Old Front Line: Podcast Talk – Lowther’s Lambs in WW1

In tis latest Podcast Talk we look at the story of the 11th, 12th and 13th Battalions Royal Sussex Regiment. Officially known as the “South Downs Battalions” they were also known as “Lowther’s Lambs”. We follow them from formation until their destruction at Richebourg on 30 June 1916.

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okay so what we’re going to do tonight is have a a kind of a little talk based around actually one of the questions that came into the Q Anda Q&A episodes that we’re putting out now um from someone I know is based in Sussex who kind of asked me a loaded question that what was my famous my favorite rather uh regiment from the uh from the first world war um my favorite unit that I kind of think of when I kind of travel those battlefields of the first world war what what unit do I think of and and kind of what unit is kind of particularly um I guess close to to my thoughts when I’m I’m thinking about the Great War and coming from Sussex it’s no surprise that it is a royal Sussex regiment I kind of think as I said I think in the answer to that question that for any historian of the first world war perhaps almost any subject to have a regiment that you particularly know well um is quite a good segue to so many different aspects of first world war history and because one regiment doesn’t entirely speak for the whole Army but there’s kind of commonality in the experience of regiments and understanding how one regiment functions and what it did with its regulars its territorials its reservists and then its new Army battalions and and sometimes Pioneer battalions and wartime race conscript battalions Works battalions whatever kind of regimen it is then it can give you quite an insight into the workings of the army and and also an understanding as to how the kind of things function within units of the army as well which I think is a really important kind of aspect behind any uh historians work on the first world war in trying to figure out how these battles were fought and and what the experience of men on those battlefields was like and having that kind of common knowledge of a particular regiment um is a really important kind of way of of of understanding the bigger picture really um but within a regiment I mean a regiment is quite a big thing no regiment ever fought as a regiment as such in the first world war they fought as individual battalions and within the Royal Sussex regiment there were three wartime rise battalions known officially as the South Downs battalions but for reasons we’ll explain in this talk uh they were also known as lather Lambs so that’s what we’re going to have a look at in this talk so the county of Sussex in 1914 it’s quite a big County stretches over a huge area of uh Southern Britain with Hampshire to the West s and bits of Kent to the north and to the east it’s a coastal County so it borders on the English Channel it’s got lots hundreds of small villages some of them in 1914 not much more than hamlets it’s divided between what was called then the Western Division and the Eastern Division of Sussex which is now West and East Sussex there’s a number of County towns within that area to the West Chichester being one of them which was also the Depo of the royal Sussex regiment the county regiment there was also Lewis kind of roughly in the center of the county and then key coastal towns like Worthing and Brighton and eastborne Hastings places like that and within the County area itself which was largely a rural area dominated particularly in that kind of Southern sthe from the Hampshire border across to uh above eastborn and and and Hastings the South Downs this big chalk downland with huge escarment that dominate the landscape there it was very much a rural landscape a rural County with farming uh particularly sheep farming in some areas and particularly on those Downs sheep farming and there was a a breed of lamb sheep Southdown sheep which is still a breed of sheep today that’s farmed on those southdowns and also ties into this story not just in the name of these men but also their mascot and we’re going to come across that mascot in some of these pictures that we’re going to look at so it’s an interesting County an interesting County regiment because of the geography there’s no big city I mean Brighton today is a city but it wasn’t a city then there were fairly small towns really really and the men were drawn largely from these kind of rural areas and so you see quite an interesting kind of cross-section of men from different occupations perhaps reflecting again through a county through a regiment that kind of wind a aspect of men who step forward to join the Army during the first world war but the kind of history of the royal Sussex regiment you know for in terms of this talk and the Great War goes back to that period of the uh of the bore War and this is a a photograph from that period living in Sussex having been born in Sussex myself and living in Sussex in a period in the kind of 1980s when there were junk shops in all of these old County towns and particularly on the southern coast places like Brighton and Hastings and eastborn were just absolutely full of junk shops and Brighton had a fantastic Saturday Morning Market where there’d be tons of militaria and photographs and all kinds of things I used to come across a lot of images and having kind of seen that there was this history of a regiment that I could kind of focus on and knowing then how to identify the cap badge of the rawal Sussex regiment and the collar Badges and all that kind of stuff it kind of led me down this path of collecting these these images and this is actually quite a large photograph mounted on card that probably was behind glass at some point but it’s kind of um from that turn of the century period showing the typical kind of uniforms that British soldiers wore on home service these would have been red uniforms and then if they’d gone off to serve in the B war they’d have been wearing khi drill on active service but um at that time as well there was a a huge sthe in Sussex quite an old tradition of volunteer units men had volunteered to serve in part-time battalions of in this case the roal Sussex regiment and this is the SN ports Volunteers in the East Sussex area of of the County there was this area known as the sink ports the five ports which included places like Ry for example and they formed battalions they formed a battalion made up of different companies recruited in some of the key areas of of that part of the county and the volunteer organization which you know went back well over 100 years at the time of the early part of the 20th century was formalized into what became known as the territorial force and later the territorial Army in April 1908 and in the Royal Sussex regiment there were three territorial battalions these are men from the fourth Battalion and they were recruited largely in that Western Division of Sussex what we call West Sussex today and they had headquarters in towns like ham for example where they had a drill Hall Worthing and chicha and quite a few other places besides and before the first world war infantry battalions had eight infantry companies which were about 120 Old officers and men and in territorial battalions those eight companies were locally based and each one had a drill Hall so that meant there were eight separate drill halls in West Sussex covering these men of the fourth Battalion where they could be recruited locally so they were very much even before the pals existed these were essentially Pal’s units and they could recruit locally and then train locally and then as a territorial Soldier you would do a period of four years Service as a territorial uh the only way to get out of that was to buy yourself out but as a you weren’t soldering all the time you were doing your normal civvy job and then you’d go to regular drill Hall sessions and an annual camp and this this photograph is taken at arendall in around about 1912 showing the men