Evelyn ["Evi"] Herbert Lightfoot Southwell, BA

• Matriculated: 1904

• Born: 19 March 1886

• Died: 15 September 1916

• Regiment: Rifle Brigade

• Grave/Memorial: Thiepval Memorial: Pier and Face 16B and 16C

Family background

b. 19 March 1886 as the only child of the Reverend Canon Herbert Burrows Southwell, MA (1856–1922) and Mrs Sarah Ann (“Annie”) Southwell (née Willis) (1858–1934) (m. 1883), 5.5 College Yard, Worcester.

 

Parents and antecedents

Southwell’s father was the son of a land surveyor and studied Classics and Theology at Pembroke College, Oxford (1876–80; BA 1880; MA [Oxon.] 1882; MA [Dunelm.] 1882), where, in 1881, he was awarded the Denyer and Johnson University Scholarship in Theology; he also rowed for the Pembroke VIII. He was ordained deacon in Oxford and priest in Durham in 1881, and in the same year he became the Curate of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. Soon after that he became domestic chaplain to Bishop Joseph Barker Lightfoot (1828–89), the scholarly Bishop of Durham, who had been the Hulsean Professor of Divinity, Cambridge (1861–71), and Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity, Oxford (1875–79). From August 1885 to February 1901 Southwell’s father was Principal of Lichfield Theological College (1857–1972), at that time a small institution of between 13 and 20 students.

A friend described him as “a very virile personality and [a] deeply earnest and spiritual character” who was “strict but sympathetic” and a shrewd judge of character: “a man’s man”, a judgement that will be entirely borne out by the letter that he wrote to Present Warren after his son’s death and is reproduced below. From 1901 to 1912 Herbert Southwell was the Principal of the Bishop’s Hostel in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a Canon Residentiary of Newcastle Cathedral, and from 1912 until his death in a cycling accident in 1922 he was a Canon Residentiary of Worcester Cathedral and the priest-in-charge of the small village church of Whittington, around two miles south-east of Worcester. It is said that Evelyn’s death in the war was a “blow from which he never really recovered”.

 

Evelyn Herbert Lightfoot Southwell, BA; two details from group photos of the Rupert Society (c.1906 and 1907)
(Photos courtesy of Magdalen College, Oxford)

Education

From c.1892 to 1899 Southwell attended Yarlet Hall Preparatory School, near Stafford (founded in 1873 by the Reverend Walter Earle (1839–1922), who was its Headmaster from 1873 to 1887, when he moved to Dunchurch, near Rugby, to set up Bilton Grange Preparatory School). From 1899 to 1904 Southwell was a King’s Scholar at Eton College, where, from 1901 to 1904, he was a member of the Eton College Rifle Volunteers, rising to the rank of Lance-Corporal in 1904; he also rowed in ‘Victory’, one of Eton’s “Upper Boats”, in June 1904. He was elected to a Demyship in Classics at Magdalen on the same day as Maurice Powell and matriculated there as a Demy (Scholar) on 18 October 1904, having been exempted from Responsions.

On 30 January 1905 Southwell began training as stroke with Magdalen’s 2^nd Torpid VIII, and in mid-February 1905 he made his début as a Magdalen oarsman when he stroked that crew in the Torpids races with Duncan Mackinnon at No. 5. He was subsequently described by Magdalen’s Captain of Boats as showing “by far the most promise & ought to make a good racing stroke”, but with the reservation that “he must learn to give his heavy men more time at the finish”. Nevertheless, he acted as stroke when, on 8 May 1905, Magdalen’s 1^st VIII began training in earnest for the Summer Eights (24–31 May) with a crew that included G.C.B. James at No. 2 and L.R.A. Gatehouse at No. 4. But James Douglas Stobart (1884–1970; Magdalen 1902–05), the Secretary of Magdalen College Boat Club 1904/05, was implacably negative about the crew’s initial efforts and described them in the Captain’s Book on 8 May as “Very bad row. Very short, no swing, no rhythms. Bucket of the barges”. (“Bucket” is an archaic slang word referring to an inexperienced or newly formed crew who are uneven on their slides and not in rhythm, thereby impeding the boat’s smooth forward motion.) Stobart registered a “slight improvement” on 9 May and this continued on the following day; on 13 May he described the row as “very [slow] & much too slow over the first half of the course”; and by 15 May his view of their performance had declined to “Rotten”. On 16 May Stobart called the crew “exceedingly slovenly” and lacking “life, leg drive, & swing”; and on 17 May he once more described it as “exceedingly slovenly” and spoke of

a most unsatisfactory row for we were again very slow over the first part of the course. […] but from the boat house in it was a dismal bucket; & no-one seemed properly rowed out at the finish owing to saving them selves [sic] at the start.

So a new coach took over the training “& by dint of a few home truths seemed to wake the crew up & instill [sic] some idea of rhythm into us, & by making us row a faster stroke showed us that we could”. Consequently, by 20 May Stobart considered the rowing to be “on the whole better” and showing “more drive, length & swing”, an improvement that continued on 22 May. So when the races started on 24 May, in “fine weather & good rowing conditions”, Magdalen rowed well and at the end of the day finished Second on the River, just behind New College. But Magdalen’s performance then improved so significantly that on the second day they went Head of the River and Stobart left us the following description of this feat:

The first night New College started Head of the River with Magdalen 2^nd. Magdalen got away well, rowing 39 strokes in the first minute but gained very little at first on New College; till in the straight bit before the Gut we were called upon to “give her ten”. The crew answered well &, having settled down a bit by then, began to row long and hard & immediately commenced to gain. The advantage was considerably increased coming out of the Gut owing to superior coxing on our part, but at the Green Bank New College began to draw slightly away. It was a despairing effort however, for just before the crossing Magdalen again began to draw up fast & [with] our Cox taking a beautiful course, we effected our bump just opposite the boat house & went Head of the River.

So on the following days, the Magdalen crew were not “really troubled” by their main rivals – New College, University College, and Christ Church – and on the final day of the races (31 May 2005) they passed the winning post “well out of our distance” away from them. Then, when assessing the performance of the individual members of the victorious VIII, Stobart was uncharacteristically complimentary about Southwell’s contribution to Magdalen’s victory:

E.H. Southwell; rather apt to cut the finish & hurry his heavy men. If he learns to hold the finish out & get a truer beginning from the Stretcher[,] he will make a very good stroke. He races exceedingly well, & altho’ it is his first year in the eight[,] his coolness, even when Univ. came upon us at the start in the way that they did, was remarkable. Still nothing ever could destroy his habitual sang froid. To him, more than to any other individual in the boat I think (during the races)[,] is the credit due for our having kept away from Univ; for if he had lost his head in the slightest degree & hurried us ever so little at the critical moment[,] there was every possibility, & even probability, of our going to pieces. Instead of hurrying tho’ he kept the stroke long & enabled us to settle down. Magdalen are lucky to have at last found another good stroke.

So we can assume that Southwell participated with considerable enthusiasm in the orgiastic Bump Supper that followed Magdalen’s victory on 31 May 1905 and is described in great detail by G.M.R. Turbutt.

In October 1905 Southwell sat the first part of the First Public Examination and in the first week of November 1905, he, together with L.R.A. Gatehouse at No. 2 and A.G. Kirby at No. 3, was in the crew that won the coxless IVs against Trinity (first night), St John’s (second night), and New College (third and final night). Once again, Southwell at stroke was singled out for special praise:

At Weir’s Bridge the positions were unchanged, but Magdalen took the next corner rather too close & New College came up a little: however, we reduced this gain [when] going through the Gut & were a little ahead (½ [a] length perhaps), about the middle of the Green Bank […]. New College, however, took a better line from the Red Post to the Boat House, at which point we were exactly level. Southwell here picked up the stroke & kept it up the whole way to the finish & eventually Magdalen won a most exciting and well-fought Race by ¾ [of a] length.

But in late November 1905, Southwell sprained an ankle and so was prevented from stroking the University’s second Trial VIII; nor was he in evidence in February 1906, when Magdalen entered two VIIIs for the Torpid races. The 1^st Torpid VIII, which included R.P. Stanhope at bow, J.L. Johnston at No. 5, Collier Robert [later Sir] Cudmore (1885–1941; Magdalen 1904–07; see his younger brother M.M. Cudmore) at No. 7, and A.H. Huth at stroke, started in 4^th place and finished at 2^nd place in the 1^st Division. But the 2^nd Torpid VIII, which “obtained a ‘highest possible’ [number] of bumps – 7 in all” – was described by Magdalen’s Captain of Boats as:

phenomenally successful, mainly owing to three facts: (i) That they were very well together & finished out well; (ii) That stroke absolutely refused to be bustled & rowed a slow stroke throughout which probably prevented bucketing; & (iii) Lastly but by no means least, the really excellent coxing of [Andrew Ninian] Wight [1885–1943]: he steered a practically faultless course on each night & very justly deserved the praise he got from certain experts on the Towpath.

But although Blandford-Baker includes Southwell in his list of the crew of the 1906 1^st Torpid VIII (p. 295), he does not appear in the lists to be found in the Captain’s Book which must have been compiled immediately after the races in question (see pp. 438 and 448). Gatehouse, writing in the Captain’s Book, inclined to generosity when evaluating the crew of the 1^st Torpid: Stanhope is “a hardworker [sic] who pulls more than his weight, with a sound back which is, however, perfectly firm”; Johnston is “the strongest worker in the crew; a Radley oarsman of experience who backs up stroke well and always rows himself out;” Robert Collier Cudmore is “at present roundbacked [sic] and short in the swing, but a good worker who has already got much longer”; and Huth is “a steady, cool stroke who, however, has not enough dash in him to make a good racer. His strokes are too slow at the beginning and too few per minute. But he gave his oar good length and only just failed to take [illegible word].” In his summary, Gatehouse concluded:

From this it may be seen that the state of the Rowing at Magdalen is prosperous in the Extreme, being Head of the River, having won the Fours, the 1^st Torpid [VIII] being Second on the River and the 2^nd [Torpid VIII] having made 7 bumps. It was merely a piece of bad luck that the 1^st [Torpid VIII] did not catch Univ. on Tuesday as, from the Red Post in, five really hard strokes at any point would have given them their bump, but owing to the huge crowd it was impossible to acquaint them of this fact & cox’s voice was weak, too weak to be heard above the shouts up [sic] the barges.

On Saturday 7 April 1906 the Varsity Boat Race took place with only one Magdalen man in the Oxford crew – Kirby at No. 5 – but with Southwell as its Spare Man. It is, however, not possible to say whether Southwell’s absence from the rowing scene in Lent Term 1906 was still due to his damaged ankle or to the realization that he would have to do a lot of serious work in the course of that term if he wanted to pass the second part of the First Public Examination. Nevertheless, at the end of that term he justified his Tutors’ belief that he was “very clever” by being awarded a 1^st in Classical Moderations, after which he seems to have been able to settle down once more to the more serious business of competitive rowing.

In the middle of April 1906, i.e. during the Trinity Term, when Southwell was perceived to be doing “little or nothing” academically, he, alongside Gatehouse, Stanhope, and Johnston began to train seriously for Eights Week, which began on 17 May 1906. The report on their performance that is preserved in the Captain’s Book reads as follows:

First Day of Eights: New College bumped Univ. before the Gut so we rowed over. [On the Second Day] New College came up on us at the start, but never in danger we rowed away from them from the Gut to the Finish. Christ Church bump[ed] Univ. [19 – 22 May]. As before[,] New College made great efforts to catch us at the Start & as we were slow getting away, they gradually came rather closer than we could have wished, but were always out of danger after the Gut [23 May]. Got away harder & New Coll[ege] hardly came up on us at all. We made a great effort & finished up quite two distances ahead of them. Remaining: Head of the River [for] the 2^nd year in succession.

Although Gatehouse was subsequently mildly critical of Southwell’s continuing tendency “to cut the finish and hurry his heavy men”, he repeated the praise of the previous year almost verbatim, singling out Southwell’s “coolness” and “habitual sang froid” and ascribing Magdalen’s second victory largely to Southwell’s skill as a stroke:

Magdalen are lucky enough to have at last found another good stroke. […] To him is the credit for having kept away from University College; if he had lost his head in the slightest degree, and hurried us ever so little when they were in the quarter canvas, there was every possibility of our going to pieces. Instead[,] he kept the stroke long and enabled us to settle down. It is exceedingly satisfactory to have gone Head after having chased New College so hard for two years. The future looks hopeful as the crew was by no means composed of veterans.

On 7, 8 and 9 June 1906, Magdalen entered two pairs for the Oxford University Boat Club (OUBC) Pairs, with Southwell in one of them, and on 14, 15 and 16 June Magdalen entered two more pairs for the OUBC Sculls, with Stanhope in one of them, but neither won even though both men performed creditably.

As a result of Magdalen’s successes, the Magdalen College Boat Club (MCBC) decided to enter its winning VIII for the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta, and on 11 June 1906 the Magdalen crew began to practise under the expert eye of Harcourt Gilbey Gold (see G.S. Maclagan). Although their performance visibly improved as a result, on 3 July 1906 they were beaten in the first round of the Grand Challenge Cup by the Belgian Club Nautique de Gand. The Secretary noted:

In this race it is good to reflect that we probably rowed better and faster than at any other period of the summer. Our Belgian opponents were the ultimate winners, and there is little doubt that we could have reached the final had the draw been more lucky. In this race at any rate they were much too fast for us. […] Magdalen had a lead for a very few strokes; afterwards the Belgians drew away fast and were two lengths ahead at the half-mile. At the three-quarter-mile they were a length-and-a-half ahead and were said to be rowing well within themselves. Magdalen gained a little but could not make any real impression, and the Belgians won in front of a huge crowd by 1¼ length[s] in the fastest time of the Regatta, 7 m[ins].

The Magdalen crew, it should be noted, was one of the two Magdalen VIIIs that would lose four of its nine men killed in action.

As early as December 1905, i.e. the end of the Michaelmas Term in the academic year 1905/06, Christopher Cookson (1861–1948), Magdalen’s formidable Senior Dean of Arts (the equivalent of the modern Senior Tutor) from 1905 to 1919, who was well-known for his caustic tongue, for his strange idea that undergraduates were at university primarily to study, and for his intolerance of academic under-performance, remarked tersely of Southwell in the College’s academic record book: “Good scholar – hasn’t worked”. But despite Southwell’s excellent performance in the Examination Schools, his Tutors’ comments indicate that his enthusiasm for rowing was seriously distracting him from his academic work, and that when he did get round to doing any, it was rushed and not of particularly good quality. And by Trinity Term 1906, i.e. the final term of the academic year 1905/06, two of Southwell’s Tutors remarked in their reports that they had seen little or nothing of him.

Southwell’s disciplinary situation worsened when he became the Secretary of MCBC for the academic year 1906/07, with Charles Leslie Garton (1885–1941; Magdalen 1904–07; see H.W. Garton and E.C. Garton) as Magdalen’s Captain of Boats. Although the quality and quantity of the writing in the Captain’s Book improved considerably, such laudable features also suggest that Southwell’s commitment to rowing had grown. Thus the year begins with a congratulatory paragraph and a celebration of the fact that the four men “who figured in the so-called ‘first crew’” when Magdalen won the coxless Fours Challenge Cup in the previous year – Charles Leslie Garton, Gatehouse, Kirby and himself – were still at Magdalen and had begun training on 14 October: “This crew had not much difficulty in getting together, as they had rowed in the same order last year”, but on the day before the race, Gatehouse fell sick and had to be replaced by Johnston, who had “done no rowing since Henley [and so] could hardly be expected to do himself justice”. As a result, the Magdalen crew lost to their old rivals New College by two feet on the second day of the competition. Later on, in December 1906, Southwell was also one of the five Magdalen men to row at Moulsford-on-Thames in one of the two boats that were competing in the OUBC Trial VIIIs, and together with Kirby at No. 6 and two other Magdalen men who survived World War One – Angus Gillan (1885–1981; Magdalen 1905–09) and Arthur William Fishburn Donkin (1887–1966; Magdalen 1906–10) – he was selected to row in the Oxford VIII in the Varsity Boat Race that took place on 16 March 1907.

In February 1907, Magdalen entered two VIIIs in the Torpid Races for the second time. Three members of the 1^st Torpid VIII were freshmen and four would be killed in action in World War One: T.B. Cave at No. 4, Duncan Mackinnon at No. 5, C.A. Gold at No. 6 and J.R. Somers-Smith, “last year’s Eton captain”, at stroke. Although Magdalen took the Headship of the River on the first day, they were bumped by Christ Church and came second at the end of the Torpids week.

Oxford won the toss at Putney on 16 March, but its crew suffered from the fact that Angus Gillan at No. 5, whom the Times correspondent called Oxford’s “strongest man”, had been weakened by influenza during the run-up to the race and was still not completely recovered on the day. Nevertheless, to use Southwell’s phrase, “he rowed with the greatest pluck”. But whilst the writer for the Times conceded that the race had been rowed in “difficult and baffling weather conditions”, he was brutally frank about the differences between the two crews: “the rowing in the Oxford boat was not at all good”, they “never rowed in unison”, “Mr Southwell, at No. 7, was not always in time with [the stroke], and the Cambridge crew were able to row with a longer stroke, being more experienced, older and physically stronger”. So although both Southwell and Kirby gained their first Blues, Cambridge, who had immediately taken the lead by rowing at 39 strokes per minute to Oxford’s 38, won by four-and-a-half lengths in 20 minutes and 26 seconds. Then, on 23 May, the third night of Eights Week in Trinity Term 1907, Magdalen were finally “rowed down” and bumped by the faster Christ Church crew – and so lost the Headship of the River even though their VIII included Stanhope at bow, Duncan Mackinnon at No. 3, Gatehouse at No. 4, Kirby at No. 6, Southwell at No. 7, and Somers-Smith at stroke. In his subsequent analysis, Southwell speculated that as a “heavy” crew, Magdalen had put too much trust in the following wind – which normally assisted them but this time let them down – and tried “too many experiments”, notably with new-style oars, about which there had been considerable discussion.

