Boy Soldiers of the Great War (48 page)

Interestingly, the proportion of underage soldiers in a battalion can sometimes be calculated by taking a snapshot of a unit involved in one catastrophic event before drafts began to dilute the original composition of the battalion. The disaster that overtook the 1/7th Royal Scots is just such an example when, on 22 May 1915, 216 men were killed in the train crash on the first part of their journey to the front. Looking closely at this incident, it is possible to calculate that of the 116 soldiers with known ages, a quarter were under age. A similar calculation can be made for the Accrington Pals who suffered so appallingly during the attack at Serre on 1 July 1916. Thanks to the author William Turner, whose
long-standing interest in the unit enabled him to put ages to 95 per cent of those killed that day, it is clear that around 10–12 per cent of those who lost their lives had originally enlisted under age. Likewise the detailed work undertaken by Jack Alexander in his book
McCrae’s Battalion: The Story of the 16th Royal Scots
, elicits further useful information. He identified the birth dates of 1,009 other ranks serving with the battalion in December 1914 of whom 145 were aged between sixteen and eighteen or 14.77 percent. This figure excluded a further thirty boys who were found to be under the age of sixteen and were consequently ejected from the battalion on mobilization. Not all boys of such extreme youth were identified at the time. Private Charles Hyslop, for example, went undetected and served in France aged sixteen. He was killed in September 1918 aged nineteen and therefore would not figure in any calculations in this book.

On a smaller scale numerically were the losses incurred by a battalion of the Birmingham Pals in June 1916, when, shortly before it was relieved from the frontline trenches, it was subjected to a very heavy bombardment, followed by the explosion of three mines, one of which caused considerable damage and loss of life.

Sixty-seven other ranks were killed. An examination of those who died reveals that all but a handful were original members of the battalion. Of their known ages, one was sixteen (Willoughby Greaves), two were aged seventeen (Stanley Hold and John Ludlow), four were eighteen (Percy Antrobus, Arthur Franklin, George Gilbert and Lawson Williams) and four were nineteen (Clarence Bradley, Leslie Bromwich, Oswald Baker and Matthew Barlow). In other words, at least eleven of those killed had enlisted under age (16.4 per cent) and a further ten were killed aged twenty, making it possible that they too joined up, albeit narrowly, under the specified age of enlistment.

It would be dangerous to extrapolate too much from such snapshots, but all of the four examples given appear to clearly indicate an underage enlistment in 1914 of at least 10–15 per cent.
Furthermore, from figures given in the following chapter, there is no reason to believe that that proportion dropped in 1915.

Anecdotal evidence of the prevalence of underage service, collected from different sources, constantly surprises me, and while it does not in itself prove very much, collectively it has also led me to believe that there were more underage soldiers than I, for one, would have believed. At the back of George Coppard’s book,
With a Machine Gun to Cambrai
, the author reproduces letters he received in the late 1960s and early 1970s from appreciative readers, all but one of whom were veterans of the war. Of the fourteen letters he quotes, four came from men who served under age, a fifth enlisted at eighteen and a sixth can be deduced from census records as serving under age. Of the remaining eight, four make no mention of their age. Recent research through soldiers’ surviving enlistment papers at The National Archives in Kew threw up many interesting details. One such search, for a known underage soldier called William Roberts, elicited a number of men all with the same name who had served under age. The records were revealing. William Roberts from St Helens, ‘of fair physical development’, enlisted aged nineteen, but was in fact under seventeen years of age and later discharged. William Roberts, aged nineteen, a gardener from Llandudno, was under age when he enlisted in April 1915 and was discharged in September. William David Roberts, fifteen years old and a steel worker from Swansea, enlisted into the 6th Battalion Welsh Guards, claiming to be nineteen years and three months. He was wounded on the Somme in July 1916, his post-war discharge papers proving that he was born in 1899. And William Frank Roberts from Walsall enlisted aged nineteen years and two months into the Warwickshire Yeomanry, but was aged sixteen years and six months when he was discharged in February 1916.