of the fourth Battalion at their annual camp and arendall park which was then as is still to this day I believe owned by the Duke of nor uh it was a place where the fourth Battalion did have a lot of its annual camps so that was in the western part of the county in the eastern part of the County uh was the S ports Battalion that grew out that s ports volunteers that we saw in the earlier photograph and this is a rather kind of um fabulous photograph showing the officer’s mess tent of the fifth Battalion sink ports uh one of their annual camps before the first World War I mean this really is something straight out of kind of downtown and Abby really when we kind of look at this but from a military point of view you’ve got ordinary ranks in there these are mess waiters not the actual officers so these are mess waiters waiting to to wait on the officers who will come in and die we can see a bit of regimental silver in there we can see uh some fine plates and and Cutlery and so on and and this is a kind of um typical of of what a lot of these territorial battalions were like they were kind of um certainly for the officers they were kind of country gentlemen and this was an extension of their country lives the catch was in time of War of course they could be mobilized which is exactly what happens in 1914 so there was a fourth territorial Battalion fifth one in syn ports there’s also a sixth Battalion as well and they were a cyclist Battalion now this wasn’t uncommon in the British army before the first world war the Army cyclist core that would be formed during the Great War did not exist so infantry battalions formed cyclist units which could be then used to move these infantry soldiers about on bikes rather than have to rely on military transport and they could be sent rapidly to locations in the case of territorials they were initially not seen as men that would be sent overseas on active service to a theater of war but within the UK these cyclist battalions could cycle to railway Junctions and marshing yards and places like this and ports and set up defensive points there and guard positions and so on and this is a photograph of the signalers of the sixth Battalion in Brighton in [Music] 19134 and the sixth Battalion was very much based uh in and around Brighton itself I’m not sure if there was a particular connection to cyclist and Brighton at that time I know that some of the the early kind of En listies in some of these cyclist battalions had a connection with the AA organization but I don’t know if that’s that’s true in Sussex there’s not a lot of material actually on the sixth Battalion despite the fact that it had a kind of an interesting war and one of it units went over to India but that’s the kind of state of play so you got three territorial battalions and you got two regular battalions uh the first which was in India and the second Battalion which on the eve of the Great War was in woking was in barracks in woking and this Photograph was taken in about 1913 or early 1914 and shows men of the second Battalion Royal Sussex regiment at the woking barracks um during a period of of training so these are all regular soldiers men have enlisted for 12 years normally in a phase of seven and five so seven years as a regular Soldier 5 years on the reserve and I remember looking some years ago at the kind of numbers in this Battalion on the eve of the Great War and it was about 23 regular soldiers um so there was about seven six or 700 officers and men and the rest would be made up in time of war with reservists and it would remain in the woken area as part of an active wider division although it never did any Maneuvers within its Brigade or division before the war and then it would be mobilized as it was on the 4th of August 194 and those reservists were then recalled to the Army to join this Battalion and this one was sent overseas on the 12th of August 1914 so quite early on it didn’t serve as such at mons it was in The Retreat from mons and then on the man and the A and its first action was at a little village called prz um in September 1914 during the Advance on the a Heights so that’s the kind of state of play of the regiment on the outbreak of the war the first Battalion in India second regular Battalion in Britain third one was the Depo the reserve Battalion and then three territorial battalions but when the war broke out all of those battalions were activated for service overseas or in the case of most of the territori was initially on the home front but there was this huge influx of men and kitchener’s army the new Army became a facet of life in Sussex when in late August 194 officially Lord kitchen had kind of stepped forward and uh called for 100,000 volunteers that had already started in Sussex with the formation of the seventh Battalion Royal Sussex at Chichester which was formed in just a couple of days in August 1914 and was already full and it was quite a mix of men and not a lot of uniforms available you can see from this Photograph and was quickly followed by an eighth Battalion and these are men from the eighth Battalion who with no space left at Chichester to house these new volunteers they were moved to Colchester which was a massive military Barracks area used by the British army for quite some time thinking no doubt they were going to go into kind of brick uh billets when they got there but there was no space for them at Colchester and they ended up um in tents which you can see in the background of this photograph here and we can see that there’s very little uniform available for them a few forage caps one man’s got a tunic the rest are in these kind of jumpers which are physical uh training drill jumpers that seem to have been used in kind of Barracks before the first world war and I’ve got quite a lot of photographs of the eth Battalion where men are wearing these so maybe that’s kind of what they had to make themselves even vaguely look Marshal look military by wearing something that was at least uniform if it was was n an actual uniform itself and the two long the enfields they’ve got at the bottom there I suspect probably didn’t actually work most of the weapons that were issued to these men were um drill purpose only weapons that were just used for marching up and down they weren’t meant for firing and it would be quite some time before they got that um a ninth Battalion was then formed in Brighton very quickly as following this so we can see already within a few weeks of the formation of the new Army or the call for the the new Army three new battalions now exist within the raw Sussex regiment the seventh formed at Chichester the eighth that went off to Colchester and the ninth in Brighton this is now on this is this photograph is taken on the seafront at Brighton and these are the men parading within the ninth Battalion and these battalions fill up very very quickly indeed and there’s a demand for further Kitchener battalions and that’s when this gentleman steps in this is Claude lather MP Claude lather was the MP for West mland and Cumberland I think it was uh so he he didn’t his seat wasn’t actually in Sussex but he had a stately home we had a large house at hman so in in what was East susex uh where for many years there was a an observatory but he’ bought that that house which was pretty much derel had um completely renovated it and uh that was where he lived when he would commute up to London to attend his duties as a member of parliament in the House of Commons he was a veteran himself he’ served in the bore war with the Imperial yry and he’d been in a key action in in the bore War for which he’d been recommended for but not awarded the Victoria Cross so he was quite a you know kind of well-known Soldier and he approached the war office in 1914 to try because of his experience in the Imperial Yom to try and form a mounted Sussex regiment so an infantry battalion of essentially mounted infantry the war office wasn’t that Keen on that because the yry had been formed as part of the territorial force and in Sussex there was a Sussex