Nevertheless, for the rest of Eights Week the Magdalen VIII retained its second place with ease and went on to finish the year by winning “the Cups for all three Four-Oared Races” in the Henley Regatta – “an event which had not happened in any previous year in any club”. On 4 July the 1^st VIII, which had had “the enormous advantage of the coaching of Mr Harcourt [Gilbey] Gold” and included Southwell himself, won the Stewards’ Challenge Cup against Leander by three lengths (see Duncan Mackinnon); on 5 July the 2^nd VIII won the Visitors’ Challenge Cup by two-and-a-quarter lengths; and on 6 July, the 2^nd VIII won the Wyfold Challenge Cup with ease, thanks to the opposing crew fouling an underwater obstacle. The pundits are also agreed that under Southwell’s and Kirby’s leadership, the academic year 1906/07 marked the beginning of Magdalen’s “First Golden Era” of rowing [recte Second, the First having lasted from 1892 to 1895] which continued until 1913. Blandford-Baker, for instance, notes that the “period from 1907 contains the most remarkable set of achievements of which the College and its Boat Club can be justly proud, covering the greatest variety of success of any of the five periods argued for” (p. 87).

When Kirby took over as Secretary of the MCBC for the academic year 1907/08, Southwell became Magdalen’s Captain of Boats, and as a result, his rowing activity increased even more. Magdalen entered three crews in the coxless Fours, with Somers-Smith at bow, Kirby at No. 3, and Southwell at stroke in the 1^st crew; with Duncan Mackinnon at No. 3 in the 2^nd crew; and with Gold at No. 3 in the 3^rd crew. When appraising the three-week event, two weeks of which were spent in training and getting fit after the two-month-long summer break, the Secretary said that Magdalen’s rowing “showed an extraordinary improvement during the race week [end of October / beginning of November 1907 – i.e. the third week of the Michaelmas Term]. In practice we had all been stiff with the shoulders & slow in lifting from the stretcher; while even at a slow stroke we never got a long finish”. But although Magdalen went Head of the River on Wednesday 30 October 1907, the first day of the races, they were bumped off that position by Christ Church on the following day, and although they beat New College by three-and-a-half lengths on the final day of the races, Friday 1 November, they ended up in second place overall. Nevertheless, Kirby singled out two members of the 1^st VIII for special praise for their performance on the first day of the races:

Southwell spurted wonderfully, and rowed, according to several unprejudiced spectators’ watches, 42 [strokes per minutes] all the way up the Barges, finally getting us home by ½ a length. Somers-Smith’s steering was perfect, while theirs was indifferent.

In the same term, on 3 December 1907, Southwell and Kirby rowed once again in the OUBC Trial VIIIs and were, together with Stanhope and two other Magdalen men who survived World War One, selected to represent Oxford on 4 April 1908 in the Varsity Boat Race. But by summer 1907, Southwell’s Tutors had begun to express considerable dissatisfaction with his irregular attendance at tutorials and below average academic performance, and towards the end of the Michaelmas Term 1907 they also began to be displeased by his increasingly wayward behaviour. This began in earnest when Southwell fell foul of the University authorities towards the end of that term, causing the rumour to do the rounds at Magdalen that the Proctors (George Chatterton Richards: 1867–1951, Fellow and Chaplain of Oriel 1897–1923, Senior Proctor 1907; and Willoughby Charles Allen: 1867–1953, Fellow of Exeter 1897–1927, Chaplain of Exeter 1898–1923, Junior Proctor 1907) had sent him down for being out of his College after hours and climbing in at 4.30 a.m. But their Black Book contains no reference to such an incident – possibly because they did not usually take such minor misdemeanours very seriously, and if, on this occasion, they did change their practice, it was probably just for the few days of term that remained. Nevertheless, in a letter of 28 December 1907, Richard Gunstone (1840–1924; known in Magdalen as “Gunner”), the legendary Steward of the College’s Junior Common Room from 1879 to 1914, who kept his ear very close to the ground where undergraduate misdeeds were concerned, wrote to Alan Campbell Don (1885–1966), a recent graduate of Magdalen with a distinguished clerical career before him:

The Term that has passed was not very eventful though we don’t often get a Demy sent down. It is late in the day to tell you about it, as it may be stale news. It was in this way, on the Saturday after the Bump Supper [7 December] there was a party in the Town and Mr Southwell & [Collier Robert] Cudmore came in over the wall [and] at 4 a.m. they went down by the Mill no doubt forgetting that Mr Webb [C.C.J. Webb: 1865–1944, Senior Proctor 1905/06] was so near [he lived in the house at Holywell Ford], and caught Southwell but the other got away and as far as I know the Dons do not know who it was Till this day.

Webb kept an extensive and detailed journal and in his entry for 9 December 1907 he described the above incident as follows:

We had been disturbed in the night by some men who came down the lane [to Holywell Ford] & (I think) came thru’ the door by the sluices, wh[ich] the servants had not bolted, & looked at the millstream in flood; smoking under our maids’ window, who were much frightened. From the bedroom window I saw them walking away up the lane; & by the time I got down and out there was no trace of them.

Despite being identified, Southwell’s unruly behaviour persisted, and after the Christmas Vacation, on 20 January 1908, it was resolved at the first meeting of Magdalen’s Tutorial Board in the Lent Term that if he “fail to give complete satisfaction to his Tutors and the Dean [i.e. Mr Cookson], his case be referred to the Officers [of the Tutorial Board – i.e. the President, the Vice-President, and the three Deans] with a view to his being deprived of his Demyship”. Accordingly, on 13 February 1908 Southwell appeared before the Officers of the Board and his misdeeds were thoroughly discussed:

The Dean of Arts reported that for about a week Mr Southwell had consistently knocked in late [and] alone upon midnight or had had visitors going out at the same time. He further reported that on the night of Saturday February 8 Mr Southwell had been reported by one of the Porters [on] duty as having come in in a state of excitement and apparent “intoxication”, and that on the night of Sunday February 9 he had been reported by the other Porter[,] Kingston[,] as having come in in a similar state. Mr Southwell admitted having drunk a good deal at Pembroke College on the Sunday, and having aggravated his condition by running home, and having therefore been somewhat affected. But he denied having been drunk on the Saturday or having been in any habit of drinking previously, and he pleaded that he had not been clearly put on Probation and asked for a further opportunity. His Tutors Mr Underhill and Mr Webb reported themselves as on the whole satisfied with his work, while thinking he might have done more. The Officers decided that[,] while thinking very seriously of Mr Southwell’s misconduct as reported to them, they did not view it as absolutely “requiring deprivation” and they therefore resolved that they would not proceed to deprive Mr Southwell [of his Demyship] but would warn him that he is [to] regard himself as distinctly “on probation” until the expiration of his Demyship, and that should he be again reported to them for misconduct or on having failed to satisfy his Tutors and the Dean[,] he would forthwith be deprived.

On 5 March 1908 the Tutorial Board considered Southwell’s position one further time, including “the representation of the Tutors in the subject” and “forbade him to row in the College Eight next term [i.e. Trinity Term 1908]”. This meant that he lost his position as Magdalen’s Captain of Boats and was replaced by his friend Kirby, with Angus Gillan (see above) acting as the Club’s Secretary. After the meeting, the President and the Dean also decided that Southwell should be gated for the rest of the Lent Term, fined £5, and given a written copy of these decisions. But the College did permit him to row as No. 3 for Oxford in the Boat Race, thereby enabling him to win his second Blue.

On 4 April 1908 Oxford lost to Cambridge for the third year running, this time by two-and-a-half lengths, after a race that was not “very interesting to watch”, partly because the Oxford VIII was suffering from three misfortunes. (i) Gillan, one of Oxford’s outstanding oarsmen, was not allowed to row because he had just got over a bad attack of influenza that had affected other members of the crew. Indeed, according to the Times reporter, “Oxford were hardly free from illness during the whole of the first half of their training.” (ii) Kirby had not completely got over an attack of jaundice by the day of the race. And (iii) the reporter identified Cambridge as “the stronger crew” because the Oxford VIII was troubled by the rough water whereas the Cambridge VIII knew how to deal with it and rowed “much more smoothly”.

Such considerations apart, Magdalen’s sanctions on Southwell had the desired effect, since after the Boat Race his name all but disappears without explanation from the Captain’s Notebook for three entire months, and during the first part of Trinity Term 1908 he lived at home in order to work without distractions. So in June 1908 he was awarded a 2^nd in Literae Humaniores (Greats) – at which point it is worth noting that Southwell was the exact contemporary of Johnston who, despite his enthusiasm for rowing, never allowed his academic efforts to flag and was awarded a 1^st in both Moderations and Greats. After graduation Southwell went on to row for Leander and be the spare man for an Olympic crew; he also shared the poignant distinction with Kirby and Stanhope of rowing in two of the Magdalen VIIIs that would lose four of their nine men in the war.

 

Professional life

After taking Finals, Southwell spent time in Berlin and at the Sorbonne in Paris and took his BA on 12 February 1910. But in May 1910 he began work as an assistant master at Shrewsbury School, Shropshire, teaching French and Classics as one of the band of brilliant young masters who had been recruited by the Reverend (Dr 1917) Cyril Argentine Alington (1872–1955; Headmaster of Shrewsbury 1908–17; Headmaster of Eton 1917–33) and a cousin of Geoffrey Hugh Alington and Gervase Winford Stovin Alington).

Thanks to Two Men, a Memorial Book that was edited by the slightly younger Hugh Edmund Eliot Howson (1889–1933), we know a great deal about Southwell’s four years at Shrewsbury, and the abbreviated account of his life that follows derives almost entirely from that remarkable and moving source. Together with three other Eton masters – Edmund Vere Slater (1877–1933), Eric Walter Powell (1886–1933), and Charles Robert White-Thomson, an alumnus of Magdalen (1903–33) – Howson died on 17 August 1933 in a mountaineering accident on Piz Rosegg, near Pontresina, Switzerland.

Southwell began teaching at Shrewsbury on the same day that the younger and musically gifted Malcolm Graham White (24 January 1887–1 July 1916) began teaching Geography there. White, the son of John Arnold White (c.1852–1916), who lived at 24 Bidston Road, Birkenhead, and described himself as a “Merchant of American Produce”, had been a pupil at Birkenhead Preparatory School, on the Wirral, from 1894 to 1897, and at Birkenhead School itself from 1898 to 1905, where he was a member of the 1^st cricket XI from 1903 to 1905 (Captain 1904/05). From 1905 to 1908 he was an undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a lower second in 1908, having taken three Parts of the Classical Tripos in June and October 1905 (BA 1908; MA 1913). He also captained the College VIII in 1908/09, sang as a voluntary member of the Chapel Choir for four years, and did some teaching for King’s College Choir School. During his first year after graduation, he spent some time in Berlin learning German and in Rouen learning French. Moreover, although Marlborough College, Wiltshire, has no record of it and White’s name does not appear on its War Memorial, the Senior Tutor’s record book of King’s College, Cambridge, and an obituary that appeared in C.A. Macvicar’s Memorials of Old Birkonians who fell in the Great War, 1914–1918 (1920) show incontrovertibly that he taught at Marlborough from 1909 to 1910, when he began teaching at Shrewsbury.

Right from their first meeting, Southwell and White became friends and quickly developed a very close relationship with one another. Consequently, they became known as “The Men” because of their habit of addressing and referring to one another and other close Shrewsbury friends (such as Howson and the Reverend John Osborn Whitfield (1885–1965), who began teaching at Shrewsbury in 1909 and was still there in 1939) as “(the) Man/Men” – an idiosyncracy that seems with hindsight to have protected them against an emotional and physical intimacy that went beyond what was permitted by the mores of the day. Although the two friends were expert oarsmen and good musicians, Southwell was better at the former – and so was put in charge of the school’s rowing for four years, during which he coached the Shrewsbury VIII for its first appearance at Henley in 1913 – and White was better at the latter.

But Howson, writing as an anonymous “friend” in Two Men, suggests that their friendship derived not from shared interests or even from a common outlook, but from the realization that the other had tastes and interests that were new, valuable and worth acquiring. So while White “felt the debt which he owed to Southwell for literary interest”, Southwell was grateful to White “for what he had learnt of music”; and while Southwell’s preference before meeting White had been musical comedy, White introduced him to the great German classical composers – with the result that his piano playing and musical comprehension improved markedly. So it would seem that their particular friendship had a great deal to do with the complementary nature of their paradoxical personalities. Southwell was more obviously the extravert and enjoyed an easy sociability while being prone to periods of dispiritment, and Howson, who shared a house at Shrewsbury with the two friends from 1911 to 1913, had a very clear view of this side of Southwell: “Few meals passed without [Southwell] explaining exactly what he had been teaching and how, and who had done well and who badly; this soon became a source of amusement, in which he fully shared.” But Howson also understood that Southwell was a man of contrasts – and recorded:

It was typical of the amazing contrasts in his character that, immersed in a fugue of Bach, he should discover that he was overdue for the river, and after an hour’s absorption in the science of rowing, return immediately with zest to the piano.

In contrast, White, who was the more experienced teacher, was also more of a sensitive introvert, a loner who did not make new friends quickly and found it harder to adjust to new company. Nevertheless, his extravert side found a day-to-day outlet though music. So while Southwell tended to write expressive letters, White’s give less away and one has to look for his real feelings and opinions in his diary, which is very revealing; and while Southwell’s behaviour veered between wild enthusiasm and coolness when, for example, a subject embarrassed him or did not grab his attention, White found compensation for his shyness by using the vacations, which Southwell preferred to spend with his family, to face the risks and challenges of mountaineering. But according to Howson, both men shared a common characteristic – an absolute thoroughness in whatever they undertook. If a new subject or duty arose that was interesting and/or important, then there was no stopping either of them until it was completely understood. But where, for White, this would mean a kind of nervous restlessness, asking questions, and diffidence about his own powers of comprehension and execution, Southwell quietly came to grips with the facts and would never say that he understood anything until he felt he had complete mastery.

For two years from September 1911, the two friends and Howson occupied a house called Broadlands, which is situated in Field House Drive, in the suburb of Shrewsbury called Meole Brace and a mile or so south-west of the school. Howson would describe it as:

an untidy, comfortable place above the river, with a view of the twin spires and Haughmond in the distance; and there were days when you smelt the autumn mist that rose from the Severn and lay wreathed about the town and the four poplars, so that – as White said – one longed for Corot to have painted it. The ramshackle state of the house and garden, which was given over as a jungle to the cat, was a perpetual source of satisfaction to the Men. And there was the conservatory which had no flowers and the lift which sank monthly to the basement with a shattered freight of crockery, and Southwell would say, ‘We shall have to have a man about it.’”

Possibly because the house itself was never taken seriously, it was a house where many interests flourished, some fleeting, others permanent: the life of the school, metaphysics, the nature of the universe, the poetry of Racine. But above all the house was fun to live in and had something of the character of a 1960s student pad. Howson recalled:

Among later memories of [Broadlands] stands out the occasion when one member of the house became a temporary invalid through a concussion after skating, and the accent of a nurse caused so much rearrangement of rooms and furniture, and such confusion and laughter of the Men, that a misfortune was turned into a picnic; or a night at the end of a winter term, when examination papers were corrected far into the night, with intervals for biscuits and cocoa. Walter George Fletcher [1888–1915; taught at Shrewsbury from September1911 to July 1913; moved to Eton for a year; served as Second Lieutenant in the 2^nd Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers with effect from 23 September 1914; and was killed in action at Bois Grenier on 20 March 1915, aged 27 (London Gazette, no. 29,151, 30 April 1915, p. 4,248)], left us at 3 a.m. and went to his house across the river shouting Meistersinger; and there were some of the party who were still found working by the dawn.

Music was central to life at Broadlands, and Howson remembers that on Saturday evenings White would play violin sonatas, while Southwell accompanied him on the piano, and that mealtimes were frequently “usurped” by Bach, Beethoven and Corelli. Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons, as many as 40 boys would come to tea and lie about the floor, reading or listening to chamber music. Ivor Atkins (later Sir; 1869–1953), who was Organist and Choirmaster at Worcester Cathedral from 1897 to 1950 and knew Southwell’s family well, paid him the following tribute for engaging in such activities:

He must have shown a missioner’s zeal in making good music known to the boys of Shrewsbury School, for he brought me glowing accounts […] of the success which came to those who co-operated with him in the work of introducing chamber music to them. The steady growth in attendance of the boys at these little music-meetings was a joy to him, and the fact that the best music easily won a way to their hearts was to him a sufficient reward.

During the vacations, when he was living in his parents’ house in Worcester, Southwell devoted a lot of time to reading and studying music, and Atkins continued:

His enthusiasm for music, and, perhaps, especially his measureless admiration for Bach, made him very attractive to me, and this attractiveness was only heightened by his quietness and modesty. He was at the time studying the piano, in which I was able to give him some help, and it was a great delight to me to watch him working at the forty-eight preludes and fugues. Though his playing was wanting on the technical side, he more than made up for it by his insight and sense of interpretation; and in discussing them with me I was very early struck by his knowledge, and by the clearness of his musical faculties. It was his habit to find his way to the organ-loft at Worcester soon after his arrival in vacation time, and I found increasing pleasure from his visits. His coming was always the occasion for some of the greatest of Bach’s organ works to be drawn upon, and though, as I have said, he had a considerable knowledge of Bach, he had had few opportunities up to this time, I should imagine, of hearing the later organ works. This was especially true of the Choral Preludes. His joy in a great work was splendid, and I shall never forget his reception of the Fuga Sopra Magnificat. He shared with another, whose ties to the Cathedral were similar to his own and who has made the great sacrifice, a power of appreciation which was nothing less than an inspiration to others.”

