Valentine Fleming, DSO, MP

• Matriculated: 1900

• Born: 17 February 1882

• Died: 25 May 1917

• Regiment: Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars

• Grave/Memorial: Templeux-le-Guérard British Cemetery: II.E.40.

Family background

b. 17 February 1882 at Newport, Fife, Scotland, as the eldest child of Robert Fleming (1845–1933) and Sarah Kate Fleming (née Hindmarsh) (1857–1937) (m. 1881).From 1890 the family lived at Walden House, Chislehurst, Kent (eight servants), from 1902 at Joyce Grove, Nettlebed, to the north of Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire (12 servants), and from 1903 also at 27, Grosvenor Square, London W1.

Parents and antecedents

Robert Fleming, who was born in a tiny house in Liff Road, Lochee, near Dundee, was the fourth child of John Fleming (1806–73), a farmer, who, after being ruined as a mill-owner by the crisis in the flax industry of 1843, became an overseer at one pound a week in one of Dundee’s linen and jute mills (see G.B. Gilroy). At that time, Dundee had some of the worst slums in Europe and five of John’s children died of diphtheria. When Robert was 13, he started work as an office boy at £5 p.a. and within two years became a clerk for the Cox Brothers, at that time the world’s largest firm of jute spinners. When he was 21, he became a book-keeper with Edward Baxter & Sons, whose Chairman was a Dundee merchant with large interests in American securities.

During his time with the firm, Robert became interested in stocks and shares, and despite the crash of 1866 in Britain which affected him personally, he became particularly interested in the potential of the booming American stock market during the period of recovery after the Civil War (1861–65) and visited America on behalf of his Principal in c.1870. Although the principle behind investment trusts had been known on the continent since the Middle Ages, Robert played a central role in designing a modern version and establishing the guidelines for their sound management. He thereby enabled nervous British investors to earn twice the interest from American railroad bonds that they could have earned from British government stocks. In 1873 he convinced four of Dundee’s leading businessmen to act as trustees for Scotland’s first investment trust, the Scottish American Investment Trust, of which Fleming became the Secretary. Over the next two years, two further trusts were floated, using money that had been raised mainly in Dundee, and thanks largely to Fleming’s efforts, the trusts did very well, despite the economic depression that afflicted America between 1873 and 1879. For the next half-century, Robert was regarded as an authority on investment in America and became a Director of several similar trusts and an adviser to many others. In the 1880s, he became a recognized expert on American railroads, and two important railroad systems were constructed in America thanks to his advice: the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé and the Denver and Rio Grande lines. At some point, Robert was responsible for organizing bond- and shareholder opposition to Jay Gould (1836–92), the leading American railroad developer and speculator whose reputation was that of a “Robber Baron” and who was trying to gain control of the Texas and Pacific Railway for very little money.

In 1888, Robert’s links with London became stronger when he set up the Investment Trust Corporation there, and in 1890 he moved his business from Dundee to London, where he worked for three decades as a highly reputable City financier, underwriting companies all over the world by means of his network of investment trusts, insurance companies, etc.: it was, for example, his advice that assisted the formation in 1908 of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the fore-runner of BP. It is estimated that by the time of his death, he had crossed the Atlantic c.130 times; he had become a Director of the Royal Bank of Scotland (1907), the British Investment Trust (1889), and the Metropolitan Trust Company (1899). In 1909, he set up his own private bank, Robert Fleming and Co., at 8, Crosby Square, Bishopsgate, London EC2: it was acquired by Chase Manhattan in 2000.

Robert was a serious and somewhat taciturn man who was committed to hard work and intolerant of idle conversation. Although he could appear severe and intimidating, he was a kindly person by nature and an adoring husband and father. He loved such outdoor pursuits as rowing, walking, stalking and shooting, having learnt to shoot during his time with the Dundee Volunteers when a young man. In 1903, the Flemings moved to Joyce Grove, a 2,000-acre estate at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, where he demolished the seventeenth-century house that stood there and replaced it with what John Pearson called “an architectural tyrannosaurus” of a house that is now a Sue Ryder Home. Duff Hart-Davis describes it as “decidedly Gothic and totally hideous” and as being of “devastating ugliness”: but Pearson, more charitably, records that it:

was undoubtedly the best that money could buy. No window was left plain if stained glass could possibly be used instead. No balustrade remained uncarved. There was a hint of Chartres, a memory of Spa, an echo of all the most recent châteaux built along the valley of the Loire, with craftsmen brought over from France to achieve the correct effects. There were to be forty-four bedrooms, a great fireplace of Carrara marble weighing eleven tons, and the largest conservatory in south Oxfordshire.

In the latter part of his life, Robert took much interest in farming and forestry. Being philanthropically inclined, he also supported both local and national causes, particularly hospitals. He donated a recreation ground to the village of Nettlebed and in 1912 had a multi-purpose hall designed for the village by the Arts and Crafts architect Charles Edward Mallows (1864–1915). In 1906 he was appointed a member of the Finance Committee of King Edward’s Hospital Fund for London, and in 1909/10, he served as High Sheriff of Oxfordshire. During World War One he served on the Financial Facilities Committee and gave up part of his Grosvenor Square house for the use of wounded officers. He also gave large sums of money to University College, Dundee, including the money that was needed for the Fleming Gymnasium: in 1928 St Andrew’s University awarded him an honorary LL.D as a gesture of gratitude for his gifts and advice over many years. At about the same time Robert also acquired  Black Mount, an 80,000-acre deer-forest near the Bridge of Orchy, in Argyllshire, where he and his family used to go for a sporting holiday every August. The estate is still owned by the Fleming family, since some years later it was put on the market by the Breadalbane Trustees and bought by Philip Fleming and his brother-in-law, the 2nd Lord Wyfold (see below). At Christmas 1928 Robert gave £130,000 to Dundee in order to finance the Fleming Housing Scheme, “which transported hundreds of slum-dwellers from their crowded, insanitary hovels in the backstreets of the city to the pleasant open spaces of a garden suburb at Wester Clepington”. He added a further £25,000 in September 1929, when the foundation stone of the project – a total of 400 houses – was laid by the Duchess of York; on the same day the grateful City of Dundee made him a Freeman of the City. He left nearly £2.2 million (according to the Measuringworth site, this would have been worth £95 million in 2005 – although, of course, nearly half of that sum would have been paid in tax), and is buried in the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s Church, Nettlebed, Oxfordshire.

Valentine Fleming’s mother was the daughter of a senior tax official in Scotland, and she and Robert got to know one another when they attended the Lindsey Street Congregational Church in Dundee.

Siblings and their families

Older brother of:

(1) Dorothy (1883–1976); later Hermon-Hodge after her marriage in 1906 to the Hon. Roland Herman Hermon-Hodge (later Lieutenant-Colonel, DSO, MVO, DL, JP, 2nd Baron Wyfold of Accrington from 1937) (1880–1942); one son, four daughters;

(2) Kathleen (1886–1957); later Hannay after her marriage in 1918 to Walter Maxwell Hannay, Croix de Guerre (1873–1952); two sons;

(3) Philip (1889–1971); married (1924) Joan Cecil Hunloke (1901–91), the daughter of the Olympic sailor (1908) and courtier Sir Philip Hunloke, GCVO, JP (1868–1947); two daughters, one son.

The Honourable Roland Herman Hermon-Hodge was the eldest of the seven sons (nine children, of whom one daughter – Marguerite – died in infancy in 1879) of Robert Trotter Hermon-Hodge (1851–1937), the 1st Baron Wyfold of Accrington, a well-known sportsman who lived at Wyfold Court, Rotherfield Peppard, near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. In 1877 Robert Trotter Hodge, as he was then called, married Frances Caroline (1856–1929), the daughter of the wealthy cotton-master Edward Hermon (1822–81), who had been the MP for Preston from 1868 to 1881 and built Wyfold Court between 1872 and 1878. On 1 January 1903, Robert Trotter Hodge had his name changed to Robert Trotter Hermon-Hodge by Royal Licence. He was the Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames from 1895 to 1906, and after the death of Valentine Fleming he took over that constituency from 1917 to 1918 (London Gazette, no. 30,072, 15 May 1917, p. 4,756). Two of Robert Trotter’s sons died on active service during World War One. John Percival Hermon-Hodge (1890–1916) was killed in action at Ploegsteert Wood on 28 May 1915, aged 24, while serving as a Second Lieutenant with the 1/4th Battalion, the Ox. & Bucks Light Infantry (buried in Rifle House Cemetery, Grave III.F.1, inscribed “Sixth Son of Lord & Lady Wyfold Praemium Virtutis Gloria”); and George Guy Hermon-Hodge (1883–1916) died of wounds received in action on 7 July 1916, aged 32, while serving as a Captain with the 165th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery (buried in Gezaincourt Communal Cemetery Extension, Grave I.B.12, inscribed “Son of Lord & Lady Wyfold ‘Quo Fas et Gloria Ducunt’”). A third son, Major the Hon. Robert Edward Udny Hermon-Hodge (1882–1937), was a brother officer of Valentine Fleming in the QOOH.

In 1899, Roland was gazetted to the 3rd Battalion, the Grenadier Guards, and served in the Second Boer War, gaining the Queen’s Medal with five clasps and the King’s Medal with two clasps. He became the Battalion’s Adjutant in 1905 and served throughout the Great War as Brigade Major, Deputy Assistant Quartermaster-General and Deputy Assistant Adjutant General. He was promoted Major in 1917, mentioned in dispatches once (possibly twice), awarded the DSO in 1917 and promoted Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel in 1919 (LG, no. 29,890, 2 January 1917, p. 197; no. 30,111, 1 June 1917, p. 5,476).

Walter Maxwell Hannay was a merchant.

Philip Fleming was educated at Eton and was a Commoner at Magdalen from 1908 to 1910, but left without taking a degree. While at Oxford, he won the Inter-University point-to-point, stroked the Magdalen VIII that went Head of the River in 1910 and 1911, and in 1910 rowed at No. 7 in the victorious Oxford VIII that included Duncan Mackinnon, Arthur Stanley Garton (see H.W. Garton and E.C. Garton) and A.W.F. Donkin (cox for the fourth time). In 1912, at the Olympic Regatta in Stockholm, Philip stroked the Leander Eight (all but one of whom were ex-Magdalen) which won by a length against New College, Oxford, and brought home the Olympic gold medal. After leaving Oxford, he joined the family firm in 1911, two years after Fleming, and soon became a partner. During World War One he was an officer in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars. He disembarked at Dunkirk with his elder brother and the entire Regiment on 22 September 1914, and rose to the rank of Major. After being demobilized in 1919, Philip worked as a merchant banker, became “one of the best liked and most widely respected members of the City establishment”, and held many directorships. He had a reputation for being “an exceptionally shrewd investor with a real flair for finding winners in the most unlikely situations”, and was noted for his common sense, caution and invariable courtesy to those with whom he had dealings. But his real passion was sport, about which he was “a perfectionist”, and field sports in particular. Like his father and elder brother, he was an excellent shot and enjoyed deer-stalking; he rode with the Bicester and Heythrop Hunts and was Chairman of the latter for several years. His family home was Barton Abbey, Steeple Aston, Oxfordshire. Philip became a JP (1927), High Sheriff of Oxfordshire (1948), and Deputy Lieutenant of Oxfordshire (1949), and in 1951 he founded the PF Charitable Trust. After Robert Fleming left Joyce Grove to him and his sisters, Dorothy Wyfold and Kathleen Hannay, they gifted it collectively to St Mary’s Hospital, Praed Street, Paddington, London W2, in 1940.

Wife and children

In 1906 Valentine married Evelyn (“Eve”) Beatrice Ste Croix Rose (1885–1964) (m. 1906). Evelyn was the sister of an Eton and Magdalen contemporary, Harcourt Gilbey Rose (1876–1952), and Valentine may have met her through an Oxford Commemoration Ball. Her brother was a distinguished oarsman who was later knighted for services to rowing and was the brother-in-law of G.S. Maclagan, another distinguished oarsman. Valentine and Evelyn lived first at 27, Green Street, just off Park Lane, in Mayfair, London W1, until 1911. But Robert Fleming settled more than £250,000 (the equivalent of £14,337,500 in 2005) on his son, and the couple used this money to buy Braziers Park, a mock-Gothic mansion at Ipsden, Oxfordshire, that was four miles away from Joyce Grove. When Valentine became an MP in January 1910, the couple sold their residence in Green Street and moved to Pitt House, a white Georgian mansion on the edge of Hampstead Heath in north-west London that had belonged to the elder Pitt (1708–78). On the outbreak of war Valentine sold Braziers Park and acquired the house and estate of Arnisdale, Inverness-shire, in the Highlands of Scotland. It was an ideal location for deer-stalking and by 1916 Valentine was building a new house there. In 1923 Eve sold Pitt House and moved to Turner’s House, 118, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London SW3.

Evelyn was the beautiful, flamboyant, extravagant daughter of a Berkshire solicitor. She was, according to Andrew Lycett, “the very antithesis of Fleming thrift and heartiness” as she had an artistic temperament and dressed with an exotic garishness. But she was also the granddaughter of two men who, having risen to the very top of their professions, had been knighted in recognition. Her maternal grandfather was Sir Richard Quain (1816–98), a distinguished surgeon and the editor of the Dictionary of Medicine (1882), who had risen from being a tanner’s apprentice to the position of Physician Extraordinary to Queen Victoria; her paternal grandfather was Sir Philip Rose (1816–83), who had been Benjamin Disraeli’s legal adviser. On becoming a widow, Evelyn inherited Pitt House and all Valentine’s horses, carriages and cars outright, but the rest of his large estate, valued at £265,596 gross (the equivalent of £11,436,563 in 2005), was turned into a trust fund whose income, for Evelyn, would drop to a mere £3,000 p.a. if ever she re-married. But although Evelyn kept to the strict terms of the trust, she had an affair with the painter Augustus John (later OM, RA) (1878–1961), by whom she had a daughter, Amaryllis Marie-Louise Fleming in 1925, who did not learn her father’s true identity until she was about 24. Evelyn Fleming is buried in St Bartholemew’s Graveyard, Nettlebed, near Henley, Oxfordshire.

Valentine and Evelyn had four sons:

(1) (Robert) Peter (later Lieutenant-Colonel, OBE) (1907–71); married (1935) Celia Johnson (later DBE) (1908–82); one son, two daughters;

(2) Ian Lancaster (later Commander) (1908–64); married (1952 in Jamaica) Ann Geraldine Mary Rothermere (née Charteris; 1913–81); two sons, one of whom was stillborn (1948) and the other of whom committed suicide (1975);

(3) Richard Evelyn (later Major, MC) (1911–77); married (1938) the Hon. Charmion Hermon-Hodge (1913–2001), the daughter of Roland Hermon-Hodge and therefore a first cousin; three daughters, five sons (three of whom studied at Magdalen);

(4) Michael Valentine Paul (reportedly mentioned in dispatches three times) (1913–40); died as a prisoner of war in Lille on 1 October 1940 of wounds received in action while serving as a Captain with the 4th Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry; married (1934) Letitia Blanche Borthwick (1913–2002); three sons, one daughter; her later name was Thomson after her marriage in 1945 to Major J.C. Thomson (1911–2001), a merchant banker; one son, one daughter (twins).

As a child, (Robert) Peter Fleming suffered from a rare digestive illness which could not be named or cured and which deprived him of his sense of taste and smell. But he was recovering by the time he went to Durnford Preparatory School, near Swanage, Dorset, from 1916 to 1920. From 1920 to 1926 he attended Eton as an Oppidan Scholar, where, like his father, he became a member of the elite society known as “Pop”. He also became Captain of the Oppidans (i.e. head of school except for the 70 Scholars) and editor of the Eton College Chronicle, and he acquired a reputation for his caustic wit. From 1926 to 1929 he was an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a first in English even though he did not much enjoy the academic side of university life. He also acted in a lot of plays – and despite his mother’s disapproval, his lack of talent as an actor, and the imminence of finals, he became President of Oxford University Dramatic Society in his final year. Despite his enthusiasm for the stage, he also became a member of the notoriously “hearty” Bullingdon Club and the editor of Isis.

Peter’s family wanted him to join the family firm after leaving Oxford and sent him to New York for six months, starting in September 1929 to do an apprenticeship with a firm of stockbrokers. But the work bored him to tears and being a lifelong enthusiast of shooting game, he left in December to go on shooting expeditions in Alabama and Guatemala. After these he returned to England, where he made one last attempt to work in the City and several other abortive attempts at finding work before becoming assistant literary editor on The Spectator in the spring of 1931. From mid-September to mid-December 1931 he travelled in China before returning to his job on The Spectator, and from April to November 1932 he took part, as the unpaid special correspondent for The Times, in a poorly organized expedition to Brazil in order to search for an explorer, Colonel Percy Fawcett (b. 1867, d. in or after 1925), the original Indiana Jones, who had disappeared in the Matto Grosso while looking for the lost city of ‘Z’ (El Dorado). The experience led to Brazilian Adventure (1933), his highly entertaining first book, which was translated into many languages, enjoyed great success in Britain and America (not least because it “administered the coup de grace to a boastful type of travel book then fashionable”) and had, in the words of one critic, “set the world laughing”. In June 1933, Peter travelled to China as special correspondent of The Times to report on the civil war that was raging there. He interviewed Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), the Commander-in-Chief of the Chinese Nationalists from 1925 until his death, entered territory that was held by the Communists, returned home via Japan and the USA, and used the experience as the basis of his second best-seller, One’s Company (1934). In August 1934 he returned to China, where, for seven months in 1935, he made a 3,500-mile journey by road through Szechwan, Tsaidam and Sinkiang and down into northern India, which resulted in 14 pieces in The Times and his third successful travel book, News from Tartary (1936).