yry and there wasn’t a need for it so instead lather decided that as the other three battalions of the regiment that have been formed within Kit’s Army didn’t really represent the county as a whole they represented either the eastern part of the county or the western part of the county he former unit that represented the whole of Sussex and it wasn’t called a pal’s Battalion but essentially it was officially he decided because of the predominance of that huge chalk feature that went right across the county the South Downs they would be called the South Downs battalions and they adopted a Southdown sheep a lamb as their mascot and because of that and because of La’s name very quickly the Press called them LA’s Lambs the who joined it and there was all kinds of post guards produced this this is a very common style of Post Guard that was produced for almost think every Regiment of the British Army in the Great War and at the bottom there in this kind of hwk deut it says for goodness sake halt there louers Lambs are coming um and that’s a kind of play on on the name of it of course but louders Lambs became a kind of byword really for these men joining up in September 1914 when the first South Downs battalion it official name was formed and the newspapers were full of it and the men literally flocked from all over Sussex to come and join this regiment in fact 1,00 officers of men joined within the first 48 hours so a first southdowns Battalion was formed very very quickly and it had men right over from the west from chister from Bogner from Worthing from then over to the east they had men from from from Lewis from eastor and Hastings and beex Hill and places like that so it represented already just in that first Battalion men from all over the county in a way that the other kitchen of battalions had not done and this is typical of what these men found themselves suddenly in when they joined up because there wasn’t enough uh uniforms and equipment for the other three Kitchener battalions the 7th eth and Ninth and there certainly was nothing really for these LA’s lamb so this is some of the men from eastborn at kudin camp now kudin Beach is a little village just on the Sussex Coast close to a railway line and kind of in between I guess eastborn and uh and bexil and Hastings it’s only a tiny little village then at the time of the first world war but there was a bit of land there and and um lather was was able to step in and acquire that land to create a camp and the only facilities available to buet these men in that camp were Bell tents which we see in the background of this Photograph uh of men from eastor who just joined the first South Downs battalions there was no uniforms for them there was no weapons for them there were no cat badges or shoulder titles or anything and they turned up in their civies like this and gradually they became soldiers and there are some fantastic photographs this period kind of showing this transition from Ians in their own clothes to becoming men who were part of a military force so we got pictures like this this is the bathing parade at cuden camp the camp and I’ll come to this but I kind of interviewed a lot of veterans of these battalions the men if they remembered anything about kudin they remembered and you can see it ply on this Photograph it was on a slope and most of the tents were at the bottom of the slope and when it rained in the Autumn of 1914 the water came straight down the slope straight into the Bell tents and made life very very uncomfortable for these men so lather being quite a wealthy guy studied to add facilities he added washing proper washing facilities for the men he eventually added an Olympic siiz swimming pool where they could swim and exercise areas he he paid for some boxing rings to be put in there and he he encouraged boxing within the Battalion and awarded prizes for men who were particularly good at it so gradually this kind of uh ad hoc force and if we go to the kind of next um photograph here uh we can we can see this is the church parade on that slope with gradually uh the tents getting bigger and bigger more and more numerous in the background we can see some of the first wooden Huts that lather managed to acquire that uh were then brought in and became the nucleus of a much bigger camp we can see in the uh the photograph here this is a couple of weeks or so in into the enlistment of these men there’s a few that have got bugles that’s the only kind of military attire they’ve got the rest are still in their civies still wearing their flat caps no sites of any weapons or anything like that um I think the only men who had any kind of military uniform were the senior warrant officers the regimental s majors and the company s Majors many of whom were ex- regulars and seem to still have bits of their old uniform and you see a right old mish mash of Kit being worn at this time and of course this replicates the whole experience of the whole of kitchener’s army right across Britain at this moment and and here I mean this is an absolutely fabulous photograph I think showing the men at their dinner time uh they’ve got some military kind of style Dixies there they started to get enamel cups and things but it’s still fairly primitive and it looks more like some kind of Sunday school kind of thing or uh you know kind of local Lads outing um rather than being part of The Wider British Army but there’s some quite formidable looking guys on there and quite a cross-section particularly of Ages and at this stage you know people were as we know from the work of Richard vanemon and so many others you know these teenage tommies these boy soldiers of the Great War the South Downs of LA’s lamb certainly had their um their their their um examples of those and and one of the guys uh that I interviewed was a very young Soldier he was discharged and another family that I found in Bogner I think the regimental s major May who was um sd1 so when they joined the battalions they’ given a regimental number with the prefix SD indicating South Downs Battalion and sd1 the first man in was regimen on sergeant major May and he was a b War veteran he’d known lther during the bll war um and he brought two of his sons one was in his kind of mid late 20s and the other one was only 12 and he got him in and he became a bugler he was eventually discharged in 1915 and then conscripted later on in in the war um but um he would attend the uh although he served in the Royal artillery just after the war he would always attend the LA’s lands reunions as a proud original member of the of the Battalion but they couldn’t remain in civies forever and what happened AC right across Britain with battalions of kitchener’s army is that they were issued with these so-called kitcheners Blues they often referred to them as kind of prison uniforms and they were a blue surge tunic blue surge trousers a side cap rather than a peak cap uh and then they would wear proper car key putties and army boots and there we are we got our first glimpse of the regimental mascot there’s a southdowns lamb in the front there Peter the lamb and he became their mascot uh during their training period and he appears in quite a lot of the of the photographs one of two of the men in this image you can see they’re wearing uh campaign medals the bloke on the left wearing the queens of Africa medal I can some with ribbons of other military campaigns from the 19th century and the only man who’s got K ke is the platoon Sergeant in the middle there and uh and he’s proudly wearing a couple of ribbons himself but this is the kind of state that these men in this is their transition period and they’re still at kudin the camp is gradually expanding they take over some of the farm buildings and estate buildings behind it which you can see in the rear there when I began my kind of exploration of these men and where they’d been in Sussex some of these buildings were still there at cuden Camp sadly it’s all been knocked down now and the whole kind of area that we’ve seen in these Camp photographs is all um