cambrai Memorial, Louverval, on the north side of the major road that runs between Bapaume and Cambrai. He left £8,321 1s. 2d.

 

Bibliography

For the books and archives referred to here in short form, refer to the Slow Dusk Bibliography and Archival Sources.

 

Printed sources:

Horsfall and Cave (2002), pp. 90–2.

Philip Paine and David Norcross, ‘Hubert Pennington Cattley’, in The 48 (Surry County Cricket Club and Royal British Legion, forthcoming; see https://www.kiaoval.com/main-news/surrey-partners-with-royal-british-legion/).

 

Archival sources:

MCA: P320/P1/4 (Photograph of the cricket first XI [1909]).

OUA: UR 2/1/62.

J121/7243. 

WO95/1608.

WO95/1860.

WO339/7682.

WO339/70873.

 

On-line sources:

Wikipedia, ‘12th (Eastern) Division’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_(Eastern)_Division (accessed 12 December 2018).