As teachers, both men rapidly gained the affection and respect of the boys. Howson tells us that White “could teach sitting among the boys or standing on the widow-sill and swinging from a cord” and that Southwell was “unique as a teacher”, whose

own accounts of his work were so self-deprecatory, and often so comic, that we never really knew what went on; but no boy who had been in his form ever forgot it. He probably spoke more freely and naturally to his form even than to his friends. He read poetry to them, which few can do with success […]. It was this that indirectly inspired the poems which were written for him every week, some of which were eventually published under the title of V.b when he was serving in France. Few of those who have read the book will deny that it is a remarkable result; for the poems were written by average boys of sixteen, and [Southwell’s] detailed criticism was small; they were the direct outcome of his enthusiasm. […] Of the spirit of the form his own pupils alone can adequately speak; the fourth Eclogue [written by Virgil in c.42 BC, it deals with the birth of a boy child who would be the saviour of the world] is still remembered by the gestures with which he declaimed it; for he would read it to his form whenever Christmas drew near with the enthusiasm of a religious rite; and when one of his boys was asked about the form, he said: “Mr. Southwell walks round the room reading Homer to us with tears in his eyes.”

Similarly, after his death in action, another former pupil wrote in a letter to Southwell’s father:

Unfortunately I was never in his form, but he took me for a term in French, and I can only say that those French hours were the most delightful hours I have ever spent in study. I liked them to such an extent that I often used to count the number of hours until the next one. I fear I am not a lover of books, and it was simply the personality of your son which made those hours so delightful. I don’t think I have ever got to like a master in such a short time as when I began to know your son. I think his poems were very characteristic of him, and the book he arranged, V.b, is one of the gems of my bookcase.

Once Southwell had left Shrewsbury to join the Army, his friend Ronald Arbuthnot Knox (1888–1957), one of the most brilliant classicists of his generation (see G.M.R. Turbutt and L.W. Hunter), succeeded him as form-master of V.b for five terms in 1915 and 1916, i.e. at the time when Knox was gradually converting to Roman Catholicism. When describing his spiritual journey in two privately printed books – Apologia (1917) and A Spiritual Aeneid: Being an Account of a Journey to the Catholic Faith (1918) – Knox recalled his experiences at Shrewsbury as follows:

Of the junior masters at Shrewsbury […] I can honestly say that I never came in contact in all my life with a group of minds so original. Mr. Southwell and Mr. White, who both left just before I came and have both since been killed at the front, left behind them a language and a tradition full of the strangest eccentricities and of the most penetrating humour. (p. 213)

Southwell and White were avid and eclectic readers and Howson tells us that:

when once an author, were he Shakespeare or Jerome K. Jerome, was admitted a classic of the house, quotations from him were permanent. Southwell’s shelves in particular comprised a strange medley, [with Swinburne’s verse drama] Atalanta in Calydon [1865] living neighbour to a volume on the golf courses of the British Isles. But there were favourites in common to both: Richard III, Orthodoxy, The Four Men, Ronsard’s poems, The Pickwick Papers (on which Southwell was almost infallible), the Song of Taliesin from the Mabinogion [a selection of texts in Middle Welsh that were collected in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries], The Babe B. A. [by E.F. Benson (1896)], Salt-Water Ballads [by John Masefield [1902]), and [A.E. Housman’s] A Shropshire Lad [May 1896]; Lamb’s Essays [Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia (1823); The Last Essays of Elia (1833)] were equally dear to White, and Southwell read The Pirate every Christmas. Perhaps the most quoted and best loved book of all was [Hilaire Belloc’s] The Path to Rome [1902; which Southwell mentions with great enthusiasm in his letters from the Front to H.E. Walker (b. c.1887), an assistant master at Shrewsbury, of 4 August 1916, and to Howson of 8 August 1916]. Charles Amieson Blake [a character in a scenario in The Path to Rome] was an accepted member of the household, as was Michael Finsbury [the attorney in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Box (1889)]. Of the classics, Virgil was the special favourite.

Both men spoke strongly to approve or disapprove of books “with feats of exaggeration that were humorous, but never intolerant”. For all that, Howson continued:

Southwell, who had an infinite patience with tiresome conversationalists and was generous to a fault, could be impatient with a tiresome author. He forgave men more readily than books; yet even in his literary antipathies he never lost balance; whatever is meant by the “Artistic Temperament”, creative or critical, it shone clear in him; so clear, indeed, that his obvious sanity over all things vital and human was the more remarkable. Though his preference was for imaginative writing, he showed remarkable grip of an argument, for all his pretence that he could not follow the plot of [Robert Louis Stevenson’s] Kidnapped [1886 …]. Once fascinated by an author, he was only content when he had searched for his innermost meaning and thrown light on every obscurity.

But, Howson continues, in contrast to White who was interested in problems of the day and fond of pictures, Southwell

was seldom heard to talk of politics, and – strangely enough – with few exceptions, such as the “Mona Lisa”, pictures had little interest for him; characteristically he devoted his time almost exclusively to other forms of art which appealed to him more. White said of him, that had he not been a schoolmaster, he would have been known as a critic; and it is probably true.

In May 1913, the denizens of Broadlands moved to the larger New House, a hostel for bachelor masters which had been recently built nearer to the boys’ boarding houses and which, as the School’s Medical Centre in Ashton Road and near its main gates, still commands a wide view over to Wenlock and the Stretton hills. Howson records:

It was something of a tragedy to leave Broadlands and all that “human disorder and organic comfort which makes a man’s house like a bear’s fur for him”, but it was a change to civilisation, and we became respectable householders.

Howson records that their two years in the New House slipped happily by:

there was the work of school hours every day, of living interest to both, and in the evening we would “sit round” (to use Southwell’s phrase) and (with Southwell himself often asleep in a chair) discuss books, theories, or the day’s events; or there would be boys to tea, and one would look into Southwell’s room and find a silent ring engrossed in books before a winter fire. […] On November 5, White annually let off five fireworks in the garden dressed in a scholastic gown and broad brimmed felt hat, […] and there was a lazy summer afternoon when Southwell in a fit of boredom suddenly announced “A ride in a cab is required”; and within the hour we were wandering sleepily round Shropshire lanes in an open Victoria, whose driver had orders to stop at every bridge, where he received a cigarette while we watched the stream under the willows; and so home, when Southwell fled to the river to coach the Henley VIII, or played the 17th Fugue of Bach, which he called “The Foundations of the Earth”. Meals were necessarily spasmodic, and White would heighten their irregularity by presenting arms from “The Port”, or giving a detailed rendering of the Eroica Symphony, or imitating a puma in its cage at the zoo. On winter evenings we would find exercise by running in the dark; and on Thursday mornings, having no early school, Southwell practised this alone before breakfast, recalling the days of Putney. And on summer afternoons there was cricket to watch, or we sat in the garden by the half-grown privet hedge; “and if it doesn’t grow quickly” Southwell would say, “we shall be overlooked by a long necked man in a straw hat”. Expeditions were frequent; sometimes “up river”; sometimes (in winter) to the town, from which Southwell would return with twenty collar studs and an early edition of Ossian [The Works of Ossian (published 1760–65) were a cycle of epic poems, allegedly written in the original Gaelic and collected by the Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736–96), but actually written by Macpherson himself]; sometimes, too, farther afield, often in company with boys, to the Briedden hills or Ludlow or Church Stretton, to climb Caradoc. Southwell often went by himself on the spur of the moment, and visited the Long Mynd or lost himself on the uplands of Clun Forest. Or White would be taken in George Fletcher’s side car, and together they would scramble on the rocks of the Stiperstones. To both Southwell and White the procession of the seasons was a pageant; the winter term was always the most welcome, but all times of the year had their glamour and mystery. They appreciated the fireside and the hillside alike, the “Friendly Town” and the “Open Road” [two books of poetry by the English writer Edward Verrall Lucas (1868–1938), both published in 1905], November winds and days of heat in the summer when it was almost too hot to row; and all with an affection that was far stronger than mere liking.

Howson concluded:

Unreal enthusiasm and bad taste made them unhappy, and they coined a new word, “spinal”, for the feeling, yet their sense of humour invariably prevailed, and left them generous and kindly. They were readily adaptable to new places and surroundings, though the power of self-adaptation came to White by effort and to Southwell by nature; but there was no circle which after a month did not receive both with open arms. White felt himself a stranger for a time at Shrewsbury; he was drawn by so many incentives, and was the slave of so many visions, that the settled habit of surrender to its atmosphere came slowly, and he was beset with doubts as to his ultimate work. These uncertainties gradually faded, and – by the time that he left – the place and its life lay close to the centre of his affections; he felt happy in his work, and one of his colleagues dared call him “the ideal schoolmaster”. It was high praise, but at least shows that White was not far from finding his life’s work. Southwell, with equal humility, was yet fond of Shrewsbury from the day of his arrival, and his happiness was infectious. Throughout, it was the one real pivot of his interests. Religion was to both a thing of wonder, not to be directed in direct speech, defying analysis, but vital. Life remained to them a mysterious web, shot with tears and folly and that laughter which marks a “gross cousinship with the most high, and feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man” (Belloc, The Path to Rome). Their humour was of that rich sort, which does not paraphrase itself, but confidently assumes its equivalent in others; yet it was never cynical, and never far removed from sympathy.

 

War service

Malcolm Graham White and Evelyn Herbert Southwell (October 1914–July 1915)

White was commissioned Second Lieutenant in Shrewsbury’s Junior Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) on 6 August 1910 (London Gazette, no. 28,404, 5 August 1910, p. 5,675) and promoted Lieutenant on 1 July 1911 (LG, no. 28,521, 11 August 1911, p. 5,992). As such, he became involved in the war effort almost immediately after its outbreak, and from September to early October 1914, when he was required back at school, he helped train a battalion of recruits for the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry at Blackdown. On 13 February 1915 he was promoted Temporary Captain in Shrewsbury’s Junior OTC – which meant that he was given responsibility for a Company (LG, no. 29,093, 5 March 1915, p. 2,360). In contrast, Southwell was less keen on things military and was not commissioned Second Lieutenant in the School’s OTC until 1914. According to Howson, he found “ceaseless amusement” at the thought of himself in this new part, and was forever drawing ludicrous pictures of the character of the “practical man” and pretending that military science was beyond his grasp.

Left: Evelyn Herbert Lightfoot Southwell, BA (Photo courtesy of Magdalen College, Oxford).  Right: Malcolm Graham White, BA (Photo courtesy of Birkenhead School, The Wirral)Towards the end of Michaelmas Term 1914 Southwell strained himself so badly while on a field day that an operation was necessary, and then, during Lent Term 1915, the friends’ last at Shrewsbury, news arrived that Walter George Fletcher had been picked off by a sniper on 20 March while serving with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. According to Gavin Roynon and Tim Card, Fletcher, who had returned to teach at Eton for a year after teaching at Shrewsbury from 1911 to1913, was one of three members of Eton’s Modern Languages staff, all OTC officers, who had been called up by the War Office on the outbreak of war because of the shortage of interpreters and liaison officers. The other two were Charles Andrew Gladstone (1888–1968), the grandson of the Prime Minister and, from 1967, the 6^th Baronet, and Eric Walter Powell, an artist and Olympic oarsman (1908) who survived the war only to die in the mountaineering accident of 17 August 1933 mentioned above. Howson cites part of a letter that Fletcher had written from the Front shortly before his death:

I have now had dinner – Irish Stew, Beer, Sardines on Toast, Marmalade. Also the sun is streaming in with some real warmth and I am feeling hearty. I will therefore make some general remarks on the subject of the War. There may be some excitement in it, but that takes the form of fearful strain on the nerves without any of the exhilaration one usually associates with danger. Perhaps a day attack can be exhilarating: in fact the only time I have been pleasurably excited was when the enemy attacked us by day and we knocked them down. Our attack is yet to come. The fact remains that war is a bore and we are all fed up with it. Death: one becomes a fatalist on this subject and looks forward to the prospect of extinction: “That moving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on……” [lines from Omar Khayyám, The Rubaiyat, trans. by Edward Fitzgerald (1809–53), 1859]. Fear and Courage: I think it was a man called Socrates who said that Courage was a right knowledge of such things as are to be feared: and to a considerable extent, he was right. When you know how little damage a high explosive shell does to you compared with the noise it makes, you don’t fear him so much. But Socrates is only partly right. I know what a fool a shell is and what a fool a bullet is, and yet I am terrified of both. But a more insinuating and demoralising fear which seizes a man is an entirely illogical unreasoning fear of the enemy as such; imagining him to possess superhuman qualities when he knows he is very human. Hence the great thing is, and will be, to make men realize that the enemy is much more afraid of you than you are of him. Hate: is non-existent – at all events on our side, I think on the enemy’s too. He too is capable of being jovial in his enmity towards us, and will signal misses or bull’s-eyes when we plug his loop-holes. Atrocities: I haven’t seen any. All first-hand evidence – even that gained on the retreat – goes to prove that the German soldier as a whole is capable of gentlemanly and chivalrous behaviour, and of this he has given numerous examples. The Future: in front of us there is a ridge on which we can see three rows of trenches, barbed, barricaded and cunningly dug. These we will have to deal with after his first line. They probably have several hundred of these behind those we see. In October [probably 1914, on the Messines Ridge (see V. Fleming)] the Germans, with unheard of courage, determination, and force, tried to break through a single line of ours and failed – Well what abaht it?

Fletcher concluded the letter by exhorting the two friends to join up, and Southwell later said that it was Fletcher’s death as much as anything that had made him take this step, a view that is substantiated by Southwell’s letter to his father of March 1915 in which he writes that he now feels obliged to take Fletcher’s place. White expressed his feelings in a letter of 26 March 1915 to George Fletcher’s father, the Imperialist historian C.R.L. Fletcher (1857–1934; Tutor in History at Magdalen 1885–1906, Fellow 1889–1906; Classics and History Teacher at Eton September 1914–Easter 1915 and January to Easter 1919):

The news which you sent us on Wednesday was to me the most terrible blow the War has sent me. George was absolutely the most splendid character I know; such a perfect honesty and directness in conversation, such a fresh and genuine temperament, made him the companion one would have chosen for any circumstances. I am telling you things you already know, but I can’t help trying to put him into words, in every sense of his loss and our great sorrow. It was a great day in our life here when he joined us at the New House. That was my happiest term here. His personality lies stamped on all the little institutions of our life, and his name is mentioned almost every time we sit down together. He was, and is our d’Artagnan. As I say that, it strikes me what a long way that comparison will go. […] I hope I may catch some of his spirit and show one hundredth part of his courage.

So by the end of April 1915, both White and Southwell had either applied or decided to apply for regular commissions, and had left Shrewsbury, leaving a gap “that was felt by masters and boys alike”. Lack of room prevented them from joining the same battalion, and although White had to wait a while before a posting was confirmed on 7 May 1915, Southwell was gazetted Temporary Second Lieutenant in the 13^th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade (London Gazette, no. 29,156, 7 May 1915, p. 4,419) – which he joined on 24 April 1915 at Perham Down, on the edge of Salisbury Plain, some six miles north-west of Andover. A memorable week of Brigade training ensued (10–15 May), and then, for more than two months, during which he and White visited Shrewsbury together for one weekend (10–12 July), Southwell worked at Windmill Hill Camp, near Ludgershall. Although his letters expressed regret that his civilian life and profession were receding and a slight shame at the Army’s success in narrowing down his life to that of a healthy animal, with “the importance attached to one’s food or bivouacs after a long march” being “rather scandalous”, he was very happy in his work. Indeed, one of his former pupils, who was himself later commissioned in the Rifle Brigade, said in a letter:

I suppose we can’t drag Mr. Southwell away from his military duties, which he seems to love. I can just see him stretching out his arm quite straight and stiff, palm of the hand turned upwards, fingers pointing up, so as to make a cup of his hand, saying “It’s that, it’s that. Very fine man”; or when some unhappy private drops his rifle, “Oh, not a good man. You stand there with a face like a plate of whoggy porridge, like some great owl.”

Southwell kept a diary, and while he admitted there that Army life was tough, machinelike even, he waxed lyrical about his experiences amidst the quintessential English countryside during the Brigade training week of May, which he called “one of the happiest I have ever known”. During that exercise, Southwell’s Company was based for a while in the Wiltshire village of Wilcot, just west of Pewsey, and for a time he was billeted at the vicarage there, where the Vicar and his wife received him and the other subalterns of his Company with great kindness:

The morning was naturally blank, but I shall not easily forget the sudden transition from the long march to the garden behind the Vicarage, where we lay about under the hedge and looked sleepily over the long, low water-meadows, and watched the consoling English mist wrapping itself round the English trees. No soldiering ever troubled the serenity of the landscape, nor the old church tower [of Holy Cross Church] behind; for the whole of that valley has just accepted very quietly the memory of the men who died for it in year after year before we ever saw it, and every one, I felt, was another perfectly present, and therefore entirely hidden and unsuspected, guarantee of that incredible peace. It was during this evening that I walked part of the way with Leggatt towards his billets at Sharcott, and so back over the fields: and it was there that I went with opening eyes down an English lane […]. But it is not of these happenings that I want to write, only my pen is so cursedly obstinate. It is of those few memories that I want reminding – The Savernake wood country at dawn, the stars over the night march, the water of the Avon, the church by the canal, the five minutes in the lane, the dear Vicar and our return to his home, the bugles as we entered Pewsey from Wilcot on the last morning, the morning in the “Ebenezer” school, – Wilcot above all, above all Wilcot: those are the things which make the Wonderful Week, and which in any future inconveniences (such as I might be excused for expecting) I hope and pray for courage to remember.

Southwell, it seems, had found a highly-charged, semi-religious vision of England that expressed what he thought he would be fighting for and he linked it with the poetry of John Masefield and, inevitably, A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. On 27 May, while at Sidbury Camp, Southwell underwent another, similarly epiphanic experience and noted that this moment of peace was what he had been seeking for weeks.