housing Estates today and this is one of the larger buildings that was on the fringes of the camp which actually is still there and this is another kind of um uniform that was worn it was a variation of the blue Surge and then it had proper pockets and they had Peak caps with a kind of shiny brim to them so again uh these men previous ones kind of look like criminals these men look more like police officers or as some of them said they look like um tram drivers or ticket collectors so um you know they’re kind of moving they’re not quite got to that point where they’re proper soldiers in terms of what they’re wearing but they’re moving from a state of aairs are wearing their own clothes through to wearing something that you know kind of is vaguely a uniform and this is a I mean there’s a a lot of photographs of these guys that I’ve picked up over the years of them going to local Studios kin’s not far from beex Hill so a lot of them went into beex Hill there’s a lot of photographic Studios there and they had their portraits taken and then their mates get together and they’ have a little group photograph like this but this shows us kind of typical blue surge uniforms that were being worn at that time and again it’s a kind of mismatch these ones are actually Fair copies of service dress uh with both utility tunics and the proper service dress but still these men are kind of not really thinking that they’re Soldiers the officers of course were very different so these are the original officers of the first South Downs Battalion there’s lather in the middle Peter the Lamb on the right and he obviously like most animals in photographs wasn’t really um cooperating because the officer grabbing him by uh his woolly um uh jumper there as it were holded holding him still to stop him running off into the uh into the distance and that’s L’s dog somewhat more calmly sitting at the front of the uh of the group there but the officers of course bought their own kit they had a kit allowance from the war office and they were the ones that were strutting around in ki when everyone else was wearing these blue surge tunics and the building at the back there it that still exists it’s the cuden Beach Golf Club headquarters now and back in the 80s when I turned up this Photograph and um went down to cuden to trying and see what was left of the camp I found this building and I was kind of standing there outside and and these guys come out said you know can we help you and I showed them this Photograph and they had no idea that they’ been a camp and they were you very interested so I sent them some uh some copies of this but on here is quite a few of the original officers um to the left of um colonel lther in the middle there uh two gwood brothers just here I’m not sure I’ve just kind of drawn a box around them which I’m not sure is visible on your Zoom but um they were two of three gwood brothers in the Battalion one of whom would be the commanding officer and two of whom would say sadly die in The Great War there’s no names against this this Photograph but I’ve identified quite a few of them and just as we mentioned kind of young soldiers in the Battalion if you go to that kind of front row seat seated group of officers and go to the far left it’s quite an elderly officer there whose service if I remember correctly went back to the 1870s and he was then discharged by the war office in 1915 as being too old so just as there were men who were too young to serve there were others who were too too old as well and cuden Camp while it was being expanded with tents and then some Huts still there wasn’t enough space because the the first southdowns Battalion uh was very popular filled up as we’ve said within a couple of days the second Battalion uh that which became the 12th raw Sussex that filled up very quickly so there was a need for a Third Battalion which became the 13th raw Sussex and Men found themselves being billeted in beex hill and Hastings and this is a a group section that’s been bed in a private house in Beck Hill and this proved to be not a very popular thing because soldiers are clumsy they break things they break doors they break Windows they drop things they put their boots through things and it calls merry hell while initially the local populace was very keen to be doing their bit to have Soldiers bued with them once these guys in their you know size 10 boots started coming through the door covered in cud and mud and uh smashing things up the local populist perhaps wasn’t quite so Keen to to have them so lder had to find a more permanent solution to this which he eventually did but they were recruit they were Abed in local schools as well so this was a school in beex hill and this is um number one number one platoon a company second South down 12th raw Sussex and in the middle there is the company s major who is Nelson Victor Carter and he will feature later on in this story because we’re going to follow follow the South down through to their first big battle you can see quite a lot of the men have got weapons at this stage there was actually no ammunition to go with the weapons but they got weapons the senior ncos and the warrant officers have got um car key all of those men are ex regulars Nelson Victor carer had been a gunner in the Army before the war he’ been discharged through sickness while on active service tried to become a police officer and ended up as uh the um working in the local cinemar the Oldtown cinemar in eastborn uh where he’d been the kind of person in charge there and was string around in a kind of a uniform and uh making sure that um the local OES didn’t come in and make Mery hell in the cinema that was kind of his reputation before the war but he was U nearly 6’6 tall very tall guy he had tattoos of Buffalo Bill on both his forearms and was a formidable guy and he was the fourth man to join the regiment so he came sd4 and it was originally in the first South Downs and then when the second South Downs was formed lther made him the first company s major of a company of that unit and a position that he would hold until his death in 1916 Christmas moved forward uh the months moved forward towards Christmas and at Christmas 194 they’ now moved in to Huts lder had managed to get through contract these Huts at the war office were provide providing he’d bought some himself and the men were moved into companys siiz Huts where there was a couple of hundred men in each Hut and at Christmas 1914 there’s a lot of photographs taken at that period like this one where they’re having their Christmas dinner they’ve got their decorations up they’ve got the flags of the Allies up and they’re waiting for their Christmas grub and in some cases I think almost kind of companies and platoon were photographed so that um the uh the men could kind of send these send these home you can still will see that this is Christmas 1914 and they still have not got proper uniforms they’re still in their kitchen as blues uh and there’s still a kind of primitive nature to this but rather than be outdoors under canvas than now indoors uh in a hut which is going to be infinitely preferable as the winter is coming on and again we kind of see these these photographs I mean they’re incredible images really it was a local photographer who was based in kudin that took the I think he must have taken two or 3,000 different images from the formation of LA’s Lambs through to their departure from here in 1915 and then the Royal artillery moved into cuden camp and later on the Canadians and by the end of the war he must have taken over 10,000 images of all those different units that passed through sadly his archive does not survive but for the centinary um they did a big exhibition of his work in beill as part of a project to remember cuden camp and all the different kind of Nations and units that had uh that had passed through there there was a storm at Christmas 1914 a big Gale along the coast it’s pretty open ground there at cuden Beach and some of the Huts got damaged or destroyed there’s a lot of postcards