Looking up one underage individual frequently drew my attention to another. The case of Norman Gunn, highlighted during the war by the National Service League, was typical. He
was sixteen years old when he was killed serving with the 1st Cameron Highlanders in 1915. He had just two namesakes in the British Army, one a sergeant, considerably older than Norman, the other a private in the Yorkshire Regiment. The records for the latter survive, and in the first instance gave no indication that he too was an underage soldier, except for a letter attached to his file, written after the war from his home in Middlesbrough:

Dear Sir

If possible I would like a copy of my Discharge from the Army as I have lost the original one … I will try and give you a few particulars which may help you. I enlisted in the P.W.O. [Prince of Wales’s Own] Yorkshire Regiment on the fifth of January 1915 as 19 yrs and 11 months, at the same time I was not 17 years old. I was drafted to the 8th Battalion … Went to France in August 1915. Wounded and returned to England …

In July 1916, this Norman Gunn suffered a gunshot wound to his right leg. He was discharged at the end of the war.

As noted, the exact number of boy soldiers can never be known. Many years trawling through wartime issues of every newspaper would no doubt elicit thousands more underage boys whose ages are not listed by the CWGC, especially in local papers which invariably paid tribute to men in the area who were killed or wounded, and frequently noted their ages. Where such a trawl has been undertaken by particular researchers or authors, concerned about the men from their own town or city, interesting results have been found. Books published in recent years on the Pals Battalions, for example, have highlighted many of those who originally enlisted and served abroad under age until they were killed.

David Bilton’s history of the four Hull Pals Battalions identifies the ages of 653 other ranks, out of 1,062 original Pals who died in the war.

These four Pals Battalions reached the Western Front in March 1916 where they remained. Only nine lads have been identified as having been killed under age, eight aged eighteen, one aged sixteen. Yet scores more died before the war ended aged between nineteen and twenty-two, men who were originally underage recruits in 1914. In addition to the nine already identified, a further 103 of the 653 were aged eighteen or under when they enlisted, while another twenty-five were possibly under age, that is, they were aged either eighteen or just turned nineteen when they made their way to the recruitment office. These figures are not necessarily typical of all battalions, but they are highly significant. They show that by counting young soldiers purely on the basis of the date of their death, many tens of thousands who were under age when they actually enlisted but nineteen or over when they died are entirely left out of the calculation.

As I started writing, my estimate of the total number of boys who enlisted under age was a conservative figure of 250,000. From the research I have undertaken and from all the anecdotal and hard evidence seen since, I believe this figure is an underestimate. Tens of thousands of boys who enlisted under age were discharged, some after a matter of days, or trained but held back in Britain ready to serve abroad once they were the right age. If these boys are all factored into the equation, a total number far in excess of 250,000 is reached, a remarkable testament to a generation born to serve the country in time of war.

And these boys did not just serve their country but it is arguable that they saved it too. The British Army was relatively small in 1915 compared to 1916–18, and underage soldiers formed a substantial proportion of the forces committed abroad. Had they been instantaneously withdrawn at a time when Germany was militarily predominant, the outcome of the war might have been very different.

Cecil Withers was one of the final half-dozen surviving underage soldiers. I saw Cecil after he had taken to his bed after a fall.
It was summer time 2004, and although the weather was hot, he was tucked up in bed. I felt privileged to be allowed upstairs to talk to him, for Raymond, Cecil’s well-brought-up octogenarian son, was at first unsure whether it was the right thing to do. I sat on Cecil’s bed, tape recorder in hand, and listened to the old soldier, who, as he lay at right angles to me, could only look at me slightly askew. He addressed the issue of underage soldiers and the ones who hid their true names from the army and so from history as well.

