George Upton Robins

• Matriculated: 1897

• Born: 2 December 1878

• Died: 7 May 1915

• Regiment: East Yorkshire Regiment attached to Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding Regiment)

• Grave/Memorial: Railway Dugouts Burial Ground (previously Transport Farm Cemetery): no known grave (commemorated by Memorial Stone A.1)

Family background

b. 2 December 1878 as the only son (second child) of George Upton Robins [I], JP (1816–95) and his second wife Emma Flora Upton Robins (née Sheppard) (1841–1927) (m. 1876), of “Delaport[e]”, Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire. At the time of the 1881 Census the family employed six domestic servants plus a coachman, at the time of the 1891 Census six domestic servants, at the time of the 1901 Census five domestic servants, and at the time of the 1911 Census six domestic servants and a butler.

 

Parents and antecedents

Robins’s paternal grandfather was Francis Theophilus Robins (c.1791–1849), a solicitor of Yeovil, Somerset. Francis Robins’s wife (m. 1813) was Elizabeth Upton (1791–1859), the daughter of another leading Yeovil solicitor, George Proctor Upton (1763–1827), who in 1785 had married Eleanor Leach (1761–1848); one son, three daughters.

In 1791, George Proctor Upton was one of Yeovil’s four solicitors; he was twice the Mayor of Lyme Regis (dates unknown), and the Steward to the Earl of Westmorland. In 1831, Parliament decided to give better representation to towns and cities in industrial England, but several Yeovil solicitors, including Francis Theophilus Robins, opposed these reforms, and on 27 October 1831 a mob of rioters attacked his house in Yeovil and caused considerable damage. The principal suspects were brought to trial on 3 April 1832 but acquitted.

George Upton Robins [I] was also a solicitor and practised in Frome, Somerset. He married (1847) Helen Brinson Ferris (1817–75), the daughter of Captain William Brinson Ferris, RN (b. c.1780, d. probably before 1837), and the widow of John White [II] (c.1817–1845); one son.

Elizabeth Upton (George Robins [I]’s mother) was the sister of Harriett (“Harriott”) Upton (1799–1862), the wife of John White [I] (1775–1830) of Up Cerne Manor, Dorset (m. c.1816), and their son was John White [II] (see above). John White [I] served as Sheriff of Dorset from 1821 to 1822, and on his death, Up Cerne was let and his widow retired to Yeovil. So George Robins [I]’s first wife was the widow of his first cousin.

After the death of Helen Brinson Ferris, George Robins [I] married (1876) Emma Flora Sheppard, the daughter of George Wood Sheppard (1807–94), a woollen manufacturer from Frome, Somerset, who had retired to Garden House, Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, by the time of the 1881 Census, i.e. when the Robins family was living nearby. There were four children of this second marriage.

 

Siblings and their families

George Robins [II] was the half-brother of Strode (b. 1848, date of death (abroad) unknown), the only biological son of George Upton Robins [I] with his first wife. He was the brother of:

(1) Flora Olivia (1877–1950);

(2) Mary (“Molly”) Stuart (1881–1968);

(3) Elise Irene (1883–1965).

None of George Upton Robins [II]’s three sisters married, and from 1909 Mary Stuart was Mother St George of the Canonesses of St Augustine of the Mercy of Jesus, an order of nuns that arrived in Britain in 1902 but that goes back to the Middle Ages and is semi-contemplative according to the rule of St Augustine and semi-devoted to caring for the poor.

Strode was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and, like his father and grandfather, became a solicitor. According to the 1881 Census, he was also a licensed victualler who employed three women and 13 men. He was declared bankrupt in 1893, the year when he absconded to South America with monies that he was holding in trust for his wife Blanche Shelley Reid (1851–1921), their four children and others: they were ruined and he was never heard of again.

Strode’s father-in-law, William Reid (1805–67), was a wealthy brewer who left £120,000 (£10 million in 2014).