 

Evelyn Herbert Southwell (July–August 1915)

On 29 July 1915, Southwell’s Battalion left for France as part of 111^th Brigade, in the 37^th Division, and landed at Boulogne two days later. But as Southwell had trained for less time than the other officers in his Battalion, he was left behind as OC (Officer Commanding) Details, and on 16 August he was transferred to the 15^th (Training and Reserve) Battalion of the Rifle Brigade at Belhus Park, Purfleet, Essex. Here, on 19 August, he was overcome by an attack of intense nostalgia that seems, judging by the German insertion, to have been fed by Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ (written in Berlin in May 1912 and first published in 1914 and Other Poems in May 1915). Southwell transcribed the experience in his diary as follows:

As usual, I have left a large – lieber Gott, How large! – part of myself behind on [Salisbury] Plain. Time is probably short; and that is why I have not the time to linger and dream over that adorable country. But I will give myself just five minutes very occasionally; and those will be the times when I will remember the two home signals of the tree clumps on Windmill Hill: and the finest and first and most alive Downs-Road in all the world which leads from its foot; and the very British Village to which that dear road flies; and the very Roman Guard that is kept at the top of Sidbury; and the little church spire of Chute, little known and never visited, though there was that supper in the house of the old lady, of Wiltshire, one night very late in my stay; and the night of bivouac at Fenner’s Firs; and Wilcot – but I should be a fool to trespass on that sacred ground; and Ludgershall Church and village, and my first billet there; and Salisbury Close, peaceful beyond all bearing; and Church Parade under Our Hill; and for love of that country I will even include Bulford Ranges (though I cannot go so far as Perham Down, its huts and its trenches); and the most glorious College of Marlborough must find a memory; and the Andover Road, which found me so strong (!) amidst the “fall-outs”, though so powerless to help them; and the slopes that used to call me, day after day, I well knew where, I well know where; and my own, my very own Details, whom I see, thank God, with a wistful and most worshipping affection day by day, the remnants of the 13th, ah yes! the 13th R[ifle] B[rigade] in a very strange land.

 

Malcolm Graham White (May–July 1915)

 

Meanwhile White, who had been made a Lieutenant in the 6^th (Special Reserve) Battalion of the Rifle Brigade on 31 May 1915 (London Gazette, no. 29,224, 9 July 1915, p. 6,708), joined his new unit in Sheerness, the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, to take command of a company of convalescents. He found it more difficult than Southwell to adapt to Army life or to take pleasure in the immediate, and on 21 July he noted in his diary that he had just had “an hour’s loneliness and depression” and how different he felt from “the Tommies under me”, not least because of his visceral reaction to the poetry of Housman and Browning, and how he wished that he had “someone” there with whom he could talk about “everything”. Four days later, on 25 July, he wrote to Howson, who was still at Shrewsbury:

Oh Man, I wonder too if you know how I felt, when you saw me off a fortnight ago, and you and the blue hills and Shrewsbury were drawn swiftly away and then finally blotted out by the Wrekin. (“I never liked that Wrekin” mightn’t your nurse have said? – and I like him now less for his insolence and relentlessness that evening.) I was somewhat comforted by the dinner at which I was your grateful guest, but I was horribly conscious of the increasing absence of the host. I am rather dismal about the end of term. Isn’t that odd? But I feel that Men (and boys) are there and that the place is solid, and exists for me to picture at any moment I like. The end of term causes it to lose something of its existence for me. I’ve had a wonderful letter from the Man [i.e. Southwell] to-day. I wish we were together – it is really a tragedy as I miss him so very much. He is lonely, and so am I very often.

This is a significant letter because the jokiness, literariness and third-person distanciation that mark so many of the letters that passed between the three men has given way to an unashamed sense of sadness and loss. Here, for the first time in the Memorial Book, the reader begins to feel that the relationship that existed between White and Southwell, and possibly Howson, too, went well beyond the comradely or intellectual-aesthetic.

 

Evelyn Herbert Southwell and Malcolm Graham White (September 1915)

By mid-September 1915, with the Battle of Loos looming, the focus of both men was turning towards France. But first, on 19 September, what turned out to be the farewell reunion of the Broadlands household took place for a few hours at Purfleet, and on 20 September Southwell moved to South Camp, Seaford, in Sussex. Two days later he wrote a characteristically enthusiastic letter to his erstwhile Headmaster, the Reverend Cyril Alington, expressing satisfaction at the quality of the huts and food there, at the proximity of the sea and a town, and at the availability of the Downs for walking after the claustrophobia of the Purfleet mud-flats. On 24 September, White told Howson in a letter that while two of his “real friends” at Sheerness – probably Jocelyn Murray Victor Buxton (1896–1916; killed in action on 1 July 1916 while serving as a Second Lieutenant with the 6^th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade; no known grave) and Hugh Francis Russell-Smith (1887–1916; died of wounds received in action in Rouen on 5 July 1916 while serving as a Captain in the 1^st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade) – both Cambridge graduates – had been listed for front-line duties, the Colonel needed him to stay at Sheerness for the present because of the current shortage of senior officers. He concluded: “I never pretend that I want the trenches; but one part of myself says to the other part – ‘This war is an ordeal which I dare you to face; I don’t believe you can’, and the other part replies – ‘Lord, then I suppose I must try’.” But finally, on 30 September, with the Battle of Loos now over, Southwell, who was on leave in Worcester with his parents, was ordered to the Front and left on 1 October, meeting White on the way in London.

 

Evelyn Herbert Southwell (October 1915–June 1916):

According to Southwell’s medal card, he landed at Le Havre on 20 October 1915, but this must be a transcription error for 2 October since it was on this day that he wrote a farewell letter to his mother while he was on the train to France. Moreover, the War Diary of the 9^th (Service) Battalion, the Rifle Brigade (42^nd Brigade, 14^th (Light) Division), in which Eric King Parsons and Herbert Westlake Garton – still away sick because of his wound – were still serving, confirms that Southwell reported for duty on 3 October. At that time, the 9^th Battalion was in Reserve in the relatively quiet Ypres Sector and on 12 October, before his first taste of the horrors of a war of attrition, Southwell penned three naively enthusiastic letters about life at the Front. The first was to the Reverend John Osborn Whitfield (see above):

The inconceivable prospect of a wooden-lined dug-out, in reserve, with the yellow leaves and the October term, and nothing but the shells, still bullying the battered remains of the city a couple of hundred yards away, to remind one of realities – this was indeed a change. We weren’t idle: six hours digging per day keeps one fit all right. But this sort of digging is not like making a new trench at fifty yards, and there is time (when the three aeroplane whistles go, and work and staring upwards are forbidden) to look over one’s shoulder and watch the crumbled houses and ruined towers. “Hate the business?” Why, there is not a blade of grass or a broken brick which does not remind one that no one ever had such a time in his life as this of mine, nor ever will again! Oh yes, I am in a colossally good temper. But then I have had nothing to go through yet, like those others.

The second was to his sister:

I was pretty sleepy last night, and I slept without a break for eleven hours, but in camp. Oh! but the dawn over Flanders, and the booming of a big bombardment farther away, in a different direction, and the glorious sort of war-wind with just the right amount of suggested pestilence in it that blew over the fields as the sun rose, and reminded one that one was in a big show; and right below one the wood, huge on the map, ten short stumps on the field; and the city of Ypres with not a house standing entire; and the terribly sad view of glorious churches, battered to blazes, seen as the mist cleared in the morning, weeping to break one’s heart across the desolate plain. Oh! if I could always be as happy as I was during that trial trip, I should not have much to complain of! And the men were so glorious. They’d been in the trenches continuously for many, many days, begrimed from head to foot, their eyes heavy with want of sleep, and their whole appearance quite different from that of men who’ve not been up. It was a very, very young Corporal, and there was a deuce of a bombardment going on, and the Sergeant-Major met him: “What are you doing?” “Oh! just issuing rations, Sergt.-Maj.” That is not particularly remarkable, no doubt, and that is why it is worth quoting, as being so frightfully typical. Well, there wasn’t any risk as far as I was concerned, and it was only when we got back that somebody said, “By Gad, we’ve been under fire; what fun!”

The third was to Whitfield’s mother:

We had a glorious time there; we were heavily shelled, coupled with almost complete safety; and what more interesting experience could you wish? Safety, because our front line was too close to theirs to be aimed at, but our support trenches (and in fact the back of my dug-out, only – by fragments – occasionally, in the front line) got hit. Yet only one casualty, as their shells mostly fell between us and them. It went on for two hours and was called “fairly intense”, i.e. nothing like that before an attack. Digging a new trench at sixty yards from the Bosches [sic] under flares and (bad) rifle shots was less of an arm-chair show, rather! I would like you to think that my thirty-six hours there are a good omen, for they were absolutely the best I ever knew. I loved everything; at every step, even in the “horrible mire and clay”, I seemed so much the more admitted right into the Great Show. But I am getting foolish and must stop. It is because I am very, very happy.

Finally, when Southwell wrote to Alington on 26 October, he described the period that ended with the uneventful week in the “reserve dug-outs outside the ruined city” as: “The most priceless ten days in my life, I think.”

On the following day, the Battalion moved up to the trenches at Potijze, a north-eastern suburb of Ypres, an experience that Southwell could still enjoy despite its discomforts, and on 21 October, the day after it had ended its stay there, the Battalion entrained for Poperinghe, around six miles due west of Ypres. It then marched to billets at Houtkerque, a further five miles to the west-south-west and just over the border in France, where it stayed in Reserve for four weeks, resting and training. On 14 November 1915, Southwell wrote a letter to Ronald Knox in which he described his recent experiences at Houtkerque in greater detail and with more frankness:

The time here has really been more like training in England than anything else: we run, slowly and ponderously after my manner, before breakfast, then parade with smoke-helmets, inspect men for absurd deficiencies, shoot a little, drill, do musketry, digging, wiring, make speeches (very rarely; I’ve made two on “trench duties” to the Company on wet days, mainly because I swore when in the trenches that I would get about thirty points really hammered into them in a lump, instead of having to strafe a man here and there in each of the twenty-two bays); and so forth. Even football has found its way in; and our Coy. is as pleased as any school ever was over coming top in that. It is all very different from the trenches; sleeping in a bed seems absurd luxury, especially a bed like mine; one hopes this period will not convert us all into soft jellies again. However, no doubt things will seem more straight-forward when we do go in, as one can’t help picking up a little sense in even so short a visit as our last.

Then, on 18 November, the Battalion marched back to the trenches in Potijze, half in the Canal bank and half in the Kaaie Salient, and alternated in these positions with the 9^th (Service) Battalion, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps – with which it would be brigaded in 42^nd Brigade during the Battle of the Somme – until the end of the month. Unfortunately, the weather became so bad that on 20 November 1915, during a spell in the trenches in Potijze Wood, Southwell developed a severe chill and a high temperature and, much to his disgust, had to be hospitalized in No. 12 Casualty Clearing Station at Hazebrouck until 8 December. He recorded in a letter that “the authorities were very generous […]; we were excellently fed, and night after night there would be red and white wine, whisky and brandy on the table”. Nevertheless, when he was first allowed to get up and walk about he discovered that the illness had left him very weak, and during his absence from the Battalion, his batman, “an awfully nice youth,” was killed by a whizz-bang. On 11 December 1915, shortly after his return to the battalion, Southwell wrote to Mrs Whitfield concerning his hospital experiences:

I was very angry at this, being a little ashamed of going under to a very unmilitary kind of complaint like that. So I said to myself, “I will not advertise this episode”. Well, naturally there was no news from such a place, though when I got out of bed it was interesting to meet other convalescent officers and exchange talk, about where various Divisions and Battalions were, and so forth. The trenches are in a very dreadful state, frightfully wet, knee-deep in very many places, unusable in others (a trench is regarded with disfavour when it gets more than “thigh-waders-depth”!), and falling in all over the place; but the men are wonderful. They are, I repeat it with the most sincere reverence (there is no other word) – Wonderful. They have a dreadful time, especially in soaked dug-outs at night – where officers generally get at least fairly dry ones and do get more chance of a sleep, and no touch of drama comes along just now: they just stick it. I adore them; they are the people.

On the night of 5 January 1916 Southwell had a narrow escape while wiring in front of the line – a mere 15 yards away from the Germans. A machine-gun had already opened up on wiring parties several times without causing any casualties. But Southwell’s Company Commander, Captain John Alwarth Merewether (1882–1916; killed in action on 15 September 1916 at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette; no known grave), heard the breach of a machine-gun click as it was being loaded and got Southwell and his detail back into their trench just as the flare went up and the German machine-gunners opened fire.

During January 1916, the Battalion was in and out of the trenches near Elverdinghe, about four miles north-west of Ypres, and suffered nearly 90 casualties killed, wounded and missing, but Southwell missed a week of this fighting as he was home on leave from 19 to 26 January, and managed to visit Shrewsbury on 22 January and White in London during his return journey to the Front. After a week in the trenches there, Southwell wrote to his father on 2 February 1916:

We came out absolutely “flat-out” into The Farm last night, the men quite exhausted after a bad time. I am tremendously happy to be here at rest for two or three days; so are the men. It was grand to see how they loved a rest in the mud of the road coming down last night, falling asleep constantly in some cases. It is rather fun when it’s over; the mere physical delight of a chair when you are pretty well exhausted, the walk in the air (fresh and not foul) before a late breakfast back here, the comparative silence; the chance of writing a letter, of reading a book, of hearing the dear old sad songs of the British Infantry, which thrill me whenever I hear them, because I know the men, poor hardly-used creatures, are happy after a hard time. They have had an exhausting week.

On 9 February 1916, while the Battalion was out of line, Southwell was promoted Temporary Captain (London Gazette, no. 29,589, 19 May 1916, p. 5,044), removed from ‘D’ Company, and given temporary command of ‘C’ Company. Its previous Acting Commanding Officer, the Cambridge Cricketer Captain Francis Bernard Roberts (b. 1882 in Nasik, India, d. 1916), had been killed in action two days previously, aged 33, at a time when its nominal Commanding Officer was away on leave. Southwell was pleased with the promotion and wrote to Alington:

The OC ‘C’ Company […] was killed in what would have been probably his very last tour of inspection of his trenches, the foulest, most unspeakable and battle-scarred, I suppose, in the world: it is there that – oh well, I mustn’t put in horrors. This was two nights ago, and for thirty-six hours I have been in his shoes, with a feeling of something like remorse at the dreadful noiseless continuity, so typical of the Army, with which the place he leaves is (nominally) filled. […] I knew him only slightly; but he was much liked and is terribly hard to follow. It would be silly to pretend that I am not pleased with this very unexpected lift up, however irrelevant I may feel to my predecessor’s memory. It is a big opportunity, in its way, after all, and I only wish I were more equal to it.

On 12 February the 9^th Battalion marched to Houtkeerke once more, and from there, on the following day, a further five miles westwards to Wormhoudt before being transferred from the Ypres Salient to the Arras Sector of the British front line. Before leaving, Southwell wrote to his mother: “I couldn’t leave the [Ypres] sector quite without a pang. After all there is nothing like it on earth nor, I suppose, ever will be. It’s not a bed of roses exactly – see the casualty lists recently and those to come – but I said I would not have missed being there for the worlds.”

After a week’s rest in billets, during which they were inspected by Field-Marshal Haig, Southwell’s Battalion moved southwards by train to the village of Halloy, where, on 21 February 1916, he was able to have tea with White, whose Battalion was a mere two kilometres away – their last encounter as it happened. On 24 February the 9^th Battalion began marching towards Occoches, and on 27 February Southwell wrote to Alington:

Since leaving [the Halloy area] we marched a couple of days, sideways with regard to the line, in snow; bitterly cold and miserable billets – for the men, I fear: the officers managed better; we had a house of some kind and could keep out of the cold, which pierced the barns where the Company was. But it’s not easy to be quite happy with the knowledge that one is probably one of perhaps four or five who aren’t pretty miserable – or at least so one would think: but they are very wonderful with it all.

The Battalion reached Sombrin on 29 February and finally, on 1 March, marched to Simencourt, nine miles west of Arras, where it spent the next two months in and out of the trenches. On 17 March, Southwell wrote to John Osborn Whitfield:

One’s values fluctuate so strangely out here. Some things are spinal at home, but bearable and even good out here, because they simply depict what Belloc called “the great emotions” [The Four Men (1912)]. In fact it is no exaggeration to say that I have known a poem or a verse, or whatever it may be, to be intolerably spinal in billets, and very near one’s heart twenty-four hours later in the line.

On 26 March 1916, Captain Geoffrey William Barclay (1891–1916), an officer who was senior to Southwell though several years younger and who would be killed in action on 28 July 1916, near Ypres, aged 24, when serving with the Rifle Brigade’s 1^st (Regular) Battalion, took over from Southwell as Commanding Officer of ‘C’ Company. This event left Southwell strangely dispirited even though his Captaincy with effect from 9 February 1916 was confirmed five days later (London Gazette, no. 29,589, 19 May 1916, p. 5,044). On 2 April, Southwell wrote to Alington again, thanking him for a letter he had just received and apologizing for his fit of the dumps when writing his previous letter:

I really think that was the only period when I was definitely a little fed up, ever since I joined: and that was probably because we’d been out of the trenches too long, and our “trek” period, with the constant fuss over billets night after night, was getting tiresomely long. Since then we’ve been in [the trenches] again, and had the most infernal time I remember from the weather, though the Hun was evidently so equally miserable that the firing was small. We are all feeling much better, thank you; for here we are sitting in the open air, and the men are writing home, bless their souls (till we come to the job of censoring this evening), and the sun is glorious, and the snow seems really gone this time. Well, as I was saying, things are pretty well, really; I think I was depressed, when I wrote, to a considerable extent, but your letter cured me this time. […] Yet, when I remarked to my officers that evening, “Isn’t this rather fine reading?” and proceeded to read a bit of your letter, I found to my amazement (and theirs, if they noticed it; but I doubt if they did, for it was listened to in spell-bound silence, and they were vastly impressed, I know) that I could not quite read the last page with a steady voice.