When you think back on it, thousands and thousands of decent boys left their homes and were blown to pieces: scattered all over the place. At night the rats would be feeding on the dead bodies too, it’s shocking and an almost unbelievable blasphemy, that’s the way I thought about it, a blasphemy. And when these boys were killed in action, their identity disc would be taken from them with their name and number on, and that number would be looked up in the records and would be found to be untrue, and so they became, in a sense, unknown warriors.

16
The Final Reckoning

OUR ONLY REGRET ‘TOO YOUNG’

Killed in Action 17 May 1915, aged 16

In drawing conclusions about underage service in the Great War from the service records of 2,046 underage soldiers, some clarification is needed. The first 1,000 records I examined were found by randomly searching through the microfiche pension records (WO364) at the National Archives (the microfiche rolls are no longer publicly available) while the remaining 1,046 records were gathered by close examination of the same records available online through
Ancestry.co.uk
. Through Ancestry’s search fields I was able to narrow the hunt, for example by checking enlistment amongst supposed nineteen-year-olds in 1915, making it easier to find records of underage soldiers as opposed to looking remorselessly through
all
records in the hope of finding relevant evidence.

It is important, then, that in a subsequent examination of all these records I use the first 1,000 for any extrapolation of figures, purely because they were a random sample. In the main, the remaining 1,046 were gathered during my ongoing search for the records of 250 (in the end I had 251) underage soldiers who served abroad so that I could discover, with additional qualifications, such
things as the ratio of those who served in Britain only to those who subsequently served overseas. Any lads who legally enlisted for Boy Service were automatically exempted from my research.

In the case of WO364, there were more than 5,300 microfiche boxes at the National Archives, of which I studied every record in 157 boxes, or one in thirty-four of the whole. Each box was picked at random from across the full range available. From these, I extracted 1,000 underage soldiers who were discharged from the army. Of these 119 or almost 12 per cent had served overseas. On the basis that WO364 holds approximately one million records, I would expect to find around 34,000 underage soldiers were I able to look through every box. As there were between five and five and a half million servicemen in the army alone, it could be said that between 170,000–190,000 boys served in khaki. However, there is a problem with this crude calculation.

In all but a small number of cases, it is possible to identify an underage soldier only if he is discharged as having made a ‘mis-statement as to age’. Yet there were several other reasons why a boy might be discharged, any one of which automatically superseded a declaration of true age as the cause for discharge. A boy might be discharged as ‘unlikely to make an efficient soldier’ or for ‘being no longer fit’; he might be claimed as an apprentice, or his file might merely state that he had been ‘irregularly enlisted’. All of these hint that he could be just a boy, especially where, on enlistment, he declared his age as precisely that required by law. Equally, if a soldier was discharged as ‘medically unfit’, then that too would hide his true age. This category would disguise the records of those underage soldiers who were sent home not first and foremost because of their age but because of their wounds and were discharged solely on this account.

It is impossible to quantify just how many boys I would ‘miss’ owing to these alternative reasons for discharge, but it would certainly run into many thousands, probably tens of thousands over the whole of WO364. Furthermore, the records hide another large
and relevant group: those soldiers unidentified by their youth who survived at home or overseas until they reached the age of nineteen; the same lads who made post-war claims for physical ailments. All this evidence, circumstantial though it is, is indicative nevertheless of a truly astonishing number of boys who chose to enlist into the British Army in 1914 and 1915 from amongst the 2.47 million men who volunteered for the Regular and Territorial Army.

In 1914 the authorities had been besieged by boys driven by patriotic fervour to enlist. Thousands went overseas, often with territorial units that struggled to raise the necessary numbers to reach establishment. These battalions were already flush with lads aged seventeen or eighteen who had lawfully enlisted before the war, but then lost members who were free to transfer to regular units, including those raised by Lord Kitchener’s appeal. Kitchener’s battalions also harboured many youngsters swept up in the general excitement and clamour to raise so-called Pals Battalions.

In looking at the enlistment years of the first 1,000 underage soldiers I examined, some interesting details emerge.