On 14 March 1899 London Man of the World (vol. 13, no. 544 [NS], p. 6) reported that Blanche had just sold Bess, a black-brown mare, for 30 guineas (c.£3,500 in 2014) at Tattersall’s, from Harpole Manor. In the 1901 census Blanche described herself as the manager of a poultry farm in Greenford, Middlesex, and described herself as a widow. In the 1911 Census she described herself simply as a housekeeper. Strode and Blanche’s four children were:

(1) Florence Helen [Upton] Robins (1874–1944); later Lindsay after her marriage in 1898 to Norman Conyers Lindsay (b. 1875 in Nass, Ireland); at least one daughter;

(2) Violet Mary (“May”) [Upton] Robins (1875–1938); later Pope after her marriage in 1903 to Charles James Pope (1867–1932), at least one son and two daughters;

(3) Margaret Justina Robins (1877–1933); later Mavor after her marriage (1902) to Ronald Mavor (1872–1948); one daughter;

(4) Francis Edward Upton Robins (1879–1949); married (1904) Elizabeth Smith (b. 1879), at least two daughters.

When Florence Helen married in 1898, she was cited as daughter of Mrs Strode Upton Robins of Harpole Manor, Northamptonshire. In 1904 Norman Conyers Lindsay and John Edgar Bass invented and acquired a patent for “an improved device for withdrawing skewers from meat, game, poultry, & the like”.

At the time of the 1911 Census, Charles James Pope described himself as a brewer and employer and was living at 465, Collingbourne Rd, Northampton (one servant).

Ronald Mavor was the son of a veterinary surgeon who lived in St Albans. At the time of the 1911 Census he described himself as stock jobber.

In 1918 Francis Edward Upton Robins was landlord of the Bell Inn, The High St, Minster, Ramsgate, Kent.

 

Wife

In 1905 Robins married Beryl Upton Stevens (1877–1966), the daughter of a Colonel who had served in the 33^rd Bombay Cavalry of the Indian Army. They lived at The Cottage, Old Windsor, Berkshire.

 

Education

Robins attended Golden Parsonage Preparatory School, Hertfordshire, from 1889 to 1893 and then Haileybury College (Haileybury and Imperial Service College from 1942) from 1893 to 1897, where he became a College Prefect. He matriculated at Magdalen as a Commoner on 21 October 1897, having passed Responsions in Hilary Term 1897. He passed the First Public Examination in Trinity Term and Michaelmas Term 1898, but after taking Group B3 of the Pass School (Elements of Political Economy) in Michaelmas Term 1899, he left without taking a degree. After three years as a regular soldier (see below), Robins became a partner in a firm of London and China merchants, and after his marriage he and his wife spent two years in Shanghai. He was a passionate sportsman and fond of poetry, and in 1912 he published a book of verse, much of which is about the joys of hunting. He became the Assistant Secretary of the Hertfordshire Hunt, 14 of whose followers died in World War One. In August 1914 he was again in Shanghai, in sole charge of the firm’s business, and, according to a memoir by his sister that was published in the 2^nd (posthumous) edition of his book of verse, “it was not until December [1914] that he was able to fulfil the one wish of his heart and come home at once to offer his services to his country”. He was, according to the same source, “terribly impatient at his enforced exile” and during the Battle of the Aisne wrote, citing with some irony King Henry’s famous speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V: “I know of one gentleman of England […] who thinks himself accurs’d he was not there.” His sister continued: “I think he was never so pleased to see any one in his life as he was to welcome the man who came out to take his place and so set him free to come home. My brother was an idealist, and to him his King and Country were not mere names, but a very real part of himself.” Magdalen’s President described him posthumously as “a cheery, sturdy, capable fellow, of good sense and not a little ability and acumen” who, besides being “a useful man here and in the wider world”, was “a connexion of the Provost of Worcester College [Charles Henry Oliver Daniel (1836–1919)]” – possibly because both families came from Frome.

 

 

Military and war service

Robins, a University Candidate, was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the 2^nd (Regular) Battalion, the East Yorkshire Regiment (The Duke of York’s Own), on 23 May 1900 and served in India in 1901. In December of that year he was seconded for service in the Second Boer War, where he served in V Corps of Mounted Infantry and was awarded the King’s Medal with clasp. On 11 July 1903, a year after his Regiment had returned to England, he resigned his commission and became a member of the Special Reserve of Officers. But on the outbreak of war in August 1914 he rejoined the 3^rd (Reserve) Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment, part of the 13^th Brigade in the 5^th Division, that had been created at Beverley, Yorkshire, and was stationed at Hedon, near Hull. On 2 March 1915, when he took over ‘D’ Company, he was promoted Captain, and just over six weeks later, on 21 April 1915, he was ordered to the Western Front to take command of ‘C’ Company in the 2^nd (Regular) Battalion, The Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding Regiment), also known as “The Duke’s”, which, like the 3^rd Battalion, was part of the 13^th Brigade in the 5^th Division.