On his return home, in December 1935, Peter married the highly successful actress Celia Johnson (1908–82), whom he had first met in 1929, and in March 1938 the two of them travelled to China to report on the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and the completion of the Burma Road. Having been a member of the Guards’ Special Reserve since September 1930, Peter joined the Grenadiers on the outbreak of World War Two. Although, for most of the war, he saw little active service in the orthodox sense, he worked, inter alia, for the Special Operations Executive alongside Allix Peter Wilkinson, the future son-in-law of A.H. Villiers, and was given a series of training, undercover and intelligence jobs in Britain, the Balkans and the Far East which, being unconventional, often proved to be extremely dangerous. From 1942 to 1945 he served under Field-Marshal Archibald Wavell (1883–1950; Viceroy of India 1943; from 1947 Earl Wavell) as head of ‘D’ Division in New Delhi and so was in charge of military deception operations throughout south-east Asia. After the Japanese surrender, Peter returned to civilian life as a Lieutenant-Colonel with an OBE (1945), settled at Merrimoles, south Oxfordshire, just off the A4130, which he had had built in 1938–39 on the Nettlebed estate that his uncle Philip, “in an act of great generosity” had given him because none of Valentine’s sons had received anything from Robert Fleming’s will and Sarah Kate, Robert’s widow, had died intestate. Here Peter became an “enlightened and progressive landowner, and moved contentedly in a wide circle of friends”. He became a member of the County Council and commanded the local Territorial Army Battalion. In 1952, following his father and grandfather, he served as High Sheriff of Oxfordshire, and in 1970 he became the County’s Deputy Lord Lieutenant.

Peter’s obituarist summarized his opinion of his post-war life as follows:

If he had wished, he could have had a dazzling career, fully in the public eye. But he preferred a role less familiar to his own generation than it was 50 years earlier: that of an English country gentleman, cultured and enterprising, whose first concern was with his own estate and countryside, but who remained acutely interested in what was astir in the world beyond.

Although Peter continued to write fourth leaders for The Times as Atticus and a column for The Spectator as Strix, he also turned his authorial skills to serious military history and wrote four more successful books: Invasion 1940 (1957), The Siege at Peking (1959), Bayonets to Lhasa: The Full First Account of the British Invasion of Tibet in 1904 (1961), and The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (1963). After the death of his younger brother Ian in 1964, Peter sat on the Board of Glidrose Ltd, the company which managed the literary rights over Ian’s estate. Also, like his father and grandfather, Peter was an excellent shot and returned every autumn to Black Mount estate, Argyllshire, for a shooting holiday. It was here, while he was out grouse-shooting, that he died suddenly in 1971. He and his wife are buried next to one another in the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s, Nettlebed.

Ian Lancaster Fleming was still at preparatory school when his father was killed in action, and was deeply affected by his death. At Eton he showed little academic potential and directed his energies into athletics, for which he had an exceptional talent. In 1925 and 1926 he became only the second Etonian to become Victor Ludorum (Junior and Senior) two years in succession. He was also active in school journalism and edited an ephemeral magazine called The Wyvern. But his academic performance worsened over time; he left Eton a term early under a cloud after being relegated to the Army Class; and although his widowed mother arranged for him to attend the Royal Military College Sandhurst, beginning in 1926, he was totally unsuited to its tough military discipline and left without a commission in 1927. Then, hoping that Ian might find a job in the Diplomatic Service, his mother arranged for him to spend the year 1927/28 in a quasi-finishing school for men in Kitzbühel, Austria, and then to study in Munich and Geneva (1928–31), where he learnt German, French and Russian, read widely, developed a range of unusual tastes, enjoyed himself, and acquired the reputation of being a playboy. But in 1931 he failed the Foreign Office’s competitive examination and in 1932 he was given a job in Reuters Press Agency which, on his own admission, taught him to write and involved him in going to Moscow in order to cover the trial of six British engineers who had been accused of espionage and wrecking (March/April 1933). After leaving Reuters in October 1933, he finally found work in the City – first with a small bank and then with a firm of stockbrokers, where he showed no aptitude even though he remained a Junior Partner there until 1945.

But in May 1939 he was invited to join the Naval Intelligence Division in “Room 39” as part-time personal assistant to Admiral John Henry Godfrey (1888–1970), the Director of Naval Intelligence, and this time he struck lucky. He proved to be not only a very good administrator, but also someone with the quick mind, off-beat imagination and flair that are vital for intelligence work. So he quickly rose from Lieutenant to Commander, was put in charge of the top-secret sub-section known as 17M, and played a key part in several important wartime projects, including Operation Mincemeat, which became famous as “The Man Who Never Was”. But Ian already wanted to write spy novels, and when, after the war, he was employed by the Kemsley (now Thomson) newspaper group as the manager who looked after its correspondents worldwide, his contract allowed him to take three months’ holiday every winter in Jamaica, which he had got to know during an Anglo-American naval conference there in 1942. In 1945 he acquired land on the island’s north coast and had a house built there called Goldeneye after his wartime plan to maintain communications with and defend Gibraltar if Spain should enter the war on the side of the Axis and attempt an invasion. In March 1952 he married his long-standing mistress Ann Rothermere (1913–81) in Jamaica, and Caspar, their only child to survive, was born in London six months later, only to die of a drug overdose in 1975.

In early 1952, Ian wrote Casino Royale, his first 007 novel, which enjoyed great success – probably because its glitz, glamour, sex and non-stop action contrasted so greatly with the dull, lean, repressively routinized world of the 1950s – and from then on, Ian used his annual stay in Jamaica to write a Bond novel a year until his death in 1964. In 1959 he left regular newspaper work to devote himself to writing fiction, but in April 1961 he suffered a heart attack that was probably connected with personal, professional and legal problems. Three months later, however, he signed a contract with the film producers Albert R. (“Cubby”) Broccoli (1909–96) and Herschel (“Harry”) Saltzman (1915–94): the first Bond film, Dr No, starring Sean Connery (b. 1930), came out in autumn 1962 and was immediately successful. Nevertheless, his heavy smoking and drinking worsened his heart condition and almost certainly contributed to his death in hospital in Canterbury in August 1964. He is buried in St James’s Churchyard, Sevenhampton, near Highworth, Swindon, Wiltshire. During his lifetime alone, Ian sold 30 million books; it is estimated that 100 million have been sold worldwide; and by 2000 the Bond films had made over $3 billion in box-office returns and £400 million in profits, not counting the sales of videos, DVDs etc. Unlike his father, grandfather, uncle, elder brother and two younger brothers, Ian disliked field sports and Scotland, preferred golf, bridge and swimming, and avoided family gatherings whenever possible, especially at Christmas.

Richard Evelyn Fleming was educated at Eton from 1924 to 1930, where he was Master of Eton Beagles, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a Commoner from 1930 to 1933 and graduated with a 2nd class degree in PPE. After a short apprenticeship with Barings, he joined the family firm and soon became a Director. His obituarist speaks of his “remarkable ability and energy and his infectious good humour”, and suggests that these qualities helped Flemings to extend its activities in Britain, the USA, the Middle East and Hong Kong. During World War Two he served as an officer in the Lovat Scouts and the Seaforth Highlanders, gained the rank of Major, was wounded in 1944, and was awarded the MC (London Gazette, no. 36,850, 19 December 1944, p. 5,854) and the TD. After the war, he succeeded his uncle Philip as Chairman of Flemings and was Director of several investment trust companies, Barclays Bank and Sun Alliance Insurance Company; he was also Chairman of Pilgrim Trust. As he was devoted to Scotland, he went on holiday every year to Black Mount in order to stalk, shoot and fish. He also hunted with the Heythrop Hunt and the Oxford Beagles, “who he rescued from disaster when university support was withdrawn”. His obituarist described him as a generous friend, who was respected for his fairness, good judgement, and personal concern, and concluded: “Never was there a more upright, courageous and inspiring personality.”

Although he was the youngest of the four brothers, Michael Valentine Paul Fleming seems to have combined the virtues of the other three. Like Ian he was a keen golfer, and like Peter and Richard he was an excellent shot. One obituarist wrote:

He was the good companion of men of all ages: he enjoyed the good things of life and appreciated them for their quality, and for the happiness they gave to his friends. Besides the memory we all carry with us of Michael as the happy host, there comes back the picture of him with gun in hand – and he was quick on the trigger and accurate – and of that happy, carefree figure striding the hills, ever keen and tireless.

Like Ian Fleming, he was characterized by charm, good looks, gaiety and humour, and like Peter Fleming, he had “a nimble mind and tongue”. He had been a keen member of the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars (Territorial Force) ever since leaving Eton, but in 1937 he moved across to the 4th (Territorial Army) Battalion of the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry since his “stern sense of duty” persuaded him that it was there that competent officers were most needed, and he raised a platoon from people who lived around the family home at Nettlebed. He turned into an excellent and well-respected officer, of whom a brother officer wrote posthumously: “In the regiment his powers of leadership grew in a most striking but effortless way, as he adapted himself to the new outlook and occupations which life in the Army impressed on him.” Another brother officer wrote:

He was always receptive, always resourceful, always vigorous. I can never remember an occasion on which he looked bored or baffled, or any movement of his that even remotely suggested apathy, or lethargy, or fatigue. He brought with him everywhere quickness of thought and power of decision, and he could rapidly convert his decision into action. His outstanding feature was always his irrepressible vitality.

The 4th (TA) Battalion went to France in January 1940 as part of 145th Brigade, 48th (South Midland) Division. During the two weeks of fighting which began on 10 May, Michael was reportedly mentioned in dispatches three times (London Gazette, no. 35,126, 1 April 1941, p. 1,951), but his Battalion was gradually pushed back westwards and encircled by the Germans at Watou, just north of the Franco-Belgian border, where most of the survivors, including the wounded Michael, were taken prisoner. After Michael’s death from wounds in Lille, where he is buried, one of his obituarists concluded that his loss left one “not merely with a permanent sense of bitter personal loss, but with dumb fury at the crude waste of war”.

Fleming’s wife Evelyn was a gifted violinist, and Amaryllis Fleming (1925–1999), inherited her mother’s musical ability – although Evelyn forbade her daughter to follow her in the violin and directed her towards the cello when she was nine. Amaryllis began to play the piano when she was three and made her first radio broadcast – on BBC Children’s Hour – when she was only 15. In 1943 she won a scholarship to the Royal College, where she studied the cello with Ivor James (1882–1963) of the Menges Quartet and John Keighley Snowden (1892–1958), and won all the College prizes. She appeared in public for the first time in 1944, when she played Elgar’s Cello Concerto at Newbury with the augmented Newbury String Players. After World War Two she took lessons with Pierre Fournier (1906–86) in Paris and later said of him that “he opened my eyes to the immense possibilities of colour, nuance and phrasing”, and in 1950 she visited Prades in the French Alps to work with Pablo Casals (1876–1973) on Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A minor (1850).

In 1949, together with the former child prodigy, the violinist Alan Loveday (1928–2016) and the pianist Peggy Gray (dates unknown), she founded the Loveday Trio; in 1951 she played for the first time with the Fidelio Ensemble; in 1952 she won the Queen’s Prize and performed in London for the first time; in 1953 she gave her first recital with the pianist Gerald Moore (1899–1987) and performed Elgar’s Cello Concerto with Sir John Barbirolli (1899–1976) and the Hallé Orchestra at a Promenade Concert; and in 1955 she and the pianist Lamar Crowcon (dates unknown) won the Munich international competition for cello and piano. In the late 1950s she developed a particular interest in the music of the Baroque and acquired a five-string cello that had been made by a member of the Amati family from Cremona in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. In 1968 she, together with the viola player Kenneth Essex (dates unknown) and the violinist Granville Jones (1922–68), formed the Fleming String Trio; and in 1974 she was appointed Professor at the Royal College of Music. She suffered a stroke in 1993, which left her unable to play the cello, but she continued to teach at the Royal College of Music and Wells Cathedral School. Described as a “flamboyant, extrovert person” and an “extraordinary all-round intelligent person” with an “engaging personality”, she was an exceptional teacher with a prodigious memory for the strengths and weaknesses of her pupils, but left relatively few recordings because of her perfectionism. In the early 1990s, after a trip to Bhutan, she was drawn to Eastern mysticism, meeting the Dalai Lama in spring 1997.

Education and professional life

Valentine, who, according to John Pearson, was “one of those rare, slightly baffling Edwardian figures of whom nothing but good is ever spoken”, attended Mr Hawtrey’s Preparatory School, Westgate-on-Sea, Kent, from c.1889 to 1896. The school had been founded in 1869 at Aldin House, Slough, by the Reverend John Hawtrey (1850–1925); it was known as St Michael’s School from 1869 to 1925; it moved to Westgate-on-Sea in 1883; and it existed in various locations until it merged with Cheam Preparatory School, Headley, Berkshire, in 1994 (cf. H.W. Garton and E.C. Garton). From 1896 to 1900 Valentine attended Eton College, where, like Peter after him, he became a member of the élite society known as “Pop” and acquired a reputation for his outstanding personal qualities. When, on 28 May 1904, he was singled out by the Oxford University student newspaper The Isis as its 269th “Isis Idol”, the anonymous author of the accompanying panegyric claimed that while at Eton, he was “presently engaged in all the various fields for energy which that establishment offers” and although that may be something of an exaggeration, he was certainly a good all-rounder and an excellent oarsman who rowed for the Eton VIII in 1900.

He matriculated at Magdalen as a Commoner on 15 October 1900, having passed Responsions in the Hilary and Michaelmas Terms of 1900, and here, according to the Isis idolator, “under [Magdalen’s] kindly shelter [he] has enjoyed a career of unbroken success in the world of letters, sport, and good fellowship”. He passed the First Public Examination (Scripture and Jurisprudence) in Michaelmas Term 1901, was awarded a 3rd in Modern History on 2 August 1904, and took his BA on 22 June 1905. “But”, his encomiast continued with a certain irony, despite his academic successes “he is no bookworm – rather the reverse”, being a good cricketer, an enthusiastic and proficient player of tennis, squash and billiards, and “a daring and successful player at Beggar My Neighbour”. In 1902, Valentine rowed with G.C.B. James in the Oxford University Boat Club IVs and the OUBC Trial VIII and might have made the Blue Boat had he not developed a boil at the last minute. He was Magdalen’s Captain of Boats 1903–04 and he was in the College VIII that came Second on the River in 1903 and 1904. In summer 1904 he, together with James, helped the Magdalen VIII to win the Ladies’ Challenge Plate at Henley for the first and last time: the same VIII also tried for the Visitors’ Challenge Cup but lost. The Captain noted in his Book:

Fleming is heavy with his hands and lets his slide go at the beginning. A very hard worker and was invaluable in the middle of the boat. His general good humour and light-hearted badinage helped the crew in several trying periods of depression.

When Magdalen’s 1st VIII were competing in the Henley Regatta in mid-June 1906, the part played by Valentine in the history of the Magdalen College Boat Club was remembered by a note in the Captain’s Book:

The warmest thanks of the Boat Club and the College are due to Mr. and Mrs. Fleming, whose son Mr. Val Fleming was a wellknown [sic] Magdalen oarsman, being captain in 1903. During practice and the Regatta they kindly invited the crew to make their house at Nettlebed their headquarters. We were driven down to the river each day in motors, and had the advantage of the cooler air on the hill of Nettlebed on returning in the evening. Everything was done to make the crew comfortable by our hosts, to whom we and the College have every reason to be most grateful.

On 16 December 1907 Valentine’s prowess as an oarsman was recognized when he was made a Steward of the Henley Royal Regatta.

But according to The Isis, if one really wanted to understand Valentine’s love of field sports,

one must see him in his sanctum at Longwall House. The skyline – if we may use the metaphor – is broken by a forest of horns – royals and ten-pointers enough to have depleted Scotland. Below are smaller trophies, the roebuck, the fox, and what an admiring lady has described as “a lovely rabbit”, the victim of the New College and Magdalen Beagles. Looking round his walls[,] we are transported by [Archibald] Thorburn [1860–1935; a Scottish artist specializing in birds and animals] and Cecil Aldin [1870–1935; an English artist specializing in drawings and sketches of animals, sports and rural life] from one sporting scene to another: now we have cleared a monstrous obstacle and are in the same field as the hounds; now we are holding well in front of a driven blackcock; in another moment we must follow a twenty-pounder best pace down the stream. Fortunately suitable weapons are ready to our hands, for the Farlows are stacked in the corner and the Purdeys peep out beneath the sofa. A nodding acquaintance with the classics is indicated by [John Guille] Millais’ “Red Deer” and [Augustus] Grimble’s “Salmon Rivers” in his book-case.

Nor, the writer continued,

have his social successes been less numerous – indeed[,] popularity is assured for one who is literally all things to all men. Thus he is President of the Junior Common Room and Librarian of the History Library; he is an inevitable member of every committee, and, what is more, an energetic member. His versatile spirit revolts at the specialization of the present day; for him the question of the moment is always first – whether he is discussing the advantages of a classical education with the Deans or the merits of the Jock Scott [an artificial fly used by fishermen] with his gillie. His philosophy of life has been the easy creed of “Carpe diem” and long may he continue to practise it! We can leave him with no better wish than that it may bring him the same success in after life that it has during his “Varsity career”.