On the following day Southwell wrote to Whitfield: “The trenches were long and frightfully boring to patrol, owing to mud and snow and frost and considerable exhaustion – seems incredible now, for to-day it has been boiling.” On 8 April 1916, Southwell saw the announcement in the Morning Post of Milo Massey Cudmore’s death three days previously, and wrote a letter of sympathy to his older brother, Collier Robert Cudmore, in which he referred to the part Milo had played as one of the initiators of Magdalen’s “Golden Age” of rowing:

I won’t write a long rigmarole, as I don’t expect you could bear to be inflicted with one just now. But I can’t help adding [that] I feel it is all rather splendid. That may be a bit absurd, but I do feel it. I suppose it is a rather selfish view of things, but I confess the second idea which came into my head was, “There; you see again how the thing can be done”. And yet, all this infernal philosophy may be very fine, but the fact does remain; and it is not easy to console oneself when one remembers old times, and how he is the first of a very priceless old crowd to go.

On 11 April 1916, Southwell set out for England on leave once more, but on reaching Boulogne during the night of 12/13 April he, like J.B. Hichens, found that as all leave had been cancelled, he had to return to the Front. On 20 April, Captain Barclay was transferred to the 1^st Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and Southwell regained command of 9^th Battalion’s ‘C’ Company. From 4 to 13 May, he was on leave in England again and managed to find the time to visit Shrewsbury in order to see a boy called Blakeway who was ill and who was, coincidentally, a distant cousin of the Reverend Philip John Thomas Blakeway, who had died of heat-stroke while on active service at Ismailia, Egypt, on 16 June 1915. While staying at Bapton Manor, near Warminster, Wiltshire, he wrote the following diary entry:

It is wonderful moonlight over the Wylye Valley and I am at the window of my childhood’s bed-room. My pencil is in my hand, but I could not reach my only remedy in expression – not, I was going to say, if I sat for ten years; but that would be even more hopeless – I should have to live twenty-five years backwards. For as I sit here there rushes in upon me the inconceivable throng with which I have for twenty-five years peopled this country – all the men and women of my reading, and of my dreams. One day I will take ink and paper and I will try and set some of them down; at present I content myself with saluting the old cedar-tree under whose arbour Tracy T[upman] kissed the spinster aunt, and the old lady’s promenade to it from the house. But it was all Dingley Dell, and I am not here to annotate Pickwick. Ho! the malady from which I suffer is the memory of the water-meadows, so old and so young: and I cannot think how I shall ever deliver my soul of it. Of course, I know every inch of them through and through, from here to Fisherton de la Mere [Wiltshire]. The old gate I used to swing on, that is gone: but the bridges remain, and the swaying weeds, and the still fishes, and the little hatches, and the incredible, deep unapproachableness of the river – “deep water and don’t you got too close” – and the bare possibility of being drawn into the mill; the smell of the mill, and of the wet meadows; the strange ventures of my thrown sticks and boats beneath the bridges; the river over which the garden leans, and the ditch along the garden towards it – ah, Wilcot, where are you? Somewhere jealous and beyond the Downs? Ah, but I am sprung from this valley; there is no drop of water in the myriad streams but has its kin in my veins.

On 13 May 1916, while waiting for the ferry at Folkestone, Southwell wrote a letter to his mother in which he optimistically prophesied that the war would go on for “about one and a half years before the pessimists expect it” but concluded: “And as I said before, I’m glad to be in it, and so are all of you; so we’re all glad together!!” On the same day, too, having reached Boulogne, he also wrote a letter to White in which he mused on the point of the war and the specific nature of England:

Those men are good, and they live in a good place. I think they are happy, too, and you will be glad to hear that. Also, Man, one discovers that England is not as other countries are. And, in fact, it differs in so many small ways, that the real difference is not easy to seize. But perhaps I thought more than anything of the manner in which they arrange their fields there. And I thought so much of this little matter, as I travelled across them, that I think you might do worse than agree or otherwise with what I said to myself in the train: and it went somehow like this. “Out there [i.e. France]”, I said “the fields lie hedgeless, naked, inviting manoeuvre. And coming from the deep, interminable trenches of the south, I am not sure I ask anything better. Certainly I have had glorious days there; and yet, perhaps, never till I came back a few days ago did I know what it really was to worship the secluded valleys and the quiet fences of home. But I am at home now,” I continued, “and my whole soul goes out to clustered counties, where beneath the mother-grey of a summer haze, shoulder to shoulder and safe from the remembered storm, the fields of England lie close.” There are other differences also, but this will do to go on with. This is a very important matter, and I will thank you for further enlightenment on essential differences.

The influence of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, a copy of which John Osborn Whitfield had sent him during the second half of March, is very audible.

Meanwhile, during Southwell’s absence, on 6 May 1916 the 9^th Battalion had moved to Berneville, a village some four miles south-west of the centre of Arras, and it would spend the next three months in and out of the trenches in the Arras/Berneville area. But when Southwell arrived back with the Battalion shortly after 14 May, the first piece of news he received concerned the death on 13 May of Second Lieutenant Edward Pitcairn Jones (1896–1915), aged 20, the only other Salopian (1910–15) in the 9th Battalion, who had been mortally wounded by a shell on 10 May. But as the sector was relatively quiet after that, Southwell had little to say about life there for the rest of the month – except for a gas alarm on 20 May.

According to the Battalion War Diary, Herbert Westlake Garton rejoined the 9^th Battalion on 26 May 1916, during a period when it, like the 7^th and 8^th Battalions of the Rifle Brigade which were also part of the 41^st Brigade in the 14^th (Light) Division, was experiencing a rise in casualties from around five to 50–60 per month. After a brief period of familiarization, Garton took over from Southwell as the Commanding Officer of ‘C’ Company, as a result of which, on 5 June 1916, Southwell had to revert to the rank of Lieutenant. He first mentions Garton in a letter to his sister of 6 June 1916 that he wrote after he and Garton had ridden five miles to a nearby village to see model trenches: “after it was over, we sent our horses away, and walked into the village and had tea, talking about Eton and Magdalen and old times generally”. Although this was the second time that Southwell had had to cede command of a Company to a younger man – Garton was five years his junior and had not overlapped with him at Magdalen – the two men had much in common, not least a passion for rowing, and worked well together. But Garton’s return meant that Southwell was free once more to go on courses, and from about 14 to 25 June he was taken out of the trenches to attend one at the 14^th Division’s School of Instruction, at Hauteville, probably the one eight miles west of Arras, which he found most useful as it was run by people who could provide him with the latest tips from the Front. Southwell also took great pleasure in the nearby village of Noyelle-Vion, describing it as

perhaps […] more adorable than anything I have seen since Houtkerque, and it would be absurd to deny that in itself it is much more beautiful. The road through the village climbs slowly up the hill like a pilgrim to the church on the hill-top; and it seemed in most English wise that it loitered by pools and official house corners as it rose. Finally the church reminded me tremendously of some little church on the Plain; with its avenue of chestnuts diagonally leading to the little door, and its little cemetery, and the big trees and curé’s house around.

On 18 June, while he was on the course, Southwell was much affected by news of the death of Captain Leslie Woodroffe, MC (1883–1915), a slightly older Salopian (1909–14), who was serving in the 8^th (Service) Battalion of the Rifle Brigade. After being wounded at Hooge on 31 July 1915 (see B. Pawle, H.N.L. Renton and J.J.B. Jones-Parry), Woodroffe had rejoined his Battalion on 1 June 1916 only to be seriously wounded three days later, and subsequently died of those wounds on 10 June 1916. Two of Leslie’s three brothers were also killed in action: Sidney Clayton (1895–1915; no known grave), who fell at Hooge on 30 July 1915 while serving in the same Battalion of the Rifle Brigade as Leslie and was posthumously awarded the VC for his actions there; and Kenneth Herbert Clayton (1892–1916; no known grave), who was killed in action on 9 May 1916 while serving with the 6^th (Reserve) Battalion of the Rifle Brigade. In a letter of 18 June to Ronald Knox, Southwell wrote:

It was owing to [Leslie], as much as any one, that I joined the R[ifle] B[rigade]. Everyone of course says “What a wonderful Family”, and this is perfectly true: but his death was not wonderful at all; it was just the most miserable piece of bad luck for his Regiment, and that sort of nonsense is no consolation at all for his loss. It does remain true that those three great men made a name in the R[ifle] B[rigade] which is famous in every one of it’s [sic] Battalions.

The passage is significant, for it is the first time that one hears Southwell seriously asking himself whether the loss of so many fine young men was truly justified by the conventional rhetoric – and discovering that his answer was in the negative. Two days later, Southwell wrote to Alington, expressing his “distress” at the loss of “one of the best men who ever put on a gown” but without allowing his profounder doubts to rise to the surface of that letter. On 26 June 1916 he reverted to his more usual idiom when he wrote to his sister:

They are quaint places, these trenches, that wander in and out of houses, and in a way rather picturesque. Summer fights its way in even here, and you may find your face brushed with a yellow cornflower, sticking out of the side of a field as you plod along through the trench, and remember better days.

 

Malcolm Graham White (8 February–1 July 1916)

Meanwhile, White left England during the night of 8 February 1916 – “the most wonderful day of my life” as he wrote in his diary – in a state of high excitement, and landed at Le Havre at 01.00 hours on the following day, not knowing to which battalion of the Rifle Brigade he would be posted. While in Le Havre, he learnt that he had been posted to the Depot of the 1^st (Regular) Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, part of the 11^th Brigade, that was located at Rouen and part of the 4^th Infantry Division Base Depot. He received his movement orders on 12 February and arrived at midday in Rouen, which he knew from 1909, when he had stayed there learning French:

It is good to see Rouen again. It fulfilled itself again according to my memory, more completely than I had expected. I went and looked again into the font at St. Ouen, and saw down in the water the reflection of the depths of the church; and I smelt again the quais, and the street which leads up to, and frames at the other end, the lonely little church of St. Vincent. […] In the evening we went to [the] Folies Bergères and saw a Revue and, what was better, had a fine picture of a French audience. For the lights suddenly went out, after the show had been going about twenty minutes, and for a time the audience took possession of affairs. It was either a Zeppelin alarm or the rehearsal of one. There was no sort of panic, but a terrific hubbub; shouts and suggestions came from the gallery, and the place was soon dimly lit by flickering candles, tied to pillars or leaning dizzily over the edge of balconies. After about three quarters of an hour, the band got candles, and played an overture to some light opera and “God save the King”. Then the curtain went up, and the “management” announced that they were going to continue the performance by candle-light. The leading lady appeared and stood over the footlights, arguing with the conductor and the audience as to the best positions for the candles; and while she gesticulated and appeared to direct operations, various characters of the Revue appeared and dotted the front of the stage with candles, while the gallery shouted its approval and its advice – “Ça va tomber,” etc., etc. Altogether an amazing scene.

From 14 to 17 February 1916, White killed time with fatigues and pointless lectures and began to wonder whether trench life would be equally dull. But his orders finally arrived and on 18 February 1916 he joined his new battalion at Gézaincourt, just south-west of the crossroads town of Doullens, at a time when, to his chagrin, it was in Reserve for a month. On 19 February he wrote to his sister:

We are billeted in a little typical French village, with hills all round, and a Maire, and a church with bells all Sunday long, and children who say: “How-do-you-do, Sir: quite well thank you.” It is very cold here, but signs of Spring on the ground; e.g. a general sort of waking up, and those loose blue flowers one finds in woods and thinks are violets at first. Things here are very smart. I used to think the discipline at home wasn’t bad, but here – by Jove! There are four officers in this Company. We have our Mess in a dank back kitchen sort of place, which isn’t any too warm. But I expected to go straight into the flooded trenches, which is a very different matter. The Company Commander is a Scotchman, a Cambridge Rugger Captain and international, and very efficient seeming [Captain Rowland Fraser (1890–1916), a Cambridge rugby Blue and a Scottish international rugby player, who would be killed in action on the same day as White, aged 26; no known grave]. I’ve got an awfully good servant, who says, “May I offer a suggestion, Sir?”

On the same day he wrote to Alington:

It was really rather funny, our arrival yesterday. I kept leaning out of the carriage window as the train crept along, very excited to hear the first gun, and wondering if I should be under shell fire in a few hours, etc. etc.; and then, two hours later, I was hiring a cab to take me to my Regiment, where on arrival I was shown my way to a real bedroom and then began a four course dinner with oysters. There’s a small chance of our being out of the line for three months. That would be awful, to come out to the Front and never see a trench for three months.

White was assigned to ‘A’ Company, “where people received one with the same silent and detached air of saying, ‘This isn’t much of a picnic. Take a chair and share our boredom. Carry on.’” On 21 February 1916 he walked four miles to Halloy to see Southwell for what would be their last meeting: “I was awfully disappointed not to take him more by surprise. An officer gave me away by telling him there was an officer of the 12^th R[ifle] B[rigade], a Shrewsbury Master, waiting to see him. The whole incident is much more amazing than I can realize – that’s the worst of it.” On 22 February White described their meeting to his sister:

Well, what do you think? I met Southwell yesterday – an incredible piece of good luck. I am likely to see him again quite often for some time. It is so extraordinary that it is hard to realize. It seemed quite natural to be sitting round a stove fire in a kind of back kitchen. I still fancy that I shall wake up soon and find it’s a dream, though the cold and wet are real enough. It’s been trying to snow to-day.

On the following day he wrote to Ronald Knox:

Of my amazing meeting with the Man there is nothing to say except that, if Tolstoy was writing War and Peace now, he would use the incident with great effect to show that it is not Joffre or Haig, but fate, which orders such things. He would also say this for two or three chapters, just as one was getting interested in some charming old people in Moscow. (Lector: “For Heavens sake.” Me: “Well I’ve just finished that work.”)

On 25 February, when the 1^st Battalion was still in Reserve near Sombrin, 16 miles to the north-east, White was taken ill with a severe chill. He noted in his diary: “Stayed in bed all day till tea-time. Fortunate enough to see a doctor. It is desperate business being ill now. I am lucky to be in Reserve; otherwise I am feeling very wild about it all.” On 26 February he wrote to his friend, the Tudor historian Charles Richard Nairn Routh (1896–1976), who had been an assistant master, a housemaster, and the Senior History Master at Eton for more than 30 years:

I’ve been with the Battalion about a week now. We are out of the line for a month’s rest, which will be over before very long. Rather lucky for me that I did not go up to the trenches straight away, as I got a chill which has developed into modified bronchitis; a distinct bore, as it is awfully difficult to get rid of in damp billets and bad weather. I’m only hoping I shall be really fit to go into the trenches. I have a horror of getting into hospital before I’ve seen the Huns. The really notable fact is that I have met Southwell, which was an event. Rather jolly hill country this, and the villages have all that French villages should have: a Maire, a town crier, large heaps of steaming straw, pigeons, and a grey church in a commanding position. The people of my billet are “des honnêtes gens”, and I am writing this from the stove in their kitchen, which I prefer to our Coy Mess, which has got a fire at last; but that fire smokes so, that one can’t see across the room.

On 4 March 1916 White heard that his father had died on 27 February and immediately wrote to Howson:

The chief thing about this crisis for me has been the impossibility of realizing out here what has happened and a feeling of being cut off from the rest of my family by this inaccessibility and the lack of any kind of familiar surroundings. I dare say you won’t understand me when I say this. I don’t understand it myself. The last two days I seem to have been living in a kind of coma. I am very glad you got to know my father that jolly week last winter at Mere Cottage [the family home at 24 Bideton Road, Oxton, an affluent suburb of Birkenhead], and to like him. All did, whoever came across him. He had quite a wonderful attractiveness for people who sometimes had only known him for a few hours even. He had a very happy life, really; full of poetry – in the sense, I mean, that he loved, and taught me to love, such a lot of those things which you and I agree are good; mountains and mountain streams, clouds, west winds, good manners and gentleness to humble country people, and good books. In nearly all my “Alpine” moments, he was not far away.

Despite his illness, White was able to go on leave to England, but not in time for the funeral, and while he was there he found that he could not shake off his illness and had to extend his leave by nearly a month. On 4 April 1916 he visited Shrewsbury and noted in his diary:

It was First Day; otherwise I would not have gone, for after my visit last November I have always felt that I mustn’t go again till I have faced things at the Front. There are many motives which have driven men to fight in this war: the violation of Belgian neutrality, a very few; more, the love of country; some, the hatred of militarism: and I think my motives are not uncommon; which are, the feeling that one’s friends have been through this test and that I must, and a kind of personal challenge to oneself, which is the strongest thing in my morality and leads so often to irrational results, which says, “You dare not do this thing; therefore you must.”

After staying the night at Shrewsbury, White left by the breakfast train and spent two days getting to St-Amand, ten miles due east of Doullens – covering part of the way on foot and in the dark. He noted in his diary, somewhat ruefully: “I was set down at 11 p.m. by a motor lorry in a dark unknown country. I walked to St-Amand and woke up the Transport Officer, who found me a bed. On this walk I discovered the War.” On 8 April 1916, “after a delightful slack day”, he rode by lorry to rejoin his Battalion in the trenches at Hannescamps, about four miles further east and in a relatively quiet sector of the front, where he had his first experience of trench life. “I wonder”, he noted in his diary, “if those bored Transport men and that bored Transport Officer knew how excited I was. Or the orderly who led me along a deep, star-roofed communication trench, did he know that that walk thrilled me as little else has done?” Three days later he remarked:

I have been introduced to War, and at present I find him a sunshiny old devil by day and a star-spangled old wizard by night, attended by countless elfish little devils who sigh through the air when we stand to arms just before daybreak, and noisy chattering fellows who always try to get in the last word and must all be talking at once, especially when one of them thinks that an aeroplane is flying low enough to be hit. It is hard to believe, in fine weather, 1200 yards from the Bosches [sic], that all this chattering and banging is anything more than an uncouth game, into which one has been drawn by curiosity. So strange are the emotions stirred by all the circumstances of this trench-life – the rough awakening after an hour or two of sleep, when one staggers out of a dug-out, chill and sleepy, to hear the monosyllabic rifles and the chattering machine-guns, who have, it seems, kept up their palaver during one’s period of forgetfulness.