 

 

George Valentine Williams (1883–1946) was a journalist and popular novelist who worked during World War One as a War Correspondent for Lord Rothermere’s (Harold Sidney Harmsworth [1868–1940]; from 1919 the 1^st Viscount Rothermere) stridently pro-war Daily Mail. Williams worked out of the General Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force – i.e. relatively close to the front line – and narrated the events that had taken place during the Battle of Hill 60 (17 April–6 May 1915) in a long, detailed and very anti-German report that finally appeared in the The Daily Mail on 7 August 1915. This was about a month after the Hill had passed into German hands (until 1917), and two weeks after Williams had published a preliminary report on a visit to the Hill in the same newspaper on 27 July 1915 as a result of a question in Parliament relating to its loss a few days before. The second (August) report contrasts markedly with the more dispassionately factual, less theatrically chauvinistic report on the first four days of the Battle for Hill 60 (17 April–20 May 1915) that had appeared anonymously in The Times on 24 April 1915, having been written on the previous day by Lieutenant Cecil William Gason Ince (1888–1966), the Adjutant of the 2^nd Battalion of “The Duke’s” who had been wounded on Hill 60 on 18 April 1915.

Williams began his report by zooming in, like a cameraman creating an establishing shot, on a striking event – a large military parade – which he appears to have witnessed more or less by chance, and without at first explaining why it had taken place even while he succeeded in suggesting that it was of great symbolic importance. Thus:

The other morning I stood by the gate of a field on a country road in these parts and watched a Brigade march past the saluting point under the eye of the General Commanding the Second Army [the newly promoted Lieutenant-General (later Field Marshal) Sir Herbert Charles Onslow Plumer (1857–1932; 1^st Viscount from 1919)]. There was a fine swing about the battalions as they went by, and with eyes shining, heads held high, and shoulders well back, they marched with the air of men who are inspired by the memory of a great ordeal greatly endured. These are the men of the 13^th Brigade […]. Twice the [13^th] Brigade attempted to recapture the Hill [from the Germans]. Twice it failed. There was no shame in the failure, only glory. The Commander-in-Chief [Field-Marshal] Sir John French (1852–1925; 1^st Viscount from 1916)] had already expressed his warm appreciation of its gallantry [in a congratulatory telegram], and [now] the Army Commander had come to speak his thanks to the 13^th Brigade for its splendid services. Indeed, the lustre of its record shines so bright that I count it a privilege to be able to relate for the first time the full story of how Hill 60 was captured and lost.

The introductory paragraphs then segue into a denunciation of underhand German barbarism that is clearly meant to contrast with such patent English virtues as “gallantry” – one of Williams’s favourite words of praise – and the narrative ends with a divinely sanctioned call to arms:

[This] is a story illuminated by innumerable feats of deathless heroism, a story of splendid tenacity and grim determination, beginning with a fine feat of arms and ending with the asphyxiation of gallant men taken unawares, a crime so foul that no man who saw the railway cutting by Hill 60 after the Dorsets and the Duke of Wellington’s had been gassed will ever take the hand of a German again. If[,] after reading this story as it was told to me by the men who went through the fight[,] any man can shirk his duty to his country, then surely our dead of Hill 60, the men who held out on the hilltop to the end and [lay] out on the hilltop to the end and lie there still, will rise up in their hundreds on Judgment Day and denounce him.

Several densely written pages later, the concluding paragraphs of Williams’s “story” pick up the dramatic irony of his introductory ones, but turn them inside out, changing the opening uncertainties and imprecision into a confident act of celebration that resonates with Henry V’s famous speech before Agincourt in Shakespeare’s most patriotic play.