According to Andrew Lycett, Valentine emerged from Magdalen “with a degree in history and the manners and bearing of a perfect English gentleman”. After graduation, he decided to train as a barrister, and on 12 January 1906 he was awarded a 3rd in the first part of the Bar Exams (Evidence, Procedure and Criminal Law), followed by another 3rd in the second part of the Bar Exams on 12 January 1907. But although he was called to the Bar later on in the same year, he never practised and was taken into his father’s merchant banking firm, Robert Fleming & Co., of Crosby Square, London EC2, of which he became a partner in 1909. A member of the right-wing Primrose League and an opponent of Home Rule for Ireland, he was accepted as Unionist candidate for the Henley Division of South Oxfordshire on 18 December 1909, and on 15 January 1910 he defeated the Liberal Philip Morrell (1870–1943), the husband of Lady Otteline Morrell (1873–1938), who had come in on the landslide election of 1906, by 5,340 to 3,701 votes, a majority of 1,639.

While an MP, between 10 March 1910 and 1 November 1913, Valentine made a total of 32 interventions, two of which were speeches and the rest questions, predominantly on rural Scotland, the operation of the Poor Law, and local issues in rural Oxfordshire. One of his speeches (13 July 1910), in which he seconded the amendment for rejecting the Reading Borough Extension Bill, was a swingeing attack on the Borough of Reading for trying to annexe part of Oxfordshire, the nearby town of Caversham. Another (13 March 1912) was a passionate critique of the “ludicrously inadequate” opportunities for the training and recruiting of Territorial units, the smallness of British Territorial Forces in comparison with the armies of other major European powers, and a plea for the institution of national military service. Because Valentine clearly knew what he was talking about – he was, in Andrew Lycett’s estimation, “one of the best trained volunteer officers in the British Expeditionary Force when he set off for France” – he was asked to serve on the Paul Committee, whose remit was to investigate and report on the administration and financing of the Territorial Forces. Valentine was a very good but reticent speaker, and by April 1913 it was rumoured that the pressures caused by the worldwide success of his family’s business were moving him to think of resignation at the end of the current Parliament, and his constituency even went so far as to find a prospective successor – Captain (later Major) Henry Nevile Fane (1895–1947) of the Coldstream Guards. During the war, Fleming was, however, sometimes recalled from France to take part in a parliamentary debate.

“Valentine Fleming … was most earnest and sincere in his desire to make things better for the great body of the people, and had cleared his mind of all particularist tendencies.”

But Fleming’s friend Winston Churchill saw the situation rather differently and put it as follows in his obituary of 25 May 1917:

Valentine Fleming was one of those younger Conservatives who easily and naturally combine loyalty to party ties with a broad liberal outlook upon affairs and a total absence of class prejudice. He was most earnest and sincere in his desire to make things better for the great body of the people, and had cleared his mind of all particularist tendencies. He was a man of thoughtful and tolerant opinions, which were not the less strongly or clearly held because they were not loudly or frequently asserted. The violence of faction and the fierce tumults which swayed our political life up to the very threshold of the Great War, caused him a keen distress. He could not share the extravagant passions with which the rival parties confronted each other. He felt acutely that neither was wholly right in policy and that both were wrong in mood. Although he could probably have held the Henley Division as long as he cared to fight it, he decided to withdraw from public life rather than become involved in conflicts whose bitterness seemed so far to exceed the practical issues at stake. Friends were not wanting on both sides of the House to urge him to remain and to encourage him to display the solid abilities he possessed. It is possible we should have prevailed. He shared the hopes to which so many of his generation respond of a better, fairer, more efficient public life and Parliamentary system rising out of these trials. 

But events have pursued a different course.

A week later, in an obituary where Churchill’s influence is very evident, President Warren said:

Both in his election speeches and in his career in the House, Fleming showed a singular and too rare temper. A man of business rather than a student, and of affairs rather than letters, he yet had a special capacity for acquiring and presenting what was essentially valuable in political ideas and ideals. His natural courtesy, agreeable address, and bright common sense, made him singularly acceptable, and few men of his age were more persuasive or effective. And this was the more remarkable because he eschewed party, and regarded its bickerings and battles as often a somewhat squalid waste of time. He had indeed, though neither pensive nor melancholy, a dash in him of Falkland, and had announced his intention of retiring from politics and devoting himself to the life of business and the country, for which he was so well fitted.

But the outbreak of war frustrated his intentions and Fleming had to remain an MP in absentia until his death in 1917.

As The Isis article makes clear, Fleming was passionate about field sports: he excelled at them all and kept a pack of beagles, followed by one of basset-hounds. Like his father, he enjoyed the Black Mount estate, and his proficiency with a rifle enabled him to represent the House of Commons in July 1910 when it defeated the Lords in the Vizianagram Challenge Cups: one of his opponents was Earl Stanhope (see R.P. Stanhope). Fleming was also a keen billiards player, and in 1912 he contested the final of the American Billiards Challenge. In 1916, he was elected Fellow of the Zoological Society of London.

Military and war service

Fleming was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the Imperial Yeomanry on 15 October 1904 and promoted Lieutenant on 24 April 1909. Although he became an energetic MP just eight months later, he found the time to learn his work as an officer in the 1/1st Oxfordshire Yeomanry (Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars: QOOH) (Territorial Force), Winston Churchill’s Regiment since 1902, and, according to Churchill’s obituary, went on most of the courses of instruction that were available.

Like many Yeomanry officers, Fleming was “drawn from the land-owners and country gentlemen of the district”, and his commission was transferred to the QOOH on 1 April 1908. He was promoted Captain (Territorial Commission) on 6 May 1909.

Thanks to his pre-war experience and willingness to undergo training, Valentine was, when war broke out, not only the best-turned-out officer in his Regiment, but also a very capable soldier. He was mobilized with the rest of the Regiment at Oxford on 4 August 1914 as part of the 2nd South Midland Mounted Brigade in the 1st Mounted Division. After about four weeks training in England, on 22 September 1914 he and Philip disembarked at Dunkirk with their Regiment – comprising 26 officers and c.525 other ranks (ORs) – the first Territorial Force unit to see active service. Fleming was the second-in-command of his Regiment’s ‘C’ Squadron, and the Regiment’s Adjutant was the slightly younger Guy Bonham-Carter, with whom he had overlapped at Magdalen from 1902 to 1904. Finally, Adrian Wentworth Keith-Falconer (1888–1959) also landed with the QOOH on the above date: another brother officer who managed to survive the war, wrote the regimental history, and penned what is probably Fleming’s most fulsome obituary.

The Regiment stayed at Dunkirk until 29 September 1914, when it marched 23 miles south-westwards to Hazebrouck, where it trained in infantry tactics. It then patrolled in the area of Nieppe/Strazeele and Bailleul/Berthen, i.e. along the Franco-Belgian border, until 6 October, when it retired to Bergues, seven miles south-east of Dunkirk, where it spent two nights in billets. On 8 October it marched to Malo-les-Bains, a suburb of Dunkirk, where it did further training until 15 October. On 17 October it was billeted in the infantry barracks at St-Omer and did more training in this general area until 30 October. During this period, Fleming was one of the two officers in the Regiment who preferred to live in tents, like their men, rather than in hotels, like their brother officers.). On 9 October 1914, the Division had become part of the two-Division (later three-Division) Cavalry Corps, commanded by Lieutenant-General Edmund Allenby (1861–1936), who is now best remembered for the part he played in the war against the Turks in Palestine. From 31 October until 11 November 1914 the QOOH was part of the 2nd Cavalry Brigade in the 1st Cavalry Division (formed on 13 September 1914). On 1 December 1914 Fleming’s captaincy was upgraded from being a Territorial to a Regular commission (with effect from 19 August 1914: London Gazette, no. 28,873, 18 August 1914, p. 6,506); his promotion to Major (Territorial Commission) soon followed (with effect from 2 November 1914: LG, no. 28,991, p. 10,150). About this time, Fleming was given command of ‘C’ Squadron, with Philip as his second-in-command.

Although the first Battle of Ypres began on 19 October and ended on 22 November 1914, the serious fighting for control of the ridge linking Wytschaete and Messines began on 21 October, when the Germans began their attempt to break through the British front line and into the flatlands beyond, and advance south-westwards in order to capture the major Channel ports, notably Calais and Boulogne. The British Expeditionary Force responded by trying to push further north-eastwards into Belgium and outflank the advancing Germans. The crux of the Battle came about at first light on 30 October, when the German artillery began to bombard the British positions for an hour and then advanced towards Ypres along the Menin road. Then, at about 16.00 hours, they finally broke through to the strategically important crossroads at Gheluvelt (Geluveld), about four miles due east of Ypres. Earlier that day the QOOH had been ordered to saddle up in the pouring rain and march the c.21 miles south-eastwards to Nieuwkerke (Neuve-Église), just over the border in Belgium.

The QOOH arrived at Nieuwkerke at 06.45 hours on 31 October and its Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Dugdale (1869–1941; later CMG, DSO), reported as ordered to Major-General Sir Henry de Beauvoir de Lisle (1864–1955). De Lisle, who had taken over from General Allenby as the General Officer Commanding the 1st Cavalry Division on 12 October, then ordered the Regiment to move to the small town of Messines (Mesen) (1,400 inhabitants), some two miles east of Wulverghem and five miles south of Ypres. When it arrived here at about 08.30 hours, it became part of the 1st Cavalry Division, which had been tasked by General Haig with the defence of Messines, whose importance throughout the war lay in its commanding position. Rising c.150 feet above the surrounding countryside, the town and the ridge linking it with Wytschaete formed a natural hindrance to any body of troops that wished to pass south of Ypres from east to west.

The QOOH began by riding to the bottom of the hill that was surmounted by Messines, then dismounted and began to dig a long line of Reserve trenches. But it was very soon ordered forward to the front-line trenches, and according to an unfinished letter that Fleming wrote to his family a few days later, probably on 5 November 1914:

We had to throw down our tools, leave greatcoats and everything and start off to take a line of advanced trenches which were supposed to have been dug as the troops on our left had begun to fall back. Off we went[,] each squadron on its own front extended and in about 300 yards we began to come under the German shell fire, not very heavy but very frightening. However[,] the men stuck it very well when they found they were not hit, and we went on to find when we got to the crest of the hill that only about enough trench had been dug for one squadron, so we disposed ourselves as well as we could behind ditches, trees, etc. and lay there firing occasional shots at distant German infantry. Meanwhile the village on our left [possibly Blauweroorhoek] was burning like mad and wounded men kept coming back saying the troops on our left were being driven back, so it was anxious, especially as about midday our area was very heavily shelled for about four hours. But we found it was all right and were very lucky only to have four men wounded [the Regiment’s first casualties]. There we stayed until 11.30 p.m. [on 31 October 1914]. They looked like attacking at dusk but did not. At 11.30 we were relieved by some infantry, marched about three miles back, and had just started to prepare food in a barn, when out we had to go again and relieve some other cavalry who had been holding a barricade in M[essines]. This was very exciting, the whole place burning like a torch, and the Germans brought a little gun up under the smoke with which they fired at the barricade to try and set it alight. However the street was too straight and whenever the smoke lifted[,] our maxim sorted them up [sic] and they did not try our left flank which was the weak one. Then[,] at 5.30 a.m. [on 1 November 1914] we were relieved in our turn and marched back to N[euve] É[glise] very weary and famished: two nights and one whole day very hard at work, no sleep, very cold at night (no time to get out and put on coats and think things). Very cold and very hungry [we] arrived at N[euve] É[glise]: about 7 a.m. [on 1 November] fires just started, everyone waiting for tea when up galloped de L[isle. He told us that] the Germans had got through the left [flank of the British line] just an hour after we left. Out we had to turn leaving everything in the road and do a long advance, part of it under rifle (not shell) fire and then fall back to a line of trenches the digging of which our advance had covered. The Germans did not come on with the attack but started very heavy shell fire which they kept up till dark.

The Regimental War Diary confirms all this, and at 07.00 hours on 1 November the two squadrons that had previously been manning the barricades at Messines set off north-eastwards along what is now the N134 from Wulverghem for a couple of miles towards the Wytschaete–Messines Ridge, where the Germans were reported to have broken through the British line. But when the reconnoitring party arrived at the Steenebeek, a brook which crosses the N134 just before Messines Hill begins to rise up steeply from the countryside, they heard that the British Cavalry on their right – probably the 5th (Princess Charlotte of Wales’s) Dragoon Guards – had received orders to retire from the hill-top town. So the QOOH tried to support them by means of long-range rifle fire directed at the enemy troops who they could see coming over the ridge. But when they tried to retire themselves, they came under rifle and machine-gun fire that killed Acting Major Brian Charles Baskerville Molloy (1876–1914) and wounded one OR. For the rest of the day the two squadrons stayed in their trenches along the Wulverghem–Wytschaete road (N365) until they were relieved at about 20.00 hours and were able to return to their billets in Wulverghem. Valentine Fleming’s unfinished letter picks up the narrative at precisely this point:

At dark [on 1 November] we were able to crawl back by reliefs out of the trenches and get some bread and bully beef, and at midnight were relieved and got three hours sleep exactly and some hot tea and coffee. Then off again and spent the next morning [2 November 1914] digging a new line of Reserve trenches [to the east of Lindenhoek, just south of Mount Kemmel and about nine miles south-west of Ypres]. Just as we had finished these (5ft. deep[,] 2ft. 6 in. wide, traverses etc. etc., and very hard work) off we had to march again to relieve some Regulars in the advanced trenches [i.e. the front line,]. We were there all night [2/3 November 1914]; between the 9th [Queen’s Royal] Lancers and the 4th [Royal Irish] Dragoon Guards – no sleep of course) and all next day [3 November 1914]. That next day was very hot, the most terrific shell fire. The troops on our left had a vile time and we had to support them in the afternoon [at the crossroads on the Wulverghem–Wytschaete road] as well as look after ourselves and then at night [3/4 November 1914] occupy their trenches till reliefs came – which they did at 11.30 [3 November 1914]; and at 2.30 a.m. yesterday morning [4 November 1914] we got to sleep on the floor of a cottage [one OR killed in actionand one OR wounded]. Woke up at 10 [on 4 November 1914], had a huge meal, and then moved into three farms where we had last night [4/5 November 1914] and today [5 November 1914] to rest, and did we sleep and eat last night and today? – I don’t think.

So when, during the early evening of 5 November 1914, the extremely fierce fighting of the previous six days came to an end, the Germans, at considerable cost, were in possession of Wytschaete, Messines and the ridge that joined them, and held a front line that extended for about five-and-a-half miles south-westwards from Hill 60 in the north to Spanbroekmolen in the south. But, as Cave and Sheldon make it clear, these places had not originally been their final objective, but simply an intermediate part of their strategy to break through south of Ypres in the direction of the Channel ports (p. 119). Moreover, despite Valentine Fleming’s graphic letters, the QOOH had been used mainly as a Reserve unit during the fighting and general withdrawal south-westwards, and had not suffered losses that were comparable to those of other British and French battalions and regiments. But the Germans had also taken very heavy losses and were nearly out of ammunition, two factors that helped the front line to stabilize. Nevertheless, the Germans held the newly acquired high ground until 7 June 1917, when, at 03.10 hrs, they were blown off the ridge by the detonation over 20 seconds of 19 huge mines containing 454 tonnes of ammonal and gun cotton, probably the largest man-made explosion before the advent of nuclear weapons, which killed c.10,000 Germans.

By 6 November 1914, the QOOH was secure in its new billets in farms between Dranouter (still in Belgium) and Bailleul (just in France), and could now rest. But these were by no means ideal, and one of Fleming’s brother officers who survived the war described them as follows:

Our new billets were, I think, the worst we ever had. The farms were small and filthy beyond words, and the inhabitants equally disagreeable. To add to our discomforts the weather, which hitherto, though cold at night, had been generally fine and sunny, now took a turn for the worse, and soon settled down to rain almost incessantly for weeks. The horses, picketed out in the field, were over their fetlocks in mud; the men, once wet – and they had to go out in the rain at least three times a day to water and feed – never got properly dry, and even the officers were none too comfortable. For example, in ‘D’ Squadron the officers ate and washed and slept in one small dirty brick-floored room, with a fireplace, but no possibility of lighting a fire because the chimney had been bricked in. Next door, in the kitchen, ten sergeants, four officers’ servants, the sergeants’ cook, and a number of exceedingly dirty and unpleasant inhabitants were herded together while the servants struggled with the inhabitants for a place on the fire to cook. And of course everybody was smoking, and the windows [were] all shut to keep out the wind and rain. The atmosphere may be imagined, but anyway it was warm.

Fleming continued his unfinished letter of about 5 November 1914 by commenting on his recent experience of warfare:

Well, it was an introduction to war a good deal more abrupt and arduous than we had quite bargained for. The idea was that we should find gallopers and orderlies for the various generals and act as reserves etc., but the situation [on] the night we came up was so anxious and they had lost so heavily [that] they had to use us properly. I think we may fairly claim to have done well. De Lisle congratulated the Colonel on the behaviour of the regiment [sic] and our Brigadier (2nd Cavalry Brigade) Molyneux was really quite effusive, and all the regular soldiers said they never thought that yeomanry would have stood the shell fire, which during the last three days is said to have been the heaviest of the whole war. The Kaiser himself was behind the Germans at this point in the line (M[essines]) [he was watching the events of 1/2 November]. They knew the line was thin and if we had got out and wobbled when we began to feel it really badly it would have been very serious because there were no, or practically no, supports at that particular moment and place. But we were extraordinarily lucky to lose so few men. Poor Brian [Molloy] and two men killed, seven wounded, and half a dozen knocked up from hunger, fatigue, etc. Poor Brian – I am sorry. We had all got so fond of him and he was a very brave creature.