by Chapman you can see his name at the bottom right hand corner there the photographer who took all these images so that meant rebuilding work it gave the men something to do because at this stage training was PR fairly rudimentary that they were uh Mar doing a lot of marching a lot of physical training and things like that occasional bits of firing when they could get ammunition for some of the rifles they had but again this wasn’t really On a par with regular army or even territorial training the whole Army kitchen as Army was faced with this problem where you had thousands of men uh enlisted thousands of men in camps thousands of men wearing ad hoc uniforms and with only a handful of weapons and they still weren’t getting to a point where they could easily be sent overseas because they hadn’t been trained to any kind of level of proficiency and in some units it would take well into 1916 to do that and that’s certainly the case with these three South Downs battalions but finally in early 1915 they get khi the issue of khy comes and these men finally feel that they are part of a British Army wearing KH Kei wearing khi uniforms caps the badge of their regiment the raw Sussex regiment raw Sussex shoulder titles and gradually all the other kit that they need to go with it arrives as well here they’re doing kind of what many soldiers discovered was a reality of military service which is laboring rather than soldiering but um if we move to the next image this is a photograph taken of one of the battalions out on March um in early 1915 as they’re coming around a park somewhere on the outskirts of Beil or Hastings and you can see that rather than webbing equipment that they’ve got they’ve got the 1914 patent leather equipment that was issued on a wides scale basis to Men of the new Army or kitchen’s Army and they’ve got their longly en fields that they’re carrying and that’s the kit that They Carried with them through the rest of their training and that’s the kit that They Carried largely across to France although short magazine the enfields were issued on the eve of their dispatch to France in 1916 finally after nearly a year at cuden they were sent off and they went up to um deadling camp in Kent and then to an area above the river temps where this Photograph was taken where they were digging in preparing trenches along the Tims because at that point in the early part towards the the spring kind of early summer of 1915 there was a fear uh an unfounded fear but there was a fear that the Germans would send some kind of flotilla up the temps just as the Dutch had done many centuries before but they would send this flotilla up and there would be some kind of land landing on the Kent Coast so a whole system of entrenchments was dug in that area and the LA’s Lambs the three battalions of the LA’s Lambs found themselves doing this from there they moved to ERS shot and then from ERS shot they moved to Whitley camp in Su and Whitley Camp was a camp that had been established for units of the new Army was a proper almost permanent looking camp and we can see this kind of shot that dates from 1916 looking over the camp with fairly large buildings and a big um area of encampment there’s a few tents in the background but when the men came here there was a proper parade ground there was proper um half company bullets in the uh in the in the barracks that we can see here so they weren’t all crammed into one building and there was lots of open space around it for marching and then the kind of rifle Rangers not far away were set up they’ve done rifle training and Order shot um so gradually I think they kind of felt as 1915 came to a close in the move from old the shot to Whitley they were becoming proper soldiers they spent a lot of time here parading Church parades marching they got home leave of course because they were still in Britain back to their families in Sussex they spent their second Christmas here in 1915 and while a lot of kiters battalions had been dispatched to the Western Front at this point their division that they were in now which is the 39th division was not yet ready to be sent overseas and would be one of the the last divisions of kitchener’s army to be sent overseas in 1916 before the battle of the S but one of the other things that happened at Whitley was that the whole all three battalions the whole unit was photographed and these photographs were done by a local photographer who had worked with the British Army in aop before the first world war taking photographs of units that served at old shop and he then came in and offered these photographs s and they were photographed Company by company and then in some cases platoon by platoon and all the officers were photographed all the senior ncos and warrant officers were photographed and while I’ve found quite a few of these over the years I think I’ve got seven or eight of them I don’t have photographs unfortunately of every single company and none of these are named I have one where some of these written a load of names on the back of it but doesn’t say which name relates to which face on the front of them but it kind of gives us an it into uh the men uh in the middle of this Photograph I can see leftenant Colonel draffin it was a Scot Scottish officer uh his medals recently came up for sale in in auction he got a DSO serving with the South Downs later on in the in the conflict so you can pick out one or two like that when you know a little bit about them but the vast majority of the rank and file are not named and that’s a great shame that’s that’s the the frustration of images like this but they are fantastic photographs this is a company second sound souths 12th Battalion company s major um Nelson Victor Carter is is kind of sat there with alongside the officers and many of the men in this company were from eastor in fact almost all of them were from eastborn and they would be in the Vanguard of the assault of the regiments the units first battle when they went over the top in 1916 finally in March of 1916 they had uh in March they had their March in orders it sounds like a bit like an Army joke but they had their March and orders to go down to Southampton go across on a series of ships to laav and then move by rail up to northern France where the whole division uh assembled and then went into the front line beyond the village of n Chappelle now this is a a stereo photograph uh one of a whole series taken earlier in the war of the trenches near to new Chappelle in this case they’re Scottish and gerka soldiers in this Photograph but it’s this kind of Tres fairly primitive basic trenches that really hadn’t changed much since the early months of trench warfare in this area from the winter of 1945 and this is where the South Downs took over the trenches for the first time there’s a little Cemetery between um they they occupy the trenches between new Chappelle and a place called Flur Bay and there’s a cemetery up that way called y Farm Cemetery which has got some of the very first casualties of the South Downs most of them were men who were careless they didn’t really understand the realities the trench warfare and walked along trenches bolt upright that had lower parapets and didn’t understand that they were exposing themselves to enemy fire and got sniped or they were groups of men that concentrated in trenches and didn’t understand that the Germans would send over rifle grenades Min andw for trench mortars and they got hit by that kind of stuff men don’t can’t pick up this kind of battle knowledge Battlefield knowledge immediately and it’s learned the hard way which is always always sadly through casualties so cas IES begin to kind of Mount not on a big scale but they begin to start losing their mates and when you kind of link that through newspaper research and you look at the the papers from chest and eastborn beill and Lewis uh and some of the Sussex countywide papers you start to see these descriptions of men being killed in you know what we often call on the podcast the day-to-day activities of uh of trench