After a week of rain and mud from 17 to 22 April, the next three days were glorious spring days, beginning with

a really beautiful Easter Day. The chaplain came round to our trenches at 6 a.m., to hold a Communion Service in a large dug-out. This is a good man and makes me realize what good men Christians are, when they are Christians. There is a good “influence” from him, of which one is conscious at his first appearance. Not many men would cry out “A Happy Easter to you”, with meaning and without any impediment of self-consciousness or spinality. It makes one rather sad about the slight shyness with which we returned his greetings, the shyness of laymen towards the parson.

From 30 March to 2 May, the Battalion was in and out of the line in the Hannescamps/Foncquevillers sector or in Reserve at nearby Pommier, and on 2 May, just before being relieved by the 11^th (Service) Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, a shell burst within 20 yards of White who confessed to being “very frightened, and rather proud to have had one at really close quarters”. On the same day, White took temporary command of the Company, while its Commanding Officer was on a course at the Army School. On 3 May the Battalion set off, in beautiful weather, to march the nine miles westwards to Halloy for a period of rest and training that lasted until 15 May. The first news of the coming “big push” arrived on 18 May 1916, while the Battalion was in the Hanchy/Le Festel training area, eight miles north-west of Abbeville, where the D941 crosses the Roman D108. So on 21 May, it began to march back eastwards to Beaumetz, on the main road (D925) between Abbeville and Doullens, arrived at Beaussart on 23 May, and stayed there until 11 June 1916. On the day before its departure White wrote in his diary:

I am sorry to leave this place, its duck pond, orchard, and cider press; the little boy who leads a different dog every day about on a string, and the other good people of the farm, who can’t know about life in towns, whose kingdom is sufficient; the red clover fields, and the orchard where our cookers are quietly busy; the nightingales, and the May blossom.

The Battalion continued marching towards the trenches via Orville, on the River Authie and four miles south-east of Doullens, where the men were able to bathe, and it finally arrived in Beauval, “an unlovable village”, five miles due south of Doullens, at about 23.30 hours. White noted:

The men’s billet bad. When we came to find our Mess, we discovered a very angry, high-screaming woman, pushing our servants out of the door and depositing their rifles and their “sacs” after them. It appeared that the servants had come in and taken possession in rather a cavalier fashion. Indeed, the lady brought her husband clad in pants and a shirt, and thus arrayed he gave us a spirited imitation of the exact song and dance which the servants had done, his wife providing the music. I’ve never heard any one as loud as that woman. I remarked that there were “des choses de plus mauvaises” – Q. “Quoi donc?”– A. “Les Allemands.” – “Alors, Allez, allez les chasser.” We assured them that, as usual, there would be money for all this. At that the man ceased to dance, but the woman is still shouting, and has forbidden us to play with a tennis-ball in the orchard at the back.

The Battalion spent its training time mainly in reconnoitring and preparing trenches for the coming attack, and on 25 May 1916 White noted in his diary:

Went up to the ground for work again this morning […] a weary walk. At night the Company worked in those same trenches from 9.30 to 1.30 in the pouring rain. Got back in an “uneasy dawn” at 3.00 a.m., drenched and muddied. And whereas we officers could change and sleep in something like beds, the men had not a dry stitch save their great-coats in which to lie on the floor of their barns, and I felt ashamed at this unavoidable injustice. With the amount of comfort that an officer has and must have, it is easy to love the tiredness for sleep and the hunger for food that are so frequent in this kind of life.

On 9 June 1916, White received a letter from Southwell to which he replied cryptically, signing off with “Love from A Man”. On 11 June, Whit Sunday, the Battalion marched the one-and-a-half miles to Mailly-Maillet in order to prepare the Battalion assembly area, known as Dog Trench, camouflaging and grassing over as they went along, and on the same day White wrote a remarkably clear-sighted letter to Arthur Everard Kitchin (b. c.1888 in Calcutta, d. 1946), an exceptionally gifted rowing coach whom Alington had appointed straight from Oxford together with Southwell, and who stayed at Shrewsbury all his working life:

I am reviving my interest again in the European problem. Do you know, I believe that, if we win, the best solution will be almost the status quo, because it would only be the status quo materially, not spiritually. For the Germans would not be humiliated, and the large better element among them (I don’t believe it doesn’t exist) would probably “rapproche” with the good elements among the Allies, and that would be the basis for a European understanding and a determination on all our parts to behave better in the future, seeing how little the War would have brought to all of us. The greatest victory that could be won in this War would be, not the particular gain of one or a few nations, but the tragic realization by all nations that nobody has gained anything; statement! As for “The War after the War”, and Mr. Hughes, and all that disastrous sort of idea – what are we to do about it? We are still behind the line, but only a short distance away, sleeping and eating in daylight and working in the dark, and generally just get out of the bullet zone as dawn arrives, and the moon and the stars and the star-shells get faint. I have been chiefly engaged in clearing out an old disused trench, all overgrown with grass and marked by shell-holes of some old battle of a year ago, I should think; full of old refuse pits and wet spider’s webs, and generally rather a creepy, unpleasant place. One expects to see the ghosts of French soldiers as one turns the corner. But the star-shells of the Bosches [sic], 200 yards in front, keep one to realities.

On the same day, he also began a letter to the future Byzantine historian Henry St Lawrence Beaufort Moss (1896–1960), the 20-year-old son of the Reverend Dr Henry Whitehead Moss (1841–1917), a brilliant classical scholar who was Headmaster of Shrewsbury from 1866 to 1908. White finished the letter on 25 June 1916, when his Battalion was back in billets at Beaussart:

We had rather an impressive Church Parade Service this morning. I always find Church Parade a very moving affair. At the same time it seems awfully odd, reconciling all this with Christianity as a weapon. For while the Church out here, to all appearances, makes an appeal to the individual soul, yet it is felt by all to be an item in the training, and everything is made “appropriate”; all the most warlike similes of St. Paul are made to apply, and “Fight the good Fight” is of a certainty this Fight against the Bosches [sic], and little else. Indeed the most tragic thing about war is that one has to make a new morality, compatible with it, and to alter all standards of right and wrong. And it is a great thing to have instituted the Conscientious Objector [by means of the Military Service Act of January 1916]. Never mind whether he is of the sincere kind or not. We have, by that clause in the Act, recognized that the individual conscience is supreme. If shirkers have taken shelter under it, I don’t worry about them very much. This morning I have been reading some remarkable poems by C[harles] H[amilton] Sorley [1895–1915], who was at the King’s Choir School when I was up there [1905–08], and afterwards at Marlborough [1909–10], and was killed [at Hulluch, aged 20, during the Battle of Loos by a sniper on 13 October 1915, while serving as a Captain in the 7^th (Service) Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment; no known grave].

The collection, Marlborough and Other Poems (January 1916) was published as a memorial volume by Sorley’s parents and Cambridge University Press. Sorley’s father, Professor William Ritchie Sorley (1855–1935), was a British Idealist Philosopher and from 1900 to 1933 the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, where he was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity College in 1883 and became a Professorial Fellow at King’s College on 12 June 1902.

Of the Battalion’s first four nights at Mailly-Maillet, White noted:

Working every night on assembly trenches. The first three nights rain poured, and the trenches were in such a state as to make movement very slow. […] The number of troops on the Serre Road (Watling Street) at night is very great, and the chaos at trench junctions, when parties are returning at 1.0 a.m. and converge on each other, is almost ludicrous. Traction engines come through the night, dragging huge guns and howitzers. Everywhere we see men struggling with boards, hurdles, and all kinds of building materials.

On 16 June, White noted:

The weather has cleared again, which is good, though it made the night very clear for work, and the Bosche [sic] drove us to ground with “that” machine-gun several times. But I don’t think he has seen our work yet. I am rather liking this life; at least I hate some of it so much that the good parts are glorious, which is the true kind of enjoyment. I hate starting out at night, with the possibility of casualties and of parties going astray up wrong trenches. But it is grand getting back in the dawn, and sitting down noisily to sort out a meal and a pipe before going to bed. Fraser [the Commanding Officer of ‘A’ Company] has gone on leave.

On 22 June White’s Battalion moved back from Mailly-Maillet to Beaussart for a few days’ rest, and White duly noted:

Camp, instead of our old billets; and the lady, in whose house we were to mess, drove us from the place with hard force of logic and much shouting. We failed to find a place till, at 8.0 in the evening, we borrowed a table and chairs from the Town Major’s office, and put them in a disused house. In the evening the Colonel talked to the Battalion. There was a wonderful sky in the north-west as I lay down in my valise, and I watched it under the flap of my tent, and I thought of many things that were under it. Country railway-stations, porters, and four-wheeled cabs came into the picture. A strange picture – but there is much of England in those things. And I thought of fields with hedges (the Man [Southwell] made me do that some weeks ago), and of blue hills, and all of those dear people and things under that sky. Fraser returned while I was looking at these things.

The artillery bombardment of the German trenches began on 24 June 1916 and had intensified by the following day. White noted:

It is clear that their gun power is nothing to ours now. And knots of foul-mouthed men stand about, men who have sat cowering and incapable of retaliation in the early days of Ypres, and now exult over the merciless hurricane that is raging over the Bosche [sic] lines. Officers stand about in their calm way and comment on the play, and a little white terrier brushes its way among the corn, which may and may not be reaped. Amid this pandemonium it is surprising to see and hear the ordinary circumstances of trench warfare. Occasionally a Very light goes off, scornful and inquiring, and “that” machine-gun gets in a word or two between the bursts. And I have also been out along the lane to the west side of the village, past the wild roses and the dog daisies, and looked across the spiky fringe of a battalion of corn at a quiet sunset, with violet clouds that looked like comfortable mountains, and watched a hedgehog trying to heave its way through the undergrowth.

On the afternoon of 26 June 1916 White went up to the Sucerie [sic] to reconnoitre a communication trench for carrying parties and had a good view of the German lines around Beaumont-Hamel, and the fountains of earth and smoke and ruin which spouted there. On 28 June he noted in his diary: “At 10.0 p.m. we moved to bivouac a mile to the south of Beaussart, where the ground is shaken by a 15-in. howitzer close by. I began to have a pre-Bumping-race feeling from time to time. Heavy rain poured at intervals, and the men had no cover.” Between 26 June and the attack, which began five days later, he wrote several letters to friends and family. To Alington on 27 June:

I have had a good deal of news of the best places lately. Good news of the glorious Malvern Match, of the Corps Inspection, but also of Leslie Woodroffe’s death. I could never have thought that they would send him out again. He was so very much a part of the place, and is still. Do you think that we all continue to have our part in the place after death, even when not remembered? I am very jealous of mine; and though I know such an article of faith is called animism or some such horrible name, yet I cling to the idea of becoming, after death, more completely a part of Shrewsbury than when I was an unworthy, active member of the community; not by what I have done there, but by how much I loved it. It is inevitable, just at present, that we should think such things, and impossible, at present, for me to express them legibly or intelligibly. I expect Leslie Woodroffe thought something of the same sort, but I expect also that he met death easily; for I think he trained himself to self-sacrifice.

To Southwell on the same day:

Oh Man, I can’t write now. I am too like a coach before the Bumping Races or Challenge Oars. So, Man, good luck. Our New House and Shrewsbury are immortal, which is a great comfort.

To Howson on 29 June:

There is a big attack coming off very shortly, and we are in it. And there is just a minute to scribble a line to you, with my love and greeting. We hope it will be a success, though it will be a difficult business, I am sure. Our job will be to take the front system of trenches in this area. Man, I can’t write a letter. There is much to think, but nothing to say, really.

To his family and friends on the same day:

I dare say this will not reach you, but I have asked a friend to send it for me when censorship does not apply any longer. We are taking part in the big attack, and I go up to the trenches this afternoon and shall not be able to write again between now and the beginning of it. All hope that this attack will bring us a little nearer to the end of the War. There is little doubt that it will be a difficult business, but we hope for success after the bombardment that is going on. Our business is to take the front system of German trenches in the area we are in. And now, I just want to say to you all, that, if I don’t come through it, you must all be quite cheerful about it. I am quite happy about it, though of course I can’t deny that I am very keen to come home again. I look at all this from a very personal point of view, almost a selfish point of view. It seems to me that, if I die in this action, it gives me a great, simple chance of making up for a lot of selfishnesses in the past. And when I want to reconcile myself to the idea of not coming back again, I just think of all those selfish mistakes I’ve made, and am almost glad of the opportunity to put them right. That’s my view on it. It is not priggish – I hope it doesn’t sound like that. It is also a great comfort to think of you all going on, living the same happy lives that we have led together, and of the new generation coming into it all. I can’t write more. My dearest love to you all. I am very fit.

On the night of 29/30 June 1916, ‘A’ and ‘B’ Companies moved into assembly trenches where they made two attempts to get into the enemy’s trenches but failed because of uncut wire. By the morning of 30 June 1916 the Battalion, still part of 11^th Brigade, 4^th (Infantry) Division, was assembled in that section of the British front which formed one side of an equilateral triangle, with the east–west road between Serre and Mailly-Maillet and the diagonal road known as Watling Street as the other two sides. The left of ‘B’ Company, on the very left or north of the front, rested on the east–west Serre Road, with White’s ‘A’ Company on the left centre of the Battalion’s position and ‘C’ and ‘I’ Companies in close support behind them, one in front of the other. The 4^th (Infantry) Division and the 31^st (Infantry) Division constituted VIII Corps – the most northerly Corps to be involved in the Battle of the Somme, which had been given the difficult task of capturing the strong enemy positions around Serre. Not only were these advantageously situated on higher ground, they were also deep, strongly protected and defended, and almost untouched by the preliminary bombardment. 11th Brigade, reinforced by two battalions from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, was tasked with taking the German system of trenches to the north of Beaumont-Hamel and then advancing to the north–south road that linked it with Serre, an advance on a front of about one mile to a depth of about one mile that included the extremely strong defence point known as Ridge Redoubt which dominated no-man’s-land. White’s Battalion formed the centre of the Brigade’s first wave, with the 1st (Regular) Battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment on its right and the 1/8th Battalion (Territorial Force) of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment on its left. After the first wave had done its work, the plan called for a second wave of three battalions to pass through it at the first objective and take the second objective.

The Battle of the Somme began at 07.30 hours on 1 July 1916. At first, 4^th Division’s advance went well under the cover of the artillery barrage, but when the first wave had nearly reached the German positions, which had not been as heavily damaged as anticipated, it was enfiladed by such heavy rifle and machine-gun fire that only a few of White’s Battalion, mainly from ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies, succeeded in reaching the enemy’s wire and getting into the German trenches, followed by elements of ‘A’ Company and the 1/8th Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. After this small, isolated force had been reinforced, it managed to hold on until, at about 11.30 hours on the following day, it was ordered to withdraw. It had nearly run out of grenades, most of its Lewis guns had been knocked out, and the German gunners were increasingly finding its range. White was killed in action on 1 July 1916, aged 30, while leading his men from the front. After he was initially wounded his batman, who had followed him in the attack, reached him and asked if he was badly wounded. White had just answered: “I’m all right; go on”, when a shell burst near them and almost certainly killed him. His batman could remember nothing more until he woke up in hospital.

After White’s death, one of his friends at Shrewsbury School wrote of him:

Malcolm was quite by himself, the most lovable and sympathetic and splendid of men, and seemed to combine so many of the good points one has known in other friends, in a wonderful way, which one feels would make it impossible for anyone else to be to his friends what he has been. When I think that he may be dead, it depresses me dreadfully, for he was the one person to whom one always felt one could talk about important things that matter and find a sympathetic hearer, just in the same way as he was the best possible of people with whom to enjoy all the trivial moments of life.

Another of his friends said:

I think you know what he was to us – his music and his turns, and behind all that his wonderful unselfishness and idealism which seemed to grow every day, and [which] always seemed to me to account for his humility and nervousness about whether he would do what was best.

A former pupil wrote:

I have never known such a real Christian. […] Fancy Malcolm talking about being selfish [in his letter to family and friends of 29 June 1916]. I doubt if he knew what selfishness meant. If he did, it was only the more fully to understand selfishness. It was that and his utter sincerity and genuineness which have made him what he was. His ideal was always so high, and he was never falling short of it. His ideas were just wonderful, and in the six years that I have known him I have learnt more of what real religion means than anything else. He was never tired of trying to put down all bitterness against the Germans, and if he has died, he will have done very much to justify in many people’s eyes the idea which he started in life.

Another Salopian friend wrote:

One always felt there was about him some indefinable quality, which he expressed perhaps most clearly in his music. When he was playing one of the more ethereal Bach fugues he seemed entirely in keeping with it, and one realized that it was his natural mode of thought. And it was just this that seemed to give him an immense breadth of view, for he lived in a region where small controversial things did not seem to matter. In everything that he talked or wrote about, he expressed views which we instinctively knew were right, and which were the conclusions we should have come to in our highest moments. Only he was always on a plane which we reached at too rare intervals. And yet he was not in the least unsympathetic, for his height and breadth only made him the more able to comprehend. There sometimes appears to be a region, or state of thought, in which we are no longer troubled by questions of art and morality, of ambition and honour, of personal afflictions and grievances. One felt that he never departed from this region, but made one believe that for the time one was his companion there. I do not think that any of his friends will ever forget him, and one of them will always be entirely grateful that he was allowed to know such a man, to whose inspiration he owes more than he can possibly say or realise.

