Ernest Walling, MA, MC, Croix de Guerre (France)

• Matriculated: 1904

• Born: 11 December 1885

• Died: 25 April 1918

• Regiment: West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales’s Own

• Grave/Memorial: Tyne Cot Memorial: Panels 42 to 47 and 162

Family background

b. 11 December 1885 as the second child and eldest son of George Walling (1862–1931) and Margaret Ann Walling (née Hale) (1862–1942) (m. 1883). At the time of the 1891 Census the family was living at 23, The Bottom, Ingleton, near Kirkby Lonsdale, Yorkshire (one servant); at the time of the 1901 Census they were living at 25 Moorlands, New Road, Ingleton, near Kirkby Lonsdale (no servants); at the time of the 1911 Census they were living at Ferncliffe, Ingleton, near Kirkby Lonsdale (no servants).

Parents and antecedents

Walling’s father was the son of Thomas Walling (1831–88), a butcher of Halton, Lancashire, who became an elementary school teacher. When war broke out he was the Headmaster of Ingleton Village School, Yorkshire, and, among his many other village duties, the Ingleton correspondent for the Craven Herald (edited from Skipton, North Yorkshire). In 1898 he was chairman of the Ingleboro branch of the National Union of Teachers. He was also a member of the Settle District Council and a Justice of the Peace.

Walling’s mother was the daughter of William Hale (1830–1911), a cotton waste dealer of Preston, Lancashire. She had become a schoolmistress.

Siblings and their families 

Brother of:

(1) Mary (1884–1973);

(2) John (1888–1930); married (1920) Edith Willan (c.1883–1967);

(3) George (1892–1974); married (1924) Alice E. Cappell (c.1889–1950);

(4) Eva (1897–1970); later Hartley after her marriage in 1922 to John Henry Hartley (1891–1982).

At the time of the 1911 Census John was a schoolmaster at Ashley House Private School, Worksop, Nottinghamshire. He left teaching and went to Hatfield College, Durham University, graduating with a BA in 1915. He was ordained in the Church of England. There is a report that he served in the war, probably in the ranks. However, from July 1917 until the end of the war he was officiating at marriages in Weaste, near Salford, where he was curate, and so it is unlikely that he served in the forces. He subsequently became curate at Oswaldtwistle and Wensley before becoming the Vicar of Coverham. But, when he died from accidental drowning in the River Tees, he had been the Vicar of East Cowton, Northallerton, North Yorkshire, for two months. His wife was the daughter of a gentleman farmer.

George enlisted as a private in the West Yorkshire Regiment and went to France in November 1915. He was commissioned in September 1916, leaving the army as a Lieutenant. At the time of the accidental death of his brother John he was a bank clerk in Windermere.

In 1939 John Hartley was farming Tatham Hall in Lunesdale near Kirkby Lonsdale.

Education and professional life

Walling obtained a County Minor Scholarship that enabled him to attend Giggleswick School, Yorkshire, from 1897 to 1904, and was awarded a West Riding Major Scholarship of £50 p.a. that enabled him to attend university. Oxford awarded him an Exhibition in Natural Sciences (Chemistry) in March 1904 and he matriculated at Magdalen as an Exhibitioner in Chemistry on 18 October 1904, having failed Responsions in September 1904. He resat them in Michaelmas Term 1904 and passed. He then took the First Public Examination in October 1905 and, later on in Michaelmas Term 1905, he took the Preliminary Examination in Natural Sciences (C3 [The Elements of Physics] and C4 [The Elements of Chemistry]). In Trinity Term 1907 he was awarded a 2nd in Chemistry (Honours), and he took his BA on 6 August 1907. He took his MA in 1911 at about the same time that he passed an Oxford examination in the Theory, History and Practice of Education. Günther wrote of him posthumously:

Walling was a keen and “sceptical” chemist, always so eager to turn out good work that it was a pleasure to help him. While still an undergraduate he hit on a new method of separating antinomy and bismuth, which it was thought might be of considerable importance. The natural bent of his mind was, however, towards teaching rather than to research.

Clifton College, Bristol, President Warren’s old school, gave him his first teaching experience in Lent Term 1908, and he produced a very instructive report on why so few scientific Cliftonians were going up to Oxford. He taught Science at King Edward VII School, Sheffield, from 1908 to April 1909 and Dulwich College Preparatory School from May to December 1909, probably so that he could work with Dr Herbert Brereton Baker (1862–1935). Presumably for the same reason, he then moved to Oxford High School from April 1910 to 1911 in order to assist Baker in research that he was undertaking at Christ Church.