warfare now the next couple of pictures are taken from a little collection that I think I’ve shown you some of these before actually taken by a soldier of the raw Welsh fusers who was in the 38th Welsh Division and they kind of followed the South DS battalions in and out of this part of the trenches between initially Flur Bay Levante and new Chappelle and then they they moved down to the area between fut and gavinci and this is windy corner at gavinci taken by this soldier in the Royal world shelers in the spring of 1916 showing kind of kind of typical um Frontline Village on that forgotten front that was sandwich between Flanders to the north and Aras and the Som to the South and this is the kind of Battlefield the the southdowns moved into into an area that had seen a lot of static Warfare and a lot of Mine Warfare as well and they got hit by quite a few German mine explosions while they served in this sector The Trenches were U this is a photograph of one of the communication trenches at uh gavinci um the line here had not moved really since October November 1914 was fairly static front but in the very front line both sides are gone underground we’ve got an episode on the war underground coming up this weekend and the minds were blown in this sector the 4th of June 1916 the Germans blew quite a sizable mine underneath the raw Sussex positions and killed quite a few soldiers they crossed over the labas canal which was close by uh to this part of the battlefield to The quinci Brick stacks one point as well and it was about that time that a young officer joined the Battalion and his name was Edmund blundon he was the son um of a school teacher from a little tiny um Sussex Village called framfield and uh he just joined from one of the Depo battalions of the royal Sussex regiment and he would become an officer in the unit uh for a big chunk of the rest of the war moving on to another Battalion of the regiment in February 1918 and blundon not only one of the Great kind of War Poets of the first world war he wrote fantastic Memoir undertones of war that is a kind of unofficial history really of of the South Downs battalions and he talks about not only their history but the kind of men and the stories of those within his Battalion the 11th um right throughout the war but after months of static trench warfare um it was clear that some kind of offensive was coming and the offensive the big offensive that was coming was of course the battle of the s that would begin on the 1st of July 1916 but the South DS battalions were not going to be a part of that at least not at that stage instead they were one of a number of units that were detailed to take part in diversionary attacks this has been tried with the Battle of L in 1915 when up on the bada Ridge and in the Indian core sector um they’ launched these diversionary attacks try and draw German attention into those areas and away from the main thrust but a similar kind of tactic although that had not really been that successful at l a similar kind of tactic was employed for the battle of the Som and a series of attacks were planned one here at rbor they moved up into this rorg area in late June 1916 and another one was going to be attempted near to the double cier at lose also involving a battalion the Royal Sussex the second Royal Sussex and also first Battalion Kings Royal rifal core and we’ve done a little bit about that in one of the podcasts I think when we looked at that double cier area near lose but but from the South Downs point of view um their battalions their three battalions were selected to be the assault battalions for this diversionary raid and Colonel Garder we mentioned he was one of three brothers serving in the first souds battalions his middle brother so he was the eldest his his other brother his middle brother was died of pneumonia at um merville in May of 1916 and he had a younger brother Francis who was a platoon commander and I think he was greatly affected by the um the death of his of his brother uh I I traced the gwood family back in the day and his son said that his father was never really the same after his brother had died of pneumonia but when the plans were laid before Colonel gwood and the other Battalion commanders gwood was the vocal one he stepped forward and he said to the Brigadier that the plan was ridiculous they were going to attack in the early hours of the morning with not much of a prep Preparatory bombardment and that um he wasn’t prepared and this was apparently his words he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice his Battalion as cannon fodder now that kind of statement had to be taken seriously and what was the kind of morale implications of that and what was decided at both Brigade and divisional level was that gwood would be um relieved of his command as he was on the eve of the battle the 11th Battalion he commanded instead of being the one that led the assault they would be in reserve and only supply of one company and gwood was sent home not quite in disgrace but he was sent home he would return to the front later on in the War Commander Battalion of the Manchester powers and he was very badly gassed at um at EP in uh in 1917 I think it was um so their their whole kind of plan changed at that point um the 11th was kind of relegated to reserve position and the other two battalions the 12th and the 13th second and third South Downs battalions um I can just hear someone with their sound on in the background there if I can just ask you to mute that because I I can’t do that myself from where I am at the minute without pressing too many buttons uh just to keep the kind of flow of what I’m saying as well so the 11th was in reserve 12th and 13th would be detailed to make this attack and they would be attacking the German positions just uh beyond the Alba sorry just beyond the rud Bo and this is the rud photographed in 1915 it’s a dead straight bit of Road probably an old Roman road that runs from near the village of new Chappelle up towards the town of bethon which was behind the British lines and just beyond it was the flat lands Open Fields with deep drainage ditches and ground that was very very boggy indeed where there were more breast Works than trenches so these were positions built up above ground level rather than kind of trench uh networks so if I just move to this this is not a photograph that I have unfortunately myself but this is a Imperial War Museum photograph uh that show taken from a ruined house on the rud ofir looking across towards the front line area and you can see the British support line and in the distance the British front line and they are breast Works built up above ground level you can see how high those kind of trenches are there so it was a different kind of Front Line area perhaps to one that we would kind of imagine and the plan here was was to attack this position called the B’s head which was a promet in the German lines where they were essentially going to try and bite off the Salient of it so of straighten out the line here and if we look at this we can see the BS head marked in the center of this aerial photograph and then Vine Street trench across to the right that’s where the 13th Battalion would attack from there going from right to left across no man’s land and then the 12th would come in the area just to above and to the left of the ball’s head coming from North to South effectively from looking at this image and then D company of the 11th who’ once been spearhead in this attack were then sent to try and connect up a old German trench in no man’s land with the BS head itself together with the divisional pioneers of the glou uh and one or two others as well that was the plan attack in the early hours of the morning of the 30th of June 19 after a fairly basic bombardment and um sorry I’m just pausing for a minute because I can still hear some background noise there can you just check if You’ if you’ve got your mic on uh if you can switch that off for me thank you um so they were going to attack in the early hours of the 30th