 

If we had lost a lot of men the first day[,] it would have made a lot of difference, but when they found [that] these huge shells fell so often and hit so few[,] they got steadied and stuck it out very well. It is impossible to describe the din and destruction that these shells make, no person could find words to do it. It’s the moral effect rather than the actual, because one shrapnel shell which is filled with bullets might do a lot of harm one hundred yards from its fall, but these “Hairy Marys” as they are politely dubbed, though if they hit they of course completely eradicate, may fall within two yards of a man lying down and only frighten him, but the holes they make and the columns of earth and stone they send up and the ear-splitting crashes of the things are very shaking. It’s very cold at night in the trenches, especially if it’s wet, and oh so sleepy. I personally cannot sleep until anything that’s going on is over; some can lie down and sleep anywhere for half an hour, but not me. I am afraid [we suffered] very heavy losses the last week. One of the most pathetic things in the actual battle area is the wretched animals. All the farms are either shelled to atoms or abandoned, the fences broken, cows, horses, pigs, dogs, etc. straying everywhere, so wretched and not knowing what to do. I picked up a kitten which came out of a burning barn at M[essines] the night we were at the barricade and took it into N[euve] É[glise] but in the night it went away. A goat came running up and down the line of our trenches bleating one night – It was [a] very clear moon and the Germans started sniping it, so we pulled it by the leg into the trench and milked it. I am clean and replete today but [letter breaks off].

The QOOH spent 6/7 November in the trenches between Wulverghem and Wytschaete, from 14.30 hours onwards on the following day in billets north-west of Bailleul, and 9 November in Reserve on the Dranouter–Neuve-Ểglise road. On 10 November, the QOOH’s no. 1 Squadron, together with men from the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards, and two other troops of the QOOH plus elements of the 9th (Queen’s Royal) Lancers, were in the trenches at Wulverghem, about half-a-mile west of the Steenebeek brook. Here Fleming wrote a long and remarkable letter to his friend Winston Churchill in which he described the “first week’s serious fighting” in a manner that may remind the modern reader of a huge Expressionist canvas by Otto Dix (1891–1969).

It begins: “Well [–] you will have heard of our first week’s serious fighting. Let me give you some general impressions of this outstanding conflict:–”

1. First and most impressive the absolutely indescribable ravages of modern artillery fire, not only upon all men, animals and buildings within its zone, but upon the very face of nature itself. Imagine a broad belt, ten miles or so in width, stretching from the Channel to the German frontier near Basle, which is positively littered with the bodies of men and scarified with their rude graves; in which farms, villages, and cottages are shapeless heaps of blackened masonry; in which fields, roads and trees are pitted and torn and twisted by shells and disfigured by dead horses, cattle, sheep and goats, scattered in every attitude of repulsive distortion and dismemberment. Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of wounded men, by the piteous calls of animals of all sorts, abandoned, starved, perhaps wounded. Along this terrain of death stretch more or less parallel to each other lines and lines of trenches, some 200, some 1,000 yards apart, hardly visible except to the aeroplanes which continually hover over them [–] menacing and uncanny harbingers of fresh showers of destruction. In these trenches crowd lines of men, in brown or grey or blue, coated with mud, unshaven, hollow-eyed with the continual strain[,] unable to reply to the everlasting rain of shells hurled at them from 3, 4, 5 or more miles away and positively welcoming an infantry attack from one side or the other as a chance of meeting and matching themselves against humanassailants and not against invisible, irresistible machines, the outcome of an ingenuity which even you and I would be in agreement in considering unproductive from every point of view. Behind these trenches, a long way behind, come the guns hidden in hedgerows and copses, dug into emplacements, concealed in every imaginable way from the aeroplanes which give their range; behind them again come the reserves and supports and masses of cavalry, or at least their horses, for all the English cavalry are in the trenches; behind them again the forward supply and ammunition depots; next the Headquarters and last the big base, in our case on the coast.

2. Next to the destructiveness of the thing, what most amazes me is the number of non-combatants required to transport, to supply, to connect generally[,] to provide and equip the comparatively small fighting line. Every road between the coast and the trenches hums with motor transport, every base is the centre of converging lines of supplies, every trench, every regimental, every brigade, every divisional, every army corps headquarters is connected and linked up with field telephones, motor bicyclists and motor cars. In fact far more men in uniform are seen behind than in the actual fighting line, and what is satisfactory is that the whole machine appears to work admirably. It is a very different problem to tackle from the South African War. Here[,] each battle is a prolonged bombardment of a series of carefully prepared positions; all the appliances of 20thcentury civilisation can be brought to work and the result is good.

It is wonderful to see the variety of uniforms and of faces; and to hear the babel [sic] of tongues at the big centres. In or on the way to the trenches people are either too tired or too frightened to talk, and all movements take place in the dark. One night last week, beautifully starlight [sic], I was riding up the reverse slope of a wooded hill round which were encamped the most extraordinary medley of troops you could imagine, French Cuirassiers with their glistening breastplates and lances, a detachment of the London Scottish, an English howitzer battery, a battalion of Sikhs, a squadron of African Spahis [light cavalry from French colonies in Saharan Africa ] with long robes and tartans, all sitting round their camp fires, chattering, singing, smoking, the very apotheosis of picturesque and theatrical warfare with their variety of uniforms, saddlery[,] equipment, and arms. Very striking it was to see the remnants of an English line battalion marching back from the trenches through these merry warriors, a limping column of bearded, muddy, torn figures slouching with fatigue, with wool[-]caps instead of helmets, sombre[-]looking in their khaki, but able to stand the cold, the strain, the awful losses, the inevitable inability to reply to the shell[-]fire, which is what other nations can’t do. It’s going to be a long long war in spite of the fact that on both sides every single man in it wants it stopped at once. [end of letter]

On 11 November, a grey foggy morning, the QOOH was relieved at daybreak and transferred from the 2nd to the 4th Cavalry Brigade and from the 1st to the 2nd Cavalry Division. It then returned to its billets north-west of Bailleul and spent 12–14 November in billets near the hamlet of La Becque, about seven miles south of Lille between the small towns of Avelin and Attiches, before being sent north-eastwards towards the Belgian front. From 15 to 17 November it was back in its former trenches in front of Wulverghem, where it suffered a few more casualties. The weather was terrible and Fleming’s brother officer who was cited above has left us another grim description:

The weather was perfectly foul, pouring rain and cold. We had to ride about 3½ miles at a walk; we then dismounted and marched another 3 miles to the trenches in an absolute downpour of rain. The men hated marching on foot, not being accustomed to it. The worst part about it was the weight one had to carry; full haversack and water-bottle, rifle and ammunition, waterproof sheet and blanket. Many of the officers also carried a rifle and ammunition, besides field-glasses and a revolver. On top of this everybody wore a heavy greatcoat or British warm, and very often a light Burberry or mackintosh over it. Later in the war British warms were issued to the men, but at this period and for long afterwards, they wore long heavy greatcoats, the lower part of which became caked with mud in the trenches, and the whole soaked through and through with rain, adding greatly to the weight. Although the head of the column generally moved at a foot’s pace, the rear troops usually had to march at four or five miles an hour, and often to double, in order to keep up, owing to the congested state of the roads and the difficulty of keeping close touch in the darkness. The result was that, whatever the weather, hot or cold, dry or wet, one almost invariably arrived at the trenches in what is coarsely, but exactly, described as a “muck sweat”.

Conditions in the trenches were even worse:

The trenches were inches deep in water and the sides a mass of thick, clammy slime, so that everything one touched – rifles, ammunition, food – was immediately covered with it. The trenches were so narrow that it was impossible to get along them; there was only one miserably inadequate communication trench, full of water, which led nowhere; there were no sanitary arrangements and no drainage. The men were not supposed to get out of their trench even at night, and as a matter of fact it was no easy matter to get out, climbing up the steep, slippery side in one’s full equipment. Above ground the muddy surface was equally slippery, and even in well-nailed boots it was impossible to keep one’s feet. So that troops relieving or being relieved slithered and fell in all directions, often into some ditch or shell hole full of water. […] We remained in these trenches seventy-two hours, unable to move a limb by day or by night without being shot at by snipers at close range, and desperately cold, with the temperature some 15 degrees below freezing-point all the time. Many of the men got frost-bitten, and in some cases lost one or more toes, while a few eventually died from gangrene setting in and poisoning the whole system. During all this time we had nothing but cold bully and biscuit to eat and ice-cold water to drink, except for a mouthful of rum.

The QOOH returned to billets at La Becque on 18 November 1914 and from 19 November until 19.00 hours on 22 November it relieved the French in the trenches in front of Kemmel, just to the east of Loker (Locre) in Belgium, where it lost one OR killed in action and three ORs wounded. By this time, Fleming had gained the reputation of being a brave and conscientious officer who took good care of his men, and an incident that occurred on the morning of 20 November shows why. A Trooper in his ‘C’ Squadron was badly wounded in the trenches, whereupon Fleming immediately went to him, had him bandaged up, and carried him to the dressing station with the help of a Sergeant even though it was daylight and they were in full view of the enemy. The weather was freezing cold, and had the man been left in the trench until it was dark, he might well have died of exposure.

At 19.00 hours on 22 November the QOOH was relieved by the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards and proceeded to billets at Noote Boom in northern France, just south-west of Bailleul, where it stayed in Reserve until the end of December 1914, when Fleming’s Regular captaincy was confirmed as a Regular captaincy. Although the Regiment was still in Reserve, it was also a good five miles well away from the front line, and the men spent their time constructing shelters for horses and carrying out whatever training was posted. A colleague later recalled that when in “Reserve”, harsh physical conditions were replaced by monotony, since there was practically no work to be done beyond the daily routine of stables and exercise from about 09.30 to 11.30 hours. So Fleming took up running and persuaded colleagues to do likewise, and he also showed himself to be an imaginative inventor of training schemes so that there was “a very fair variety of recreation, considering the circumstances”. The same officer also recalled that although the terrain was unsuitable for cavalry training, being 90 per cent plough-land with very few jumpable objects except dikes and ditches, a few jumps were constructed over which to train the horses. A couple of officers from other regiments brought back some harriers and beagles from England and started hunting hares, but although this supplied the British officers with some sport, the French Government disapproved of it so much that the British Commander-in-Chief was forced to forbid all forms of hunting and shooting. Polo matches were also organized, with the QOOH being the first regiment to play the game in France, albeit on very rough pastures and generally with only two players per side: nevertheless, the officers got a lot of fun out of it. The men – and some of the officers – played football, and such pastimes helped rather tedious days to pass pleasantly enough: “We were thankful to be left in peace for a time, and did not worry about the future, while we soon grew accustomed to our cramped billets and scarcely noticed the petty discomforts, thinking that any change would inevitably be for the worse.” On 29 November 1914 a replacement draft of three officers and 40 ORs arrived from England.

On 6 December 1914 Fleming wrote another long letter to a friend whom he knew as Randolfo and who, although an officer in another British regiment, it has not been possible to identify. Fleming had expected to meet up with him in Saint-Omer at the end of October and was “immensely disappointed” that the meeting could not take place: “But”, he wrote to his friend, “console yourself with the reflection that it may be bloody in Britain but it’s positively fucking in France.” He then continued with “a faithful account of what we have actually done” which to some extent overlaps with the material cited above:

Till Oct[ober] 30th our tour of the principal French watering places was only relieved by a really quite interesting contact with the Germans near the M[ont] des Cats; I can’t call it a battle as we didn’t discharge one single musket at them! And for the same reason it was hardly a rearguard action, but there was a lot of successful scouting and patrolling done and the three squadrons which had been covering a French detrainment – on a front of about 4 miles! – managed to retire and keep contact quite respectably on parallel roads all day. The G[erman]s were strong, a Brigade of Cavalry and two companies of cyclists, in advance of a Cavalry Division, and we were lucky to get out, as the French had had the R[ai]l[wa]y line blown up and were far too busy, (in fact they flatly refused!) to support us. I was lucky enough to have [had] an Officer’s Patrol the previous night and all that day, and really had some very pretty sport (though I was in a bloody funk and pump slipped at intervals of 10 minutes all day long) getting back through their advanced screen which at one moment had the impertinence to get between myself and the Regt. Then we hung about at Dunkirk and St. Omer for a fortnight (very dull, but we had 6 days field firing, at brown petrol tins etc., which was really useful.) The adjt. etc. put them out in various places, our scouts located them, and we advanced and attacked, ranges unknown of course, and on the sand (at Dunkirk) and light plough (at St. Omer) you could see the hits and correct your ranges if wrongly given. Then on October 30th at 4.30 p.m. raining like hell and v[ery] cold we were told to saddle up and move at 6, we got off at 6.30, marched all night to Neuve Eglise, 35 miles, had a hurried breakfast and were put at 8.30 a.m. [on] 31 Oct. to dig a line of reserve trenches behind Messines. (They produced spades, picks etc. from somewhere.) Then [Major-General] De Lisle appeared and told us to advance up the hill and occupy a line of trenches on the right of Messines. This was disagreeable as projectiles of every variety were exploding with a disquieting regularity all over the ground of our advance. We also had to leave our coats and tools. Off we went, over some very holding plough [= heavy plough-land], 3 squadrons in [a] succession of rushes[,] in extended lines, the regularity of which was soon disturbed by the wire! (Never more without nippers on the Sam Brown[e] belt!) Luckily we had no[-]one hit – I can’t think why – which put some heart into the men. On arriving at the indicated position we found only [enough] trenches for one squadron, the other two lay about in the open scratching themselves in with Bayonets [sic]. We had 4 or 5 men wounded, and lay there, getting occasional blows off at [the] G[ermans] at about 800 yards, under a really very heavy fire, only luckily all the shrapnel burst just behind us, and the B[loody] Marys [the 18th (Queen Mary’s Own) Hussars who were brigaded with Fleming’s Regiment in the 2nd Cavalry Brigade] just in front, so though horribly frightened, we weren’t hurt. There we stopped (v[ery] hungry) till 11 p.m. We couldn’t move about to get food as they had 2 Maxims closing on our line of retirement pretty continuously till dark. When relieved we were given 1 h[ou]r’s rest by squadrons and then put on a barricade in Messines with the 4th [Royal Irish] D[ragoon] G[uards] and the 18th Hcb [the 18th (Queen Mary’s Own) Hussars]. This was frightening, all the houses were burning, the G[ermans] were only about 500 yards away, and had a gun with which they kept blowing shrapnel at the Barricade, but it was a stout obstacle.

They kept pooping away at our squadrons on the left of the Barricade with rifles, and coming v[ery] close under the smoke, so we began to wonder how to fix the bloody bayonets with which we had been issued 2 days previously!! However we were relieved at 4.30 a.m. and marched back about 2 miles [to Wulverghem] to get breakfast, v[ery] hungry and sleepy. Just as the dinners were boiling[,] De Lisle appeared, told us that the line had been broken [by a strong force of Germans from two Bavarian Divisions at about 02.00 hours] between the Carbs [the 6th Dragoon Guards were known as “The Carabiniers”] and the London Scottish and that we must counter[-]attack! This bloody prospect almost made us sick, however[,] still with empty bellies we began plodding up the usual wire-enclosed ploughed fields on the left of Messines, being pooped at by very high and wild rifle fire, till we found the troops on our left halted and those on our right coming back out of Messines, and the whole line fell back about ½ a mile, under v[ery] heavy rifle and maxim fire. Poor Brian Molloy was killed [1 November 1914] and 2 or 3 more men wounded. The rest of that day we spent 2 Squadrons in the advance, 1 in the support trenches, getting a perfectly filthy black, 1 man killed, 2 wounded. We were extraordinarily lucky, the regt. on our left had 1 Squadron practically wiped out and the 9th [(Queen’s Royal)] Lancers on our right had a bad doing, and they kept missing us by really not more than 4 or 5 yards. We had several men buried and trenches blown in, but none (or only those 2) hit! It was a very trying day for the men, and they were d[amne]d hungry, cold and kept seeing wounded men come hopping back, bleeding and howling, and swearing the G[erman]s had broken through (which they v[ery] nearly did!)[.] In the evening our squadron crawled up and took over the trench of the 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards Squadron which had been so knocked about. The G[ermans] were only about 200 yards away and kept sniping and we went into the trench which was[,] as you may imagine[,] in a pretty bloody condition! full of corpses etc. We were relieved from there [at] 1 a.m., slept and ate till 4.30 a.m.[,] then back into some fresh trenches all that day and till next morning. Not so much shelling but they made a sort of half-hearted attack during the night, never came closer than 150 yards and only small parties. Then we went back to billets, not sorry to either, and since then we have been in and out of the trenches, usually at 48 hours intervals, never so badly shot at as the first day, but always v[ery] wet and cold. Our last spell was 3 days and three nights. Heavy snow the first night and never less than 10 degrees of frost, but better than the wet, though we had a good many people laid up with frostbite. Since Nov[ember] 22 all the cavalry have been in billets, and officers having 3 days leave. It’s a filthy district this, huge flat ploughs, very relaxing, and the mud!! No possibility of getting exercise and we are all getting as fat as butter. The men have realised the fact that it’s safer to sit in a trench than to get out of it and run away, and really thanks to our extraordinary luck the first 2 days they don’t mind the “grosses pieces” [large-calibre shells] much, and they keep very cheerful, but we have not yet had to stand a determined bayonet attack nor to deliver one! So we must not be too sure either of them or ourselves!! It’s deadly dull sitting in the trenches and it’s all my eye [and Betty Martin] about their comfort, at least any that we have been in have been perfectly loathsome, espec[ially] the ones dug by the French, and all the cavalry agree – that the patrolling work they do was only a shade better, simply bumping along roads until you get shot at out of a house, you can’t get off the roads because of the wire and the dykes and you can’t search all the farms and cottages because there are too many of them! So it’s a case of buggering along and trusting to luck. Bring an extra big haversack for French food, also a pair of mackintosh trousers[,] a souwester hat and a pair of Cording’s leather knee waders. I find my stalking telescope a great blessing, you can find snipers etc. with it twice as well as with binoculars.