Like Walling, Baker was from the north of England. He had been a Brackenbury Scholar at Balliol, where he was awarded a first in Chemistry. He left Oxford in 1884 to become Head of Science at Dulwich College, South London, where he worked in his spare time on the catalytic effect of trace amounts of water on the rate of chemical reactions. For a short time, he was Headmaster of Alleyne’s School in south London, but in 1902 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, a rare honour for a schoolmaster, and in the same year he became a Student (Fellow) of Christ Church and Lee’s Reader in Chemistry at Oxford, where he gained a reputation as an eloquent lecturer and skilful experimentalist. In 1912, he was appointed to the Chair of Chemistry at Imperial College, London, and during the war he worked on methods of protection against poison gas, for which he was awarded the CBE in 1917. It is likely that Baker’s imminent move away from Oxford caused Walling to leave Oxford and return to Yorkshire as Senior Science Master at Leeds Grammar School in January 1912. He stayed here until he was called up, spending several evenings per week doing voluntary work for the Leeds Boys Club.

War service

Walling had been commissioned Second Lieutenant in the 1/7th (Leeds Rifles) Battalion (Territorial Force), the West Yorkshire Regiment (The Prince of Wales’s Own) at Easter 1913, and Lieutenant in August 1914 (London Gazette, no. 28,881, 28 August 1914, p. 6,808). Although he was mobilized on the outbreak of war, an injury received during training prevented him from being with the Battalion when it landed at Boulogne on 16 April 1915 as part of the 1st West Riding Brigade (146th Brigade as from 15 May 1915) in the 49th (West Riding) Division. The Battalion moved to Flêtre, about four miles east-north-east of Bailleul, on 28 June 1915, marched to Proven, c.13 miles to the north-east, on 30 June 1915, rested there for a few days and arrived in the trenches south of Pilckem during a heavy German counter-attack on 8 July 1915. Meanwhile, Walling landed at Le Havre on 30 June and spent some time at nearby No. 16 Base Camp before leaving by train on 11 August 1915 for the Somme. On his arrival there he spent some time with No. 3 Entrenching Battalion near Albert and finally rejoined his own Regiment back in the Ypres Salient on 19 August 1915, an event which the very sketchy Battalion War Diary does not record.

Walling’s first few months on active service in the Ypres Salient were relatively quiet, and spent in the general area of Pilckem, with rest periods in Coppernollehoek, and although the Germans occasionally shelled the 1/7th Battalion and the rain made life in the trenches very unpleasant, casualties were low. On 12 September 1915, as Walling was taking a party of 50 men to do some trench work near the front line, a bullet passed between him and his Sergeant while they were standing together in the motor bus. After spending two aimless hours trying to find out where he and his men were supposed to be working, he ended up in a Brigade mess and enjoyed a glass of port. Writing home on 12 December, Walling correctly predicted that he would be in the trenches over Christmas, and on 19 December 1915 the Germans attacked all of VI Corps with gas. But the attack failed and the old pattern continued for another ten days. On 30/31 December 1915, Walling’s Battalion marched to billets in Houtkerque, just over the border in northern France, and rested at Wormhoudt, a few miles further west, from 1 to 15 January 1916. It then route-marched westwards for three days until it reached the port of Calais, where it trained until 1 February. Over the next 11 days the Battalion slowly made its way south-eastwards towards the Somme, arriving at Bouzincourt, just north of Albert, on 13 February. After resting here, it spent seven days in support in the village of Authuile and then, beginning on 21 February 1916, four days in the trenches until 24 February, when it marched to billets at Martinsart, near Bouzincourt. Walling was promoted Temporary Captain on 24 March 1916, and until the end of June the Battalion was deployed in all kinds of ways over a broad area at the northern end of what would soon become the Somme battlefield: resting, helping to build a light railway, manning trenches and training in methods of attack.