Despite the high, melodramatic tone of the paragraphs that bracket the sometimes bloodthirsty narrative of the middle sections of Williams’s piece, Hill 60 was in reality part of threendramatic heaps of spoil which had been formed in the 1850s by the creation of a deep railway cutting and which were, as Fate would have it, three of the few elevated spots on an otherwise flat plain, making Hill 60, the highest, an excellent site for a military observation post (see A.H. Huth, T.E.G. Norton). But Williams does not mention the Hill’s military value for both the warring sides and simply describes it as “an isolated position on the extreme western edge of the Klein Zillebeke Ridge, with the Ypres–Comines railway, which here runs through a deep cutting spanned by a bridge, and the Klein Zillebeke–Zwartelen road on the other. It is a low hill with a flattish top, about 45ft. above the surrounding country.” The Germans had held the Hill’s upper slopes and summit since 11 November 1914, while the British trenches ran round the western parts and outskirts of the lower slopes. But in February 1915 the British High Command, having realized the strategic usefulness of the Hill, began tunnelling beneath it in order to plant a row of large mines which, when detonated, would, it was hoped, destroy the German defences and enable the British troops to take the hill with relative ease.

The 2^nd Battalion of the “Duke’s” had landed in France on 16 August 1914 and over the next six months had taken part in the Retreat from Mons, The First Battles of the Marne, the Aisne, and Ypres, a succession that had ended in a stalemate on 22 November 1914. But between 10 and 18 April 1915, while Robins’s Battalion was acting as the 5^th Division’s Reserve and recuperating in billets just outside Ypres, it was stood to without warning and, between 03.00 and 06.00 hours on 18 April, marched eastwards for about three miles to the village of Klein Zillebeke, just next to the railway line with its adjacent Hill 60. The reason for this sudden move was that at 19.05 hours on the previous evening, five large British mines, packed respectively with 2,000 lbs of black powder (left), 2,700 lbs of black powder (centre) and 500 lbs of gun-cotton (right), had finally been detonated beneath Hill 60, enabling the 1^st (Regular) Battalion of the Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent) Regiment and the 2^nd (Regular) Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers (see Huth, Norton, A.J.F. Hood) to capture it at very little cost to themselves and take over the old German front-line trench on the crest of the Hill. But during the night of 17/18 April, the surviving Germans soon counter-attacked, bombed their attackers out of their advanced positions, and forced them to move down from the crest of the Hill to the three newly-made craters on the near-side (western) slope of the Hill. So as the 2^nd Battalion of “the Duke’s” had just enjoyed a week’s rest, it was summoned back to Hill 60 to relieve the two British Battalions that were now holding the line. At about 03.00 hours on 18 April, ‘A’ Company of the “Duke’s” 2^nd Battalion was ordered up to take over those craters, only to be heavily bombed in their turn and incur very heavy losses – not least because of their proximity to the enemy. So at about noon on 18 April, the Battalion’s Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Alexander Turner (1869–1940), ordered ‘A’ Company to be reinforced by the Battalion’s ‘B’ Company and a platoon each from ‘C’ and ‘D’ Companies. Then, at about 16.30 hours, orders were received for the entire 2^nd Battalion of “the Duke’s”, supported by the 2^nd (Regular) Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, to join in an assault on Hill 60 at 18.00 hours and capture an area that was 250 yards long, 200 yards deep and seamed with innumerable trenches and saps. But the German artillery pounded the British positions, hurling in “tons of metal and high explosive” which, to quote Lieutenant Ince’s report in The Times, “wreathed the hill-top with poisonous fumes […], swept away whole sections at a time, filled the trenches with dead bodies, and so cumbered the approaches to the front line that reinforcements could not reach it without having to climb over the prostrate forms of their fallen comrades”. Nevertheless, British reinforcements managed to “[sweep] the Germans from the foothold they had gained”, relieve the two British Battalions mentioned above, strengthen the old German trenches, alter their defences so that they now faced eastwards, block off the old communication trenches, and construct new communication trenches which linked the summit of Hill 60 with the British Reserves waiting below. Beyond a certain amount of grenade throwing and sniping, there was a lull in the fighting during the night of 18/19 April while Robins’s 2^nd Battalion was holding the summit of Hill 60 and its craters. This meant that the Germans did not launch their expected counter-attack and also enabled units of the 15^th Brigade to relieve units of the exhausted 13^th Brigade who had been holding the Hill. But the heavy German shelling started up again before the “Duke’s” were withdrawn down the Hill, having been relieved at 05.00 hours on 19 April by the 1^st (Regular) Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment, which had been loaned temporarily to the 14^th Brigade.