Well old lad, don’t hurry to come out, you can have my share of the glory in exchange for 1 Turkish Bath, 1 game of Squash, 1 30 minutes from Poodle to Twyford stick heap and 1 good slosh after an old Jack Puss [a male hare] with my Bassetts [hounds].

Write to me again in exchange for this epistle. We are brigaded with the 3rd HB and the Carbs. and (in confidence) they are not so bloody much better than a good yeoboy regt. for all [that] they are Regular Cavalry!

From 1 to 12 January 1915, the QOOH rested near Noote Boom, after which it moved further away from the front line again and spent from 13 to 30 January in billets near Roquetoire, seven miles south-west of St-Omer. On 31 January 1915 it moved further north, to billets between Le Doulieu and Steenwerck, a few miles south-west and south-east of Bailleul respectively. On 12 February it was taken by London buses to relieve the 1/1st North Somerset Yeomanry (see E.L. Gibbs), who were occupying trenches east of Ypres between the 6th Dragoon Guards (Carabiniers) and the 3rd (King’s Own) Hussars, and although it was still in the same trenches from 14 to 18 February, it suffered no casualties as the front was relatively quiet. From 18 February to 22 April 1915, a period during which the Cavalry Corps was broken up, the QOOH occupied billets that were well away from the line and spent most of its time training: first in Roquetoire and Warne, about seven miles south-east of St-Omer (26 February to 9 March); then in Bleu (9–14 March); and finally, in Pradelles, ten miles to the east and just to the far side of Hazebrouck.

Valentine Fleming wrote letters to his father fairly frequently, and one of these letters, which dealt with events between 23 April and 3 May 1915, was carefully censored, excerpted, and used to create a long feature article that appeared on 19 June 1915 in The Morning Post under the headline “Letters from the Front: Round about Ypres: Some Days with a Yeomanry Officer”. Much of what we know about the QOOH’s part in Second Ypres derives from that article and from a typed checklist of the contents that has survived in Fleming’s papers.

The Second Battle of Ypres began on 22 April and ended on 25 May 1915. At 10.00 hours on 23 April 1915, the second day of the battle and the day when the Germans launched a major counter-attack in the northern part of the Ypres Salient (see A.P.D. Birchall), Fleming’s Regiment was “turned out of billets in a great hurry”, rode northwards for the rest of the day and reached a farm at about midnight, where they slept in a barn until 04.00 hours on 24 April. According to the newspaper article:

 we were quietly pursuing our ordinary duties […], when a motor-cyclist dashed up with the order to concentrate at once. The horses were out at exercise; one troop was doing bomb-throwing [grenade-throwing] and another map reading. Two of the servants had gone to buy vegetables, &c., and we had some men down with measles, so at once was only a figure of speech. However, we got off in time, only to wait three hours in a very cold, windy, dusty corner while the 3rd and 5th Brigades passed with their guns, limbers, and &c. There were all sorts of rumours about the Germans having broken through, and as we could hear some gunning there was a certain amount of excitement. We marched very slowly and halted by the roadside from 8.30–11.30 p.m. We were lucky in halting by a farm and with a good hedge to sit under. I ate three raw eggs, and slept from 12–4 a.m. in a farm which had just been evacuated by the cavalry, who were on the road in front of us. [It was] just light when we started next morning, and fine, but very cold and windy. Marched to [Vlamertinghe, two-and-a-half miles west of Ypres], which we reached about mid-day [on Saturday 24 April]. Picketed the horses in a very wet field [just north of the village]. (I moved the squadron under a dry hedge in the evening.) Drew rations at about two o’clock and boiled some tea. A lot of gunning to be heard and a lot of wounded coming in.

After a very wet and uncomfortable night, the men got up at 04.30 hours on Sunday 25 April, and marched on foot to dig a line of trenches to support some Zouaves (French colonial cavalry from Saharan Africa). The work was done without incident and the Regiment returned to its horses, rode until 01.00 hours on Monday 26 April, left the horses, marched back five miles to Vlamertinghe, and after arriving there at 06.30 hours, finally got to bed “in a very dirty stable” at 07.00 hours.

After 24 hours’ rest, the Germans began shelling Vlamertinghe during the afternoon of Tuesday 27 April. The shelling worsened and many of the shells began to fall near the hospital, it was decided to ask the QOOH for volunteers to help carry wounded Canadians – some of whom had almost certainly served under Birchall during the Battle of Pilckem Ridge in which he was killed in action on 23 April – to a place of safety. The entire Regiment volunteered and helped the Royal Army Medical Corps personnel to transport 359 stretcher cases and to the ambulances that were waiting for them in a field one-and-half miles away. The gesture cost the QOOH their Medical Officer (wounded), plus two ORs killed in action and four ORs wounded. The troopers then walked back to their horses and stayed with them for 30 minutes before marching ten miles with the rest of the Division to the trenches north of Potijze and between Potijze and Wieltje, north-eastern suburbs of Ypres, where they arrived at 05.15 hours on Wednesday 28 April. Fleming noted “dug in as best we could, shelled a little[,] seven men wounded, six in my Squadron, had a good sleep in a dug-out [on] Tuesday night”. Although it is written from the perspective of Fleming, its narrator, the article in The Morning Post dealt with the situation more dramatically and recorded that the Germans “were dropping shells all round the road, luckily none on it. A lot of wounded coming back and a lot of dead men and horses on the road. Lovely mild spring night; heard a nightingale”. On Thursday 29 April Fleming’s notes record that the Regiment “slept and dug all day, little shelling”, and on Friday 30 April they consist of the terse “Dug and slept”. But he then added: “A shell burst on top of my dug-out not 30 seconds after I had got out of it, blew my fur coat and both my woollies to fragments, broke my pipe and my stick Etc. but not a splinter in my fat form”. This hair-raising experience was translated into the printed version as follows and sauced with a certain devil-may-care humour to make it more palatable for the readers at home:

Occupied some reserve trenches. I slept well in a nice dug-out which I started to build up early in the morning; had just got it nice and splinter-proof when they started shelling the trench; sat down in the dug-out, happened to think it was a little short, got up to get into the trenches, heard a shell coming, jumped into the trenches, and the shell, [a] “Black Maria” [a 35lb high-explosive shell that was fired from the German 105mm. howitzer and emitted a black column of smoke on impact], got my dug-out in the middle and blew it to fragments. My sheepskin coat [was] blown 50 feet into the air and torn to bits, both woollies wiped out, pipe broken, glass, revolver, &c. blown into the trench but not broken. However, better them than me!

As it was very misty at dawn on Friday 30 April 1915 and there was no shelling, the officers of Fleming’s Regiment took the opportunity to wash in a handy pond. The article in The Morning Post then reported that “just as we had finished[,] a shell fell in the middle of us. Nobody touched but [name omitted], who got a graze on the face.” But Fleming’s notes make it clear that two of his colleagues – Gerald Valerian Wellesley (1885–1933) and John E. Kingscote (1885–1934) – were grazed by shell splinters and the printed description of the near miss softens the shock by concluding Fleming’s letter with the heartening observation “You would have laughed to see me jump into the trench stark naked except for my boots! However, it was only a happening shot, so I was able to complete my toilet in peace.” Saturday 1 May 1915 was another quiet day – “not much shelling in our area” – and there were few casualties:

[name omitted] was hit in the back by a big splinter and knocked out, but not really hurt, and one man was hit on the head by a splinter. The General got a few round his dug-out. The French made an attack on our left, and made a little ground; a lot of shelling of roads and woods during the night. Our ration party were buried by a big shell – only casualty one man very sick. The limbers had two horses and one man wounded coming up with the rations.

The Regiment was still in the same defensive positions when at 17.30 hours on Sunday 2 May 1915 the Germans attacked them with heavy rifle fire, machine-gun fire, a “terrific bombardment – the heaviest I have seen during the war”, and gas – an aspect of this particular attack that is not always mentioned in accounts of Second Ypres. According to QOOH’s War Diary: “at the same time a thick haze was perceived coming over the ridge [southwards from Mousetrap Farm] towards our trenches, which proved to be asphyxiating gas used by the Germans”. The piece in The Morning Post confirms this and describes the gas attack as follows:

Suddenly […] a great cloud of green gas [chlorine ] appeared rolling along. Luckily we only got the fringe of it, but it made us cough and spit like anything. It missed the front line trenches, but got two infantry battalions in the support line. Some were choked on the spot; the rest came back through us. It was an awful sight; they were absolutely helpless, quite off their heads, torn with coughing, spitting blood, and being sick; officers just as bad as men. The [name omitted] and [name omitted] were ordered up to take their places. They lost about 60 men and four officers from the shell fire, which continued terrific [sic] till dusk. They dropped all round us, over the trenches, between them, all round them, but by an extraordinary piece of luck never in them. The shelling stopped at dark, so the situation was all right. It was the most appalling, inhuman, savage sight I have ever seen.

Although the German attack was repulsed by 19.30 hours, their use of gas despite the fact that they had signed up to the Hague Convention of 1907 had clearly shocked Fleming deeply and the piece in The Morning Post continues as follows:

Up to now I have not really felt bitter against the Germans, but now I cannot find words to express my loathing of a nation who could agree with all civilised nations in convention to exclude this revolting inhumanity from warfare and now resort to it. All war is awful with modern guns and explosives, but, after all, it is one gun and one shell and one man against another; it’s all part of the game, even though it’s a bloody game. But this is different, and I only wish some German–American sympathisers had been there to see their fellow-creatures being tortured, and choked and twisted and strangled by those cursed dirty tricks. It makes me sick. We were relieved at 1.30 a.m., marched back to our horses, got there at 8.30 [a.m.] very tired, rode 15 miles, and got here at 8 p.m. where we have been since, and very glad to get our clothes off and [have] a good sleep. I really can say “Gott strafe Deutschland” [“May God punish Germany”] with some vigour now.

Fleming is here citing the famous poem in German that was entitled ‘Hassgesang gegen England’ (‘Song of Hate against England’) and written in 1914 by the German–Jewish poet Ernst Lissauer (1882–1937); it included the oft-quoted line “Gott strafe England” (“May God punish England”). Fleming is reciprocating the sentiment.

On the day after the gas attack, the QOOH were pulled out of the front line, and from 3 to 13 May the men rested and trained near Houtkerque, c.12 miles to the west just over the border with France. But on 14 May it was put on the alert once more and sent back to its old trenches at Potijze via Vlamertinghe and Ypres. By now, however, these trenches were in a very bad state of repair because of rain and shells, and dangerous, even at night, because of rifles that could be fired from fixed points at fixed targets. But it was very accurate night-time sniping that mortally wounded G. Bonham-Carter, still the Regiment’s Adjutant, at 03.00 hours on 15 May 1915 when he was returning to the front line via the support trench. He died of his wound later in the day in No. 2 Field Hospital (Casualty Clearing Station) at Bailleul.

The Regiment stayed in the trenches at Potijze until 21 May, but although they were relatively quiet, they continued to be “in an awful state”. It then rested for four days in huts near Vlamertinghe, and on 25 May 1915, the final day of Second Ypres, it began a five-day stint holding a line without trenches in the north-east corner of Zouave Wood – i.e. on the southern side of the Ypres–Menin Road (the N8), just after the little village of Hooge and just before the kink east-south-eastwards in the road itself (mentioned in dispatches: London Gazette, no. 29,200, 18 June 1915, p. 5,983). The next five days were uneventful, too, and on 30 May 1915 Fleming’s Regiment moved back to billets at Vlamertinghe. It then spent the next 14 months either resting in billets, or training, or digging trenches, or improving fortifications. It worked, for example, in or around Hazebrouck at Wallon Cappel, two miles to the west, or in the Bois des Huit Rues, two miles to the south-west, or at Buysscheure, four miles north-east of St-Omer, or at Le Doulieu, the tip of a triangle that was formed with Merville and Estaires. All of these locations were quiet places in northern France and well away from the fighting in the Ypres Salient itself.

It was during this period of inactivity, on 3 February and 15 March 1916 respectively, that Fleming became second-in-command of the Regiment and J.A.P. Whinney joined it, having been commissioned Second Lieutenant six months previously – on 28 September 1915. Because of its location away from the front, the QOOH took no part in the Battle of Loos (25 September–8 October 1915) and very little part in the Battle of the Somme (1 July–18 November 1916). After his arrival, Whinney helped to break the monotony of the QOOH’s existence by horse-riding and improving the men’s horsemanship. He also spent a considerable amount of time writing frequent letters to his whole family – or to individual members of his family – back in England. Although Whinney knew and respected Fleming, these letters mention him only rarely – partly because of the exigencies of “very strict” censorship, and partly because their three main purposes were (1) to reassure the recipients in England about the writer’s safety and  morale, (2) to request items that would improve his physical situation in the inhospitable surroundings of war-torn France, and (3) to enable Whinney to escape imaginatively for a while into a remembered world that was a pleasanter, more hospitable, and less dangerous world than the one he was forced to inhabit in France. So they are cited here to cast light on the situation and doings of the QOOH since they give us, by implication, at least some idea of the circumstances in which Fleming also found himself.

For instance, in his letter to his mother of Sunday 2 April 1916, Whinney reported that he had been out riding from 7.20 [to] 8.20, [eaten] breakfast at 8.30, [had] another ride 9.00 [to] 10.30”, and must now go and “arrange with the Major [Valentine Fleming], who speaks French without any teeth, about a field to put up some jumps for the Troop of which I am [the] supernumerary officer.” But by 21 April 1916 (Good Friday), the Regiment had moved elsewhere for nearly two weeks of manoeuvres during which, much to Whinney’s disapproval, they were allowed to ride over crops. According to Whinney, the training, which lasted until 2 May 1916, consisted in

pursuing a beaten and demoralised foe, under the very able guidance of General [Thomas Tait] Pitman [1868–1941; GOC 4th Cavalry Brigade 1915–16] who is practically the best exponent of cavalry warfare out here. […] The actual “gap” – as the breaking of the German lines is always called – promises to be fairly exciting if it is anything like its dress rehearsals.

On 1 June 1916 Whinney wrote to his mother once more to reassure her that he and his comrades were

really having a most enjoyable time and it does not seem much like war, but still we’re all quite content with this version of it. All the men sleep in dwellings called “cabouches” out in a field – they are made of ground sheets and very airy, though much healthier than the barns which they reckoned was [sic] “reg’lar lousey”. […] We are having gorgeous weather here and everything is rather like a picnic; if I come home soon I’m afraid I shall be rather an uninteresting sort of warrior with none of the usual blood and thunder stories “out there”.

Eight days later Whinney wrote to his father that the Regiment had gone up to the trenches “for a short time” but that he had been left behind with  “173 horses & sixty men” and was “having a very busy time”, but was hoping to begin a spell of leave on 12 July. He also, for the first time, expressed an opinion in a letter about the war as a whole:

People here seem to think that the war will not last thro’ the winter as far as the Germans can help, but if that tub-thumping brute – Asquith – persists in his warrior-minded scheme to crush Prussianism entirely, he will get a nasty knock and that will shut him up. We [are] all fed up with war; both sides must be.

By 19 June 1916 the QOOH had returned to its base from the front and rumours began to circulate that an offensive over to the east was imminent since the Regiment had been ordered to ride all through the night for two nights – Tuesday/Wednesday 20/21 June and Wednesday/Thursday 21/22 June – when they passed through Hazebrouck, in a direction that “is anything but west”. So in a letter to his father of 23 June Whinney was able to say – confidently, but rather rashly perhaps – that “as there are plenty of people who go thro’ Hazebrouck every day, and the [front] line is within 20 miles of H[azebrouck], we are about 8 or 9 miles from the line, and there is plenty of noise”. On the morning of Sunday 25 June, Whinney penned a letter to his whole family:

We are here within seven miles of the firing line but nevertheless feeling very very safe and secure, our horses are in the fields and our men sleep out, but we officers have beds of doubtful softness and more doubtful cleanliness, but when one is tired one can sleep anywhere. As a matter of fact I could have slept in an orchard with a mule in it, but on interviewing the mule I decided he gave off a more filthy odour than the bed I was offered so I chose the latter. […] I am billeted on some most charitable people who stayed up [until my arrival] and messed me some coffee […]. The family consists of one old man who has only one tooth, and shouts at them when he talks, and talks Walloon [the dialect of French spoken on both sides of the Franco-Belgian border but mainly in Belgium] and is therefore very nearly unintelligible to me, but he is nevertheless very well meaning. He has one daughter who in turn has five others plus a husband and a son. This family lives in a house about half the size of nothing and makes more noise than anything I have [as] yet had the misfortune to hear.