On 1 July, however, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the Battalion moved into assembly trenches in Thiepval Wood, and at 15.30 hours the entire 146th Brigade attacked Thiepval village, with Walling’s Battalion in reserve. But the attack was unsuccessful and on 2 July the Brigade was back at the assembly trenches, from where it moved to hutments in nearby Martinsart Wood until 7 July. On 8 July the Battalion moved to the heavily fortified position called the Leipzig Salient, half a mile east of Authuile and nearly a mile south-south-west of Thiepval, which 32nd Division had captured from the Germans on 1 July at the cost of heavy casualties and successfully held since then. Six days later, on the first day of the Battle of Bazentin Ridge (14–17 July), two of the Battalion’s Companies took part in the unsuccessful attack on the Ridge and by 16 July the whole Battalion was back again in the trenches in front of Authuile. The Battalion then rested at Martinsart Wood from 21 to 24 July, trained at Forceville until 3 August, and did two spells of duty on the Leipzig Salient from 3 to 7 and from 11 to 13 August. This pattern was repeated until 27 September 1916, when the Battalion moved to billets in Mailly-Maillet Wood and at different locations in the same general area between 29 September and 18 October, three days before Walling was promoted Captain, when the Battalion moved to the trenches in front of Foncquevillers, a quiet sector of the front to the south-west of Arras. It stayed here until 20 November and from then until 3 December 1916 it was in support at nearby Bienvillers-au-Bois, after which it moved to Bouquemaison, where it trained until 5 January 1917 before spending about a month in and out of the trenches at Bailleulmont, to the south-east of Arras. This sector of the front was also a quiet one and on 20 January 1917 Walling was promoted Acting Major and attached to HQ for about six weeks. In late February the Battalion was moved c.35 miles northwards to Lestrem, seven miles north of Béthune, and then a few miles eastwards, where it was in and out of the trenches in the Laventie–Fauquissart area until 10 July 1917. During the month of March 1917 Acting Major Walling took temporary command of the Battalion and signed its War Diary, and on 7 June 1917, he commanded a raiding party of four officers and 87 other ranks that tried, unsuccessfully, to bring back some useful intelligence from the German trenches opposite Fauquissart.

On 10 July the Battalion marched to nearby Estaires from where, on 13 July, it travelled by train to Loon Plage and the village of Mardyk, about half-way between Calais and Dunkirk on the northern French coast, but arrived there three days too late to become involved in what became known to the British as the Battle of the Dunes – Operation Strandfest in German (see T.S. Arnold and D.H. Webb). Dunkirk is very close to the westernmost end of the Allied front line that extended just to the north of the Belgian coastal port of Nieuport-les-Bains (Nieuwpoort), and Nieuport is not far south of Oostende, where the River Yser (IJser) flows into the North Sea. The strategic importance of the area between Nieuport and the mouth of the River Yser had been recognized as early as autumn 1914, when the Belgiums halted the German advance by flooding the sea locks and opening the sluice gates at Nieuport. The Belgians then remained in possession of an area that was about a mile in depth to the east of the Yser and to the north of the town until summer 1917, when they handed it over to the British, who were preparing to advance up the coast in order to capture the main U-Boot base at Zeebrugge in conjunction with the beginning of the Third Battle of Ypres (31 July–10 November 1917). But the Germans, who realized the value of Nieuport as a base for their own coastal offensive, seem to have got wind of the plan, and at 06.00 hours on 10 July they started to shell the area, while fighter-bombers destroyed the old and somewhat rickety bridges over the River Yser. Then, just before 18.00 hours the Germans, using flame-throwers, launched a shock attack along a 1,400-yard front and took the first three British lines with ease, capturing 1,300 prisoners of war as they did so and inflicting casualties amounting to 3,126 officers and other ranks killed, wounded and missing at very little cost to themselves.

After its arrival in the battle area on 13 July, Walling’s Battalion moved up the coast via Koksijde, and by 26 July it was in the westernmost trenches of the Belgian front, where they were subject to bombardment by the German artillery. During the night of 1 August, the Battalion raided the enemy trenches and pulled back to billets at Ostduinkerke, between Nieuport and Koksijde, and from there to Ghyvelde, just over the border in France (3 August), and Téteghem, a southern suburb of Dunkirk (4 August), where it trained on the beaches until 27 August. From 28 August to 24 September, the Battalion did further training at the nearby Ghyvelde training area before travelling on foot and by bus towards Vlamertinghe, west of Ypres, where it arrived on 6 November 1917. At 05.20 hours on 9 October, in terrible weather conditions, the Battalion took part in the disastrous assault on Passchendaele village that became known as the Battle of Poelcapelle and was held up by heavy machine-gun and sniper fire from carefully concealed conditions. But the War Diarist tells us nothing about the outcome of the battle or its human cost. Fortunately, the Battalion did not take part in the even more disastrous follow-up attack of 12 October that is known as the First Battle of Passchendaele and cost the Australians very large numbers of casualties, since by then it was back in Vlamertinghe, west of Ypres.