White has no known grave but is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier and Face 16B and 16C, on the large wooden memorial in the Chapel at Birkenhead School, the Wirral, and on the list of names that is carved into the wall in the Memorial Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.

 

Evelyn Herbert Southwell (1 July–1 September 1916)

Throughout July 1916, Southwell’s 9^th Battalion stayed in the Arras Sector of the Front, where it did two spells in the trenches. In early July, after the fighting on the Somme had begun in earnest further south and the casualty lists were rapidly lengthening, Southwell began to be worried by White’s silence and started to contact mutual friends: on 4 July he signed off a letter to Knox as follows: “Good-night, everybody. Pray God all’s well with our Man. Love.” And on 8 July 1916 he wrote to Knox again:

H[erbert] W[estlake] G[arton] [with whom Southwell was by then sharing a cellar in a ruined house] did me a good turn last night by recalling some of the touch of romance that still hangs about the War. It is a dreadful thing, Ronnie, and there are a few people for whom you ought more heartily to pray than those for whom it is a question whether the Romance of War is dying out. Thus, just as we went to bed last night, he said, “Listen! That is always rather thrilling, the sound of men marching past your billet singing and whistling.” Good, that, because I am afraid my own thought was less interesting, especially as I knew what job they were finishing up; and I doubt whether I should have done more than murmur “Carrying Party returned”, and turn over to sleep. As it was, I sat up in bed and loudly praised God. Pray God all’s well with the Man, Ronnie. There are rumours of the Battalion [that are] rather disquieting. Please cable me the first news you get, good or bad. Yet I hope and believe he may be safe yet.

But on 11 July 1916 Southwell received definite news of White’s death from his Old Etonian friend Richard Fitzroy Bailey (“Phiz”; 1884–1951). After teaching for a while at Elstree School, Bailey had become an assistant master at Shrewsbury in 1911 (where he was commissioned Temporary Second Lieutenant on 9 December 1914 in the school’s Junior OTC (London Gazette, no. 29,093, 5 March 1915, p. 2,353) and lodged in the New House. He ended his teaching career as a respected headmaster of Quarry Bank School, Liverpool). On the following day Southwell wrote to his mother:

[White] was my greatest friend, and loved Shrewsbury. The last letter he wrote me was just before the push, and he said, among other things, “Anyhow, Shrewsbury and our life at the New House are immortal; that’s one comfort.” I dare say it shows terrible selfishness, but I have faced the casualty list daily without a tremor for two years now, and now, when I am hard hit myself, I cry out! Mum, he was such a dear; he was so keen on everything, and the most true “artist”, in the full sense, that I have ever known. […] But I cannot be very happy, even though I did write, just before he died, to say “Nothing matters to you or me; we’re both all right, in the right place, and we know it”. I still think I spoke the truth; or pray that I may really believe it. War is a terrible thing, especially lately, as all of us know…

On 13 July Southwell wrote a long and very distressed reply to Richard Bailey in which he tried to give his confused emotions some kind of shape:

I doubt whether any man was loved quite in the same sort of way as ours, or had such a colossal effect, with so entire an absence of claiming it, on the people he lived with. That is why I find it so hard to send you and the Man [Howson] the sort of sympathy I would give years of my life to send: as well as argue with the church over the way that, whatever its foundation may now look like (!), it is really doing very well. I will try and write again, and to the Man [Howson]: forgive this lamest of letters (from “trenches” theoretically, but – for a bit – Reserve Company; so we have more chances of writing and more facilities in many ways), which I fear leads nowhere, but just stumbles about. Tell the Man and yourself that I love you very dearly: it is quite true, God knows: I cannot see anything else worth saying: but that, I believe, is; and I think our Man [White] would have wished it: and I think he knows I am not lying!

On 16 July 1916 Southwell wrote two similar letters. The first was to Knox:

Ronnie, it is very terrible; more so, I think, than yesterday. There is a curious method by which one pushes aside some feelings that get in the way (ordinary second-rate sort of aversions, I mean; as to unpleasant sights, for instance) with an almost physical sense of effort which becomes half-mechanical; (I say second-rate aversions, for I do not dare to come near saying that I shift heavier visitations in the same way:) and so it was, perhaps, that I got behind that sort of callousness, or tried to, for a few hours. But just as it is a kind of effort, so it lives; especially when one is not moving about and being busy. And I don’t know that it is much of a shelter worth trying, anyway. One is alone, terribly alone, without the Man (of whom you, most surely…). Yet I find Herbert Garton tremendously comforting: one of the best of men.

The second was to Howson:

If I could write the sort of letter I know I ought to try and send you, I should be the happiest man alive, in spite of everything. For it seems, somehow, that you must be in the very centre of the pain that goes with every word of the news; since to be in the New House all the time without our Man … And yet, I don’t know; for only to-day I wrote to Ronnie, and wished all the time that I could have the chance of giving all I possessed for one day with you, Phiz, and him. […] I dare say you saw my letter to Phiz. I don’t think, Man, that it will be clever to try and belittle the calamity. One wonders, sometimes, whether the “Loss is common to the race” attitude is any good, and I am pretty sure it isn’t. Too many priceless things have happened ever since Broadlands; and to pretend to drop (even to the small degree which might be possible) this memory, is surely a loss rather than a gain. There never was a man really like ours, and I think the answer must be: “So much the better for the men that owned him; still better, the more they remember.” Oh Man dear, I am sticking down all this philosophy, and I do hope it’s all right: I try to offer something, for what it’s worth, and please don’t be angry if the ring is a bit hollow: the tune is a bit shaky, but it is the right tune; of that I am sure. What you want is a great strong man, with a faith like the foundations of all the hills; and if I, evidently, Heaven knows, am not fit to kiss the feet of such a man as that, much less to be the kind of real support I would give everything to be, yet I thank God all day and every day that, if ever two men answered that description, I believe they are in that house with you now. Do let them talk about the Man, and what they really think is the explanation of it all; if I were to be shot tomorrow, I would leave you that as my last message. You mustn’t try and carry it off alone: I know what that’s like. Dear me, Man, a heavy letter; I almost wonder if the Man’s smiling over my shoulder. So clumsy and so voluble, isn’t it? But not wrong, Man; no.

On 20 July 1916 he wrote a letter to his father in which he tried to make theological sense of the loss caused by War:

Yes, it is M.G. White, I am afraid. I like to think of him, as Browning did of Abt Vogler [a composer and musical innovator who is the subject of a poem that Robert Browning published in 1864]; say that his million ideas of music, poetry, teaching, friendship are now utterly satisfied: and it seems at least mistaken to grieve for him too much. Ah me! but I was nearly saying it is a cruel world. What a wonderful thing the faith must be, when it is able to keep one absolutely proof against everything! I sometimes think that, in the Divine Arithmetic, 1 and 1 do not make 2. I mean that one is apt to look at the tragedies of the War, and say, “This, and this, and this – how awful!”, while all the while it may not be more awful for anybody, God included, for twenty myriads of families to be bereaved than for one; it is at least arguable that no one family suffers more, and perhaps, even, it suffers less, by the thought that others too need comfort. I do not know, but I try my little hardest to believe. It is dark, and “He is a God that hideth Himself” [a reference to Isaiah 45: 15]; but a man may walk, when he cannot see his hand in front of his face – and arrive after all! It is not only in the trenches, I expect, that there is such a thing as the great “Stand Down” and the Great Dawning!

Two days later, on St Mary Magdalen’s Day, while the Battalion was in the trenches, Herbert Garton and Southwell dined together, after which Garton wrote to President Warren:

I was never able to attend a gaudy when I was up, but we have just drunk “Floreat Magdalena!” and he [Southwell] has gone out into the trench. He was a contemporary of [Charles] Leslie, [Herbert Garton’s elder brother and a distinguished oarsman who survived the war] a long time ago. I hope and am beginning to believe in a reasonably quick decision in the war. […] I am afraid that when we all meet again in Oxford there will be many gaps in old friendships (such people as Pat Hardinge can never be replaced) but one must not think of that. Hollins [Frank Hubert Hollins (later Sir; 1877–1963) was at Magdalen from 1897 to 1901 and was awarded a Blue in both cricket and soccer; during World War One he became an Acting Major in the 9^th Battalion, the Rifle Brigade] and Eric Parsons, whom the war robbed of all but one term of Oxford life, are here. I think myself very lucky in having had the three most perfect years of my life at Magdalen before this broke out, and I shall always feel that I cheated Fate thus, at any rate.

Southwell, too, commemorated the same feast day with a similar, if longer letter to President Warren:

Amongst the many duties of my sentries today a new one has arisen, that of telling the platoon commander the date, or at any rate of being referred to for confirmation of it. And no sooner had I asked and been told “July 22” than I remembered what day it was. This being so, and as I am not on trench patrol today, there seemed [to be] only one thing to do, namely to sit down and write a line to you. You must imagine your old demy sitting very much at ease in the front line on a fine summer evening; all quiet except for the colossal booming of guns to one flank (as I have the authority of the “Daily Mail” for saying the guns are heard in Warwickshire – credat Iudaeus Apella [= “Pull the other one, Squire” (RWS)] – I don’t think I am betraying my whereabouts very much!), an occasional shell is exchanged between the batteries to shew [sic] they are still there, and it is their own lookout if their peace is disturbed; an aeroplane is coming over at this moment, though I’ve not seen it yet and it will not cause any great stir in a trench where twice this week raiding flights of 20 of our machines have been seen; the Vickers machine-gun people in the next bay are talking the jargon peculiar to their kind; as many of my people are asleep as I can persuade to “get down to it” – astonishing how bad some of them are at seizing an hour’s sleep at odd times, though for good reasons they’re all appallingly tired; the long poppies and the “glancing grasses” dear to Walter Headlam [(1866–1908), the first line of his poem ‘June’ (RWS)] wave in the breeze on the parados; and, last but not least, it is an old Magdalen man that has just been patrolling the line he commands. This is Captain Garton, Leslie’s brother, of whom (as he will probably be invited to see this before it goes) I must not be guilty of such a breach of discipline as to write too particularly. At the moment of writing you will easily see that we are not in “the push” though I suppose there is hardly a regiment that knows that it may or may not be doing so in the future. But there must be many old Magdalen men there, and if they to happen to remember the date, especially if they were lucky enough to attend a “gaudy”, it is easy to guess where their thoughts will go. It is a great game, one must suppose, though I would give a great deal for the “reserve of heartiness” necessary to enjoy it continually. But I should be ungrateful if I didn’t confess that I have enjoyed today, and not least because it has brought to the meanest of your pupils the memory of some very great times.

On 25 July 1916, Southwell wrote to his mother that he has just sent a copy of Rupert Brooke’s 1914 & Other Poems (published May 1915, 24^th Impression by June 1918) to a friend

because there are poems about the soldier which seem to me to hit perhaps the very highest note that has ever been struck during the War. No-one who has not been here knows, I think, how difficult those tremendous ideals are, but is the better, I think, out here for reading them. The only thing I am anxious about is lest I may have given someone a copy before, at home.
You will, in any case, know the one that speaks of his life after death; but I think “Safety” [the second of Brooke’s Five Sonnets] is the greatest thing of the War. I have just been reading it again in Garton’s copy, and was enormously impressed.

Between 28 and 31 July 1916, Southwell’s Battalion moved to Candas, two miles west of Beauval, via Barly and Grand Rullecourt, both well to the north-west of Doullens, and on 2 August Southwell wrote to John Osborn Whitfield:

one plods along, not particularly hearty and not particularly sensitive; for some at least of one’s emotions here die easily: after a month and a half in the line, with a period out in supports, one becomes rather a low order of being – I mean all but the good men do. We are now no great distance from the Man, if you understand; and life above ground has been very good for some days: we are “seeing the light” (in a sense no Greek ever guessed), and a very delightful change that is. There is actually a bathing-place in this village, and after the enormous heat of the day a bathe is very good.

Two days later he wrote to Howson:

Incredibly good concert in the orchard last night. One Baynes is now our M(edical) O(fficer) and very remarkable he is. [Helton Godwin (“Peter”) Baynes (1882–1943) was an alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, had rowed against Southwell, and been awarded Blues in both Rowing and Swimming. He later became the medical assistant and close friend of C.G. Jung in Zurich and an analytical psychologist. He also introduced Jung’s psychology to Britain and helped translate several of Jung’s works into English.] He is one of those men who sing like birds, and swim, and dive (with somersaults), and do a lot of shouting, and are very good, in fine. You should have heard him take 300 men clean off their feet with “Songs of Araby” [(1877); words by William Gorman Wills (1828–91), set to music by Frederic Clay (1838–89)] last night; an old, old friend, of course, but I never saw it so effective. Nor anyone so priceless as the modern RFC man: he is perfectly immaculate, salutes all officers, and drills like a guardsman. He was much in request at the concert. Oh Man, The Path [to Rome] is always in my valise; and I read not only the tale of The Emilian Way (I seem to have known one or two such!), but also the story which tells how “Youth came up that valley at evening, borne upon a southern air”. I know what that means; it seems to make more frequent visits these latter days. It is the best book in the world, and has been read by (I think) nine officers, in more than one Battalion, since I got it from you.

 On 8 August the Battalion arrived at Buire-sur-Ancre – c.20 miles south-east of Candas and four miles south-west of Albert – for ten days’ rest, and Southwell wrote to H.E. Walker [no details available]:

By the way, The Four Men, you know. Well, I’m not going to launch forth into a tirade about it; but an officer of the 60th told me yesterday that he liked it enormously, and more than The Path to Rome. It is awfully good, but not, I think, quite such a great affair […] I will not weary you with any laments over Mr. White: you know well enough what it must mean to me and all of us. It was indeed a shock, though, coming so soon after the news of Mr. Woodroffe, who, besides being I suppose one of the best men in all the R[ifle] B[rigade] and in one of the most celebrated families, was partly responsible for my joining it, and in rather a special way seemed to have an enormous claim on my gratitude.

On 19 August the Battalion took over some new and very shallow trenches along Beer Trench, on the eastern side of Delville Wood, five miles east of Albert, where it stayed until 21 August, losing 38 officers and men killed, wounded or missing. On 24 August the Battalion returned to the front line, and although it was not involved in that day’s successful attack on Delville Wood by four battalions of the 14^th Division, on 25 August it attacked eastwards through the gap between the eastern end of the Wood and the village of Ginchy, about one thousand yards further on, and cleared Edge Trench, which ran along the north-eastern side of the Wood, up to its junction with Ale Alley.

The Battalion was withdrawn on 26 August and its work completed on 27 August by the 10^th (Service) Battalion, the Durham Light Infantry (43^rd Brigade), who drove the Germans out of Edge Trench, barricaded Ale Alley, and left Delville Wood in British hands. During this period, Southwell’s Battalion lost 47 officers and men killed, wounded or missing, and immediately after the action he wrote to his father:

I expect you’d like some horrors before long!! I dare say I can give you some one day, but it doesn’t seem particularly necessary. There is nothing so very romantic over the remains of brave men blown to every kind of bits weeks ago, as to make them worth remembering too much, nor in recollections of the same thing happening to one’s own people in one’s trench, though, so far, only in milder degree as regards numbers. Oh! but the RAMC [Royal Army Medical Corps]! They are wonderful. Seventy-six hours’ carrying without sleep, one party had. And I’ll never forget, after my corporal (I call him “mine”) was killed, how, on call for stretcher-bearers, four came doubling towards the exposed place, and I had to shout them back, all but one, the others being needlessly exposed. That arrival nearly broke me down altogether. It is a wonderful world you know!!

The Battalion was back in the front line from 28 to 31 August and lost another 43 officers and men killed, wounded or missing, and on 1 September 1916 Southwell wrote to his mother:

I am now (for a considerable period; probably; perhaps – well, no; but anyway a good long rest, I can say; during which you need not have the least anxiety therefore!) right, right back, several miles behind the most beautiful Cathedral I know [Amiens], which I hope, if I’m lucky, I may see again soon, at closer range than the railway. We are quite exhausted. After a terrible forty-eight hours (on and off) bombardment of varying degrees in trenches, we came out and marched to bivouac in Reserve. I went dead off to sleep several times on the road, and bumped into the man ahead! Comic, that; but at the time I was not happy, because I was so done that it was a struggle to get in at all. This was one of the few times I’ve been so done that I had difficulty in keeping going, and it is, I suppose, rather a good thing for people who are as a rule reasonably strong, at any rate to be really “done” occasionally – (not, of course, that I’ve been out here eleven months without finding out; but seldom, if ever, was I so tired as last night): it keeps them mindful of what sort of task is suitable for the smaller, and perhaps weaker, among the men. Well, I will write to-morrow some more about the things we have been through. At present, there’s no need to say more than that there has been indeed good cause to thank God for the events of the last three weeks.

 Southwell’s Battalion spent the period from 1 to 10 September at Le Fay, not far from Abbeville and well away from the battle area, where it underwent “special training” for the next major phase in the Battle of the Somme that would become known as the Battle of Flers-Courcelette (15–22 September) and go down in history as the action in which tanks were deployed for the first time. Here, Southwell was made his Battalion’s “OC Entertainments” and organized football for the men. On his very first day at Le Fay, he wrote to Alington about his Battalion’s participation in the fighting near Albert:

It would not be justice to our own people not to point out that we were gloriously miserable up there, and had the most beastly time, thank you! That wood [Delville Wood], with its horrible battle signs, was indeed no joy-party: and it seems likely to remain an offence before God and man for a long, long time, for it is not easy to see how to mend matters under present conditions.

On 13 September the Battalion moved back to Dernancourt, two miles south of Albert, and then, during the night of 14/15 September, gradually approached the front line until it arrived on the rear slopes of Caterpillar Valley, facing north-westwards towards the right-hand end of the almost obliterated Delville Wood. The 14^th (Light) Division was positioned along the Longueval–Ginchy Road (South Street) and out into the fields to the north of Delville Wood between the Guards Division (on the right/to the east) and the 41^st Division (on the left/to the west).