Once down the Hill the exhausted men of the 2^nd Battalion, who had had no food since the afternoon of 17 April and lost 17 officers and 406 Other Ranks killed, wounded and missing during the intervening two days, were immediately moved to the west of Klein Zillebeke Pond. The badly depleted 2^nd Battalion then spent a good 24 hours near Klein Zillebeke before being moved westwards through Ypres at 10.00 hours on 20 April and into Reserve in hutments at Zevecoten, near the village of Ouderdom, about five miles south-west of Ypres. On 20 or 21 April two drafts of reinforcements arrived for the 2^nd Battalion, and on 22 April, the opening day of the Second Battle of Ypres (22 April–25 May 1915), it was visited by Sir John French (see above). But at 20.30 hours on the same day it was ordered to return to the southern outskirts of Ypres as the Divisional Reserve, where, at 19.30 hours on 23 April, it was ordered to march the three miles or so back to Zillebeke Pond (near Hill 60 again) so that it could act as Reserve for the 75^th Brigade. Finally, at 18.30 hours on the following day, it was ordered to march about three miles north-eastwards to Hooge, where B. Pawle would lose his life at the end of July 1915, and act as Reserve for the 82^nd Brigade.

According to the 2^nd Battalion’s War Diary (where his surname appears erroneously as “Unwin”), Robins joined the Battalion on 24 April as part of a draft of 12 officers and 350 Other Ranks and took command of ‘C’ Company. But meanwhile, at 05.00 hours on 22 April, the Second Battle of Ypres had opened with a massive German gas attack on French Territorial and Colonial troops over a four-mile-long front near the village of Gravenstafel, about eight miles north-east of Ypres, causing c.6,000 casualties during the resultant fighting (22–23 April 1915). Two days later, the Germans used gas once again, this time against the untried Canadian troops who were holding the line on the Pilckem Ridge, about six miles north-north-east of Ypres, and Williams reported that as a result “there was to be little rest for the gallant 13^th Brigade. It had hardly settled down in its new quarters before urgent orders reached its Commander to push it up with all speed to the support of the Canadians, whose flank had been exposed by the retreat of the French on the left before the gas attack of the Germans.” (See A.P.D. Birchall, who was killed in action on 23 April 1915 during the assault on Mauser Ridge, near Pilckem, while serving as the Commanding Officer of the 4^th Battalion, Canadian Infantry (Central Ontario Regiment, part of the Canadian 1^st Division)). The 13^th Brigade was then put under the orders of the Canadian General Officer Commanding the 1^st (Canadian) Division, Major-General Malcolm Smith Mercer [1859–1916; a lawyer in civilian life who would be killed in action by friendly fire near Ypres on 3 June 1916], and he sent the 13^th Brigade into action east of Ypres along the road that led uphill to Pilckem, where its task was, in the words of a General Officer, “one that always seems rather useless to those taking part in it, that of making small attacks”. “But”, he added, “without those attacks the enemy would have broken through and we should not have been able to do what we did, that is, come back in our own time to the line we had prepared. Without these attacks[,] all those arrangements for defence would have been of no avail.” Williams’s report then goes in for what might seem to be exaggeration – at least as far as the 2^nd Battalion of “the Duke’s” is concerned, for it states:

The 13th Brigade found it had exchanged the inferno of Hill 60 for an equally stern ordeal in the shell-swept salient of Ypres. For days they battled bravely under a most terrible bombardment, doing their part with the French and the Canadians to keep the Germans from bursting through the gap they had rent in the Allied line. It was a stern trial for weary men, but they acquitted themselves most gallantly of their task, though again at a heavy price.

But judging by the information that is supplied by the Battalion War Diary, the 2^nd “Duke’s” had been through a much less “stern ordeal” than that. At 14.30 hours on 26 April, it was ordered to march to the front line at Potijze, just to the north-east of Ypres, to be the Divisional Reserve for both the 27^th and the Indian Lahore Division; at 16.00 hours on 27 April, when it was lying out in fields, it was ordered to support the Sirhind Brigade, part of a composite Indian Brigade made up of weak Battalions, by moving into the Reserve trenches, during which one or two men were wounded; at 20.00 hours on 28 April, it was ordered to move back to the hutments at Zevecoten via Sint Jaan and Ypres, where it arrived at 03.45 hours on the following day. Then, at 18.00 hours on 29 April it received orders to move into the woods at Kruisstraat, just to the south-west of Ypres, as the Divisional Reserve, and there it stayed for the following five days.