of June 1916 with two battalions advancing on the uh the German positions here and it all sounded very easy indeed and the idea was to confuse the Germans that some kind of major attack was going to take place here at rburg up in northern France rather than down on the S the next day I’m not sure it ever succeeded in that and what happened when these men went over the top is that they suffered huge casualties from the German positions who had not been destroyed in the preliminary bombardment and it’s fairly flat open ground with good fields of fire and in the kind of Half Light of the morning they were pretty visible as they move forward in basically lines of men in company formation moving at walking pace across No Man’s Land they’d not been issued with steel helmets for this attack so they still wore um core blimy cloth apps or the standard service dress caps and some of you may have seen Matt Dixon went here recently and spoke to the farmer whose land that this is and he’s found quite a few raw susex cat badges um in this area and by a sad kind of Quirk of Fate this is the same bit of ground where the second Battalion and the the S ports Battalion had attacked on the 9th of May 1915 the year before in the Battle of Alba’s Ridge and had lost such terrible casualties in that attack but as the 12th and the 13th went over the top and de company 11th supporting them they came under this withering machine gun fire and in some cases some of the veterans I interviewed who were here said they looked around and they literally saw lines of men uh falling uh being just chopped down by German machine gun fire and as the attack moved forward a handful of men in each area got into the German lines one party of the 12th Battalion that was led by this man who we saw in some of the group photographs this is Nelson Victor Carter that ex-regular soldier with the tattoos of Buffalo Bill he led a group of men into the German front line close to the ball’s head then up their communication trenches into their second line position and they hung on for about two and a half hours he’d also attacked a German machine gun position rushed at it he wasn’t armed with a rifle he had a sidearm a either webbley or a cult pistol and he rushed at it shot the crew dead and then turned the machine gun on the Germans and laid down suppressing fire to allow his men to move up the communication trenches and get into the next line of trenches but gradually they were running out of ammunition gradually they were running out of grenades and gradually the German reinforcements were coming in trying to push them back and the officers who were there alongside them dwindled rapidly to a point point where there was only a handful of officers left and it was clear that they could not hang on after 2 and a half hours fighting and an order to withdraw was given and gradually they pulled back Nelson Victor Carter went backwards and forwards across no man’s land during this endeavor picking up wounded soldiers being this guy that was nearly 6’6 tall he picked him up put him over his shoulders and was carrying them in and gradually they got back gradually everyone seemed to be evacuated they got back into the the forward trench and a Cry came out from no man’s land and it was a lad from eastborn that he’d known in peacetime and he couldn’t just do nothing he clambered out the trench now in broad daylight ran over to this lad picked him up and as he was bringing him in just as he got to the British parit a shot rang out and Nelson Victor Carter was killed instantly but he’d saved that lad’s life now that act of gallantry and all the others was witnessed by multiple officers who all recommended him for the Victoria Cross and that VC was awarded poly a couple of months later that’s his grave he was buried close to the uh to the ball’s head and um in a battlefield grave and then his grave was moved to the Royal Irish rifles graveyard at Levante in the 1920s with a handful of other South Downs men who were killed that day who were buried alongside him and as you can see there’s his number sd4 and the symbol of Victoria Cross now when I began my research on the south downers in the 1980s I discovered that his daughter was living in eastborn and that’s his daughter in the middle there Jesse Baker and that’s her daughter and her youngest son Spike and um when I first went to her house I knocked on her door and she she opened she knew I was coming but she opened the door and standing behind her on the wall uh hanging on the wall was the frame uh with the medals of her father including the Victoria Cross and so his VC was actually hanging on the wall of her house and I came back and another few months later to come and see her again I’d found some photographs to show her and when she opened the door that time the the medals weren’t there and she saw me kind of startled kind of looking at the wall she said oh don’t worry she they haven’t been stolen I had a nice man from the insurance company came around and he he said I couldn’t have them on the wall anymore so I about to put them in the bank um so they ended up in the bank but what she used to do and this is a picture I think from the 70s actually of her at the uh either the eastborn it might actually be the Beck Hill war memorial wearing her dad’s medals she used to come out for the Alba Ridge parade they used to have in May and also for Remembrance Day as well um and she’d wear her dad’s medals and then later in her life she’d carried on doing it and and but she had to take them back and put them in the bank then but it got to 1986 and that’s 70 years since her dad was killed and she’s still not seen his grave so I managed to persuade her son Spike who’s in that picture who was obviously a lot older then uh who was a now married man with his own family and he took her out to the battlefields in 1986 and I rung up the mayor of Lan where at the commune where her dad’s buried and he met them down there and they had a right old day and and uh and she was treated as like a VIP by the Village People of um of Levante and the mayor and they laid on a little reception for her and that was her one and only time that she went to visit her dad’s grave but when she died some years later the family scattered her ashes on her father’s grave so she’s kind of united with him for all time now on that soldier’s grave in the cemetery at Levante and her the medals her dad’s medals that uh that she still had um when she died the family decided to sell them to the raw susex Museum so they have them in their regimental collection so they are kind of saved and they disappeared off somewhere into a private collection which is a good thing now um the casualties at rbor were horrendous so this battle had gone over in the early hours in the morning there’ been two and a half hours of fighting in the um in the German trenches and uh 1100 officers of men had been wounded and 365 have been killed in action so it it was a devastating attack a devastating casualty list and a large number of men have been taken prisoner and I found this photograph in the regimental history of the German unit that was opposite them which was a verberg unit and this shows English prisoners taken on the 30th of June 1916 so these are South Downs men who were captured in the assault on the B’s head who’d got into the German second line trenches got cut off surrounded and were forced to surrender and these men then spent the rest of the war as prisoners of war in Germany but a lot of British dead were left behind in the German trenches and it appears from the German records just as up the road a month or so later they took the dead from Australia and the 61st British division from The Assault on froml and took them behind their lines and they buried them in communal burial pits one of which was found 20 years ago and resulted in uh the Pheasant Wood Cemetery up fromell which some of you may have been to the Germans seem to have done exactly the same thing at rbor and this might have been the first time that they did it they took