On 15 September 1916, at 06.20 and 06.30 hours respectively, the first two Brigades of the 14^th Division (41^st and 43^rd) began their attacks in a north-easterly direction towards Gueudecourt, a good three miles beyond Flers, while Southwell’s 42^nd Brigade formed a third wave that set off from the trenches near Trônes Wood slightly later. We know that the 9^th Battalion advanced on a two-company front – with ‘A’ Company on the right supported by Garton’s and Southwell’s ‘C’ Company, and with ‘B’ Company on the left supported by ‘D’ Company. By 06.45 hours the Battalion had reached the north-east corner of Delville Wood and succeeded in crossing Hop Alley and Ale Alley. But after that initial rush, it is difficult to reconstruct what happened. It seems that when the 9^th Battalion was about 400 yards from the first objective (the Green Line), its four companies changed into open order – whereupon they were caught between heavy machine-gun fire from the front and enfilading fire from the enemy position on the right that was known as Pint Trench. But as the four advancing companies could not rush the machine-guns without going through their own barrage, they settled down in shell-holes and waited for the barrage to pass over them. Once this had happened, the whole Battalion began to move forward again and relieved elements of the 41^st Brigade at the second objective (the Brown Line or Gap Trench), just south of Flers. But although this enabled the 9^th Battalion to pass through Flers, which had been cleared of Germans by tanks and infantry between 08.20 and 10.00 hours, its right flank was still unprotected and it was stopped by the machine-gun fire just short of the third objective, Bulls Road, which ran east to west just to the north of Flers.

During the advance, ‘D’ Company had ceased to exist, ‘B’ Company was driven back, but ‘A’ and ‘C’ Companies held on near Flers until 16.00 hours, when the Battalion was withdrawn to Montauban in Reserve. It now consisted of only four officers and 140 ORs (other ranks), having lost 298 ORs and 16 officers killed, wounded or missing, including its Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel (Brevet-Major) Thomas Herbert Picton Morris (1883–1916), who died of wounds received in action on 18 September, aged 33. The 9^th Battalion had also lost its second-in-command, all four Company Commanders, one of whom was Garton, aged 31, who was hit by a sniper when leading his men near Delville Wood, and Parsons and Southwell, both aged 31. Despite the heavy casualties, 42^nd Brigade took all its objectives and eventually stopped its advance just short of the village of Gueudecourt, one-and-a-half miles north of Flers. Four tanks were deployed at Flers on 15 September, and although only one came through the fighting intact, they had enabled Flers village to be captured very rapidly during the early stages of the battle. They had no direct effect on the part of the battle in which Southwell’s Battalion was involved, however.

Here are some of the tributes that friends paid posthumously to Southwell. A brother officer, Second Lieutenant George Guy Hammond Irving (1895–1921), who survived the battle and the war, wrote to Southwell’s parents:

The Battalion advanced and did splendidly, and when they could advance no further, Evelyn was in front of them with one sergeant and another officer. They were in fact the furthest advanced of anybody, and they got into a shell hole for cover. Your son was very shortly afterwards hit by a sniper’s bullet, and died immediately. The other officer was hit while rushing across to him, and badly wounded. I have been in your son’s Company since he took over ‘C’ Company at the beginning of the year, and of course I knew him well. In the earlier days after 25 September [1915 – i.e. The Battle of Loos (see above)], we all loved him, and he was entirely unselfish. The Company under his command always ran smoothly, and he took an immense amount of trouble over it. The first experience we had of this ‘Push’, though not so disastrous from the casualty point of view, was far more unpleasant, and all through he was magnificent. If he knew what fear was, he never showed it. […] He was leading with his usual calmness to the end. […] The few of us who are left, but who have been through so many things pleasant and unpleasant with him, will never forget him. The loss of all those wonderful men is a tragedy – but consider what they did! I think there is some consolation in that – there certainly is for me, and I trust there may be for you.

Another brother officer wrote:

His “philosophy of life” was very real, and profound in its depth. It was characteristically empirical, and not traditional, in its method. He worked it out for himself. Never would he move a step farther than he could see, in his search after truth. It was always, I believe, theistic. Long before the end it became definitely and deliberately Christian.

 Both the Chaplains at the Front wrote to say he never missed a Church Parade or Celebration of Holy Communion, unless his military duties made his presence impossible. One of the Chaplains adds that he did this largely for the sake of others, and not merely for his own sake. The same Chaplain states that it was by his influence that his servant was brought to Confirmation, and went on:

Whatever were the fundamental principles of his philosophy of life, one thing was certain; he had caught, as if by intuition, visions which we are striving all our life to find. […] His love of Nature was pathetic in its intensity. It was God’s world to him. Whenever he went to a new district, he used to explore the locality and “interpret” it in relation (by way of comparison or contrast) to familiar places at home. He drank it all in with his whole soul as a Revelation of life. Akin to his love of Nature was his devotion to two forms of art, music and architecture: with regard to the latter, his description of any new billet was always by reference to “the most wonderful Cathedral in France”, or “the picturesque little village Church”. This form of art, like that of music, seemed to be part of his religious life. His unflinching devotion to duty was another marked feature of his character. When once he had made up his mind what it was his duty to do, he did it at whatever cost to himself as well as to others. It was often obvious that, if any such decision hurt others, it hurt him much more. His devotion to others was possibly the most marked trait in his life. He loved them (albeit with a discriminating love) as his own soul, and was delighted, in his simple-minded way, when he saw their hearts’ response to his appeal. Finally, there was his exquisite simplicity. He remained “a child” in temper and spirit to the very end. Of him it could be truly said, “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile” [John 1: 47].

One of Magdalen’s Tutors wrote:

I can hardly bear to write; yet, in a sense, I have been expecting the news. Do you remember the day, long ago as it seems, when Magdalen lost the Headship [of the River (1907)], and the crew came back to the barge spiritless and cowed – all but he! Ever since I knew that he had gone out, I have felt that the gallant spirit which refused to accept defeat on the river would carry him fearlessly through this greater struggle, but only too likely to the death that I sometimes fancied he would almost have desired – the death most worthy of him. Nothing, I think, in all my life as a teacher, has given me greater pleasure than to hear from Alington, as I often did, of the great work he was doing at Shrewsbury. Only a few weeks ago he was telling me about it. But I know also, from what he said and partly from a letter he showed me, that in the trenches he had found himself as perhaps he never had before. I think we must not grieve for him. It was a great life, full of force and vigour and enjoyment, nobly laid down; and the memory of it will remain with some of us to the last. I should not be surprised to know that these last months were to him the happiest of all. But there will be many sore hearts to-day among Magdalen men, and for myself I feel that a light has gone out of my life.

On 28 September 1916, Southwell’s father responded to a letter of condolence from President Warren with a letter that throws much light on him, his relationship with his son, his son’s love of teaching and his son’s relationship with his pupils and close colleagues, especially Malcolm Graham White, whom, surprisingly, the letter does not mention:

My dear President, My wife and I are deeply touched by your extremely kind expression of sympathy with us in our sacred sorrow. The dear boy had not found his true self in his Oxford days. (He came up a year or so too soon, against my advice and very urgent appeal. But he very naturally wished not to be left behind his contemporaries)[.] He began the discovery, however, and this was due under God to Cookson and yourself. The tact and loving judgment with which you dealt with his greatest escapade [in 1907/08] proved the beginning of his “salvation”. He never tired of speaking about you both with more than grateful esteem, – with what I can only call genuine affection. Alington & his good wife completed the work which you two began. And the end was marvellous even to us at home who thought we knew him through and through. His brain power was shared by many others. His special characteristic was his devotion to others, which towards the end was quite pathetic in its intensity. An instance of this seems to my mind when he left me, & even his mother, to visit one of his boys at Shrewsbury on his sick bed [Blakeway; see above]. And he was (in his simple way) so delighted when he saw the response of others to his appeal. He loved them as his own soul, and he lived in the response of their love. His sacrifice is now completed. Ours remains, in process, & must, of course, be lifelong. You would add to our already heavy debt, if you would offer just one prayer that we may not prove less faithful and brave than he. My dear wife joins with me in most grateful thanks. I send a photograph which both of us think excellent.

Three years after Southwell’s death, Alington, now Headmaster of Eton, paid Southwell the following tribute in his Introduction to Two Men:

No Master’s meeting can ever be quite the same to me when he isn’t there to address one of us on one of the subjects which he made his own, though his harangue used […] to begin with a confession that he was not quite sure on which side it was that he felt so strongly. The importance of trifles, the stores of humour to be unearthed from the common places of life, the infinite issues depending on a word or a phrase, until it was displaced from its undeserved pre-eminence by another equally unexpected, these are some of the lessons which their daily life displayed. They had, in a word, the truly “poetic” faculty, though it did not find expression in the consecrated form of verse. Southwell’s lines and his astonishing achievement in making his form into a nursery [for] versifiers show, perhaps, what he might have done, and of course I have no means of knowing what secrets White told to his violin; but however it may have been expressed, the power was there: and if any critical reader complains that the instances I have given suggest the fancifulness of children rather than the inspiration of the author, I should answer that poets and children have the greatest qualities in common, and that when to their common powers of imagination they add the grace of humility[,] they form the chosen citizens of the Kingdom of God. Anyone who happened to read this letter without the book which it introduces might fancy that they dominated our Society at Shrewsbury by sheer force of personality and insistence on their own lines of thought; but to read their letters is assuredly to realize that we loved them for those very qualities of humility and unselfishness which shone out so supremely in the end. And here I touch on things too sacred for speech: I can only say in all sincerity that I know of none among my friends to whom the sacrifice was greater or by whom it was made in a more noble spirit. They would resent any attempt to draw a moral, but I think they would not mind me saying that their lives and death brought additional honour to one of the noblest of professions, for they loved the life and work of a schoolmaster as only born schoolmasters can. And there is one thing I know they would wish me to say, and that is that the life of our Society from which they went was for those few years as nearly that of a happy family as any which the whole annals of schoolmastering can show. The New House, the Staircase, the Rehoboamite Meetings, Kitch[in]’s room with its interminable discussions and unconventional meals, – these are things which can never be forgotten while one of us remains to bless the name of Shrewsbury: it never can happen again, but let us thank Heaven for the happiness we knew and for the friends from whom we learnt so much.

 Southwell has no known grave and is commemorated on Pier and Face 16B and 16C, Thiepval Memorial, and on a window in the cloisters of Worcester Cathedral; he and White are commemorated on the Memorial Board in Shrewsbury School, on brass plaques in the Chapel, and in the School’s Roll of Honour, which is on permanent display in the Chapel. Southwell left £710.

Bibliography

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

Special acknowledgements:

The Editors of The Slow Dusk would like to put on record that they did not know of Nigel McCrery’s excellent book Hear the Boat Sing (The History Press: Stroud, 2017) until January 2019. It provides detailed accounts of the lives of 42 Oxford and Cambridge Rowing Blues who were killed in action during World War One or died because of the war, eight of whom were Magdalenses or, like Charles Leslie Garton, closely connected with Magdalen through one or more relatives. The Editors and Mr McCrery have been following similar research paths without knowing of each others’ work and have made use of the same resources. But whereas Mr McCrery has focussed more on the finer points of competitive rowing, the Editors have focussed more on family and social history, with the result that the two projects not only overlap, but complement each other well.

 

**[Hugh Edward Eliot Howson (ed.)], Two Men – A Memoir [The Story of two Shrewsbury Schoolteachers: privately printed memorial book for Evelyn H.L. Southwell (1886–1916) and Malcolm G. White, (1887–1916)] (Oxford: OUP, 1919)]. Put online by Andrew Pay with notes at: http://www.archive.org/details/twomenmemoir00soutuoft (accessed 7 June 2021).

 

Printed sources:

[Anon.], ‘The University Boat Race’, The Times, no. 38,283 (18 March 1907), p. 7.

[Anon.], ‘Isis Idols’, no. CCCXL: ‘Mr Evelyn Herbert L. Southwell’, The Isis, no. 364 (25 May 1907), pp. 349–50.

[Anon.], ‘The University Boat Race’, The Times, no. 38,613 (6 April 1908), p. 12.

[Anon.], ‘Twice in the Oxford Eight’ [obituary], The Times, no. 41,281 (25 September 1916), p. 6.

[Anon.], ‘Local War Notes: Lieut. E.L.H. Southwell …’, Malvern News, no. 2,466 (30 September 1916), p. 2.

Ronald Knox, A Spiritual Aeneid: Being an Account of a Journey to the Catholic Faith (London: Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1918), pp. 186–227.

Charles Alexander Macvicar, Memorials of Old Birkonians who fell in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Liverpool: Henry Young [privately printed for Birkenhead School], 1920) [also available on line].

[Anon.], ‘Canon’s Death in a Field’, The Times, no. 43,005 (13 April 1922), p. 8.

Neither Southwell nor White is mentioned in Berkeley and Seymour, i (1927) or ii (1936), the most extensive history of the Rifle Brigade in World War One.

E.C. Inman, ‘Herbert Burrows Southwell 1885–1901’, in History of Lichfield Theological College (1857–1927) (Lichfield: Lomax’s Successors the “Johnson’s Head”, 1928), pp. 48–64.

Edward Samuel Underhill, A Year on the Western Front (London: London Stamp Exchange, 1928), pp. 24–95.

David Howard Rowlands, ‘For the Duration’: The Story of the Thirteenth Battalion, The Rifle Brigade (London: Simpkin, Marshall Ltd [published for the 13^th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade Old Comrades Association], 1932).

[Anon.], ‘Deaths in the Alps’ and ‘Masters’ Careers’, in The Times, no. 46,527 (19 August 1933), p. 8.

An Old Etonian, ‘The Eton Masters’, The Times, no. 46,529 (22 August 1933), p. 12.

[Anon.], ‘Mr Henry Moss: Byzantine Scholar’ [obituary], The Times, no. 54,823 (14 July 1960), p. 16.

W.A. Barker, ‘C.R.N. Routh’ [obituary], The Eton College Chronicle. no. 3,709 (10 December 1976), p. 2.

Leinster-Mackay (1984), pp. 83, 114, 116, 155, 172, 285.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Charles Hamilton Sorley: A Biography (London: Cecil Woolf, 1985), p. 24.

Hutchins (1993), pp. 26–9, 37.

Tim Card, Eton Renewed: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (London: John Murray, 1994), p. 134.

McCarthy (1998), pp. 76–83, 101–4.

Richard Sheppard, The Gunstones of St Clement’s: The History of a Dynasty of Servants at Magdalen (Magdalen College Occasional Paper 6) (Oxford: Magdalen College, 2003), pp. 64–5.

Sir Morgan Crofton, Massacre of the Innocents: The Crofton Diaries, Ypres 1914–1915, ed. by Gavin Roynon (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2005), p. 64, footnote.

Blandford-Baker (2008), pp. 82, 87, 96, 111, 286, 289, 294, 295, 297, 298.

David Gee, ‘New House Centenary’, The Salopian, No. 152 (Summer 2013), p. 12–13 [contains a colour photo of the New House].

Churchill (2014), p. 101.

Richard Sheppard, David Roberts and Robin Darwall-Smith, Gladwyn Maurice Revell Turbutt (1883–1914) (Higham [privately published by Gladwyn R.W. Tur- butt]: The Higham Press, 2017), pp. 58–65.

 

Archival sources:

The Archives, King’s College, Cambridge: KCAC/4/1/1, p. 146 [notes on White in the Senior Tutor’s Book].

MCA: F29/1/MS5/5 (Notebook containing comments by H.W. Greene et al. on student progress [1895–1911]), pp. 74–5.

MCA: Ms. 876 (III), vol. 3.

MCA: 04/A1/1 (MCBC, Crews and Blues: Secretary’s Notebook [1888–1907]), pp. 398, 406, 408, 426, 428, 434–5, 455, 457–9, 461, 465, 476–7, 484.

MCA: 04/A1/2 (MCBC, Crews and Blues: Secretary’s Notebook [1907–26]), unpag.

MCA: PR/2/16 (President’s Note-Books [1907/8]), pp. 149, 151–3, 167–8.

MCA: PR/2/18 (President’s Note-Books [1915]), p. 332.

MCA: PR 32/C/3/1096–1097 (President Warren’s War-Time Correspondence, Letters relating to E.H.L. Southwell [1916]).

The Rev. G[eorge] C[hatterton] Richards, D.D., ‘My Proctorial Year’, in: An Oxonian Looks Back (1885–1945), edited and shortened by his son J.F.C. Richards (bound typescript), Columbia University (1966), p. 50.

Richards’s memoir is particularly interesting as it paints an unusually positive picture of Magdalen’s President, who played a significant part in Southwell’s developmental years: “Having sometimes heard [Warren] spoken of in a deprecatory manner, I am glad to have an opportunity of saying that in my opinion he was a singularly able, conscientious and kindly man. […] Everything he did, he did with care and forethought. It was said of him, as it was said with equal untruth of Jowett, that he was a tuft-hunter; but he always gave as much attention to humble as to exalted personages. I was a very humble man, nullo loco natus, when he first took notice of me. To serve under him was a positive pleasure; I found him always understanding and affable.” 

OUA (DWM): C.C.J. Webb, Journal for 9 December 1907, Ms. Eng. Misc. e.1153.

OUA: UR 2/1/55.

WO95/1496/1.

WO95/1901.

WO95/2534/1.

WO339/690.

 

On-line sources:

Pat Evans, ‘2^nd Lt. Walter George Fletcher’, informative mini-biography: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=146060182083938&story_fbid=2815711331785463 (accessed 23 June 2021).

Wikipedia, ‘The Boat Race 1908’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_Race_1908 (accessed 12 June 2021)