After the 2^nd Battalion of “the Duke’s” had set off for the Ypres Salient on 22 April, the 1^st Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, which had been temporarily moved from the 14^th Brigade and attached to the 15^th Brigade, replaced it for nine days in the trenches on Hill 60 until, on 30 April, it was finally relieved by the 1^st (Regular) Battalion of the Dorsetshire Regiment, part of the 15^th Brigade. What happened next is described in Williams’s report as follows:

But while one of the greatest battles of the war was raging in the wooded country about the ruins of Ypres, fighting, more desperate than ever, had broken out on Hill 60. The Germans, foiled in all their attempts to regain by legitimate methods of warfare what they had lost, had recourse to their asphyxiating gas tubes, which they had only just employed with deadly effect against the French and the Canadians north of Ypres. […] The [1^st] Dorsets […] were holding the hill [when,] in the early hours of May 1 […] a low greenish cloud came rolling over the hill towards the trenches. Our men were taken unawares, unprepared. In a minute or two the gas had them in its grip and they were choking with the stifling fumes. As the forms of the Germans appeared swarming out of their trenches[,] these gallant Dorsets, half asphyxiated though they were, scrambled onto the parapet of their trench and opened fire on them. Notwithstanding the deadly vapors [sic], the Dorsets kept their machine-guns playing continually on the Germans and thus prevented the capture of the Hill. All that day the Devons, waiting in support, heard the brave tap-tapping of our Maxims and knew that the Dorsets were sustaining their good old name. Again and again during the day, in response to urgent demands, the Devons sent up ammunition for the guns that were frustrating the enemy. The ground was thick with empty cartridge cases when they relieved the Dorsets. The Devons went up that night, cleverly led to our trenches without the loss of a man. In the field, in the long grass, in the ditches, many [c.300] gallant Dorsets lay. As the Devons plodded on through the dark, stumbling over those prostrate forms, the men cursed the Germans savagely and bitterly.

Once they had taken over on Hill 60, the Devons managed to hold the line there until May 4, when, at 22.00 hours, Robins’s 2^nd Battalion, which had by now been brought up to strength by drafts from home and also transferred from the 13^th to the 15^th Brigade, received orders to replace them in the trenches on and around Hill 60. The relief was complete by 05.00 hours on 5 May, and what happened next was described by Williams as follows:

At eight o’clock on the morning of May 5, a warm spring day with a gentle breeze, the Germans launched another gas attack and opened a heavy artillery bombardment. The gas [chlorine] came down the hill, “gently, like a mist rising from the fields” says one who saw it, in greater volume than ever before. The gallant Duke’s were overwhelmed. Choking with the gas, swept with shells and bombs and machine-gun fire, they were forced to give ground. That morning there appeared, staggering towards the dug-out of the Commanding Officer of the Duke’s, in the rear, two figures: an officer and an orderly. The officer was as pale as death, and when he spoke[,] his voice came hoarsely from his throat. Beside him his orderly, with unbuttoned tunic, his rifle clasped in his hand, swayed as he stood. The officer said slowly in his grasping [recte “gasping”] voice: “They’ve gassed the Duke’s. I believe I was the last man to leave the Hill. The men [i.e. Robins’s ‘C’ Company] are all up there dead. They were splendid. I thought I ought to come and report.” That officer was Captain G.U. Robins of the 3^rd Battalion East Yorks, who had been attached to the Duke’s after [the 2^nd Battalion’s] heavy losses at Hill 60 on April 18. They took him and his faithful orderly to the ambulance, but though the orderly recovered, the gallant officer died that night. “He was the last man to leave Hill 60.” No man could wish a nobler epitaph than that.