Between Sunday 2 July and Tuesday 4 July 1916, the second and fourth days of the Battle of the Somme, Whinney completed a letter to his mother in which he had very little to say about the battle that was going on some six miles away except that “the whole affair gave one the impression of a firework display in the middle of about eight or nine thunder storms”, and on Monday 24 July 1916, after two failed attempts to write a letter to his parents, Whinney managed to let them “have some evidence of the fact that I am still alive”. By Thursday 3 August 1916 the QOOH was back in northern France and located near Morbecque, just to the south of Hazebrouck and 15 miles from the front, and by mid-August the weather there had become “absolutely boiling”, so that exercising the horses was restricted to two hours, from 06.00 hours until after 08.00 hours, after which there was nothing to do except see to the stables. On Wednesday 16 August Whinney wrote a cheery letter to his mother predicting that “Jerry” was “now on the downward track at last” and the Allies should be able “to fix the old man by the end of next summer”.  He also reported that for lack of anything better to do, his Regiment was occupying itself by bathing in a canal, organizing Company sports – during which “the Balaclava Melée and wrestling on horseback were hotly contested!”

By Sunday 20 August 1916 Whinney found himself a mere two-and- a-half miles from the front, where, as he told his mother, one

occasionally hears a “whizz – – – crump”, as the Boche lets his anger & his ammunition escape him in our direction or as, thank heaven, very much more often happens, the voice of a gun (British) speaks out (à la Northcliffe) […] followed by a screech and terminated in the far distance by a “wump”.

He then continued:

I have no doubt you are wondering how it is that I am within 2.5 miles of my brother when only yesterday I was more than fifteen miles away from him. Be patient while I unravel the workings of the Wonderful British Army Brain. We, the cavalry […] during the summer months are in the habit of leaving one man to 4 horses back behind the line somewhere and taking the rest of our men and a few officers up close behind the line to perform the sort of work that conscientious objectors are wont to perform, i.e. not exactly fighting but so to speak helping others to be able to fight, i.e. to be absolutely plain, no more prosaic than mending roads, or that sort of thing which I must not describe in greater detail. The officers have not very much to do except superintend and while off duty we go for walks; this morning, Sunday, I went […] up thro’ a wood towards the line and we saw the Boche line and our own line though we were far away but still enjoyed it immensely. On the way we went thro’ a village which is absolutely deserted & in ruins; I was awfully glad to have seen one and I will describe it in detail to you at I expect not too remote a  date, but I cannot [do so] here as the censorship is very strict. I have only been up here a day and I should think [that] perhaps we have fired close on two hundred shots and I have heard the Boches fire five. I fancy our attack below has rather made their stores look silly, coupled with [the Battle of] Verdun [fought mainly between the French and the Germans between 21 February and 18 December 1916]. Everybody up here is in much better spirits than those back in billets, where people get a bit grousy – in fact I have enjoyed myself here much more than I have since I have been in France. I am in a bell tent and very comfy and altogether feeling very pleased with life in general.

By Sunday 3 September 1916 Whinney had arrived “back with the horses” and immediately wrote to his parents that the QOOH “look top hole and everyone is in the best of spirits”. On Wednesday 27 September he wrote a letter to his family celebrating the fact that the following day was

the anniversary of the day when I started playing this game of soldiering [i.e. received his commission ]; in reviewing the situation and development during these twelve months, I should say [that] I have learned little of use, spent much – and taking one thing with another a soldier’s life is quite a happy one, but not the sort I want. […]  we are heartily sick of rain.

More importantly, in September 1916, as part of the overall reorganization of the British Expeditionary Force, the British Cavalry Corps was re-formed and grew in size from three to five Divisions, two of which, the 4th and 5th Divisions, were Indian. But even after the reorganization, the QOOH continued to remain out of the front line from 16 September 1916 to the end of February 1917. By this time, however, the General Staff had a better idea of why, in the context of a war of attrition, it should maintain a large body of cavalry, whose usefulness in the mud of the trenches was almost nil, except as mounted infantry. They were being trained to move rapidly across broad swathes of territory once the German line had been breached by infantry and tanks in preparation for their major task in the coming Spring Offensive of 1917. The QOOH worked assiduously across a wide area in the southern British Sector of the front  that stretched from the village of Vaulx, 16 miles north-east of Abbeville in the west,  through  Dernancourt in the centre, just south of Albert, to Savy in the east, four miles west of St-Quentin, where Fleming,  while commanding a Pioneer Battalion, dealt expeditiously with the explosion of a waggon-load of shells.

So on about Saturday 16 September 1916, the day after the British had used tanks for the first time, in the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, the QOOH returned to the front in order to familiarize itself with the contemporary conditions of battle. Shortly before 8 October 1916, as part of this familiarization process, a group from Whinney’s Regiment “went up among the dead men’” – i.e. visited a battlefield, possibly in the Ancre Heights near le Sars – where, as he wrote in a letter to Ernest Frederick, “the stink was more than I can describe in words which are for a wider circulation than an officers’ mess”. He then continued:

Unfortunately the Hun began to “crump” – which is an excellently onamatopaeic [sic] word as what one hears is a hellish whistling getting nearer and nearer and finally a crump, and the earth flies up and heaven help anyone within ten yards of where the fellow settles. The nearest one to me was twenty yards or rather less away but I managed to lie in a little shell hole and escaped everything except the falling earth; it was, however, rather a priceless experience but I am none the worse and it has merely given me quite an unmingled feeling of hatred for the Boche. There are lots of prisoner [of war] camps about here and the swine come out and work along the roads etc. They are a filthy looking lot of beggars, lousey [sic] to a certainty and one rather wonders whether they stink more dead than alive.

He would repeat this assessment of Gerrman prisoners of war in an undated letter to his family which may have been written about the same time, though in an unspecified place that was clearly further away from enemy artillery:

Anyway we mustn’t grouse as there are no shells here. There is a prisoners’ camp quite close by. I have been to see them, it is a not indifferent substitute for the zoo, except that one may not feed them with buns on the end of umbrellas (worse luck!).

On 15 October 1916 Whinney wrote to his parents that he was “up here” (which again suggests the Ancre Heights),

in charge of the regimental dismounted party – which means that I look after those men who are out here, yet for whom there are not horses so they go and dig and make roads. All the officers take charge in turn. It is rather a nice job and though occasionally we get a shell over[,] there are days on end when we don’t and we never do at night. I start up for work at midnight tonight & get back at about [07.00 hours] tomorrow morning. Yesterday I witnessed the prelude to what bids fair, I should say, to be the biggest battle of the war, the noise was terrific, all our guns were going off from midday till about 4 o’clock this morning as hard as they could and are performing even now what would be a heavy bombardment in any part of the line. […] All yesterday I could see only three German captive balloons and over thirty-five of ours. This is not because their’s [sic] are out of sight, it is because our aeroplanes keep them down. We practically never see a German aeroplane and ours are flying about the whole time.

As Whinney then went on to say that he had just seen “two tanks go by: they are fine toys”, as though he were completely familiar with the merits of this new weapon (see above), it is probable that he is writing on one of the two days in the middle of the Battle of the Ancre Heights (1 October–11 November 1916) when the British captured the heavily fortified German position that was about a thousand yards long, half a mile north of Thiepval, and known as the Schwaben Redoubt.

By 12 November 1916, the day after the ending of the Battle of the Ancre Heights, the QOOH had marched westwards for four days to an unspecified destination, where they would remain for a while and where Whinney soon heard that he was due for ten days’ home leave from 2 to 12 December. He returned to his unit by Christmas Day 1916, when he wrote a letter to his family in which he described the festivities that he was enjoying despite being at the front:

Last night [all the Squadron officers] had dinner together and we had a great feed with the Squadron glee singers who, be it said, were a trifle “gleeish” to add any cheeriness to the dinner which it would have otherwise lacked! Today we had [horse-]races in the morning. Tomorrow being Boxing Day is another holiday worse luck!

But in the evening there was a regimental officers’ dinner, and we know that this took place at Vaulx (see above) and had been organized thanks to the “inspiration and energy” of Fleming. Whinney, however, as a mere subaltern, saw things rather differently, since he wrote that one attends it “with the prospect of getting nothing to eat or drink but, if one is lucky and the wind is in the right quarter, a smell of what somebody more exalted yet less deserving is getting”.

The winter of 1916/17 was destined to be the worst winter of the war, constituting a major reason why the QOOH continued to remain well back from the front line until the end of February 1917. So when Whinney informed his mother on 27 January 1917 that he had now “got back from digging” (i.e. looking after a work detail) and was with the Regiment again, he added that he “never remember[ed] it being as cold [as this:] it snowed about 10 days ago and the snow is still on the ground and the ground is as hard as nails. However[,] I am quite warm and do plenty of walking to get exercise.” On 28 February 1917 the Brigade moved to a new billeting area. Squadrons ‘A’ and ‘D’ of the QOOH were sent to Vron, a large village c.18 miles west of Vaulx (see above), 14 miles due north of Abbeville, and a mere nine miles from the Channel coast, whilst ‘C’ Squadron was allocated billets in Les Hallots, a hamlet near Vron.

By 24 March 1917 the Regiment had heard that it was to prepare for a very sudden move – which required Whinney, who was the Regiment’s subaltern responsible for musketry, to make preparations for putting the men through a training course in rifle-shooting that involved a large amount of time-consuming extra work. A week or so later, on 2 April 1917, Whinney wrote a letter to his mother in which he said that he did not think he had ever worked so hard in his life as he had for this last fortnight. To which he added:

and now at last I believe we are just about on the move again. Of course we all knew the move was coming and hence my extra work as now […] I have a Troop[,] and after a long spell in billets people take a bit of screwing up to war ways and views.

The training programme in preparation for the move finished on Thursday 5 April 1917 and two days later the QOOH began to move east-south-east towards the front just to the south-east of Arras about 45 miles away. It was from the defences near Arras that the Germans had started Operation Alberich (4 February–27 March 1917), the phased strategic withdrawal eastwards to newly constructed and well-defended positions further to the east. These were known to the Allies as the Hindenburg Line and to the Germans as the Siegfried-Stellung and they extended for c.65 miles from Arras (in the north-north-west) to Laffaux (in the south-south-east), five miles north-east of Soissons on the River Aisne. From 14 March to 9 April 1917, the retreating Germans were slowly pursued by the British across a devastated countryside where all useful features – roads, bridges, railways etc. – had been destroyed and had to be rebuilt for an advance to be possible.

 

The move eastwards formed part of the general preparations for the Nivelle Offensive, which, as far as the British and Commonwealth troops were concerned, involved the Canadian Corps of 1st Army in the north, the 3rd Army in the centre, and the 5th Army in the south. This was also known as the Second Battle of Arras or the First Battle of the Scarpe (9–14 April 1917), and represented an attempt by the British Expeditionary Force to push forward into the territory that been relinquished by the Germans during Operation Alberich (4 February–27 March 1917) using a scorched-earth policy, and to reach, if possible, the Hindenburg Line. The Battle was supposed to begin on Sunday 8 April (Easter Sunday); but at General Nivelle’s request it was moved back to 05.30 hours on Monday 9 April, on a front of nearly15 miles that extended northwards from Croisilles, six miles south-south-east of Arras, to Givenchy-en-Gohelle, just south-south-west of Lens.

On 25 April 1917 Fleming had the time and inclination to write a long letter to his father about “the move”, which begins as follows:

Well, here followeth my usual report on our recent operations [i.e. of early April]: – First Day [Easter Saturday, 7 April, the day after the USA’s formal declaration of war on Germany] Left Billets 8.30 a.m. after the usual fussations about whether this, that or the other had been left behind, and this, that, or the other man was in the right place at the right time. Tin hats [which were first issued in early 1916] are always very heavy the first day or two, and the various impedimenta which are necessary for modern war made one feel and look like a trussed fowl. They include the following: – sword, revolver, 36 rounds revolver ammunition, telescope, compass, electric torch, wire nippers, smoke helmet, 6 maps, two notebooks, first field dressing, haversack containing two days’ rations, water-bottle, bag with spare socks, towel, washing and shaving kit, mackintosh, water-proof sheet, 12 lbs of oats, picketing peg, built up rope, head rope, odd squadron papers, two tins of tobacco and one of the Waverley Novels, not to mention saddle, bridle, horse rag and blanket; so between the horse and oneself one presents a cumbrous picture and moves only with difficulty. It was a cold day, north wind and snow showers, and we were glad to get to billets [at Bealcourt, a town on the River Authie, c.20 miles south-east of Vron and two miles south-east of Auxi-le-Château] about 5 p.m., very muddy: all the men under cover, horses in a field, and two beds for the officers, remainder on the floor.

Next Day [Sunday, 8 April] started late [at 13.00 hours] – a lovely warm day – and [we] got into billets [at Pas-en-Artois,15 miles south-east of Béalcourt and seven miles east of the market town of Doullens] just before 20.00 hours when it was getting dark. 5 huts, corrugated iron roof and wooden floor, both full of holes and very smelly and dirty, for the squadron, i.e. 170 men and 10 officers, no beds and very difficult to get water or wood; got late to bed and found floor hard. Up early next morning [Monday, 9 April] Heavy rain and everything a sea of mud, saddling up very difficult for the men’s cold fingers, straps and everything coated with mud and horses so wet and muddy [that they were] impossible to groom. [The Regiment moved off at 10.45 hours.] A very fast march over abominable roads, a lot of trouble with the pack ponies owing to too fast [a] pace and rough going. A howling wind and bitter cold snow showers. Halted for an hour about midday to water and feed. Soon began to come among our heavy guns which upset the horses a lot. A few prisoners coming back, not many wounded, passed through the suburbs of [name missing; probably Arras] and emerged on to the cavalry track. This was rather a thrilling moment. The whole division in front of us (we were reserve brigade) winding like a huge snake in and out and over the Trenches – the guns limbering up and going on, a lot of our aeroplanes about and no German ones – got to the forward Rendezvous and formed up behind a rise in the ground. The leading brigade sent out patrols and found [that] the places which had to be taken before we advanced had not been taken, so we stood about (very cold) till dusk [20.15 hours]. A few shells were put over at us, very little damage done, and luckily they stopped soon [–] for a cavalry division, though a formidable spectacle, is a very big target when it has no freedom of manoeuvre, which, of course, owing to trenches, wire etc., we had not got. Started back to water at dusk in blinding snow.

The weather did not stay fine, and when the QOOH moved off on Monday 9 April, they were faced with a howling wind, bitter cold, snow showers, and abominable roads, and the men had a lot of trouble with the pack ponies as their pace on horseback was too fast and the going was too rough. At about midday, the Regiment halted for an hour to water and feed, after which it carried on north-eastwards towards the suburbs of Arras and then through them until it finally emerged on to the cavalry track which ran eastwards from Arras towards Wancourt, just south of the long, straight Roman road that led south-east from Arras to  Cambrai.  According to Fleming,

This was rather a thrilling moment.  The whole Division in front of us […] winding like a huge snake in and out and over the Trenches [sic] – the guns limbering up and going on, a lot of our aeroplanes about and no German ones. We got to the forward Rendezvous [sic] and formed up behind a rise in the ground.

But when the leading Brigade sent out patrols, it discovered that places which should have been taken before the advance had begun – like Héninel, Wancourt and Guémappe, all villages in the valley of the River Cojeul – were still in German hands. So the QOOH stood about feeling very cold until dusk fell at c.20.15 hours, when it started back towards its allotted billets [in the village of Wailly, three miles south-west of Arras] in blinding snow in order to water the horses. Fleming then continued:

Owing to mud, congestion of traffic, etc., [we] did not get back till about midnight [in the night of 9/10 April]; found the billet was a wind-swept desolate place, tied the horses up, off saddles, watered and fed. Managed to get a fire going and make some cocoa, and lay down behind the saddles under blanket, mackintosh; we were cold and wet already but colder and wetter in the morning. It snowed all night and most of the morning [Tuesday, 10 April] which we spent standing about shivering, waiting for orders; started off to the same place [probably Wancourt, near Tilloy-lès-Mofflaines, a southern suburb of Arras] at 13.50 hours. The two advanced Brigades went on and got close up behind the Infantry, but the latter were held up still and the cavalry couldn’t do anything. We saw another cavalry Division on our left making a turning movement mounted against [name missing][:] it was a pretty sight but too much wire and trench to be a success, but they made a dismounted attack on [also probably Wancourt], kicked out the Bosches [sic], rescued some of our captured infantry and held it for the night till relieved [during the night of Tuesday/Wednesday, 10/11 April]. It’s no reflection on the Infantry to say that the Cavalry have got more dash and initiative than they have, for the Cavalry haven’t had it all mudded out of them in the Trenches. Meanwhile we did nothing but shiver and grumble, and about dark we were again sent back to [possibly Wailly; arrived 20.45 hours on Tuesday, 10 April] to water. Still heavy snow and no billets. The officers and serg[ean]ts found an angle of a ruined wood-shed to get behind. The men slept in the snow; it was bitter cold and froze hard in the night as well as snow.