With Walling as its second-in-command and promoted to Acting Major once more, the Battalion then spent the next three weeks training before it returned to the Westhoek sector of the front from 11 to 21 November, after which it went into Divisional Reserve until 28 November. It spent the following three months in various locations around Ypres, during which time, on 1 January 1918, Walling was awarded the MC (London Gazette, no. 30,450, 1 January 1918, p. 48) after being mentioned in dispatches twice in France during 1917 (LG, no. 29,890, 2 January 1917, p. 224; LG, no. 30,086, 22 May 1917, p. 5,023). On 18 January 1918, the Brigadier walked into the Battalion’s mess and said that he would like Walling to command the Trench Mortar Battery. So after saying “Yes Sir” with some hesitation, he went on a training course at X Corps Trench Mortar School, from where he could hear heavy bombardments in the distance. As a result of this training, Walling was given command of the 146th Brigade’s Trench Mortar Battery, for which, unfortunately, a War Diary exists only for the period April–August 1916; nor does the War Diary of the 1/7th Battalion make any mention of Walling’s return to the Battalion. We do know, however, that a few days before his death he was called away from his dug-out to see about some ammunition and found, when he returned a few minutes later, that his blankets, burberry etc. had been riddled with shrapnel by a Germaan high-explosive shell exploding two feet away from his bed. And his last letter home, dated 24 April 1918, says that at 23.00 hours on the previous night, he and five other officers had been decorated in their dug-out with the Croix de Guerre by a French General, presumably for their part in the Fourth Battle of Ypres (7–29 April 1918) (London Gazette, no. 30,945, 8 October 1918, p. 11,943). He modestly remarked that he had done nothing to deserve it and closed the letter by saying that he did not want a long palaver in the local newspaper as he knew “too well the journalistic tendencies of the Ingleton correspondent” – i.e. his father. But at 10.30 hours on 25 April 1918, the Germans attacked in strength in the Mont Kemmel area, about six miles south-south-west of Ypres, and overran the 7th Battalion’s trench system. After almost three years of active service in France and Belgium, Walling was killed in action at 10.30 hours, aged 32, when a shell splinter hit the right side of his forehead while he was trying to extricate his men by means of an orderly retreat from a situation of encirclement: he died in under ten minutes.

Although the Battalion War Diary gives no information about the casualties incurred by the 7th Battalion as a result of the German attack, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Harold Tetley, DSO, JP (1879–1959), a scion of the Yorkshire brewing family and newly appointed to command the Battalion, wrote a letter to Walling’s parents on 28 May 1918 in which he apologized that they had found out about Ernest’s death from his orderly – adding, however, that this was understandable as no other officers were left, by which he presumably meant that all the Battalion’s officers had been killed or wounded or were missing. His Commanding Officer would describe him posthumously as “the bravest and most daring officer” he had ever met, and the General Officer Commanding 49th Division, Major-General Neville John Gordon Cameron (1873–1955), took the unusual step of writing in person to Walling’s father and telling him how highly his son had been thought of at both Battalion and Brigade level, being “quite fearless without being reckless”. Walling has no known grave. He is commemorated on Panels 42 to 47 and 162, Tyne Cot Memorial, on the Ingleton War Memorial, the Roll of Honour boards in Giggleswick School Chapel, and the School’s Memorial Library. He left £1,250 7s. 7d.

Bibliography 

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

Special acknowledgement:

* [Anon.], ‘Letters from the front paint picture of Great War’, Craven Herald and Pioneer, no issue no. (12 November 2011), unpag

Printed sources: 

Günther (1924), pp. 436–7 and 467.

[Anon.], ‘Capt. Ernest Walling, M.C.’ [obituary], The Giggleswick Chronicle, vol. 13, no. 116 (July 1918), p. 331.

[Anon.], ‘Professor Baker’ [obituary], The Times, no. 47,050 (29 April 1935), p. 16.

P.W. Kent, Some Scientists in the life of Christ Church, Oxford (Oxford: Christ Church, 2001), pp. 34–35.

Andrew Brooks, The Ingleton War Memorial (Bentham, near Lancaster: Design and Print, 2004), pp. 104–9.

Archival sources: 

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

OUA: UR 2/1/55.

OUA (DWM): C.C.J. Webb, Diaries, MS. Eng. misc. e. 1162.

WO95/2795/1.

WO95/2802.

WO374/71444.