Williams then concluded, beginning more soberly but becoming more passionate as he warmed to his subject:

I would wish to abridge the horrors of that hot May day. Men have described to me the railway cutting as a shambles where the dead and the wounded lay so thick that one had to move them out of one’s path to pass. I have seen that railway cutting myself, a black, ugly place, as railway cuttings mostly are, with the single line of rails all bent and broken by shell-fire, silent and deserted now, some of the dead still lying where they fell, for to-day no man may cross those rails and live. The spectacle was one that made the men that saw it, as they told me themselves, sick with horror and fierce with anger against the fiends who had perpetrated this nameless crime. […] That is the story of Hill 60. It has never yet been told, perhaps because the fight was dwarfed by the immense battle which raged about the Ypres Salient during its dénouement. If it was a failure, it was a glorious failure, and in the future no battle honor [sic] shall figure more proudly than Hill 60 on the standards of the greatest regiments that fought and died upon those barren slopes.

At the end of 5 May 1915, Robins’s Battalion was down to about four officers and 150 Other Ranks, and at 05.00 hours on 6 May they were pulled back westwards to Ouderdom, where they stayed in the hutments at Zevekoten for nearly three weeks before moving to the trenches near Kruisstraat on 26 May 1915. Their departure from Hill 60 on 6 May was followed by two more days of unsuccessful counter-attacks, but then the Germans succeeded in retaking Hill 60 and holding it until June 1917 after the three weeks of vicious fighting had cost the two sides more than 6,000 casualties killed, wounded and missing.

At first, no reporters or civilians were allowed to visit the area of Hill 60 until Williams and a reporter from Reuter’s did so on about 23 July 1915, after the chaos of the battlefield had been to some extent cleared up and reduced to geometrical patterns by the ubiquitous use of filled sandbags in lines. As a result, Williams’s report on the visit that appeared in the Daily Mail on 27 July 1915 is much more sober and far less jingoistic than the one that would appear there on 7 August. Here are two extracts from the July report:

The situation on Hill 60 is unique in our lines. The Germans hold the hill with two lines of trenches which come round it near the top. It is a moot point whether our trenches are on the hill at all, but I think they be said to skirt its foot and the lower edge of the slope. They would thus be dominated by the German lines [some twenty to forty yards away in some instances] were it not for the very high, strong parapet of sandbags which shields our men from view. […] Now [the railway] lies silent and deserted, the metals all twisted, the sleepers splintered and broken by shell-fire, the little red-brick culvert dented and chipped.

As a result, the report transmits a strong sense that despite the detritus of war that still litters the area around Hill 60, making it a “sinister and deadly place”, and despite the lurking omnipresence of death and corruption, the status quo which now prevails there is marked by a static emptiness and will not be changed in the near future by any more appalling bloodbaths.

Although badly affected by the gas, Robins refused at first to be taken to a Field Hospital and there has been some doubt about the circumstances of his death. But by the end of May it was known that he had died “in great agony” of the effects of gas poisoning, aged 36. Two accounts of his death then became current. According to the first, he died on 7 May 1915 while being treated for gas poisoning by the staff of the 14^th Field Ambulance, which was at that time one of the three Field Ambulances on permanent attachment to the 5^th Division and located at the Asylum, in the southern suburbs of Ypres. But if this were the case, he would have been buried initially in the large Asylum Cemetery and his remains, like those of many others of the men who lay there with him, would have been transferred elsewhere, probably to Enclosure No. 2 of nearby Bedford House Cemetery in the mid-1920s, by when it was felt that the Asylum Cemetery, like that of the École de Bienfaisance, was too close to the centre of Ypres. A residue of this account can be found in the two Rolls of Service that were published by Robins’s old school, both of which give his date of death as 7 May 1915 with one of them identifying the place of his death as Neuve Chapelle (where a major but inconclusive offensive had been mounted by the British from 10 to 13 March 1915). But Robins’s name does not appear on the list of those who were treated by the 14^th Field Ambulance in April/May 1915, and in any case, what would be the point of moving a man who was so obviously dying to more distant places when there was an Advanced Dressing Station much closer at hand? More pertinently still, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s (CWGC) detailed and exhaustive documentation that is now readily available on-line shows without question that Robins died on 7 May 1915 at or near one of the Advanced Dressing Stations that had been built for protection into the railway embankment at Transport Farm – one thousand yards to the west of the village of Klein Zillebeke on the same side of the railway line as Hill 60 and about two miles to the north-west. So he was probably first buried in the Annexe to Transport Farm Cemetery in a grave that was marked with a wooden cross inscribed with his name and personal details like those depicted in the photo from 1926.