Although the harsh weather conditions  – “very cold wind, snow, hail and rain” – persisted, causing men and horses alike to suffer “considerably from the cold and exposure”, on Wednesday 11 April cavalry were sent forward at Haig’s insistence to relieve the advanced (5th) Brigade which had been shelled (near Monchy-le-Preux, a mile east of Tilloy-lèz-Mofflaines) and to penetrate what appeared to be a widening gap in the enemy lines. Although, as “the men and horses trotted forward in a snow blizzard, they heard men singing the Eton Boating Song ‘Jolly boating weather’”, they were soon halted and then pushed back by dense wire entanglements and heavy machine-gun fire. We do not know whether Haig’s order was issued to the QOOH – for it was part of the Reserve – but at 02.30 hours it moved again and Fleming commented in his letter as follows:

Nix to eat, and cold and dark beyond belief. Arrived at the same place [probably Wancourt, near Tilloy-lès-Mofflaines] at dawn a grisly dawn [c.05.30 hours]. [Lieutenant] Harold [Montagu] Worsley [1881–1956] looked very bad, so I sent him back. He was sent to Hospital and is there still; he got a very bad chill. One of the advanced Brigades [5th Cavalry Brigade] had spent the night up there and got a smartish shelling, losing a fairish lot of horses [300 according to Keith-Falconer] and some officers and men. Still nothing doing.

Harold Montagu Worsley was, incidentally, a cousin of E.G. Worsley and J.F. Worsley since his father, the Reverend Edward Worsley (1844–1923), was the brother of their father, Godfrey Thomas Worsley, and in 1911 had taught in “Evelyns” Preparatory School, the family school in Hillingdon, Middlesex. The letter goes on:

About nine o’clock [on Wednesday 11 April] I tried to eat some bully and biscuits, but found I had a chill on [the] stomach, and was violently sick and felt like nothing for 3 or 4 hours. Meantime I made each section take down its tool packs, dig itself a shelter, and sit in it holding their horses alternate half hours, running the horses round the other half hour, and I made them fill their mess tins with snow and boil themselves some snow tea from their second emergency ration. About noon [12.30 hours on Wednesday 11 April] we went up to relieve the advanced Brigade which had been shelled [near Monchy-le-Preux, a mile east of Tilloy-lès-Mofflaines]; luckily they did not shell us for I felt singularly unlike it. About four o’clock I got some tea boiled up in a German gun emplacement and ate a bit of bread and some Tiptree jam out of a pot which had bulged my haversack for days, and cleaned my teeth and felt better.

According to Keith-Falconer, at 15.00 hours that day (Wednesday 11 April), the Divisional Commander, Major-General Walter Howorth Greenly (1878–1955) received orders to return the 2nd Cavalry Division to the billets at Wailly. So the QOOH started back there at about 16.30 hours on the same day in thick snow and rain:

Started back just before dark; got to billets [at Wailly at about 18.00 hours] and managed to get ourselves and the men into some old and broken houses and cellars for the night [according to Keith-Falconer: “hardly any with a whole roof, many with none at all”]; lucky, for it was snowing harder than ever and the place was knee-deep in slush [“liquid mud 6 or more inches deep” according to Keith-Falconer]. Luckily our cyclists had been left behind for they couldn’t push along in the mud, and had been told we were coming and had got some dry wood and messed us a big bully stew. We also had a mail with the rations and someone got a bottle of whisky and I got some sausages and Veda bread, so we were glad of it. Our apartment consisted of half a ruined stable, principally occupied by manure, but it kept some of the wet out and we slept well and wanted it too.

On the following day, Thursday 12 April 1917 (the day after the infantry had captured Monchy-le-Preux, albeit three days later than had been planned) the QOOH was pulled back south-westwards towards the huts at Pas-en-Artois – a distance of c.11 miles. They arrived at 16.50 hours and spent the night in billets that consisted of half a ruined stable, principally occupied by manure. But this at least kept some of the wet out and the men were able to enjoy a much-needed sleep. Keith-Falconer would later say that the Regiment’s situation was “moderately uncomfortable in a sea of mud”, but that nevertheless they were glad to have a roof over their heads. Fleming’s letter continues:

Next day we came back to the huts [at Pas-en-Artois], and the Division has been getting reinforcements of horses, officers and men, and cleaning up. Our Regiment lost fewer horses from exhaustion than any in the Division, so we got good marks. We had one sergeant killed and two men wounded in Ned’s squadron, and two men killed in the track-making party, and about 6 horses killed and wounded, so were very lucky. It never looked like being a Cavalry operation. Since then we have been trying to make our huts habitable and luckily the weather has turned dry, as we are getting comfortable.

On Sunday 15 April 1917 Haig ordered the end of the offensive after 35,928 British and 11,500 Canadian soldiers had been killed in action and the Royal Flying Corps had lost a third of its men and machines. When, a decade later, Keith-Falconer reviewed the achievements and losses of the cavalry during the first five days of the Second Battle of Arras, he concluded that the high hopes of the first two days – when considerable advances were made – had not been realized. Of these advances, perhaps the most notable was the swift but costly capture by the Canadian Corps of the strategically important Vimy Ridge (9–12 April) – a dominating feature of the landscape which rose to a height of c.475 feet. From which he concluded that as the hoped-for breakthrough did not occur, the battle had been at best a partial success and that even though some cavalry units had been involved in some fierce fighting, the cavalry had not been able to do very much. So although the orders to the cavalry stressed that “the enemy was to be pursued with the utmost vigour”, that “every endeavour [must be] made to turn his retirement into a rout”, and that “in the event of success the pursuit [must be] pressed to the utmost limit of the strength of men and horses”, no such follow-up advance by the cavalry was possible; and such territorial gains as were made – as at Vimy Ridge – were made by the infantry at a very heavy cost. Within this context, the QOOH had got off relatively lightly, losing 16 men killed, wounded and missing, plus another two dying of exhaustion. The QOOH also got credit for losing about six horses killed and wounded and fewer horses from exhaustion than any other regiment in the Division.

On Sunday 22 April 1917 Whinney wrote a letter to his mother to give her a reassuring account of how he and his regiment were faring:

We are a goodish way back – about ten miles near enough – to hear the terrific “bombadochments” [sic] which take place in the part of the line in front of us! However[,] I have a good enough hut and we mess in a farm. My bed is made of wire netting and is very comfortable; luckily I am a sound sleeper and the brawls of the rats which take place all night through in the hut do not wake me. The rats are about the size of a month-old rabbit and run about the huts all day and night.

On Wednesday 24 April 1917 Fleming, together with Gerald Valerian Wellesley and Major the Honourable Arthur George Child-Villiers (1883–1969), the second son of the Earl of Jersey and a distant relation of A.H. Villiers as both were descended from William Villiers, the 2nd Earl of Jersey (1682–1721), made an expedition to Bapaume, 20 miles east-south-east of Pas-en-Artois. Bapaume had been in German hands since 26 September 1914 and was retaken by the British on 17 March 1917 during the first phase of their advance eastwards towards the Hindenburg Line. But they found that much of the town had been razed, and in the letter to his father of 25 April 1917, Fleming noted:

They have got on wonderfully with the [destroyed] railways etc., but it’s not worth going to see. Nothing but the usual masses of bricks, plaster, refuse and mud, ruined trenches and scattered wire. One thing it did teach me [was] that the Germans retired because we had made the area utterly impossible for human beings to live in. The ruin behind our lines is nothing like the ruin behind theirs.

He concluded the letter with the following thoughts:

I am glad things are looking better in Cuba. I wonder when a German submarine will come and shell Havana. Santiago luckily ought to be fairly safe. I am afraid you are having a fairly, or rather exceedingly worrying time, Poppa, and that you miss Walter [Kennedy] Whigham [(1878–1948), Chairman of Robert Fleming and Co., merchant bank] tremendously. He is absolutely wasted at his present job and had much better be back at the office. Phil [Valentine Fleming’s younger brother] is flourishing. I was really very glad he had to stay behind though I missed him very much. It’s a pity the Yankees are so far off; it would upset the Germans much more if they knew that this new and inexhaustible reservoir of men and munitions were[,] say[,] where Spain is! [The USA formally declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917 and the first US troops arrived in France on 26 June 1917.] These Germans are getting a bit beyond the limit with their submarines. I wish I saw how we were going to be able to deal with them. Will the Russians (A) stay in the war (B) Be in a condition to make a good offensive? It’s a pity we can’t dispose of the Turkeys and the Bulgars. [End of letter]

Despite the shortcomings of the billets at Pas-en-Artois, the QOOH stayed there until 12 May 1917; and in late April the men were pleasurably surprised when, to use Keith-Falconer’s words, the weather became “quite spring-like, beautifully warm and sunny”, with the first ten days of May “a pleasant interval”. On 12 May the Regiment, together with the rest of the Brigade, moved 15 miles southwards to Villers Bocage, on the main Doullens to Amiens road [D916], and then, on 13 May, an intensely hot day, another 17 miles south-eastwards to La Neuville-lès-Bray, on the River Somme to the east of the large town of Corbie, where the men were able to bathe in the river. On 14 May the Regiment marched another five miles south-wards to Harbonnières, a ruined village whose inhabitants were just beginning to return, and finally, on 15 May, it reached Hamelet, on the opposite bank of the Somme to Corbie – initially through countryside that was “absolutely devastated […] with hardly a stick or stone standing, and all the ground ploughed up by shells and the marks of troops”, and then through countryside that had been evacuated by the Germans in March 1917 and, apart from the deliberately destroyed villages, spared the destruction of war. Fleming, now the Regiment’s Commanding Officer, had been in England on special parliamentary leave from around 4 to 13 May and had begun his return journey on the latter date after visiting his family for the very last time (mentioned in dispatches: London Gazette, no. 30,072, 15 May 1917, p. 4,756). But when he arrived in Pas-en-Artois, he discovered that his birds had flown and, in Keith-Falconer’s words, he “spent the next forty-eight hours feverishly pursuing us in borrowed motor-cars” and finally met up with the QOOH at Hamelet on 15 May 1917.

During the night of 15/16 May 1917, when the weather worsened, the QOOH participated in the general British move eastwards towards the Hindenburg Line by advancing c.35 miles to Lempire, a large village about halfway between Cambrai and St-Quentin that is just to the south-east of Épehy-Peizières. During this move, the Cavalry Corps relieved III Corps on a front between Épehy-Peizières in the north (c.11 miles south of Cambrai) and the Omignon River (a tributary of the Somme) in the south. The terrain and military situation were, however, unfamiliar to the Regiment, since the newly established defensive line was not continuous and consisted of a broken chain of outposts and entrenched positions that were separated from one another by fairly extensive stretches of open ground. Moreover, although the gaps in the line were patrolled at night, there was nothing to stop significant bodies of enemy troops from coming through and isolating one or more of the British positions. So, after making extensive preparations on 16 May, something at which Fleming excelled, thus “making the difference between having a first-class fighting force and an indifferent one”, Fleming’s ‘C’ Squadron set off eastwards from Lempire at 21.00 hours during the night of 16/17 May, and without suffering any casualties, relieved the infantry who were manning Gillemont Farm by midnight. This farm – not to be confused with Guillemont Farm, which is situated between Longueval and Maurepas on the D107, seven miles east of Albert and had experienced fierce fighting a year previously during the Battle of the Somme – was an exposed post in the British Expeditionary Force’s front line that was situated between the villages of Lempire and Vendhuile, c.12 miles south-south-west of Cambrai on the D28.

Shortly after arriving at Gillemont Farm, Fleming and Sergeant Bull – who survived the war – reconnoitred the ground in front of it in order to identify the enemy positions, ascertain the situation and density of the wire entanglements, and establish positions for their own snipers. But they soon discovered that a lot more basic work needed to be done “deepening saps to posts, strengthening posts and parapets, wiring, improving fire steps, draining communication trenches and improving Sqdn HQ”. 18 May was another quiet day, but when, on the afternoon of 19 May, Gillemont Farm was heavily shelled with gas shells and high explosive, Fleming realized that an attack was imminent and asked to be reinforced by one troop of his Regiment’s ‘D’ Squadron, thereby bringing the farm’s garrison to c.70 men. At 02.30 hours on 20 May 1917, Fleming sent his last message back to the Regimental HQ in which he reported increased shelling by artillery, trench mortars and gas. Then, at 03.00 hours, the Germans began an extremely fierce bombardment of the farm which lasted for half an hour, after which, at 03.30 hours, some 200 Germans, i.e. two companies of infantry, attacked the British position but were repulsed after suffering heavy losses by a counter-barrage and rifle fire. Some Germans got to within 50 yards of the British line, but to no avail, and two prisoners were left behind, while the German attack cost the QOOH twelve of its number.

But near the end of the preliminary bombardment, Fleming, aged 35, and Second Lieutenant Francis Somerland Joseph Silvertop (1883–1917), aged about 34, who had recently returned to the Regiment after 19 months in the Royal Flying Corps, were killed in action by a shell when going from Squadron HQ to the troop in the forward trenches at the right-hand end of the line. As their bodies were found on top of the parapet, it is probable that they had climbed out of the communication trench to take a short cut, thinking that the bombardment was over. The attack cost the Regiment 12 casualties; and Fleming, the eleventh MP to die in the war (see C.T. Mills), was replaced as its Commanding Officer by Major Villiers (see above). Fleming, Silvertop and four ORs who were killed by the same shell were buried at first in the little graveyard at nearby Sainte-Émilie, but are now buried in Templeux-le-Guérard British Cemetery, just to the south of that. Fleming is buried next to Silvertop in Grave II.E.40, with the inscription “The heights hold peace”. (The inscription was chosen by Evelyn Fleming and its possible source is the poem ‘In Excelsis’, from Music and Other Poems (1904) by the American poet Henry van Dyke (1852–1935)). He is also commemorated on a plaque in St Bartholemew’s Church, Nettlebed, near Henley, Oxfordshire, where his father, mother, older brother Peter (and his widow) are also buried. Eleven days after his death in action, it was announced that Fleming had been awarded the DSO (London Gazette, no. 30,111, 1 June 1917, p. 5,470).

On 22 May 1917 Troop Sergeant William Alexander Smith Bayliss (1887–1917), a member of ‘C’ Squadron, wrote the following letter of condolence to Valentine Fleming’s widow:

Dear Madam, May we the Henley Troop of the Yeomanry offer you our deepest sympathy in your great loss. The late Major Fleming was loved[,] honoured & respected by all who had anything at all to do with him [–] both for his great leadership and also for his first[-class] care & consideration of his men. It is the greatest loss the regiment could possibly have had. In the words of the General ‘In all my years of soldiering I never met a more capable squadron leader’. His end was sudden and painless. I saw him a few minutes after it occurred and he was quite dead. It may be of comfort to you that he was not bodily mutilated. We hope you will bear up under your great trial and that time will partly heal the wound.

Troop Sergeant Bayliss, who would be killed in action on 5 July 1917, also at Gillemont Farm, is buried in Grave II.F.6, also in Templeux-le-Guérard British Cemetery.

On 25 May 1917 President Warren of Magdalen also wrote a letter of condolence to Evelyn Fleming:

Dear Mrs Fleming, You will know I am sure without my saying anything how deep and unfeigned my feelings are in this sad, sad loss. It is difficult to say anything and yet I feel that, if you will let me, I must try. For this is indeed no common blow. We have had one long string of sorrows and bereavements for this college ever since the very first days of the war. In a way I have felt every one of the college losses. But there was only one I think I have felt like that of your dear and gallant husband – the loss of his comrade in the House, ‘Charlie’ Mills. Yes, there is a third: ‘Dick’ Stanhope. These losses are[,] I feel[,] losses to the nation and to the Empire; losses to English life and to this generation and the next. And your husband had – as none can know better than you – a character, a rare and peculiar character all his own. There are, thank God! many gallant Englishmen, many good sportsmen, many good men of business. But he had a peculiarly winning and persuasive way – effective without the obvious effort which in itself rouses criticism or friction. I really knew no one just like him. What he was here[,] in the youthful small world of the College[,] he was becoming more and more in the great world. It does indeed seem hard and inscrutable that such a man should be called upon to give up everything – his career, his happy, right enjoyment of valuable achievement, his very self. It must be very, very difficult for you to accept it. But you will try and you will live now for his boys, live to make them what he would have wished, what he was himself. Even in your grief you must be very proud of him, and you may feel[,] too[,] the comfort of having made his life while he had it very happy and comfortable too. By and by, if the strain is not too much, I wish you would tell me a little more about him. I should much value a photograph of him too if you could spare one. Tell me something about his boys. If you are seeing them[,] will you give my truest sympathy and kindest remembrance to his brother ‘Phil’, and also to your own brother. What bright happy days their names and thought of them brings back! I think you will bear up for I know how brave you are, but it is additionally hard at your age and when life, so short a while ago, was all so bright. Lady Warren[,] I know[,] is writing too. I hope some time we may both see you again.

Warren would use material from this letter in the obituary that appeared in The Oxford Magazine on 1 June 1917.

Winston Churchill’s long obituary, which was published in The Times on 25 May 1917, is even more fulsome than Warren’s letter:

As a Yeomanry officer he always took the greatest pains to fit himself for military duties. There was scarcely an instructional course open before the war to the Territorial Forces of which he had not availed himself, and on mobilization there were few more competent civilian soldiers of his rank. […] From the beginning his letters showed the deep emotions which the devastation and carnage of the struggle aroused in his breast. 

But the strength and buoyancy of his nature were proofs against the sombre realizations of his mind. He never for a moment flagged or wearied or lost his spirits. Alert, methodical, resolute, untiring he did his work, whether perilous or dull, without the slightest sign of strain or stress to the end. “We all of us,” writes a brother officer, “were devoted to him. The loss to the regiment is indescribable. He was, as you know, absolutely our best officer, utterly fearless, full of resource, and perfectly magnificent with his men.” [… He] was always a gay and excellent companion. He had everything in the world to make him happy; a delightful home life, active interesting expanding business occupations, [a] contented disposition, a lovable and charming personality. He had more. He had that foundation of spontaneous and almost unconscious self-suppression in the discharge of what he conceived to be his duty with which happiness, however full, is precarious and imperfect. That these qualities are not singular in this generation does not lessen the loss of those in whom they shine. As the war lengthens and intensifies and the extending lists appear, it seems as if one watched at night a well-loved city whose lights, which burn so bright, which burn so true, are extinguished in the distance in the darkness one by one.