the dead that they recovered from their own trenches the British Dead from the South Downs battalions and buried them in an unknown location somewhere behind their third line trenches back towards labas and so that um uh that grave has yet to be found um so you know like we often s on the podcast the kind of page of History has yet to finally be turned and never will in terms of the battlefield today um this kind of gives you an idea of what the terrain is like so this is standing What’s called the cinder track which is a bit of a a dirt track that runs through right through the middle of the battlefield looking out towards where the Bull’s Head was it’s dead flat absolutely dead flat there are drainage ditches everywhere that cut across the battlefield in part of the assault the southdowns had to take uh duck boards over the top with them to lay across these drainage ditches but the first wave of men carrying these got hit by Machine Gun fire and mowed down and very few of these Bridges were ever LA and when the men tried to cross the ditches by going down one side leaping and then climbing up the other side the Germans swept the edge of the ditches with machine gun fire and just took those men out as they emerged from them and there were very heavy casualties there um it’s a place where there’s there’s no Memorial there people put poppy crosses on the on the kind of fence post and so on a lot more Sussex people and people connected to this have visited this since I first went there in the 1980s and when I went there on the 30th of June 198 86 with a couple of my powers from Sussex we were the only ones who were there now it’s properly commemorated the local Villages are involved um and this battle is far from being a forgotten battle the dead are scattered in in quite a wide area Nelson Victor Carter in the Royal Irish rifles graveyard but close to rbor is the some vast post Cemetery where there’s quite a few South Downs buried in there from the attack on the 30th of June these were the men who were killed immediately in front of the British trenches whose bodies could be recovered at night or were killed in the act of going over the top out of those breastwork trenches hit by Machine Gun fire fell back into them and their bodies were recovered and brought back here for burial and there’s headstone after headstone like this one where we see uh the name of a Southdown Soldier and that repetitive date the 30th of June 1916 which one of the veterans that I interviewed Albert bamfield who I often talk about in the podcast um he he did two years on the Western Front as a signaler with his brother Marcus Albert bamfield um later described it as the day Sussex died and that phrase now has kind of been taken up by pretty much every newspaper in Sussex it was seen quite a lot in the centinary period which is good and but it’s not always recorded or properly recorded or even remembered by some people as to where that phrase came from and it came from Albert bamfield because when we look at those 365 five southdowns who were killed in that attack of which private fleet was one of them it affected just the dead alone affected 77 towns and villages in Sussex and when you add the the wounded to that there can have been hardly a place within the county of Sussex that was not affected by that single day the 30th of June 1916 so when we think of whole communities thrown into mourning by an attack we always think of the first of July with the pals at s um and many other battalions with the ti Siders down at label but it had happened already it already happened before those men went over the top it had already happened at rorg just to the north of their positions the day before with these Sussex Lads from the South Downs on the 30th of June 1916 but most of those 365 men who were killed do not have a known grave they’re on the lose Memorial to the missing and when you go to the South Sussex panels that are on there the South Downs are pretty much dominant in terms of the men that are listed there almost all of these officers and ncos we can see in this Photograph were killed on the 30th of June 1916 some with very tragic stories you might be able to pick out the name of cushion AC AET Cameron cushion he was commissioned on the 19th of June 196 and joined the 11th Battalion the first southdowns the day after and he was killed 10 days later so his life as an officer his career as an officer it’s often cited that officers lasted six weeks I mean there’s a great on that subject but he lasted 10 days uh and there’s some I could say some truly tragic kind of Stories Behind these men one of those is the three panel Brothers they were from Worthing in fact there were four in the South Downs battalions three were killed on the 30th of June none of them have a known grave they’re all recorded here on the L Memorial and the fourth was taken prisoner so it was a devastating day from the panel family from Worthing and Mrs panel received four t TS telling her that her sons were missing believe killed three would never come back one eventually did so that day that Sussex died affected the county in kind of almost no other way no other day in the war affected it in the way that the 30th of June did in this attack by the South Downs battalions and that kind of brings me on to this I mean the Battalion went on to fight on the PM and and an EP uh and in the battles of March 1918 and the battle of the relase in April of that year where it kind of got broken up and the South Downs existed no more except perhaps in name only and they were no longer combat effective but they did have a battalion that went off to Russia in 19 end of 1918 and served there in 1919 during the Russian Civil War that’s probably a story for another day but after the war they formed Al LA’s Lambs South Downs old comrade Association that met regularly through the inter War period and then again unusually because quite a few of those kind of disappeared after World War II but they kept theirs going and this is the last reunion of LA’s Lambs uh in 1979 and these are the LA not all of the last veterans but these are the last ones that turned up to that last reunion and there are several men on here that I subsequently went on to interview because this is 1979 I’d kind of just began my Great War Journey then really as a teenager and a few years later I was tracking these men down and I was lucky to interview a dozen or so men who were the last survivors of the South Downs battalions Albert bamfield being one of the most remarkable Mr Wheeler on this Photograph uh he’ ended up in Sussex he’d been blown up uh on the um attack at haml on the 3rd of September 196 and and hung on the German wire for several days before he was recovered extraordinary gentleman and and I was so privileged to kind of piece their story together by meeting them by meeting the families of L’s lambs and bringing a story that then genuinely was kind of not known and the battle at rbor didn’t even exist in the pages of the official history let alone anywhere else and it kind of brought that story out of the past and and it’s nice now you know nearly four decades after I kind of began that research to see that on Facebook and across uh social media you see people who are greatly connected to their ls’s lambs ancestors and like I say at rburg every 30th of June or the Sunday nearest to it they have a remembrance service so the men those Sussex worthies as Edan blundon called them those Sussex worthies are remembered and their bit of the old front line is finally marked so there we are that’s a kind of an extended story of um I guess the unit that has meant the most to me over many years and always will do hav been born in Sussex having walked every inch almost to the South Downs I kind of feel as if um you know connected to not just that landscape but the landscape that they knew on their battlefields where they fought from rbor through to those final knockins of 1918 so I hope that’s been of Interest I see I’ve rambled on for quite a long time there so uh there we are