 

 

Unfortunately, as so often happened on the Western Front (cf. G.M.R. Turbutt), Robins’s grave, like 71 others in Transport Farm Cemetery, was obliterated by enemy shelling in summer 1917, and when the large new cemetery that was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944) and renamed Railway Dugouts Burial Ground was established in the 1920s, the missing graves could not be located. So although the 72 men now have no known grave, they are all commemorated in the Burial Ground on individual memorial stones that have been placed in a ring around one large Stone of Remembrance. This is inscribed with a line from Ecclesiasticus 44:13 that was selected by Rudyard Kipling in consultation with the CWGC for use in such circumstances: “Their Glory Shall Not Be Blotted Out”. So Robins is commemorated here by memorial stone A.1, and at Haileybury and Imperial Service College on the Memorial Tablets in the Chapel Cloisters. And both the Oxford University Roll of Service and Nigel Cave’s authoritative little book on Hill 60 (p. 57) give Robins’s date of death as 5 May 1915 and also confirm that Robins is buried in Railway Dugouts Burial Ground.

 

 

Robins left £6,015 8s. 7d.; £1,000 to his widow, and £5,000 to any children that she might have by a second marriage; but he stipulated that if no such children materialized, the residue of his bequest should go to his sister Flora Olivia.

 

Bibliography

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

Special acknowledgement:

*Cave (1998), pp. 19–74.

 

Printed sources:

L.S. Milford, ed., Haileybury Register 1862–1910, 4th edn (London and Bungay: Richard Clay and Sons, Ltd., 1910).

[Lieutenant C.W.G. Ince], ‘British Grip on Hill 60: Terrific Assaults Resisted: Incessant Firing’, The Times, no. 40,838 (26 April 1915), p. 7; reproduced in Cave (1998), pp. 28–31 as ‘Eye-Witness at Headquarters in France’.

[Thomas Herbert Warren], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice’ [obituary], The Oxford Magazine, 33, no. 24 (28 May 1915), p. 335.

[Anon.], ‘Death from Gas-Poisoning’, The Times, no. 40,864 (26 May 1915), p. 3.

G[eorge] Valentine Williams, ‘Hill 60: Visit by Our Special Correspondent’, The Daily Mail, no. 6,026 (27 July 1915), p. 6.

–– ‘Last to Leave Hill 60: Its Capture and Loss: Full story told for the First Time’, ibid., no. 6,036 (7 August 1915), pp. 5–6. See also the copy in MCA: Ms. 876 (III).

[Anon.], ‘Hertfordshire Soldier–Poet’s End’, Hertford Mercury & Reformer, no. 4,236 (26 February 1916), p. 8.

[Anon.], ‘Dead Officer’s Wish’, Birmingham Daily Post, no. 18,784 (10 September 1916), p. 10.

Fisher (1917), pp. 31–3.

Arthur St. John Adcock (ed.), For Remembrance: Soldier Poets Who Have Fallen in the War (London, New York and Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), pp. 92–6.

[Anon.], Fifth Division: 13^th 14^th and 15^th Field Ambulances: Diary of Movements in France, Italy and Belgium 1914–1919 (London: War Narratives Publishing Company, 1919), pp.8–9.

Hussey and Inman (1921), pp. 59–81, esp. pp. 61, 63, 69.

[Anon.], Haileybury and Imperial Service Register, 2 vols (Hertford: The Haileybury Society, 1995).

 

Archival Sources:

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

OUA: UR 2/1/34.

 WO95/1552/1.

WO95/5459.

 

On-line sources:

 ‘Battle of Hill 60 (Western Front)’, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hill_60_(Western_Front) (accessed 7 June 2018).

 Bob Osborn, ‘George Proctor Osborn’, The A–Z of Yeovil’s History: http://www.yeovilhistory.info/upton-george.htm (accessed 7 June 2018).

Magicfingers [pseud.], ‘A Tour of Zillebeke Part Two – Railway Dugouts Burial Ground (Transport Farm)’, With the British Army in Flanders and France: http://thebignote.com/2011/04/23/a-tour-of-zillebeke-south-part-two/ (accessed 7 June 2018).

 

Books by George Upton Robins:

G[eorge] U[pton] Robins, Lays of the Hertfordshire Hunt and Other Poems, 2nd (enlarged) edition, with a preface by Major-General the Earl Cavan and a memoir by his sister (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, [February] 1916).