In a private note to Valentine’s widow, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Tait Pitman (1868–1941), the Commanding Officer of the 11th (Prince Albert’s Own) Hussars and the General Officer Commanding the 2nd Cavalry Division from 1918 to 1919, expressed the opinion that in all his 30 years’ experience in the army he did not think that he had known a finer character. And a brother officer wrote: “We, all of us, were devoted to him. The loss to the Regiment is indescribable.  He was, as you know, absolutely our best officer, utterly fearless, full of resource, and perfectly magnificent with his men.” But possibly the most deeply felt and moving tribute came from Adrian Wentworth Keith-Falconer (1888–1959):

No greater blow could have befallen the Regiment than the death of Major Fleming. Beloved by his many friends, worshipped by his Squadron, admired and respected by all, he was a most gallant officer, a born leader of men. Deriving authority from his own ability and merit, being also a man of considerable courage, he was able to control men freely by strength of character and personal example rather than by force of military discipline. Having everything at home to make life good, he set it aside utterly to serve his country. For he was by no means one of those, happy in their generation, who love fighting for fighting’s sake; to him it was all thoroughly distasteful, and in quiet times behind the line he was never tired of descanting on the utter weariness of the whole thing. And yet he might so easily, and with perfect justification, have obtained a responsible staff appointment, in which he would not only have been reasonably safe and comfortable, but would also have done good and valuable work for the country. For his intellectual abilities were considerable, well above those of many staff officers. But that was not his way; he recognized the importance of staff work, and the need of able men to do it well. Only it just wasn’t his ideal of service. He was noted also for a complete understanding of his duty, and for great energy and self-discipline in its performance. He never spared himself, and he expected the same of others. It was typical of him that after a long day reconnoitring a position, or doing some other job, he would return to billets thoroughly tired and immediately set to work studying plans for the morrow, writing orders, interviewing the Sergeant-Major, or inspecting billets, stables, etc. Thoroughness was his motto in all things, and he never left to others work that he could possibly do himself. Witness one of his last exploits at Gillemont Farm. Nine squadron leaders out of ten would have sent a Subaltern or Sergeant to do the patrol and report, and no-one would have thought the worse of them for doing so. Major Fleming went himself. He did not always suffer fools gladly, and could not endure the slacker, of whom there were few in his Squadron; they generally found it convenient to change their habits. The Regiment lost in Val Fleming not only a brave and capable officer but also a character of singular charm and attraction. Those who knew him best perhaps remember him chiefly as the staunchest and truest of friends, the gayest and brightest of comrades; they recall the athletic figure with the long, quick stride and the keen, eager face, the laughter and talk full of shrewd thrusts which enlivened good days and bad, merry evenings in billets, wet and anxious nights in trenches. He left a gap that could not be filled, a memory that could not be forgotten.

Fleming left £265,596 19s 5d and stipulated that his salary as an MP from the outbreak of war until his death should be used for the relief of disabled soldiers and their dependents who resided in south Oxfordshire and had served in the Oxfordshire Yeomanry or the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. A memorial service for him was held in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Henley’s parish church, on the afternoon of Tuesday 12 June 1917, when, according to The Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard,

a large gathering, representative of all sections of the community, assembled to show their esteem for one of so patriotic and generous a nature. Flags were flown at half-mast over the Town Hall (the Red Cross Hospital), the Church Tower and [the] Salisbury Club, and many of the shops in town were closed whilst the service was proceeding. Prior to the service a muffled peal was rung on the church bells. A Union Jack was hung on each side of the chancel, and a beautiful wreath, which had been sent by Mrs. Valentine Fleming [who did not attend the service], was placed in the chancel […]. The Mayor and Corporation of Henley and representatives of other public bodies met at the Technical Institute and proceeded in procession to the church. […]. The service, which was choral, was most impressive, the musical portions […] being marked by a devotional spirit that deeply moved the congregation. After the opening hymn, ‘Brief life is here our portion’ [Bernard de Morlas (fl. c.1145)], the Rector [Revd Sidney Charles Saunders (185–1935)] recited the Sentences, which included those most pregnant and significant words addressed by Our Lord to his disciples ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ [John xv, 13], Psalm xxiii (Dominus regit me) and Psalm cxxi (Levavi Oculos) were then sung, and the Rev. P[hilip] Armitage [(1870–1960) the Vicar of Nettlebed from 1908 to 1920] afterwards read the lesson (Wisdom iii, 1–10). Following the singing of the Nunc Dimittis, the Apostles’ Creed was recited, and following the recital of prayers, the beautiful anthem, ‘Lie still, beloved, lie still’ was rendered by the choir boys with exquisite feeling and expression. A short address was then delivered by the Rector from the pulpit.

“They were met that afternoon”, said the Rector, “to honour one who had died the death of honour, and to commit his soul to the care of the great Father who loved mankind with everlasting love. He died for freedom[,] for his King and Country, and for the home he loved, just as he had lived. He lived for others and he died for others. He might have had a life of ease, and might have spent his leisure with those he loved[,] but he chose the higher and nobler life of service, not for mere honour or glory, but in order that he might fulfil the very purpose of life – that he might leave the world a little better than he found it. It was that purpose, was it not, that shone out so clearly and distinctly in his life, and won for him the love and respect of all who knew him. Even those who differed from him in politics and in other ways recognised that in Valentine Fleming they had found a true man and a true worker in this world of sorrow and suffering. His life was a life of service, a life of devotion. He never spared himself. When he became a Member of Parliament party feeling ran high, and there were great demands on the time and strength of every member of the House. As their representative he was often called upon to spend the whole night in the discharge of his Parliamentary duties. They knew that on more than one occasion he broke down under the strain, but, having once accepted the responsibility, he did not hesitate to carry it out.”

“From all parts of the [parliamentary] division he frequently received invitations to interest himself actively in some work or other [that was] associated with the happiness and well-being of the people, and he never hesitated to respond to those invitations, even if they came from the remotest villages in the constituency. They sometimes wondered, did they not, why it was that the little island in which they dwelt had risen to such a height of power and glory. What was the secret of their country’s greatness? It was to be found, was it not, in the fact that God had given them such men as Valentine Fleming – men who thought not of themselves, but who lived for others, and died for others, and whose only thought was to fulfil the mission of life and make the world better. Yes, that was the secret of their country’s greatness – that they had had men amongst them like him who was uppermost in their thoughts that day. They mourned his loss, they felt that the world was poorer because he had gone. But they did not mourn without hope, for their Faith told them that He who reigned above had seen some reason why He should call away that noble life, that brilliant soldier, from the Army of his King on earth to join the Army of the King of Kings in Heaven. [They believed and knew that he who loved his country with such devotion and self-sacrifice here on earth, loves it still more in the other world, and that just as he worked and laboured for it here[,] so he works and labours for it in the world into which he had gone. (The previous sentence is omitted from the Reading Mercury version.)] And so they thought of him now, not as lost to them, but only as gone before; they thought of him in that higher, purer, and nobler life which lies beyond this. The old idea of death had passed away. No longer did they think of the departed as shades wandering through twilight into darkness. They thought of them as resting in the full light of Heaven, with perpetual light shining upon them. And so they thought of him in whose memory they had met together that afternoon. And as they thought of him, ought they not to think of themselves? He had set them an example of the life which they themselves ought to live, and he called them, even from the grave, to live the higher and nobler life which he had lived. The battle was not yet won. The cry still went through the length and breadth of the land[:] “Let every man do his duty!” And so let them all go forth from the Church that day with the firm resolve, with God’s help, to do their work in the world, to cast aside all selfishness and thought of their own pleasure, and to live the life which, when it came to an end, might receive the blessing of their Father who is in Heaven.”

After the address Mendelssohn’s ‘O rest in the Lord’ was played by the Organist [Mr W.G. Bayley], and at the close of the prayers that followed the hymn ‘They whose cross on earth is o’er’ [John Mason Neal (1818–66)] was sung. The Rector gave the Benediction, after ‘God save the King’ was sung, and a most impressive service was brought to a close [by Chopin’s Funeral March which was played by the Organist. (Omitted from the Reading Mercury version)].

Postscript

By 1 June 1917, the last Squadron of the QOOH had been withdrawn from Gillemont Farm and become part of the Divisional Reserve. But because of Gillemont Farm’s tactical importance, a working party from the QOOH consisting of two officers and 160 ORs returned there every night between 16 and 21 June 1917 in order to improve the wire entanglements and dig out its defences. But at 01.00 hours on 21 June 1917 the Germans began a 15-minute bombardment of the Farm with trench mortars and rifle grenades, and at 01.15 hours a German raiding party surprised the working party when it had nearly completed its work and was collecting its tools. Reports of what happened next are confused, but it seems that Whinney, who was in charge of the wiring party that night, was slightly wounded. Nevertheless, he managed, once the shelling stopped, to lead his men back to the British lines via the communication trench in accordance with prearranged orders. Unfortunately, the Germans had temporarily taken the British position and when Whinney was within a few yards of the parapet, he was caught in the wire and shot through the heart, aged 20, one of 32 British casualties killed, wounded and missing. He is buried in Unicorn Cemetery, Vendhuile (south of Cambrai), Grave II.F.1.

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 would like to express their particular gratitude to the Fleming family for giving them permission to use extracts from the letters that Valentine Fleming wrote to friends and family from the Front 1914–15. Special thanks are due to Mary Fleming, the granddaughter of Valentine Fleming, who gave us much appreciated help with the transcription of these letters. They would also like to offer their special thanks to Peter Duff Hart-Davies, whose eminently readable and informative biography of Peter Fleming was a major source of information and who has kindly allowed us to make use of it when compiling the highly compressed biography that appears above.

The Editors would also like to extend their thanks to J.A.P. Whinney’s nephew, Mr John Anthony Whinney, for supplying them with a 52-page transcript of a large number of personal letters that his uncle wrote to various members of the Whinney family between 13 February 1916 and 10 June 1917. They were immensely valuable since they provided us with a detailed picture of the day-to-day life in northern France of a young cavalry officer from a well-to-do family during what was perhaps the worst winter of the war. Once correlated with one another, and with Keith-Falconer’s invaluable book (see below) and the regimental War Diary, these invaluable sets of letters have enabled us to situate the biographies of both men within a more detailed history of the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars (1914–17).

Many of the events described in Fleming’s correspondence are also described in Whinney’s, although unsurprisingly, since the events were written down later, time and place do not always agree.

**Keith-Falconer (1927), pp. 25, 41–5, 52, 58, 61, 69, 74, 79–81, 92, 98, 103–4, 114, 123, 131–8, 155–8, 162–3, 172, 177–80, 191–207. Photos facing pp. 106 and 206.

*John Pearson, The Life of Ian Fleming (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp. 1–23, et passim.

*Peter Duff Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming: A Biography (1974) (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1987), pp. 13–21, 26–32, 51–63, et passim.

Printed sources:

[Anon.], ‘Isis Idol no. CCLXIX: Mr Valentine Fleming (Magdalen College, President of Magdalen J.C.R.)’, The Isis, no. 293 (28 May 1904), pp. 333–4.

[Valentine Fleming], ‘Letters from the Front: Round about Ypres: Some Days with a Yeomanry Officer’, The Morning Post, no. 44,644 (19 June 1915), p. 10.

[Anon.], ‘M.P. Killed’ [obituary], Aberdeen Daily Journal (Second Edition), no. 19,465 (23 May 1917), p. 4. 

[Anon.], ‘Obituary: A Nephew of Sir John Fleming’, The Aberdeen Free Press, no. 15,096 (23 May 1917), p. 2.

[Anon.], ‘Another M.P. killed in the War’, The Scotsman (Edinburgh), no 23,080 (23 May 1917), p. 6.

[Anon.], ‘Major V. Fleming, M.P.’, The Times, no. 41, 485 (23 May 1917), p. 8.

W[inston] S[pencer] C[hurchill], ‘Valentine Fleming: An Appreciation’ [obituary], The Times, no. 41,487 (25 May 1917), p. 9.

[Anon.], ‘The Field of Honour’ [brief obituary], The Field, 129, no. 3,361 (26 May 1917), p. 753.

[Thomas] H[erbert] W[arren], ‘Oxford’s Sacrifice’, The Oxford Magazine, 35, no. 21 (1 June 1917), pp. 283–4.

[Anon.], ‘The Late Major Valentine Fleming, D.S.O., M.P. Memorial Service at Henley Parish Church’, The Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard, no. 1,596 (16 June 1917), p. 3; The Reading Mercury, no. 10,100 (16 June 1917), p. 2.

[Portrait Photos of Valentine Fleming], Illustrated London News, 150, no. 4,077 (9 June 1917), p. 684; The Sphere, 70, no. 913 (21 July 1917), p. 56.

[Anon.], ‘Major Valentine Fleming, M.P., D.S.O.’, The Eton College Chronicle, no. 1,628 (18 October 1917), p. 304.

Sir Douglas Haig’s Fourth Despatch (Battle of Arras, 1917; written December 1917).

[Anon.], ‘Obituary: Mr. Robert Fleming’, The Times, no. 46,512 (2 August 1933), p. 12.

[Anon.], ‘Noted Dundee Native: Death of Dr Robert Fleming’, The Scotsman, no. 22,477 (2 August 1933), p. 8.

Greenwell (1935 and 1972), pp. 21–5.

A.A.J., ‘Personal Tributes: Captain M.V. Fleming’, The Times, no. 48,793 (7 December 1940), p. 7.

[Anon.], ‘Personal Tributes: Captain M.V. Fleming’, The Times, no. 48,795 (10 December 1940), p. 7.

H.W.H., ‘Personal Tributes: Captain M.V. Fleming’, The Times, no. 48,796 (11 December 1940), p. 9.

[Anon.], ‘Lieut.-Colonel Lord Wyfold’ [obituary], The Times, no. 49,368 (16 October 1942), p. 7. 

[Anon.], ‘Mr. Ian Fleming’ [obituary], The Times, no. 56,089 (13 August 1964), p. 12.

[Anon.], ‘Colonel Peter Fleming’ [obituary], The Times, no. 58,255 (20 August 1971), p. 14.

[Anon.], ‘Major Philip Fleming’ [obituary], The Times, no. 58,298 (14 October 1971), p. 18.

[Anon.], ‘Major Richard Fleming’ [obituary], The Times, no. 60,084 (17 August 1977), p. 14.

Leinster-Mackay (1984), pp. 113, 142–4, 326.

Peter Duff Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming: A Biography (1974) (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1987), passim but especially pp. 13–21, 26–32, 51–63.

Gilbert (1994), pp. 319–23.

Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (1995) (London: Phoenix Books [A Division of Orion Books], 1996), pp. 3–9, 11–13, 65, 101, 223; contains a letter from the front [November 1914] from Valentine Fleming to Winston Churchill (p. 11).

Tully Potter, ‘Amaryllis Fleming’ [obituary], The Guardian, no. 47,566 (2 August 1999), p. 16.

Brown (2001), pp. 31–9.

Lloyd (2001), pp. 34–49.

Oldham (2003), pp. 13–20.

G.R. Seaman, ‘Amaryllis Marie-Louise Fleming’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 20 (2004), pp. 38–9.

Rupert Hart-Davis (rev.), ‘Robert Peter Fleming’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 20 (2004), pp. 68–70.

W.N. Smith, ‘Robert Fleming’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 20 (2004), pp. 72–4.

Beckett (2006), pp. 6, 24, 55–6, 143, 158–60, 164–5, 193–5.

Badsey (2008), pp. 240–302.

Blandford-Baker (2008), pp. 98–9, 105–7.

Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (London: Orion Publishing, 2009), pp. 3–9, 11–13, 65, 101, 223.

Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat (London, Berlin, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), pp. 7, 9, 26–7, 31, 62, 148–9, 226.

Churchill (2014), pp. 74–5.

Sheldon and Cave (2014), passim, but especially pp. 78–9, 152.

Christopher Jones, ‘Major Valentine Fleming, DSO’, in Julian Tunnicliffe (ed.), Brave Lives: The Members and Staff of The Travellers Club who fell in the Great War (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2016), pp. 125–9.

Archival sources:

Imperial War Museum (Box No. 96/28/1; Documents 593: Letter from the Fleming family of 19 February 1962 to Lord Anglesey, together with the transcript of a letter from the front from Valentine Fleming to “Randolfo” of 6 December 1914).

Fleming Family Papers: Letters from the Front from Valentine Fleming to Family and Friends.

MCA: Ms. 876 (III), vol. 1.

MCA: 04/A1/1 (MCBC, Crews and Blues: Captain’s Notebook 1888–1907), p. 336.

MCA: President’s Notebooks (1913) PR 2/188 p. 417.

MCA: President’s Notebooks (1917) PR 2/19 p. 19.

MCA: Warren Correspondence: C3/480 V.

OUA: UR 2/1/41.

WO95/1137/2.

WO374/24631.

On-line sources:

Nikolas Lloyd, ‘Celia Johnson’, with illustrations: http://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/celiaJohnson/celiaJohnson.html (accessed 28 August 2019).